Category Archives: My Writing

Review: The Man With Compound Eyes – Chapter 1 《複眼人》第一章

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Been planning several posts, but have been a little busy lately so apologies for the blogging hiatus, though I’ve got a translation of a short story by Roan Ching-yue (阮慶岳） and a review of the amazing Thoughts from Tribeca (《瓊美卡隨想錄》) by Mu Xin (木心) in the works . I’ve decided to review the next book chapter by chapter, so that there will be more regular content on the blog, and so I can give enough weight to each chapter as the story develops.

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On the recommendation of Dan Bloom, I started reading the original Chinese version of The Man with Compound Eyes —《複眼人》— by Wu Ming-Yi (吳明益) which has just been published in English translation. I realized later that I’d actually perused another book by the author in a bookshop in Taipei, a short story collection called The magician on the footbridge (《天橋上的魔術師》) , it had looked good but I hadn’t any money on me that day so I couldn’t buy it, and I promptly forgot about it.

The first chapter is divided into three parts. After the first fragment in which the Han Chinese sounding Li Rongxiang (李榮祥) is caught up in what I assumed was an earthquake, comes the second chapter, which tells the story of an island people. The story, seemed to incorporate adapted and more exaggerated, sexed up versions of Taiwanese aboriginal customs (like those of the Amis/Pancah) and those of other Pacific cultures – like women choosing their sexual partners by tickling them in some tribes, which is portrayed in the story through the series of sexual encounters the protagonist is compelled to go through in the bushes with women from the tribe while he searches for the girl he really likes before his departure from the island, as all second sons must depart the island when they come of age – related in a casual tone but in an anthropological register, which reminded me somewhat of the issues raised about the Han portrayal of aboriginal culture brought up in this essay by Huang Yuqian and about the private vs public duality of the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the film Savage Memory which I watched recently at the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. Given the controversy over representation and exploitation of aboriginal people that has surfaced in the past – including that surrounding one of the curator’s of the ethnographic film festival Professor Hu Taili, when she shot a documentary in Orchid Island and was accused by the locals of exploitation despite the clearly sensitive approach her film takes (see a review of it here) – I thought it was interesting that an ethnically Han Taiwanese author would choose to take this approach in describing what is clearly a fantastical parallel to Orchid Island. Following these two parts there is another shift in time and space. Alice, who lives in H county, which seems to be more or less synonymous with Taidong county, is grief stricken and planning her suicide after the disappearance of her Dutch boyfriend and his son in an earthquake while they were mountain climbing. The calm way in which she went about planning her own death reminded me of the Singaporean film 15 in which a young Singaporean goes on a tour round the city to see if he can find a non-cliche building to jump off, so that his suicide can be cool. The character Alice brought up several points which I thought were interesting. The first was her criticism of academia in Taiwan, which she criticizes as overly bureaucratic and she criticizes academics as overly business minded. As I have first hand experience of studying a literature degree in Taiwan I recognized this character as similar to some of the people I’ve met during my studies, as she’s almost a caricature of the typical Taiwanese young woman who wants to write but is sucked in by depression and blames everything around her for her own problems. Not that academia doesn’t have its problems – the sheer amount of work involved means that reading is always hard to fit in to your schedule, and lots of professors in Taiwan seem more interested in how much grant money they can get rather than having any passion for scholarship itself.

The second issue was the idea of development in Taiwan. She mentions that the city has changed and developed into an urban sprawl – which reminded me of a ted talk i saw but can not locate, about a guy who had originally been protesting the construction of the Suhua highway, but who discovered that he was being called a traitor by the local people who saw the highway as bringing much needed development to the region.  The same dilemma is thrown up in the book when after hearing Alice’s complaints at the development being inauthentic, her colleague replies: 「照妳這麼說，那真的應該是什麼樣子？」(According to your logic then what should it really look like?). I felt this was an interesting way to introduce doubt towards the unreliable narrator, as the controversy over urban renewal projects in Taiwan often have two sides encapsulated by this statement. When discussing this issue with aboriginal students in Taiwan I came across two different points of view, some being in favour of economic development which can help the people in terms of earning enough to survive, though it erodes traditional culture, the other favoured cultural heritage but at the cost of many people’s livelihoods.

