Running from the Singapore Turkey:

Reflections on the Process of

Literary Translation

Susan Fulop Kepner

(1997, revised 2006) 

      When I first began to think about writing an essay on the process of literary translation, I found myself jotting down the titles of a few recent, interesting translations by other people.  Although my first draft of the essay was perfectly leaden with good intentions, I realized upon reading it over that its chief failing, aside from pedantry, was cowardice.

      It is a far more appealing task to write about the work of other translators (especially dead translators, who do not write letters to oneself or to editors, much less have access to e-mail) than about one's own process.  And yet, what another translator does with a text is as unknowable, finally, as someone else's romance.  What does the translator do all day, in that room of his or her own, aware of the author's spirit hovering nearby, and even more painfully aware of the Shade of the Grand Critic, that colleague or stranger who eventually will read, and review, one's work?  Authors are generally insecure; why should translators (who are forced to be authors, after all) be any different? 

      I decided, after all, to share some unsparing reflections on my own good, bad, and dubious experiences with the translation of modern Thai literature: specifically, two novels, Letters from Thailand (jot-maay jaak muang thaay), by Botan (the pen name of Supa Luesiri Sirising);1  and A Child of the Northeast (luuk ?iisaan)  by Kampoon Boontawee;2 and two poems,  "A Forest Leaf" (bay may paa), by Naowarat Pongpaiboon, and a fragment of a lengthy poem by Ankhan Kalyanapong (bangkok kaew kam-suan),  to which I have given the title  "Bangkok: A Lament."3 

Fiction: The World of the Tale

      The first task of the literary translator is to read the text; it is also the second, at least the third, and probably the fourth task.4  I read and re-read a work of fiction that I plan to translate until I feel that I have begun to enter the world of the tale:  its time and place, its look and sounds, and smells, its feel.  I go to work on the first draft only when I begin to hear the characters, and see the places in which they live the tale.  Of course, much of what I imagine will not have been spelled out in the writing.  Like all other readers of fiction, translators naturally create and dress scenes and characters as they read.   Even the best film adaptation of a novel --

"The English Patient" is an excellent example -- requires a "dismantling," and a subsequent "translation" from one medium into another. 

      Another way to think of "the tale" is to imagine it as a shower of shooting stars which we dutifully assemble, in our own brain, into a galaxy that makes sense to us.  Of course, in the case of a story we are incapable of inventing a "galaxy" that could have been imagined by the author.  Nevertheless it is, for the reader, a galaxy into which the world of this tale, written by this author, "fits." 

      For a reader who also intends to translate the tale from its original language (usually) into another language, the process of assembling the galaxy entails countless decisions about narrative, characterization, dialogue, and other numerous components of the work that he or she intends to render effectively, and also faithfully.   (Has anyone ever set out to produce an ineffective, faithless translation?)

      The more competent and gifted the author, the more compelling and believable is the world of the tale in its original language.  After all, it is the ability of a writer to provide a "consciousness altering" experience that seduces us, and keeps us coming back.  We re-read Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens, fully cognizant of the kind of experience we are after.  Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that he returned to Anthony Trollope's novels because "[They] precisely suit my taste, -- solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of."5   It was a dependable pleasure to tip the glass ever so slightly, to catch a heady whiff of that beef and ale, and to cast a glance at characters such as the wonderfully awful Mrs. Proudie, the Bishop's wife whom "the archdeacon had called...a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred.  He believed her to be simply a vulgar, interfering, brazen-faced virago."6  A dozen elements in this excerpt alone convey the look, sound, and feel of the world of Trollope's tale --  and suggest, as well, the scope of a would-be translator's task.  "A simple ebullition of mortal hatred..."  "She-Beelzebub..."  "Virago..."  What will be the fate of these, during their passage into Hungarian, Japanese, or Thai?  Not to mention the demands suggested by  the fastidiously constructed narrator's voice; or the innumerable choices our hypothetical Hungarian, Japanese or Thai translator will have to make, in order to convey the time and place of Victorian England, the levels of character and dialogue, and the consistent tone of Trollope's fiction.

      Establishment of the world of the tale, and concerns with time, place, dialogue, and tone, were among my chief concerns when, in 1971,  I began my first lengthy translation project. 

      Letters from Thailand: Botan7

      When Botan was a graduate student at Chulalongkorn University during the 1960s, she ran out of money and had to leave the treasured privacy of her apartment to move back home with her parents.  She had already written and published one novel, which was more or less a romance.  Now, she needed to write another book in order to re-establish her independence.  Lying on her bed one evening trying to map out the new novel, she tried to ignore the noise of her parents' argument in the adjoining room.  Finally, in exasperation she took a fresh piece of paper, and began jotting down the argument.   That was the beginning of Letters from Thailand, a largely but by no means entirely autobiographical novel.  The protagonist, Tan Suang U, is a composite of Botan's father and uncle, who emigrated from southern China shortly after World War II.  Tan Suang U's youngest daughter, Meng Ju, is more or less modelled upon herself.

      In 1969, Botan won the annual SEATO literary prize for this immensely popular and controversial novel.8  Many Chinese Thais complained that it presented them as greedy, predatory, and unwilling to be fully assimilated, much less to take an active part in the process.  On the other hand, not a few Thai people claimed that Thais had been depicted as shallow, vain, and hypocritical.  But, love it or hate it, it seemed that everyone in Bangkok had read it. 

      The world of Botan's tale was entirely limited to Bangkok, to the city of Thonburi, across the Chao Phraya River from Bangkok, and to one brief, disastrous trip to the seaside town of Hua Hin.  Benedict Anderson has described Letters from Thailand as "claustrophobically preoccupied with the small world of Bangkok's 'Chinatown...'"9  Although in a sense Anderson is correct, in fact "claustrophic preoccupation" is not a fault of this novel, but its very heart.  I felt that it was mandatory that the English translation carry the reader into the narrow, teeming world of Sampaeng Lane, with its rows of shops down and living quarters above; and into the cramped home where Tan Suang U, his wife, and their disappointing children eat, bicker, grieve, and carry on the dialogue through which Botan presents the world in which she grew up -- a world in which no one, however successful, ever thinks of moving away to more spacious or gracious surroundings.  

