Universes

(No one is as upset with the closing line of this piece as I am. I apologize in advance AND after.)

Going back through a long list of saved and unread articles I came across the “Right to Rewrite?” article from my old alma matter, (no, not literally) the China Daily, and thought, '”Is it possible that they could possibly be missing the point any more than they are?

(Yes, I write this way on purpose.)

Outside of the babbling on about minutiae and “literature” and whether to say “goose-egged” (oh, how important!) and the usual dickishness (a generous term, to say the least) from Kubin and the eternal “I’m not responsible for anything, I have editors” nonsense from Goldblatt, there’s not really much there.

The problem China has, and Chinese as well, is that it’s not written well enough. And no, I don’t mean that in a Kubin/racist kind of way. I mean that in a screenwriting kind of way, a Game of Thrones kind of way because ultimately, that’s what China (and Chinese) is competing with in this world. Other places, other languages and cultural products are competing for time, attention and money with everything else that is out there. For giant superstructures like China, Chinese culture or Chinese languages, serious competitors aren’t Singapore (a weekend retreat) or “books” from other languages/places, but rather other superstructures that offer engrossing, rich, interesting worlds (universes) that take up time, attention and money. Sure, old favorites like France or Japan are competitors, but the real competitors are sports, ESPN, and drilling further down, the entire universe that grows around a single “sport”, like professional wrestling. And they’re not limited to sports, but rather also include individual book series, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, or the entire niche of jumping from one sci-fi/fantasy/mystery universe to another: Dune to Star Wars to James Bond to Game of Thrones. And then there’s the 20-500 hour console and computer games that began as one-player quests and now have transformed into literal virtual worlds, a la WOW. And while it’s true that you may learn a lot from these things and connect with real, individual people, it is also true that these things are not the world. These things are not the manufacturer of the device you use to experience these things, nor the parent yelling at the kid for being home all day doing this stuff, nor the pollution outside, nor the political repression or freedom all around that self-enclosed space.

If you don’t bring Paris with you, you’re not going to find it there.

What China (et al) lacks, and what these universes (ESPN, pro wrestling, game of thrones, etc.) have is the quality of being well written.

When you find something that sucks you in, that’s engrossing, you know immediately that you’ve found something special. You can tell that the things fit into place in that universe just as well as the laws of physics hold together in ours, even though that final bit of glue to make everything appear seamless is probably done by the audience, with the cracks only revealed on careful examination (an visible boom mic in a shot of pro-wrestling only seen by someone not paying attention to the match, or CPT violation observed at CERN only after the 1000th try.)

Despite what the haters say about Japan’s anime and manga culture, the visual and artistic distinctiveness and innovation, the clear presence of a unique element in the work and the ability to resonate issues universal, addictive, and engrossing is why Japan is in the public imagination. It’s not that other factors don’t account for this, but it’s that there’s something to dream about there’s something in people’s heads that doesn’t pop when you think about Korea (Samsung) or China (Tiananmen square guy). The depth of the rabbit hole hinted at and brought forth in the anime/manga world in Japan is just staggering. It bleeds into everything else. It is the Paris you take when you get there. Sure, you find out that everything is a bit more dull, the Parisians aren’t actually that rude, and the magic isn’t really there most of the time, but once in a while you’ll take a wrong turn down a dark alley and spot that little totem that links in to all that imagination bubbling up just under the surface of your mind and puts that little aura around everything you were sure was there all along, but were slowly coming to believe was all in your mind. This is how you make kids eat vegetables. It’s slow and doesn’t always work, but the read your 道德經 school is never going to get anyone very far. And that’s what the Hollywood movies have done for America (in the way anime and manga have done for Japan), they’ve written an engrossing and attractive story of the country/people/language etc. Sure, most of it’s bullshit or exaggerated or not true, but you’re not going to get many people to go pick up the Federalist papers or learn about Hip-Hop lyrics without a well-written story. Maybe they’re written into that story, subtly, like a Dickens character someone loved for 50 pages and was never heard from again, or maybe after Games of Thrones people actually want to go read up and really get more into the history and life of that time. It’s not that this can’t be done: the rich history and culture that something like Dune or Star Wars or Game of Thrones (or even baseball) is something that China (et all) can compete with. Maybe not every country can, maybe Estonia can’t, but China certainly can. And it won’t be one Steven Spielberg collabo flick, or a good adaptation/showing/translation of Condor Heroes or Dream of the Red Chamber shown on western television. We don’t live in a single-event world anymore (if we ever did). We live in an event-driven world that is typified by streams of everything. There’s four major sports (ok, hockey doesn’t actually count) in America that push it to the fore during all seasons, but ESPN is way ahead of them, putting 4 different sports on each season and expanding to new channels exploring the past, the celebrity, the funny, the everything. There’s wrestling channels to keep you up all the time, combined with communities online whose ranks grow and deplete as new fans come and go as they age. But if you turn on your television you won’t find a Chinese channel. You won’t even find good Chinese stuff slipped into Adult swim like anime or British sitcoms slipped into BBC America. In fact you won’t find it on the internet either. There’s literally nothing. A new dark continent, opaque all the way down. Sure, you’ll find a Chinese channel, with people in suits stiffer than a wall reading the news at you in a range of accents from FOB to not good to I know I look Chinese, but I my family has been here for 150 years, I have no connection to the culture, oh, by the way I was your neighbor and probably dated your brother during high school and I myself wonder why I have this job. But of course, a hipster (or really anyone under 40, 50?) stumbling across this station could only watch it ironically (like wearing a vote McCain t-shirt) or laugh at how stiff and serious the people were and how equally stiff and serious they imagine their audience to be. There’s an entire world out there for you to compete with, CCTV, you’re doing it wrong. To compete with the world, you first have to decide you have to be part of the world, and that may be the barrier to break through before we can even begin to talk about being written better.

