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Howard Goldblatt interview

Full-Tilt, “a journal of East Asian, poetry, translation and the arts”, which is completely new to me (and I guess everyone else, as this is their second issue), has an interview with Howard Goldblatt. The issue features several other interviews with translators as well.

Howard Goldblatt has all but single-handedly introduced contemporary Chinese-language literature to the English-speaking world. With over thirty volumes of Chinese fiction in translation to his name as well as several memoirs and a volume of poetry in translation, Goldblatt continually seeks out new talent to introduce to English-speaking readers while maintaining a commitment to more established writers. His shortlist of literary translations reads like a “Who’s Who” of important contemporary authors from China and Taiwan.

He has some interesting things to say about the art of translation (I’m tempted to quote so much more, but follow the link for the good stuff):

What are some of the problems specific to translating from Chinese into English?

Not knowing Chinese well enough, not knowing English well enough. Actually, not knowing Chinese well enough isn’t a big problem—you can always ask someone. You can ask your author, you can ask your friends. No, the thing that’s really killing translation in our field is literalism. Too many translators are afraid of the text, especially when they’re first starting out. And I understand that, because I was too. They’re all afraid of the text. You need to overcome your fear of the text, put some distance between you and it. You have to because Chinese and English are so different. Take the use of the passive voice, for example, which just runs through the Chinese language. Five different agents for the passive voice! We only have one. And the Chinese use it all the time. It is part of the language, part of the way they express themselves. But if you use it that much in English—God!

So how do you handle linguistic problems like this?

My watchword is: did the Chinese writer write it that way for a particular purpose or did his language dictate it be that way? If it’s the latter, then I put it into whatever my language dictates it should be. If I assume that it’s idiosyncratic, that the author was trying to defamiliarize the text, to slow the reader down, then I try very much to capture that.

via the ALTA blog.



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