      The life of the individual, in this world, is defined first by responsibility to one's family, including, of course, one's ancestors; second, by one's gender; and third, by one's occupation.  Among the adult characters in the novel, at least sixteen of every twenty-four hours appear to be  devoted to work.  The children study to their capacity; or, in the case of Tan Suang U's only son, somewhere beyond it.  The father is consumed by the desire to build the family fortune, but lacks any clear idea as to what "success" would ultimately mean.  He also is consumed by the determination that his family remain Chinese, and although he knows what he means by this, he cannot explain it to his children in any way that makes a favorable impression on them.  In the following excerpt, Tan Suang U's greatest

disappointment in life -- his sad, weak, only son Weng Kim -- pours out his heart to the father he never has been able to satisfy, late one night over the kitchen table.  In the previous several chapters, Weng Kim has disgraced his family, lost his girlfriend, and contracted gonorrhea.

      "Can't you say anything, Papa?  Can't you do anything but -- look at me like that?"  .... It's always been 'Weng Kim, you must do this, you're expected to do that...'  I'm the... son, the hope of the ancestors, but goddamn it, when there's anything good going, who gets it?  Meng Ju!  The third stinking daughter whose guts you hated until she got old enough to suck up to you with her straight A's and her flattery and -- and every time I've gotten into trouble it's been Meng Ju who made sure you found out what a bastard your only son is!"  He folded his arms on the table and laid his head on them, shaking with sobs, and I sat, frozen with horror, as the hatred so long controlled poured out of him.

      "Once in my life, Papa," he sobbed, "I made you do something you didn't want to do, after all the things you made me do, but I still lost, didn't I?  Weng Kim never wins, that's a fact of life..."   (Letters from Thailand, 311) 

      It seemed to me that the most important things to "translate," in this powerful and highly important scene, were the level and tone of the dialogue (slangy/mid-low class word choices/informal parent-child words/familiar speech/poignancy evident/politeness level temporarily abandoned/etc.), the setting (plain kitchen/meager light/plain table), and the emotions (shame/rage/grief/abandonment of all pretense--son/confusion & shock--father).  To do this, I moved bits and pieces of this chapter, and fragments from others, into position to focus upon the "night kitchen" scene.  For example, these remarks:  "The third ...daughter whose guts you hated until she got old enough to suck up to you with her straight A's and her flattery and -- and every time I've gotten into trouble it's been Meng Ju who made sure you found out what a bastard your only son is!"  The remarks had indeed been made by Weng Kim, but not in exactly this place.  I stand by this decision, and others like it, although I know that this is anathema to more literally-inclined translators.

      This was the first lengthy translation I ever did -- the original novel comprises two volumes, totalling 1,053 pages (which are, however, rather small pages -- it is not a huge novel).  It is certainly the "loosest" translation I have ever done, or ever expect to do, for several reasons.   At first, Botan regarded the translation of her work into English as a reasonable if not exciting idea ("I don't care --  do whatever you want..."); but on second thought, she saw a welcome opportunity to make some improvements.   She came to visit one day with the great idea that I completely re-write the beginning of the first chapter so that that Tan Suang U would not be introduced to readers as seasick and throwing up on the ship, on his

way from China to Thailand.  In retrospect, she felt that the whole vomiting motif was regrettable:  "All my friends tease me about it."    

      I am very grateful I did not agree to do this.  However, I did agree to cut a few chapters, and combine two into one, because of repetitions, and/or because they added no new information to the novel.  Thai novels are almost universally published first in serial form, in magazines and occasionally in newspapers.  Letters from Thailand, with exactly 100 chapters, ran for over two years before the chapters were combined and printed as a book.  A lack of consistency in quality, in the seventy or a hundred installments of the average serialized novel, is understandable.   Many authors are kept busy grinding out more than one (sometimes three or four!) novels at a time.  Illness, bouts of writer's block, and travel also take their toll.  Botan was a graduate student throughout the writing of Letters from Thailand.

      I translated about a chapter a day, word-for-word, setting each first draft aside and going on to the subsequent chapter.  After I had done three or four first drafts, I would go back, pick up a chapter that had "cured" for at least a week, read it over, then read the original chapter, then the translation, until I felt able to edit my draft in a way that would infuse the initial "word-pile" (just that: not fiction, not literature, only the offspring of the dictionaries on my desk) with the world of the tale.  It is nearly impossible to explain how a story can lose its very essence in the first, mechanical, word-for-word draft; the kind of effort that is required to breathe the life of the original back into it is even more difficult to convey.

      I imagined Letters from Thailand  as a picture puzzle that tells a story containing thousands of pieces.  I further imagined the puzzle broken up, and all the pieces turned over.  I imagined that the reverse side of the puzzle was called "English," and that in order to make the picture on the "English" side of the pieces tell the same story as the pictures on the "Thai" side -- the pieces would have to be put back together in a slightly different way -- as in the "night kitchen" scene above.

        This was so for elements within a chapter; it was sometimes true even for elements in individual sentences.  For example, the opening line in Chapter Ten (each chapter is a letter to Tan Suang U's mother in China) is as follows:

luuk   haang hern  meh      pay laay wan  

Offspring   far away     mother      several days

      The most direct translation of these words would be, "I have been away from you, Mother, for several days."  (In fact, they have been apart for a considerably longer period of time; laay wan,  literally “several days,”  is only a figure of speech.)  But, even ignoring that misfit, the directly translated sentence would

convey none of the emotion or the tone that characterize the original sentence, and which are carried by the words "haang hern."  According to the S. Setaputr Thai-English dictionary, "haang hernn" means ",,,far, far off, far away...far out, remote, distant, apart...to be distant, to be estranged..."  Now, we approach the matter from a better direction.  Tan Suang U's feelings about his mother are comprised of guilt, because he did not even say goodbye but snuck off in the night, leaving a note, and therefore is not taking care of her (as any good son would); and also grief and sadness, because he misses her much more than he thought he would.  The emotions suggested by the author's choice of the words "haang hern" should, I believe, be evident in the English translation; moreover, the overall tone of the text must carry the pain of the estrangement, guilt, and grief the narrator suffers.  Translating the initial line as something like, "We have been apart and I feel a certain sense of estrangement," etc., etc., certainly does not solve the problem, because these words in no way convey what is intended in the original; and also because they simply constitute bad fiction writing in English (about which, more later).  Moreover, such feelings are continually repeated throughout the novel, often using the very same words, a practice which is fairly acceptable in Thai fiction but is far less acceptable in English literature, where exact repetitions are assumed to be the result of sloppy editing, at best, and bad writing at worst.  