余華之《活著》書評 A Review of To Live by Yu Hua

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余華的短片小說我念大學時就讀到幾篇了，讀到時候感覺很新鮮——尤其是〈現實一種〉這篇——人物跟敘事者對小說中的血腥行為保持客觀的距離、漠不關心的態度，似乎主角在害他弟弟時也沒有多留意就心被分到光線那邊去。讀了許多年的刻版式的課文的我突然感覺有了活力——原來中文也有不濫情的、現代主義小說。不過，看《活著》看到一半又有一點失望，余華在這個作品中的敘事形式很像寫實主義的那派「傷痕文學」或賽珍珠的《大地》，只是以平民的視野去敘事內戰、文化大革命時期的那段歷史。這當然不見得是不好看，只是我在念高中時看這類型的小說看膩了，例如《野天鵝》、《落葉歸根》等等。

然而到最後（死了很多人之後）又讓我想到史坦貝克之《憤怒的葡萄》悲觀的收場。只是余華似乎跟史坦貝克的意圖不同，到最後富貴還是以正面的態度繼續活著。他那樣地接受所謂的「天意」令人想到台灣新電影的風格，尤其是《戀戀風塵》。

This was an average but ultimately disappointing read from an author whose short stories promised something more. ‘A Kind of Reality’ had an interesting narrative style, completely unengaged from the tragedy that occurs in the story, To Live, however, seemed derivative of a lot of the scar literature I read as a teenager, like Wild Swans, Life and Death in Shanghai, and Falling leaves return to their roots. Not that these books were bad, it’s just that I expected a more interesting technique from Yu Hua than a more or less straightforward narrative, although Yu Hua distinguishes his story somewhat in being less critical of the Communist Party than other novels in the genre. The almost Job-like persistence of Fu Gui, despite the death of his entire family brought to mind the determinism of the New Taiwanese Film wave, particularly films like Dust in the Wind. Although I identify more with the outlook of Steinbeck at the end of Grapes of Wrath or Hemingway at the end of A Farewell to Arms.

Drowning – Out the World

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The music came again, reaching a crescendo as I saw the therapist’s lips moving – I could have guessed what she was saying if I’d had the motivation to try, even though the music made it impossible to hear her words. In her clinically jovial tone she was telling me I had relapsed, that I had disconnected again. We had traced a familiar route through the hospital, that, if not for the music getting in the way, would almost been a nostalgic trip down – as Myles na Gopaleen would have put it – that cliche of a tourist trap that is memory lane, but we found no trace of the familiar waiting room at the end of the emotionally-vacant journey, and only then was it that my mother must have fumbled hurriedly for the letter as I watched on indifferently. The clinic had moved to the other side of the hospital, it transpired. My mother’s apologies would have been met with an ever-cheerful facade of small talk and smiles, masking the therapist’s minor irritation at our late-coming. I tried responding to her, resisting for a moment against the pull, but it was hard to talk over the music, which surged every time I opened my mouth – it was easier to comply. It had been ever-present over recent months, and I had lost the will to overcome it – lectures, television, headlines, documentaries, deadlines, a friend’s painful break-up, the death of a family friend – it all sank into meaninglessness beneath the powerful beat – that limbo-like grip that the music held over me. Had I been able to think over the music, I might have remembered again with bitterness the way the therapist had once poked at a tightly held secret of mine, suggesting that others who heard the music tended to be feel more effeminate, asking me if I identified more with women than with men, if I had ever had feelings for other boys. This had not been out of concern for me, but rather she had simply been helping out a student conducting a study on the effects of the music on gender identity – to me as a patient who had always performed like an eager circus animal for all the doctors, the disinterest and scrutiny in an area out of my comfort zone had left me feeling betrayed and had simply buried my secret deeper – her lack of praise for my answers had stung, and belied her previous lip-service praise of my progress. When I had gone into recovery, I sometimes believed her apparent hypothesis – as it had been around puberty that the music had first contained me – although it didn’t feel like containment… or rather it only felt like containment when one struggled against it, like the background music turned up too loud in the pub, so that it drowned out the voice of the person talking to you across the table. So that their concerns, their joy, their character became simply a few snippets of different sentences from an amusingly animated face, the snippets that could be understood were mostly pronouns and those that could be guessed by the shape of the mouth – that was when the disinterest had started to accompany the music. People no longer kept my attention with their “He… it… and… he…. “, “What… me… the…” – and the music became stronger when I tried to concentrate, weakening my resolve to attempt to understand. Without the music, I might have questioned this again now, as I had come out and had lived happily with my identity for a long time before the music’s return – but as it was I would have found it hard to have any thoughts, let alone these ones. The things I had been so concerned with now inspired nothing in me, my mother’s concern, a need to please the people around me, the need to argue, the need to please both strangers and friends, political indignation, lust – all things were now drowned  – leaving me out of the world.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HtHEgINHO0&w=560&h=315]

