Poetry Is What Gets Lost in Translation
Since the Scholastics Art & Writing competition is open again, I am reminded of the poems I submitted last year (submitted as a collection rather than three separate poems because I was, unfortunately, confused).
One of the poems was titled 我姓陶，红陶的陶 and I ended up choosing not to provide a translation, although it was more for the reason that I didn’t know (and still don’t know) how to sum up what I meant in only a footnote. Still, Google Translate provided a translation that I found thoroughly unsatisfying (My name is Tao, Tao of red pottery), and so I will try to explain it here.
I debated giving the poem an entirely different English name, but decided that ultimately, the Chinese title most closely conveyed what I wanted it to, in a way that English failed to.
Firstly, the word 姓, anglicized to “last name,” is the literal opposite of a “last name”—it is my family name, which, in Chinese, comes first, before my personal name. It is the name that my father has passed to me, that his father passed to him, and the name that will end with my sisters and me. Ironically, 姓 contains 女, the female radical, due to the fact that 姓 names were originally passed down matrilineally.
In my title, 姓 is used as a verb, connecting 我and 陶; 陶 is inherently a part of my identity, it applies to 我, to me, not my “last name.” Perhaps a better translation than “My last name is Tao” would be “I am named Tao.” But the verb “named,” is passive, implying that someone has named me, whereas 姓 holds no such implications. 我姓陶, it exists as a part of me. And so maybe the best is simply, “I am Tao.”
But even then, the second half, “红陶的陶” obviously refuses to make sense in English—“Tao, as in terracotta”—and strips away the sentence format that is so familiar to Chinese speakers, used to explain a character in a language with many homophones and no alphabet: we first give the character, then give an example of a word that the character is used in. This format (in Chinese) also conveniently provides rhythm and rhyme, not unlike iambic pentameter:
x / x x / / x
wǒ xìng táo , hóng táo de táo
But there is only so much space that a poem’s title can take up, and I do not want to force a meaning onto my poem in a language that does not understand my meaning. I also think that perhaps the meaning of this title is more impactful for me not in spite of but due to the fact that I am an Asian American whose first language was English. A part of me will always view the Chinese language with a sense of foreign-ness, and at the same time, I am just comfortable enough in Chinese to notice the poetics within colloquialisms. In some strange, borderline self-exoticizing manner this distance between me and my “mother tongue” helps my poetry, my understanding of the language, and my understanding of new ways to use it.
Translation has always been an interesting topic to me, and I think there are many writers who have learned (somehow) to navigate that space between languages, just as people must navigate the spaces between countries, between cultures, between continents. I don’t have any answers (yet), but I think a part of it has to do with who you decide to write for. Interesting articles below (that are hopefully more helpful than I am).
Resources:
To Speak Is To Blunder by Yiyun Li - this article was also mentioned in Episode #8 :)
Ep. #7 Interview with Nora Okja Keller: effective translation choices in her novel Comfort Woman
Asian American Voices in Poetry - for a list of authors who often face similar questions