That brings us back to the point here. You’re losing. You’re losing to that kid who dumps 200 hours into that SNES game which means a lot to him. And the next 10 where she tries to replicate that experience and find that deepness and richness of that universe repeated. For every 200 hours dumped into that, you have 200 hours not dumped into learning a language, or getting involved in your country/culture/people/languages, even obliquely. You have to be a time sink and you’ll never get there with government marketing push alone. If you think kids are smart, then you must know adults are even smarter. Letting a thousand flowers bloom guarantees I never have to think again about getting angry about some random translator thoughts about goose-eggs or abdicating responsibilities to editors. That’s the translators invisibility, getting the audience to the place they want to be, that rich engrossing world that is pulling them in. I can’t name the thousands of translators of the anime I’ve seen or read. Sure, now that I translate myself I have criticisms of styles and quality, but they all more or less got me there because the universe they were mediating over was powerful enough that even they couldn’t mess it up. Think the bible. Only stuffy fucks are still bitching about “with child” and other drugs. The rest of the world is busy getting their Christ on. So, China, I think you’ve got what it takes to have a larger percentage of the world get their China on. Maybe not Bible sales, but maybe Japan sales aren’t too far out of reach mid-term. You’ve just got to do a better job writing yourself, because the video games and the novel/movie universes and the MMORPGs and the Sportstravaganzas and Hollywood and anime are written really, really well, and they’re totally kicking your ass. So get off of your ass, especially whatever ass thing you think literature means, and go Git-R-Dun. (No one is as upset with this closing line as I am. I apologize here, one more time.)

兩在卡夫卡 and Epinephrine

甲 The writer Paul Adler

‘What is his profession?’

‘He has none. He has no profession, only a vocation. He travels with his wife and the children from one friend to another. A free man, and a poet. In his presence I always have pangs of conscience, because I allow my life to be frittered away in an office.’

- Conversations with Kafka By Gustav Janouch

Two: From the Wikipedia (where would I be without you?)

James Hawes argues many of Kafka's descriptions of the legal proceedings in The Trial – metaphysical, absurd, bewildering and "Kafkaesque" as they might appear – are, in fact, based on accurate and informed (although exaggerated) descriptions of German and Austrian criminal proceedings of the time, not well understood by many British or American people, who were familiar with an adversarial rather than inquisitorial system of justice.

A fascinating read which explains this. Highly recommended:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1574870

Love and other drugs

Though a lot of people seem genuinely baffled at times as to why people do the things they do, any first-semester psychology student with a passing grade could explain it to you in 30 seconds. Epinephrine (adrenaline) like any good drug, is a dumb drug. You get a shot of it whether you get punched in the face or win the lottery. And like any good drug, when you get off that high that it gives you, you sometimes do whatever you can to reproduce that situation that gave you the rush. Your body associates the action with the response, which you want, however horrible the action is. It’s why you run back to the scene of the accident, or why that violence that you saw and didn’t like is somehow something you want: because it made your heart race like that girl with the streak in her hair  that you saw for the first time, but would set off the sense whenever you saw it again, hoping, like the first time, it would give you that thrill. A lot of people try to use religion to find their ways out of this. Sometimes the natural high of group inclusion and kindness can be enough to replace what was lost. Sometimes it’s the coldness of a rock that you can lean on, that helps to block out and dull natural responses. If you hold your fists tight and close your eyes tight enough for a long enough time everything may just disappear. But it’ll probably always be there: last in our dreams, but first on our hearts.