      Edward Seidensticker, in his essay, "On Trying to Translate Japanese," describes the dilemma of dealing with the repetition of expressions such as "Oh! Oh!" to what seems to him a point of unendurable excess.

       "Most translators will decide, after the oh's and the ah's, after the blubbering that never seems to strike the Japanese as sentimental, and therefore presumably isn't, that something must be done. 

      The literalist, who insists that every word in the original must show in the translation, has his place [sic], no doubt, in translation for specialists.  One does not wish to dismiss him.  He faces puns and honorifics with grim determination, he annotates as he translates, he spares himself none of the problems -- except the problem of what is to be done about the literary quality of the original."10    

      Letters from Thailand  is an epistolary novel; all one hundred letters from the immigrant Tan Suang U to his mother in China are signed, "Tan Suang U."  Sometimes it is, "From your sad son, Tan Suang U;" or, "From your oldest son, Tang Suang U."  But the cumulative effect of the one hundred signatures would become, in an English translation, extremely irritating.

      Arguments for the value and importance of "close" literary translation always come down to the issue of degree. From a literary standpoint, an absolutely "literal" English translation of any Thai work of fiction would amount to jibberish.  No one champions this approach for literary  translation.   The next thing to

"literal" translation is the word-for-word, heavily annotated, line-by-line translation which is instructive, and absolutely necessary for scholars; but it is not the kind of translation most of us want and expect when we pick up a novel or a collection of short stories.  To put it another way, instruction and literature demand different skills, and serve equally important but essentially different purposes.

      It is in the middle ground where the battles rage.  George Steiner has written that "the true road for the translator lies neither through metaphrase nor imitation...[but through] paraphrase 'or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense....Through paraphrase  [he quotes Dryden] the spirit of an author may be transfused, and yet not lost.  Right translation is 'a kind of drawing after the life.'"11  This is precisely the kind of statement that causes heads to nod in agreement in some circles -- and necks to stiffen, in others.

      In the final draft of the translation of Letters from Thailand,  every incident, observation and conversational exchange that occurred in every chapter of the original was present and accounted for, chapter for chapter.  But it is not possible to lay the original text and my translation side by side, and read straight across from the Thai to the English, line for line, or even paragraph for paragraph; for this reason, it is not a translation that I give to my Thai language students.  Botan's comment about the final draft of the translation was, "It is not every-word-every-word ["thuk kham thuk kham"] -- but everything I wrote is there."12 

      Everything is there, indeed -- and a bit more, as critics of my translation will be glad to tell you.  The curious publishing history of the translation, which began in 1970, had a considerable effect on the final version.   One of the reasons I had chosen to translate Letters from Thailand in the first place was its universal theme: immigrants in a new land, determined to build a better life and fearful of losing their identity.  American and European friends read the translation manuscript and were amazed to find Tan Suang U  "just like" their Jewish/Italian/Mexican father, or grandfather.  But U.S. publishers saw only a novel about a small Asian country that was unfamiliar to most Americans -- except, of course, for The King and I.  The constant refrain from editors was, "We love it, of course -- but I'm afraid there's no market..."  (Translation: the average reader was too provincial and dense to appreciate it.)  Even university presses, at that time, were not much interested in "third world" fiction; one editor who did express interest decided, after all, that the book was too controversial in Thailand, and so declined to publish it. 

      A New York literary agent wrote, "When you described this novel to me on the phone, it sounded so interesting.  But looking through it, I don't see anything that would really appeal to 'the lady in Des Moines.'   Even novels about China or Japan are marginal, and even then, the leading character should be an American, or at least a European.  Can you imagine The King and I  without Anna?"

      Botan and I grew extremely discouraged.  We even thought of giving up on finding a publisher for the translation as it was, and using the novel as the core of a joint effort, a novel that would be "based upon the novel Letters from Thailand" -- but set in both China and Thailand.  It would be called The Bee and the Butterfly, after a comment of Tan Suang U's about the differences between Thais ("butterflies") and Chinese ("busy bees").   Somewhere, in a box in the back of a  closet, I still have the chapters set in China, which I wrote, and I continue to be astonished at the fact that this once seemed like a reasonable idea.  Two section-head pages from this bizarre phase of the project were accidentally left in the copy of the draft that went at last to Duang Kamol Press, in Bangkok, and to this day they remain in all the DK reprints of the translation (six, I believe).  (They are, "In the Wake of the Dream: June 1963 - July 1966;" and, "Other Houses: July 1966 - 1967"  -- which, even with the missing month before the date “1967," apparently never caught the proof-reader's eye.)

      Twenty-odd years after I first began the translation of this novel, despite the enthusiasm and kind words of many people who have read it, I feel ambivalent about it.  I am satisfied that the English version faithfully conveys the world of Letters from Thailand -- particularly its ambiance, the personalities of its characters, and the wonderful dialogue that Botan created for them.   In the recent (2005) Silkworm Books revised edition, I have delted certain "exuberances," i.e., the supplementary English words, phrases, and occasional expansions which invaded the text during the lengthy and sometimes nearly surreal process of this book's translation and adaptation. 

      Recently, I was amused and touched to receive Thai author Sri Dao Ruang's ingenious translation of my own poem, "Smoking."13 She had enthusiastically added a few words of her own, and I understood perfectly.  She wanted  to convey even more  amusingly (than I had done) the sentiments of the woman in the poem who is recalling the days before she quit smoking, when she would occasionally find her pack of cigarettes "mashed up into a little ball" by her disapproving children.  But in Sri Dao Ruang's Thai translation, the cigarettes are not only mashed up "into a little ball;" they are "puu pii pii pon / klom raw kap luuk futbon lek lek," i.e.,  “squashed up like a little squashed foot/soccerball."    Of course, there is no ball in the original poem, it is an "exuberance" of translation -- but who is going to cast the first stone?  Not I...  How I empathize with Sri Dao Ruang (the pen name of Wanna Sawatsri), alone in her room, working away and knowing that that while the original was not bad, the little squashed soccerball would make it just that little bit better.  (In fact, if Susan had  thought of it, there is no question that she would have written it that way...right?)

