Worlds Elsewhere (69 page)

In the meantime, I returned to a subject I'd encountered many times during my travels: the question of translation. How did one actually translate a writer such as Shakespeare?
Could
one really do it?

The English way of looking at it was roughly: no way. The language in which Shakespeare wrote was highly characteristic and particular, a bubbling stew of Anglo-Saxon, legal French, half-remembered schoolboy Latin and Greek, Warwickshire dialect, as well as vocabulary borrowed from the many corners of the world London was beginning to do commerce with.

Then there was what Shakespeare did with the tools at his disposal: his eye and ear for multiple meanings, half-buried senses, assonance and rhythm, beguiling imagery and metaphor. Scholars have long been obsessed by the question of how many words Shakespeare had invented (
excitement, frugal, lacklustre, savagery
: there are more, many of which haven't stuck), but – as with his deft skill at working with pre-existing sources – it was his facility with the language he heard around him that I found more remarkable. He had a sly skill at reanimating ossified meanings, an eagerness to push the most humdrum nouns and verbs in novel directions. His use of the language was so intricate and specialised that it had spawned what was in effect a customised dictionary, C. T. Onions's
A Shakespeare Glossary
(1911), 259 densely packed, double-columned pages.

And that was just vocabulary: things got still more complex when one considered sentence structure, or investigated Shakespeare's remarkable skill at conjuring voices and accents, each as distinct as an inked fingerprint on the page. Then there was his handling of verse, the surge and snap of the iambic line, the complex fugues of rhythms, and more. Although many lines were perfectly comprehensible on the surface, the more one teased apart their warp and weft the richer and more soaked with meaning they seemed. Not for nothing did his Elizabethan contemporary Francis Meres call Shakespeare ‘mellifluous and honey-tongued'.

I pulled my copy of the complete works out of my bag and plucked a line almost at random:

Macbeth,
act four, scene one. Eleven curt monosyllables, spoken by Macbeth as he decides to storm Macduff's castle and murder his family. I copied the line into my notebook. What mysteries did it contain?

For forty-five minutes, I attempted my own timid piece of translation, from English into English. The closer one analysed the line, the stranger and more slippery it got. Although its gist seemed clear (‘To follow up my thoughts with actions, I'll attack Macduff's castle'), its deeper meaning kept slipping out of focus, like the illusory dagger that leads Macbeth to Duncan's bedchamber.

‘Be it thought and done' was a pat phrase, the equivalent of ‘no sooner said than done', but, doubleness being a major theme in
Macbeth,
the line also seems to toy with the double meanings of the words
crown
(the verb ‘to add the finishing touch to' and the noun ‘royal crown') and
act
(‘actions' but also, metatheatrically, ‘performance'). But it was the sentence structure that caught the ear, a weaselling piece of subjunctive grammar (‘be it thought') that announced Macbeth's
intention
to make his intentions actions without ever fully admitting ownership – arguably the play's dominant theme. Spoken in a handful of seconds, the line was nonchalant in its brilliance. I couldn't begin to imagine how one might do it justice in another form.

And how did one do so in Chinese? Mandarin wasn't even the most complex of Sinitic languages, and, from the little I understood of its make-up, already seemed forbiddingly remote; not only because of the 20,000 characters regularly in use (with another 60,000 in reserve), but its strict tonal system, its huge variety of syllables, its thickets of compound nouns (‘wash-hair essence' for shampoo, ‘separate/combine device' for a car's clutch, ‘protect risk' for insurance).

The great literary critic William Empson – also, as it happened, a devoted sinologist who spent years in China – produced a witty catalogue of Shakespearian language in
The Structure of Complex Words
(1951), attempting to unpick every meaning of the word ‘sense' in
Measure for Measure.
Ingenious as he was, Empson cheerfully admitted one could never quite get to the end of
sense
's senses, which ranged from ‘sound good sense' to carnal sensuality, with every shade of meaning in between. ‘Almost all of them,' he wrote, ‘carry forward a puzzle which is essential to [the play's] thought.' Surely that puzzle would be utterly insoluble in Chinese?

Zhu Shenghao, writing in the months before he died, had been clear about what he had tried to accomplish, and even clearer on what he could not:

This is a thoughtful and flexible philosophy, unusually alive to the fact that Shakespeare's texts are scripts designed to be performed. But Zhu was working at a fearsome pace – twenty-five-odd plays in under two years, if the stories were to be believed – and whatever agonising he did must have been cursory at best. Also, he was vague on the details: what did ‘features of the style' mean when one was transforming Early Modern English into Modern Standard Chinese? How was it possible to paraphrase ‘clearly and faithfully' if the English version, as I'd discovered, was often anything but clear? The ‘ingenuity and vigour' of Shakespeare's language one could certainly agree on, but it demanded as much ingenuity again from the translator, if not many times more.

I looked up from my tray-table. By now we were well south of Nanjing. The Yangtze river, the colour of mulligatawny soup and crowded with barges, flashed by faster than I could reach for my camera. The journey had been so smoothly rapid that whenever we paused at a station I had the vertiginous sensation that the landscape was continuing to move. Buried in my books, I had failed even to make it to the dining car.

*

When the doors hissed open, the humidity was like being smothered by a warm, wet sponge. It had been late winter when I'd got on the train. In Shanghai, the best part of a thousand miles south, we'd skipped to early summer. As I pulled my case through Hongqiao station, appallingly vast, I found myself shedding clothes. By the time I had got up to ground level, my jacket was gone; a half-kilometre further, so were my jumper and overshirt. By the time I settled myself into the ripped mustard upholstery of an elderly Volkswagen taxi, I had an armful of redundant clothes. The driver eyed me dubiously. It looked as though I had attempted a striptease on the concourse.

