I sometimes imagine that people will ask me why Avril Lavigne is marketable worldwide (China) and a group like Panic at the Disco is not. Of course no one ever asks me this type of question, but I digress. I mean, what's the real difference here? They're both pale enough to be part of the Twilight cast. They're both young and interested in making lots of cash by being tools of corporate machines. Is it really just because Avril is a girl and is (sometimes) blonde?
Let's take an Avril song. Girlfriend:
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I don't like your girlfriend,
No way, no way,
Think you need a new one,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I could be your girlfriend,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I know that you like me,
No way, no way,
No its not a secret,
Hey, hey,
You, you,
I want to be your girlfriend.
Ok, maybe that's not fair. Let's look at a verse.
I can see the way,
I see the way you look at me,
And even when you look away,
I know you think of me,
I know you talk about me all the time,
Again and again,
So come over here,
And tell me what I wanna hear,
Better yet, make your girlfriend dissappear,
I don't wanna hear you say her name ever again (again and again and again).
I tried.
Now, let's take something like London beckoned songs about money written by machines by Panic at the Disco
Chorus:
Well we're just a wet dream for the webzine
Make us it
Make us hip
Make us scene
Or shrug us off your shoulders
Don't approve a single word that we wrote
and a verse:
I'm burning and I'm blacking my lungs
Boy, you know it feels good with fire back on your tongue
If you talk, you better walk
You better back your shit up
With more than good hooks
While you're all under the gun
Start talking "a sensationalist"
Oh, he's slightly clever to just a certain extent.
Oh, keep quiet! Let us sing like the doves
Then decide if it's done with purpose or lack thereof
I like to think of this as Hemmingway syndrome: pieces of culture A that are the easiest to assimilate and comprehend form an disproportionate share of country B's cultural consumption and understanding of A. To combat this kind of situation there are two strategies. One, decent language education. If your goals in teaching language are mere small your results will be small (Hemmingway readers, at best). Communication and reading at the level of air-traffic controllers will be possible. A boring world. If you want to pique interest you have to engage a culture and that's done by giving students the opportunity to deal with a culture and language as they are. Don't hold your breath. Two, translation. Translation can translate meaning and it can translate style. In the chinese translation world it seems that the translation of meaning placed in a chinese framework was and is dominant. This does not have to be the case. You're not going to get hip-hop into chinese by making it read like Mandopop. You have to bring it into chinese as chinese hip-hop and this will inevtiably involve dirty words like 'slang' and 'dialect.' The gap that needs to be bridged is one of register, appropriateness and form. It's the reason Shakespeare suffers a fate far worse than Homer in my opinion. Fortunately Homer was lucky enough to be written in Greek, meaning we feel free to update him. We can bring it into proper modern registers both high and low. Shakespeare on the other hand is condemned to remain a museum piece, our new latin. Shakespeare doesn't have to be updated to be Save the Last Dance 2 (I'm looking at you Julia Stiles), and it doesn't have to be silly and deep for sake's sake (I'm looking at you Ethan Hawke, and Baz Luhrman). It just needs to be touched up so it can be absorbed in a real way and not as an assignment.
Basically I'm blaming the internationalization of English for a lot, but the problems start at home. Silliness and old conventions have to be debated and challenged. If your enemies are old, you might just have to wait a few years and let them die (no offense to the recent passing of William Safire). The older generations who grew up mid 20th century don't share our convictions on a lot of things. They were schooled with the previous generations knowledge, not the things being discovered and debated from the 50s to 90s. America went pretty fast from a Reagan /Bush country to an Obama country with gay marriage and the people in power positions aren't necessarily your natural allies.
Dealing with reality is good. The closer you get to dealing with the heart of things the better.
Old does not equal high register. It just equals old. Fart jokes from Aristophanes better not come into English as a bunch of logos (unless you're British and your jokes still tend to resemble Victorian English from time to time, I guess that's what happens when you lack black culture or a real counterculture). And not all Western literature should read like Fu Lei. The only reason we even have that kind of translation is because of 方言 suppression, but that's a whole other post.