      More ambivalence:  I was not heartened by the experiment of starting anew, and re-translating  four of the chapters of Letters from Thailand  in a determinedly "closer" manner.   (I did this while depressed over some critical remarks.)  The

truth is that despite their painstaking faithfulness to the original text, these new creations seemed not more faithful to the original, but decidedly less faithful to it.  Somehow, the closer translation lacked the emotional power of Botan's original, which my first, admittedly flawed translation did convey; it also lacked the "rightness" of the dialogue I had painstakingly devised to convey the Thai conversations.  After all, if the reader is not laughing where the Thai reader laughed, crying where the Thai reader cried, how shall we consider the translation a "success" as a work of literature?   Or even as a faithful reflection of one?   I suspect that there is no cure for this dilemma.  

      A somewhat revised edition of this translation was published by Silkworm Books in 2004, with a new introduction.

      One thing is certain: the re-translating experience has convinced me, all over again, that putting all the parts into exactly the "right" places, scrupulously avoiding both additions and deletions, is no guarantee of a good literary  translation.   If the translation of a good work of literature turns out to be a bad piece of literature in translation, or if it fails to convey the "world of the tale," then something has gone very wrong; and I believe that this "something" is a far more serious matter than the fact that Paragraph X appears in a different place in the original than it does in the translation, or that a phrase or a sentence has been added to enhance or deepen the reader's understanding.14

      Finally, there was been an unexpected benefit of my having taken a rather free hand with this novel.  It took me years to figure out why translations of Letters from Thailand happened to appear in several other languages in the years following Duang Kamon's publication of my English translation.  Then, one day in Bangkok, standing in a bookstore, I leafed through a few of these translations, and found that every one of them contained 96 chapters -- as in my English translatio -- not 100, as in Botan's original Thai novel.  (Nonetheless, each translator had included a thoughtful, original introduction, in place of mine.)

      A Child of the Northeast:  Kampoon Boontawee

      Many of the requirements were different, when I began to translate Kampoon Boontawee's novel, A Child of the Northeast, fifteen years later.  (The translation was published in 1987, also by Duang Kamol.)  Having seen my comparatively "loose" translation of Letters from Thailand reproduced in other Western languages had been sobering, and disturbing.  I felt that I had unwittingly committed some sort of "canonical" sin.   I remained concerned with preserving literary quality, but this time I was more concerned with getting the "puzzle pieces" closer to each other.

      My first reaction to A Child of the Northeast,  when its publisher asked if I would translate it, was that the majority of Western readers would have no interest

in a story about a year in the life of a poor Northeastern Thai village in the 1930's, seen through eyes of a six year old boy.  Fortunately, I was wrong.    

      The novel is Kampoon's gentle, loving, humorous memoir of his  childhood.   Beyond having been declared "best novel of the year" by the Thai literary establishment, the only feature it has in common with Letters from Thailand  (and this may not be an inconsequential similarity) is that it is  autobiographical.  In short, it has the ring of truth for the best of reasons.   A critical feature of Kampoon's novel, and one that greatly influenced the process of translation, is that everything, and everyone, is seen simultaneously through the eyes of the little boy Koon, and through the eyes of the narrator, the aging man Koon will someday become.  Kampoon succeeds masterfully  at this balancing act; and I soon realized that the translation, if it was to be successful, must also achieve such a balance.

      In the excerpt that follows, Koon is on a cicada hunt with his father, who has taken him along reluctantly, after Koon's promise that he would not whine or get tired if allowed to go.  Hours have passed; and Koon is now whining, and tired.  

      "When his father saw Koon playing with the thin bamboo cicada sticks, repeatedly jabbing them into the gluey gum and then into the ground (Koon was practicing), he said, "Stop it.  You've used up almost all of our gum, and we have only ten cicadas.!"

      Koon sat down on a log and asked, "When do we eat, Papa?'"  He felt hot, hungry, thirsty, and discouraged.

      His father sighed, and plucked a handful of jik leaves from a nearby bush.  He untied the pakomah in which Koon's mother had packed their rice and jaew and laid it between them on the log.  Then he opened the wicker basket and took a cicada from their meager catch.

      "Watch now, Koon.  You pinch the head, like this, to kill it.  Then you snap off the wings and the legs, like this.  Then squeeze out the insides.  You have to squeeze out all the shit.  Are you watching?  You can't eat it until you squeeze out all the shit.  Like this."

      Koon watched as his father wrapped a tender jik leaf around the cicada he had prepared, then dipped the little packet into the jaew, tossed it into his mouth, and began chewing it noisily.  Koon carefully followed his father's example, tossed the leaf-wrapped cicada into his mouth, and bit down.  The cicada's head was rich with oil, the jik leaf was tart, and the jaew was spicy and salty.  It was delicious.  He picked up another cicada and pinched its head."  (35) 

      Often, Koon himself doesn't really understand what's going on around him; and yet, even when the narrator makes clear to the reader that a certain character's motives may be quite different from what Koon is able to deduce, neither narrative nor dialogue overreach a child's view of his world.  For example, when two young lovers in the village, Tid-joon and Kamgong, are caught in the young woman's bedroom, Koon quietly takes in the subsequent, fascinating series of events.    (Note: The term chu sao, or ch|uu s«aaw) refers to an obvious sexual liaison having occurred between a couple, forcing a marriage where families are too poor to afford a proper wedding ceremony.)

      ...Koon was very relieved to see that Uncle Yai was not standing in front of [his daughter Kamgong's] door with a long knife, but sitting calmly enough on the kitchen floor and smoking a cigarette....

      And there was [Kamgong], the cause of all the trouble, sitting next to her mother, hunched over and staring miserably at the floor.

      "All right, everyone is here now," Koon's father said.  "It is time for Tid-joon to come out of the bedroom."

      The door opened slowly, and Tid-joon crept forward.  He crawled to his father's side on his hands and knees, and sat hunched over just like Kamgong, staring at the floor.

      Koon was astonished.  The swaggering young man he had seen [courting Kamgong] at the well was not swaggering now!