At the hotel I made enquiries about a trip to visit the museum at Jiaxing, but in the meantime I had an appointment with a modern Zhu Shenghao: Professor Zhang Chong of Fudan University, one of China's most august academic institutions. Zhang was part of the team behind yet another complete works. First published under the general editorship of the respected Chinese scholar Fang Ping in 2000, it had recently been updated.

I found Zhang in a spartan, modern office on the main Fudan campus. Like the office, Zhang was neat and unshowy, a slim figure in a dark checked shirt with sleeves folded tidily above the elbows. High eyebrows and a bald crown gave him an expression of polite, mole-like surprise. Every so often, the eyebrows would jump far above his glasses and he would look sorely troubled; more often, his enthusiasm was difficult to contain. He was that rarest of creatures, a scholar who was also a born teacher.

His translation career had begun, unusually, with
The Two Noble Kinsmen,
the neglected and troubling tragicomedy, co-written with John Fletcher, that was almost certainly Shakespeare's final contribution to the stage. On a visiting fellowship to Harvard in the early 1990s, Zhang had come across the play in an American edition. Not having read it before, he excitedly assumed this was some kind of rediscovered text; then realised it was simply that it had never been translated into Chinese. He'd done it himself for fun. He had gone on to tackle
The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline
and
Pericles.
Obsessed with the late plays, he was a man after my own heart.

Before we got down to the nitty-gritty of how this all worked, he wanted to show me a thin paperback. It was a facsimile of Tian Han's
Hamlet
of 1922, the first complete Shakespearian playtext published in China, the original now enormously rare. The cover
was a riot of Chinese characters, but I had no trouble decoding the frontispiece – an engraving of Shakespeare derived from the so-called ‘Chandos' portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Even though most contemporary experts now thought it was a portrait of someone other than Shakespeare, its rugged, dashing features had attracted generations of admirers. It was an unexpected pleasure to see it here.

Zhu Shenghao was far from alone, Zhang explained: a number of heroic translation projects had been initiated in the 1930s, with varying degrees of success. A translator called Cao Wei Feng had had a similar idea in 1930, and hit similar obstacles to Zhu; he had only finished eleven plays, which were eventually published in 1943. Liang Shiqiu had also gone his own way, and taken even longer to finish – after being forced to relocate to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic, and the Nationalists after the 1949 Revolution, he didn't finish his translations until 1967. There were now at least five separate versions of the complete works available in Mandarin, and many more plays had been translated individually. A few translations were in verse; most – following Zhu – were in prose. With such bounteous options already in circulation, one had to wonder why on earth the British government was spending £1.5 million doing it all again. But then of course that was all about politics, and very little to do with plays.

The challenges to effective translation were almost innumerable, sighed Zhang: it was hard to know where to begin. First one had to choose a source text, a ticklish question in itself. He himself followed the popular American Riverside complete works, but cross-checked it with the new Oxford edition. There were countless differences.

Once you had decided what to translate, the next difficulty was the words themselves. Translators distinguished between ‘dynamic equivalence' and ‘formal equivalence' – sense-for-sense rather than word-for-word – but in practice the distinction was hazy, especially for a writer such as Shakespeare, who used words with such profound awareness of their teemingly multiple senses.

As straightforward a line as Lear's ‘Nothing will come of nothing' was surprisingly laborious, owing to the fact that Mandarin has no single nounal form for ‘nothing'. The closest one could get was ‘not having anything', which has rather a weaker ring. The most famous phrase in the canon, ‘To be or not to be', despite its apparent
simplicity, posed exquisite nightmares for Chinese translators. English is unusual in having a verb form that encompasses the concept of being alive, and the much broader ontological sense, to do with the state of
being
– so is Hamlet here riddling about the nature of existence, or deciding whether to stab himself in the chest? In Chinese you couldn't have both. A tantalising interpretational knot had to be sliced through.

Metaphors were another stumbling block, either requiring laborious spelling-out or modification into something else entirely. Isabella's description of the ‘glassy essence' of man's nature in
Measure for Measure
(‘His glassy essence, like an angry ape | Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven | As makes the angels weep') posed such a dilemma. The image of shattering fragility was lost when one used the most straightforward Chinese equivalent, which implied ‘soft/yielding nature'. Zhu Shenghao had translated this as
liu-li-yi-sui-de-ben-xing
(‘the nature [of human beings] that is easily broken like ancient glass tiles'), which had a nicely Chinese ring, but hardly tripped off the tongue.

Zhang smiled. ‘And of course we are talking here only about Mandarin. China has over fifty ethnic groups, hundreds of dialects. In Hong Kong they speak Cantonese, which is even more complicated, more tones …'

Because of the pronunciation differences between English and Mandarin (notably Mandarin's lack of an r sound resembling the one in English) characters' names had to be rendered phonetically, with a great deal of approximation: ‘Luomiou' for Romeo and ‘Luoselin' for Rosaline, ‘Hamuleite' or ‘Hanmolaide' for Hamlet. And what to do with Bottom in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
? Some translators took the coward's way out and simply called him
Zhigong,
‘Weaver'. Zhang's colleague Fang Ping had come up with
Xiantuan-er,
meaning ‘reel of thread', with its connotations of going on and on (as Bottom does). This was clever, but lacked the earthy scatological pun of the original. Bawdiness – one of Shakespeare's abiding talents – was a major problem for early Chinese translators such as Zhu, who drew a discreet veil over many of the dirtiest words.