Heidegger's translator-- part 2

I tried to say something of the translator's life in my last post. Highly intelligent and deeply curious, most translators I meet are as immensely irritable as they are brilliant. They are the guys with the permenently rolling eyes  who will tell you off in no uncertain terms when you use a hyphen in the wrong place.

English is what they own and they never let you forget that they are the masters of the language (Japanese, interestingly, they are less fussy about). A few years ago, the sacrcasm and cyber eye rolling got so bad that a group of women translators broke off to start their own group-- one hopefully less agressive; with a little less eye-rolling. They were, they said, too scared to ask questions or say anything whatsoever. Calling their group "translating women," they only worried that one of the offending male translators  would try and deceive his way into the group, and early posts were concerned with how to detect "imposters."

The guys got the point and things have been much more civil .

It is, I remain convinced, the nature of the work itself. Nit-picky work that is as tedious as it is mentally demanding.

Imagine our lonely translator of Japanese. Sitting at his low desk surrounded by thick and dusty dictionaries, he slowly makes his way through the text; stopping at every unknown character, he has to count the radicals first. Only when he knows the radicals and accurately counts the strokes can he figure where in the dictionary the kanji will be listed. The going is slow and he has to consult several technical dictionaries along the way.

Because it is slow going, with many long interludes looking things up in books and dictionaries, the task itself takes on an almost meditative quality. There is time to really ponder about the words themselves or to think about what the text is trying to say. Heidegger's translator, of course, did not have to contend with Chinese characters, but he was no doubtedly surrounded by books. German dictionaries, any Heidegger books already translated into English would be sitting near at hand; there would have been philosophy dictionaries and Kant's collected works open on his side table; a cup of tea and a good lamp too.

When I think of translators of the past, I do not imagine them to be quite as prickly as translators tend to be today as their work, by necessity, proceeded at a far slower pace. Yes, there was far more breathing room.

Fast forward to today.

Today, the only real tool a translator uses is her computer-- specifically, her online dictionaries and google-- known as "Saint Google" to translators.

Saint Google indeed. Google has utterly transformed the occupation.

Granted, in one sense it has been a god-send. For the novel I just finally finished, google provided me every last reference regarding 18th century Hawaii that I required. Indeed, the novel is basically ready-to-go. Even obsure British frigates which had made their way into Hawaiian waters during the days of Kamehameha were accessible without one trip to the library. Google delivered all the goods. I was amazed and delighted.

On the other hand, though, now all my business-related translations need to be googlized (as I call it). Every proper noun needs to be googled to find the "precedent translation." I cannot just say, for a simple example, Sony Corp. as I have to look it up (ie go to the Sony website to confirm what the established English translation is of their corporation). Then I need to add a URL comment to the document itself so there is a link-- to show that this is in fact the established translation; the teiyaku 定訳. Every choice I make needs to be checked out and given a precedent as spit out by google (no matter if the precedent comes from Romania and doesn't even make grammatical sense.... just the googlized facts, ma'am).

There are manuals for describing the process in Japanese and I have wondered if this high preference for precedents is particular to the field of Japanese translation-- there are other peculiarites to the field I'm sure. But the Japanese translator's occupation is one taken up almost completely by efficient fact finding-- that has given our work an intensely machine-like quality (which will be boosted even more when a greater proportion of translators start actively using translation memory tools).

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network's reigning model as well....

Nicholas Carr wrote a really well-done piece in the recent edition of The Atlantic called, Is Google Making us Stupid. The piece is highly thought-provoking and to give you heads up: if you find that you are unable to keep up with it till the end, well, you are in trouble! Do you find it hard to concentrate on longer stretches of prose? Do you feel an uncontrollable urge to skim? Are you watching too much reality TV?

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

It is this decrease in the ability to think about things deeply; to concentrate-- and yes, to contemplate-- that is at question. Even the authors of blogs where the writer is attempting to present a coherent, and thought-provoking idea, by nature of the medium itself, the author will feel almost compelled to keep his or her ideas to short sound bytes (present company excluded!) Discussion as well that takes place on blogs is extraordinarily superficial and unsatisfactory-- politics brings the usual passionate debate, but otherwise, there is little real 2-way discussion. And much is packaged in, well, advertising...