      ....Koon's grandmother looked at Kamgong and Tid-joon for a moment, then at the others.  She said, "A man and a woman become husband and wife in one of three ways.  One, the man asks for her, and there is a wedding.  Two, they run away together.  Three, chu sao..."

      Koon looked down at his right hand and raised three fingers, one at a time, making himself remember forever:  One, the man asks for her, and there is a marriage ceremony...  Two, they run away...  Three, chu sao... 

      His grandmother went on.  "If it is the third way, chu saw, and the woman goes to the house of the man, that is very bad.  In that case, if they do not sacrifice one white buffalo and one black buffalo, then that woman's family will be ruined.  The spirits of the ancestors will be far more angry than if the man had gone to the house of that woman."

      "What does she mean, Mama?" Koon whispered.

      His mother whispered that the spirits of the ancestors could make the whole family starve and get sick, if they were angry.  But Tid-joon had come to Kamgong's house, so it was all right.   (87-88) 

      Another important feature of this passage, and many others in the book, is the exploration of a writer's childhood:  "Koon looked down at his right hand and raised three fingers, one at a time, making himself remember forever.  One, the man asks for her, and there is a marriage ceremony...  Two, they run away...  Three, chu sao..."  A writer’s memory is being trained.

      The reader has learned (and perhaps will never forget) the meaning of "chu sao," without the translator having to substitute an imperfect English rendering of the concept.

      Because of the direct, simple language and style of the book it looked, at first, like a translator's dream.  The more direct the journey into English the better, one would think: translating simple declarative Thai sentences into simple declarative English sentences.  No big words, few complex sentences.   However,  Kampoon tells the reader nothing that Koon did not hear with his ears, and see with his eyes; and  it was this lack of supporting narrative, more than any technical problems with dialect, or cultural details, that posed the greatest challenge to bringing a simple rural tale into English, in a truly faithful manner. 

      The novel contains a good deal of information on the Northeast (Isan), which has a quite different culture from Central Thailand, where Bangkok is located, and a dialect that is closer to Lao than to Central Thai speech.  Occasionally, a passage of Isan dialogue will contain a short, parenthetical explanation of an Isan term, in central Thai.  (I wished for many more.)   For example, early in the novel Koon and his best friend Jundi attend school for the first time, at the village temple.  The abbott of the temple serves as a de facto principal.  When he reprimands a boy named Tid-ling for having a face so dirty that "it looks as though someone had taken a piece of charcoal and written the alphabet between your forehead and your chin," Jundi remarks, "It's a good thing he [the abbott] didn't bring his stick with him!"  (125-26)  The latter remark is rendered in Thai as, "baw hen luang phaw thu seh maa ka khay neh (khay neh khu khoy yang chua)."15  The author’s parenthetical remark explains that the Isan words “khay neh”  are equivalent to the Central Thai words  khoy yang chua, words which I translated (for use in this particular instance -- it has other connotations as well) with the English phrase "It's a good thing..." 

      Fitting all of this linguistic information into the text, either through parenthetical explanations or footnotes on almost every page, would have completely removed it from the realm of literary translation.  The problem of how to handle a dialect located within the language from which one is translating is an essentially insurmountable one, since the typidal reader of such a translation either

is familiar with both the chief language and the dialect(s) involved in the original (and thus has access to the original text), or (more usually) has no idea of the difference between the primary language of the original, and the dialects within it.  The decision to represent dialect through some dialect that exists in the receptor language does not seem satisfactory to me.  

      Donald Frame, writing about the "dialect" problem in the translation of French literature, expressed doubt that "...[patois] can ever be satisfactorily translated for a geographically varied audience.  Put Moliére's Ile-de-France patois into Yorkshire, say, and you may ring a bell with an Englishman but will merely confuse an American; the converse is true if you use Kentucky hillbilly."16    (However, on the next page he rather undermines this pronouncement by writing, "I have tried for what seemed to me comparable effects [of mispronunciations, rustic near-oaths and exclamations] with such forms as 'drownded,' 'land's sakes,' 'doggone it,' 'tarnation,' 'listen here,' 'jeepers,' and so on.")   

      Even differences between "educated" and "street" language (which can, at extremes, represent "dialects") are notably difficult to convey.  The reader of a translated novel set in the slums of Greece, China or Ecuador is well aware that a lower-class, uneducated Greek, Chinese, or Ecuadorean does not say "ain't," or "gonna."  Translating curse words and obscenities is even more of a problem.   Dialogue in which the translator uses obscenities, slang words, and the like that occur in the receptor language, in place of the non-translatable terms, seldom convinces.  We may not know what other people say in other languages when they are furious, or frustrated, but we do know that they don't say the things we say. 

      In the introduction to her anthology of Sridaoruang's short stories, Rachel Harrison cheerfully admits that "[my] translation of many colloquial expressions has a distinctly British ring..."  Nowhere is this more striking than in the line, "'Bugger it, they're bloody hot!' the little boy screeched, as he gathered up the mud balls he had moulded and laid out to dry in the sun..."17  

      Is there an answer tothis problem?  Not really.  All that one can do is to simply keep on re-writing the troublesome section until the tone of the original passage begins to breathe through the narration and dialogue, without undue dependence upon slangy, bawdy, or scatalogical terms that don't really work.  I beleive that sometimes, not translating a term may be the best strategy.   In the following excerpt from A Child of the Northeast, I believe that the use of some Thai words, appearing exactly where they appeared in the original, help to impart the tone of the original to the translation.   The starting point for this passage is a dense thicket of Isan dialect, an exchange of insults between young Tid-joon and old Uncle Gah, two men who argue constantly throughout the novel, yet care for each other deeply. 

      Tid-joon appeared at the edge of the woods, swinging a bird above his head.  "Woy! Woy!  Look at this -- Uncle Gah sure got him.  Koon, did you hear him out there?  What a noise he made: 'ai-ai-k-k  ai-ai-k-k'  Dumb bird, no trouble finding him."  He dropped the jungle fowl on the ground between Koon's father and Uncle Kem, who were sitting beside the campfire hugging their knees, then climbed into his own cart. 