About to Awaken / 將醒 by MuXin (木心)

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Mu Xin is the pen name for author, painter and poet, Sun Pu (孙璞). He came from a wealthy family in Zhejiang and was the nephew of the famous Chinese author Mao Dun (茅盾). After graduating from art school he became a teacher and later a professor. During the cultural revolution he was arrested and imprisoned. After being released from prison, he continued to work in fine art. In 1982 he migrated to the United States, where he continued to write and paint. He was the first 20th Century Chinese artist to be housed in the British Museum. In 2006 he returned to his hometown in China. He died in December of 2011 after having been admitted to hospital for a lung infection in October.

About to Awaken

Man just awoken from his dreams, is man at his most basic.

In that instant, man’s nature is neither good nor evil, it’s empty, weak, vaguely disconnected .

A hero’s failure, the deflowering of a beauty, all occur at such a moment. An instant on the blurry line between the conscious and the subconscious, an involuntary moment.

Man’s effusiveness, his distance, his magnanimity, his miserliness, are all deliberately acquired behaviour. Rudely awakened from one’s dreams, the pious or the villainous, the gentleman or the pleb, the loyal lover or the cad, they’re all more or less the same, after a little time passes, the differences become clear as day.

However, why is it that the masterful battle strategies, that strangely beautiful inspiration, often comes out of these instants at which one is neither awake nor asleep?

It’s the persisting presence of the dream, when the routine logic of the mind has yet to kick in; instinct, intuition take advantage of the opportunity, and man is able to exceed the limits imposed by habit – instinct, intuition, are the fundamental intelligence formed by tens of thousands of years of experience, lying dormant in the deepest recesses of our intellect, they surface only occasionally, making up for lost time with their brilliance.

That which is brilliant and majestic can be found to have been achieved by way of man’s instinct.

As if the gods had intervened to help, man actually helps himself – this without doubt is something to rejoice in. However, one mustn’t be too happy.

將醒

剛從睡夢中醒來的人，是「人之初」。

際此一瞬間，不是性本善也非性本惡，是空白、荏弱、軟性的脫節。

英雄的失策，美人的失貞，往往在此一瞬片刻。是意識和潛意識界線模糊的一瞬，身不由己的片刻。

人的寬厚、澆薄、慷慨、吝嗇，都是後天的刻意造作。從睡夢中倏然醒來時，義士惡徒君子小人多情種負心郎全差不多，稍過一會兒，區別就明明顯顯的了。

然而高妙的戰略，奇美的靈感，也往往出此將醒未醒的剎那之間，又何以故？

那是夢的殘象猶存，思維的習性尚未順理成章；本能、直覺正可乘機起作用，人超出了自己尋常的水平——本能、直覺，是歷千萬年之經驗而形成的微觀智慧，冥潛於靈性的最深層次，偶爾升上來，必是大有作為。

宏偉、精彩的事物，都是由人的本能直覺來成就的。

若有神助，其實是人的自助——這無疑是可喜的。不過不栗太高興。

(Translation by Conor Stuart/翻譯：蕭辰宇)

Translating Taiwan

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I’ve been inTaiwan for a few years now and have been translating a variety of short stories and essays on an amateur basis. I hope to use this blog to post some of the translated work and some translations that I’ve done for fun. Would be happy to take submissions from other amateur translators with an interest in China or Taiwan.

我已經在台灣侍(呆) 了六年，對翻譯文學一直有興趣，也翻過幾篇短片小說、文章等等，因此創造這個部落格的目的便是po一些最近翻譯的或我覺得有趣的譯作給大家參考。我也歡迎對台灣或中國有興趣的讀者寄給我你們的翻譯作品，或在這邊合作。