We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

**

Here is the article again. I found a lot of interesting things to think about not only in light of my own work, but also in light of the Heidegger lectures and recent reading (off and online reading) over the past few weeks. Like the author, I rely 100% on my Internet connection for work; I also keep a blog and have an online alias (more on that later); and I too spend much enjoyable time doing online reading. At the same time, however, I want to remain aware that I am reading and interacting with people online in a different way. And in this online reality, there is something of truth in what Carr describes as the creation of the Pancake Person, who when it comes down to it is unable to digest information nor cultivate knowledge. I leave you with this:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Comments

[Terry]

At the risk of being a sound bite, I must let you know how much I have enjoyed these two posts on translating and on Heidegger. I am not a translator, but I discovered you on Granite Studio and I do spend way too much enjoyable time digesting people's musings in blogs. Perhaps it is the frustrated former scholar of Chinese that I am (I run an executive search firm in Beijing) that has me spending wonderful hours following the unfolding of links to amazing pieces of information, one who also loves contemplating Time and Being (or should that be time and being?). I actually don't care much for your Li Bai translation as it injects way too much ego and interpretation of feelings that are not there, but hey, that is your prerogative. Thank you again for the brain food, now I have to get back to work finding a specialized English to Chinese legal translator to be based in Guangzhou!!! ugh.

[Peony]

Terry, thank you for stopping by! You are my first official comment-- as at a friend's suggestion I actually only opened the comments up yesterday. I am dying of curiosity however-- how would you translate the poem?

My translation was for a documentary made in 2006 and I was overwhelmed by the many comments I received when I asked an online japanese translators group I participate in for help. Some of them work as translators in both languages and are very proficient. The archiving is not great but you can follow the thread here (RE: (Obscure) Li Bai (Li Po) Poem):
http://honyaku-archive.org/search/?q=obscure+poem

I received a lot of advice. I will copy below the one published english version (it's below)... not just my attempt but I guess so many attempts at translating Chinese as well as Japanese poetry justs falls flat. I am a fan of Vikram Seth's slim volume of translations
http://www.tangdynastytimes.com/2008/05/the-road-to-shu.html

I think it's called Three Chinese Poets...

Anyway, thanks again Terry (and feel free to revise my translation)And good luck with your translator hunt.

***

> "a published English translation of this poem might possibly be found in
> "Wandering About Mount Tai" (Li Bo) or "Climbing the Peak of Mount Taibo"
> (Li Bo), in Philip K. Jason, ed., Critical Survey of Poetry,

I found this book in the Berkeley Public Library. It does not include a
complete translation of the poem, but rather it has a sort of narrative
description, with the portion in question described as follows:

| In the first poem of the group, despite the speaker's appreciation of the
| mountain's beauty, the stone gate of a cave-heaven is closed to him and
| the gold and silver pavilions of the Faerie Isles can be imagined but
| remain distant. Moreover, the beautiful "Jade Women" who come in response
| to the poet's magic, spirit-summoning whistle tease him, laughing and
| giving him nothing more than a cup of "Liquid Sunrise," the immortals'
| wine.

The bibliography for this article listed several anthologies of translated
poems that may include this particular Li Bo poem, but the author did not
cite a specific reference, so that was a dead end.

I then went to the East Asian Library at UC Berkeley and, with the help of a
wonderful librarian Bruce C. Williams, found an English version of the poem
published in the academic journal 通報 _T'OUNG PAO: Revue Internationale de
Sinologie_, Vol. LXIX, Livr. 4-5, pp. 248-251, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1983, in
an article by Paul W. Kroll entitled "Verses from on High: The Ascent of
T'ai Shan."

The translation starts off:

| In the fourth month I ascend Mount Tai;

A portion of the poem containing the two lines Leanne is interested in is
translated as follows:

| Climbing to the heights, I gaze afar at P'eng and Ying;
| The image imagined -- the Terrace of Gold and Silver.
| At Heaven's Gate, one long whistle I give,
| And from a myriad _li_ the clear wind comes.
|
| Jade maidens, four or five persons,
| Gliding and whirling descend from the Nine Peripheries.

Kroll later goes on to give an explanation including this "long whistle" as
follows:

| The Terrace of Gold and Silver" fixed in mind by Li Po92 is the same
| estrade remarked by Kuo P'u 郭璞 (276-324) when that inspired poet
| beheld P'eng-lai in the sixth of his famous series of _yu hsien_ 遊仙
| ("Roaming to Sylphdom") verses.93 Once this visionary contact with the
| higher realms is established by Li Po, the pace of events quickens. He
| stands now at the aptly named arete Heaven's Gate.94 In response to his
| "long whistle" -- an old and respected method of calling up desired
| atmospheric and spiritual phenomena95 -- a "clear wind" arrives from afar.
| But this uncanny breeze (it is a rarer, more remote wind than that which
| sounded through the pines on the climb up) is merely the herald of a group
| of "jade maidens" come from heaven's farthest bounds -- or are they
| members of the troupe of jade maidens we have already seen as attendant
| upon the lord of T'ai Shan himself?

At any rate, one thing that these two versions agree on is that 長嘯 refers
to a sort of magical "whistle" used to summon atmospheric or spiritual
phenomena, and that it is the poet doing the whistling.

[Conrad]

Hi Peony, yes, I agree with this sentiment. In fact I said something very similar here:

http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/09/technology.html

There are a lot of blogs on the internet full of nice pictures or cute quotes; so it is a relief that some of us allow the page more time and space for words.