      "If you're going to cook it now, hurry up," Uncle Gah said as he strode into camp with the gun over his shoulder.  "We have to get out of here.  You don't have time to get back in the cart and rub [your wife] Kamgong's legs."  (417-18) 

      "Woy! Woy!" is obviously a shout of enthusiasm (literally, but not confined to, "Watch out!"), coming  from a young man striding jubilantly into camp with a freshly-killed bird in hand.  Expressions in the original language of the text that can be laid into the translation are rare gifts, heightening the sense of the original scene, and enriching the reading experience.  What a senseless waste to replace "Woy! Woy!" with the awfulness of, "Hey, there!" or "Wow! Look at this!"   Too often, one is forced into compromises; the opportunity to honestly avoid one ought to be a cause for rejoicing.  Still, some translators strongly believe that it is not a thorough "translation" unless a parallel for every epithet in the original language is defined.  This may be defensible in the case of (relatively) "close" languages; but in the case of translations from Thai to English, or English to Japanese, for example, it is a prescription for awkwardness, and, paradoxically, for inaccuracy as well.

      Word choices reflecting dialect, or slang, can play a highly significant role in the reader's reaction to a work of translation.  For example, in a 1993 translation of Thomas Mann's novel, Buddenbrooks, Tony Buddenbrooks is congratulated on her wedding day by her old teacher, Frau Permaneder, with a kiss and the words, "Be heppy, you good chawld."18   I was amused to find myself really irked by this line, because I had read the H. T. Lowe-Porter translation of the novel three times over the years, and as far as I was concerned, the line "Be happy, you go-od che-ild," as it appears in the earlier translation that I love, was not only the way it ought  to be, but must be.19  Never mind the fact that the line in the original, "Sei glöcklich, du gutes Kend!"  is equally remote from both "go-od che-ild" and "good chawld."   One of countless experiences that reminds me that a translation is a work of literature in its own right. 

      Poetry and the Meditation of Translation

      The closest thing to the process of translation has always seemed, to me, to be the writing of poetry in one's own language.  "Poetry English" is not "prose English."  Except for the exceedingly rare poem that springs into life walking and

talking, perfect in all its parts, original poetry itself is born of a process of translation.

      The translation of poetry from another language is exponentially more complicated:  the final translated product is four times removed (at the least) from whatever kernel of an idea first occurred to the original author.   George Steiner has quoted A.E. Housman and Dr. Johnson on the hopelessness and the allied, unquenchable resolve that translators feel, despite all.

[N]either erudition nor industry make up the sum of insight, the intuitive thrust to the centre.  'To read attentively, think correctly, omit no relevant consideration, and repress self-will, are no ordinary accomplishments,' remarked A. E. Housman..., yet more is needed:  'just literary perception, congenial intimacy with the author, experience which must have been won by study, and mother wit which he must have brought from his mother's womb'.  Dr. Johnson, when editing Shakespeare, went further:  conjectural criticism, by which he meant that final interaction with a text which allows a reader to emend his author, 'demands more than humanity possesses'....  We re-enact, in the bounds of our own secondary but momentarily heightened, educated consciousness, the creation by the artist.20   

      If we are fortunate, our educated consciousness will lead us somewhere near the vicinity of the artist's creation.  I have only begun to translate Thai poetry within the last few years, and I make no pretense of expertise.    On the other hand, I have been writing my own poetry for many years, and I do believe that it helps, just as it helps, in translating prose fiction, to have written prose fiction, or, at the very least, to have acquired the basic skills of writing narrative and dialogue.  While I do not mean to suggest that a translator must be an excellent fiction or poetry writer in his or her own native language, or that I am one, I think it is naive and unrealistic to deny that the translator who has at least some experience with fiction writing or poetry in his or her native language is better equipped to do justice to the translation of someone else's fiction or poetry than the translator who has none.   

      Prose fiction, whether short story or novel, is concerned with the telling of a tale, plot, characterizations, and so on and on.   But successful poetry stands or falls on sheer words; and while a less than optimal word choice on one page of a short story  may not spell disaster, a clumsy word choice in a stanza of poetry may well do so.   Beyond the demands imposed by "sheer words," most of the admired poetry in Thailand still depends upon meticulous rhymes and meter for much of its beauty and its effect, and the translator is responsible for these aspects of the poem also -- to the extent that they can be replicated.  Sometimes they can, and then they should;  sometimes, they simply cannot, and one must abandon the attempt, or do worse damage.   Insisting upon meter and rhyme at any cost, even that of  turning a

subtle poem into doggerel, may represent an achievement of sorts, but it will not be a literary one.  What I mean by all this

will become clear, I hope, in the following discusson of translating Thai poetry into English.    

      Naowarat Pongpaiboon: "A Forest Leaf"

      Naowarat Pongpaiboon's poem, "A Forest Leaf" (bay may paa) honors the life and death of Chit Phumisak, a scholar, writer and leftist political activist who was assassinated in 1966.21   It is a lavishly emotional poem.  I was determined to do equal justice to its fervent tone, and to its meter and rhyme -- which I thought I could save.  Although I certainly did not succeed perfectly, or expect any such result, I did feel that the final translation was no less powerful with the inclusion of meter and rhyme than I could have made it by going to free verse. 

      Below, for the sake of convenience, my initial jottings, as I read the poem, appears below each line.  These are excerpted lines from my gloss of the fifth stanza, a moving depiction of the poet's feelings when he learns of Chit's death:   

1.

lom             prasaan                 siang khaen waa          khaen khaen

air-wind/join-weld--congruence?/sound/reedpipe/rage-bitterness-resentment

2. 

berb                             khaaw thuk khraw khaen       khwaam khüün khom

scoop/eat/take/ mouthful/rice/every time/bitter/without relish/galling/furious

3.

ngua kuu rin taa kuu leh naam haeng trom

sweat/I/trickle eye/I/dry/water/dry-of-pining/sweaty/parched

4. 

raang kuu som saan khay con khiaw khaaw

body/I/stupid/blind/come crawling/sick-fever/v.ill-corpse pallor/sick to death 

      From this, the first fumblings toward an English version:

            Wind joins music of reedpipe, urges/engenders rage

            I swallow each mouthful of rice/swallow  bitterness?

            Sweat/my sweat trickles/runs down my forehead, rinsing/bathing

            eyes dried of tears/bathing tear-dried eyes/dry eyes

            My body/ blind/ crawls/stupidly crawls?/ I sick/sorrow/grief?  

      Next, an English stanza of "prose lines" is created, written and re-written, for the purpose of coming as close to the Thai meaning, line for line, as I can get.  After that, the wrestling match with meter and rhyme begins, until the final draft is written: 

            Wind joins the reedpipe's song, a song of misery;

            With each swallow of rice I am bitter, I agonize

            as sweat descends my forehead into tear-drained eyes.

            My body blindly crawls, all sick with sorrow. 

      I am still not satisfied with the second line; but the fourth seems to me to express vividly the visual image of "sickness unto death" that the poet felt, and wanted to convey. 

      The last, ninth stanza of the poem is particularly difficult, but yields at last.   Naowarat's prognosis is masterfully vague, and unmistakable.

thaa sat muang saang muang pen paa day

raw kaw muan bay maay nay müang luang

thii hoy haa paa khaw pliaw plaw puang

cit ca ruang long thang paa khaw maa müang

 

If the beasts a jungle city  have created

we will be leaves that sprout there, numberless,

yearning, longing for that leafy wilderness

whence fallen Chits will ride the wind to town. 

      Naowarat's poem is now translated into an English poem that is as close as I can make it to what he wrote, and what he meant to convey.  At any rate, it is the best I can do.  The only other translation of this poem of which I am aware is primarily concerned with literal translation of images, and makes no attempt to represent meter or rhyme -- and many other translation decisions also are evident in the stanza.  Michael Wright's interesting version of the fifth stanza appears first, followed by my own.22 

MW:

The wind and reedpipe together sing "Poverty"

"Mouthful by Mouthful"  "Tastes of Bitterness"

"Sweat and tears"  "Tasting Bitter"

“A fevered, Sweating Body" 

SK:

Wind joins the reedpipe's song, a song of misery;

With each swallow of rice I am bitter, I agonize

as sweat descends my forehead into tear-drained eyes.

My body blindly crawls, all sick with sorrow. 

      Which stanza is “better?”  Which is more -- or less -- "poetic," in English?  Is that important?  What is important?  Is this a contest?  It ought not to be, I think.    

      Ankhan Kalyanapong: "Bangkok: A Lament"

      Angkhan is arguably Thailand's greatest living poet, and also one of its greatest visual artists.  The poem excerpted below is brilliant, technically and in every other way.  It defies translation (of course); but I had been set the task of translating it anyway, and so had to do my best.  This fragment of a poem that is very long -- thousands of lines -- is far more complicated than Naowarat's poem, "A Forest Leaf."  For one thing, "Lament," which portrays modern Bangkok as a rotting urban swamp in which greed, lechery, and vulgarity reign, appears to have been written all at once because it is such a raging, tumbling, tantrum of a poem; but any possibility of its having been tossed off in a fit of Ankhanian rage is disproved at once by reason of its impeccable meter and rhyme, among other

things.  Any English translation that could begin to capturethe language, tone, meaning, and emotional content of this poem, I soon realized, must make its peace with the necessity of sacrificing the original poem's meter and rhyme.  I am certain that readers will sense this, even if they are not able to read the Thai in the selected stanzas that follow:  first, the Thai is presented, then my initial grapplings, and finally the English stanzas.  Note that in the final English stanzas, I chose to indent the right column of the original Thai poem beneath the left, to replicate the "tumbling" quality that is such an important aspect of Ankhan's poem.

460 / original

nüang nong phluk phlaan duay    rot yon 

flooded/crowded/swarming    cars  

khap khaeng yaeng thanon con   mon may 

drive/compete/scramble for/fight   polluted/burn 

?ay sia saa ?olawon   wian thoy

exhaust/gas/chaos/confusion  allaround/despicable/mean/vile 

thuuk ngaang phang khwan way  paa chaa kalaa luang

receive/stupefied/buried/spirit   cemetery/world of/public 

460 / Translation 

Overrun, infested, thronged with

      cars

in frantic competition for the road,

      sky brewing its

poisonous pernicious

      shroud of fog.

Stunned, we see our spirits being buried

      in this vast and public tomb. 

462 / Original

rawnn khaw thaem law naa  maa suay sa cay

wag head/stick face out    dog pretty as you like 

saa yiaw nay rot ruay        raan laa

pissing in rich car     (here, all over the) 

sangkhom huay chmang chmuay       lüü lan

society/bad/strangely tend     rumour/resound 

waa nan kiat yot klaa     müay laa saalasern

say that/prestige/woowoo etc/    exhausted/laud/applaud 

462 / Translation

Observe the wagging head, the charming face

      of the handsome costly puppy

in the handsome costly car

      peeing on the handsome, costly seats

and such in a society of fools

      is proof of

glamour and prestige.

      We quite exhaust ourselves, applauding. 

      In the following two stanzas, Ankhan plays with two words that are spelled the same, but have different tones: "keng," with a rising tone, referring to the cab of a truck; and then "keng" with a low tone, meaning “clever” or “competent.”  Together, they sound "funny" in English (as they do, and are meant to do, in Thai):  "keng keng"   While I am unable to replicate the wordplay, I am able to use the two words in Thai in the English translation, to suggest, by their sound, the vulgar mechanistic sexuality that is another prominent subject of the poem. 

465 / Original

num sayam nii khlang baa    rot yon

this Siamese youth/raving/maniac/crazy      cars 

keng keng khap sapson     saa laa

keng (rising tone) = top car/truck , and keng  (low tone) = (how) clever   (try "keng-keng"?)   (followed by saa laa, meant to represent sound of dog pissing) 

thuk wan thîaw we chon    saaw ser˙˙

every day go-about  collide      dumb girls 

sum saam sot kaam klaa    thoy khaa khaaw chaw-caw

falter/blunder/blind/ignorant/sip/sexual desire  vile/trade/stench/notoriety 

465 / Translation

Siamese youth, mad

      for cars

driving in a keng-keng daze

      everywhere

daily cruising, luring being lured

      by foolish girls;

blindly boldly they sniff out

      the odor of an infamous trade. 

466 / Original

saaw sayaam yer˙ ying baa    rot yon

Siamese girls/arrogant/crazy       cars 

keng keng sap suk son     rüay cüay

(sound "keng keng" + naughty    "on and on" 

thuk wan thiaw we son     chaay ram ruay hae

every day go-about meet    men/rich + sound "hae" 

hiw farang jek khaek lüay    müay laa laa sawan

hunger-thirst/far\ang/jek/Indian/crawl/creep   exhausted/hunt/"heaven" 

466 / Translation

Siamese maidens, mad

      for cars

driving in a geng-geng daze

      hustling on

Every day cruising, luring

      rich guys

Hungry for farang man, Indian, Chinaman too,

      consumed with craving 

      The last stanza that I would like to present is probably the most erotic, flamboyant, gloriously angry fragment of modern Thai poetry that a non-Thai reader will encounter.  I will spare the reader the rough gloss, and present only the final version of the translated stanza.  

469 / Original

            saen keng pleeng pheet way

            ying chaay  

            maw mua muu hiw krahaay  

            haam lüay  

            laen loon len thanon saay  

            somphaat 

            saaw baaw ?aroy rüay cüay 

            saa füay khaya sayaam  

469 / Translation

Countless autos radiating sex

      female, male

drunk, voracious,

      crawling, squirming

in the streets,

      in transports of fornication,

tasting the bliss, licking the rapture,

            the delicious garbage of Siam.  

      "Bangkok: A Lament" is the kind of poem that makes us wonder, the moment we begin to read it, what it was "really" like, in its original language.  Not this, we are certain, even if we "like" the poem that has been written in English to represent the original.  I wrested from the original what images I could, and tried to convey the effect of Ankhan's lines scrabbling their angry way down the page, sliding past each other, or colliding, or collapsing in a jumble.  Was it enough?  What are the alternatives?   

      Running from the Singapore Turkey

      Many years ago in Singapore, late in the month of November,  a friend and I were invited to an Authentic American Thanksgiving Dinner at a new hotel.   We wanted to go out and eat noodles, but we could see from the disappointed expressions on our hosts' faces that that was not to be.  The buffet table in the hotel restaurant looked like a Gourmet magazine centerfold, featuring not one but three bronzed turkeys repining voluptuously on silver trays, their heavy breasts and gleaming thighs enhanced by sumptuous snowy mounds of mashed potatoes, cranberries like heaps of polished rubies, and rich, dark-gold wedges of pumpkin pie.  

      Alas, although everything looked splendid, no single item, when tasted, resembled the "real thing."  What were those cranberry-like objects, anyway?  We argued over the ancestry of the fowl.  What good dish might have been made of the squash that had been forced to impersonate a pumpkin?  Here we were, in Singapore, a city of wonderful food, eating a terrible translation of a Thanksgiving Dinner!

      Ever since, the "Singapore turkey" has seemed to me a perfect example of one sort of bad translation: it looked even better than the original product, while

lacking some or all of the original's substance and purpose.   The other extreme of bad translation, a dogged literalism, is the product of having all the right ingredients, but only limited skills with which to prepare them.   I suspect that all literary translators struggle more against one of these extremes than the other.  For myself, I fear the product that looks almost too good, because it is overwritten; I have to keep glancing behind me, as I move ahead through a text, to be sure that my enthusiasm is not gaining on me, and doing mischief.    

      Perhaps our saving grace as translators, struggling to bring a work of literature from its original language into a foreign one -- foreign in ways that become increasingly apparent and problematical as we proceed -- is that we tend to make the worst of our mistakes not only despite our best intentions, but also because of them.  The products of our labors are imperfect from the outset, and we know the manner and details of their imperfections too well.    Yet, there comes the time, with every translation, when one must finally set it aside, refuse to consider yet another re-write, and decide that one has done one's best.  It is here, if nowhere else, that the translator's task exactly matches that of the work's original author. 

      I was not at all surprised, the day Botan asked me to re-write the first page of her novel.  I understood so well how much she wanted just one more chance to do it right, or at least to do it better.  Few authors are ever completely satisfied with their work.  To return to an earlier remark, but in a different context, why should we expect translators -- who are forced to be authors, after all -- to be any different? 

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. and Ruchira Mendiones.  Trans. and ed.  In  the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the Modern Era.   Bangkok: Duang Kamol, 1985. 

Biguenet, John and Rainer Schulte.  The Craft of Translation.  Chicago:   The University of Chicago Press, 1989. 

Boontawee, Kampoon.  A Child of the Northeast.  Trans. Susan Kepner.  Bangkok:  Duang Kamol, 1987. 

Botan, Letters from Thailand.  Trans. Susan Fulop [Kepner]. Bangkok:  Duang Kamol, fourth printing, 1987. 

Botan, Letters from Thailand.  Trans. Susan F. Kepner.  Bangkok:

      Silkworm books, 2005. 

Frame, Donald.  "Pleasures and Problems of Translation."  The Craft of Translation.  John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte.  Chicago:    University of Chicago Press, 1989. 

The Gossamer Years:  The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan.   Trans. Edward Seidensticker.  Tokyo:  Charles E. Tuttle  Company,  1964. 

Kepner, Susan.  Somebody's Mother.  San Francisco:  Strawberry Hill  Press, 1987. 

Khammaan Khonkhai.   The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp.  Trans.   Gehan Wijewardene.  St. Lucia, Queensland:  University of  Queensland  Press, 1982.   

Pongpaiboon, Naowarat.  Mere Movement   (In Thai and in English.)   Ed. Chancham Bunnag.  Trans. Chancham Bunnag, Robert  Cumming, Michael Wright, Deborah Cumming, Pornparn Sodsie.   Bangkok:  Kao Kai Publishing, 421 Worarat Trade Center, Chan  Road, Yannava, Bangkok, 10120, Thailand, 1984.   

Sriburapha.  Behind the Painting.  Trans. David Smyth.  Singapore:  Oxford University Press, 1990.   

Sridaoru'ang.  A Drop of Glass and Other Stories.  Trans. and ed.  Rachel Harrison.  Bangkok: Duang Kamol, 1994. 

Steiner, George.  After Babel.  London:  Oxford University Press, 1975. 

Trollope, Anthony.  The Last Chronicle of Barset.  Walter Allen, ed.   London: Pan Books, Ltd., Bestsellers of Literature, 1967.