Mark Ma to Ma Ying-jeou

But Sir, in Project Mayhem, we have no names.

Now you listen to me, this is a man and he has a name. And it’s Robert Paulson. Ok?

Robert Paulson?

He’s a man and he’s dead now because of us, alright? Do you understand that?

I understand…In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.

It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.

Why we fight: we’re trying to make cricket bats.

-“In my view, emotion in a reader derives from reception of a clear rendering of primal human experiences: fear of death, desire, loss of love, celebration of being. To spark emotion, a poet must strive to attain what Aristotle called simple clarity. The world that the reader apprehends through his or her senses must be clearly painted, even if that world is wholly imaginary…” again, Mary Karr, Against Decoration.

Sticking to words in the name of some sort of belief about what translation is leads only to balls. Balls, that is:

(The following is from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.)

ANNIE: You’re jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep it sacred, special, not something anybody can do. Some of us have it, some of us don’t. We write, you get written about. What gets you about Brodie is he doesn’t know his place. You say he can’t write like a head waiter saying you can’t come in here without a tie. Because he can’t put words together. What’s so good about putting words together?

HENRY: It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.

ANNIE: He’s not a writer. He’s a convict. You’re a writer. You write because you’re a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing. More well chosen words nicely put together. So what? Why should that be it? Who says?

HENRY: Nobody says. It just works best.

ANNIE: Of course it works. You teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing, and you end up with a lot of people saying you write well. Then somebody who isn’t in on the game comes along, like Brodie, who really has something to write about, something real, and you can’t get through it. Well, he couldn’t get through yours, so where are you? To you, he can’t write. To him, write is all you can do.

HENRY: Jesus, Annie, you’re beginning to appall me. There’s something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don’t know how to deal with you. Where’s my cricket bat?

ANNIE: Your cricket bat?

HENRY: Yes. It’s a new approach. [He heads out into the hall.]

ANNIE: Are you trying to be funny?

HENRY: No, I’m serious. [He goes out while she watches in wary disbelief. He returns with an old cricket bat.]

ANNIE: You better not be.

HENRY: Right, you silly cow —

ANNIE: Don’t you bloody dare —

HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… [He clucks his tongue to make the noise.] What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … [He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.] Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting Ouch! with your hands stuck into your armpits. This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. [quoting from the play] You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you? Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live. Ooh, ouch! [He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits, going Ouch! ANNIE watches him expressionlessly until he desists.]

ANNIE: I hate you.

HENRY: I love you. I’m your pal. I’m your best mate. I look after you. You’re the only chap.

ANNIE: Oh, Hen… Can’t you help?

HENRY: What did you expect me to do?

ANNIE: Well…cut it and shape it…

HENRY: Cut it and shape it. Henry of Mayfair. Look — he can’t write. I would have to write it for him.

ANNIE: Well, write it for him.

HENRY: I can’t.

ANNIE: Why?

HENRY: Because it’s balls. Mary’s part is the least of it — it’s merely ham-fisted. But when he gets into his stride, or rather his lurch, announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific — war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons… You can’t fool Brodie — patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism… Pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the India rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea…

(end passage)

---

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

(end quote)

Yes, the words are sacred, the words your audience is reading, not the originals. You can’t get the new ones in the right order if you’re too scared to touch the sacred original ones.

Flights to quality

The meteoric rise of Apple represents a flight-to-quality, but not a flight to quality.

The idea that there’s this pent up demand for “quality”, and that all you need is a charismatic leader to smack you upside the head to make you realize it is nothing but wishful thinking.

Apple doesn’t win on quality, arranged against a sea of undistinguished, cheaper competitors. It wins by giving less risk and making things more simple. It didn’t even used to charge its mark-up as a symbol of quality and status, it did so because it really couldn’t get lower costs in comparison to its competitors. Its new products actually do benefit from enormous scale, and it does have relatively lower prices on some products, but maintains a relatively high price on many simply to maintain its status as a premium brand.

Apple gives you answers, lies of course, but definitive answers that are good enough so that you don’t have to think anymore. That’s how you sell anything, not by dripping out little things and saying it’s kinda good or whatever, and is what it is, and stands by itself, etc, etc. Those days, if they ever existed, are gone. Marketing: this is what this is, this is all there is, all you need to know, and how it’s going to help you. Done.

What I’m saying here is that we’re selling records and you don’t sell many records by not selling them. This is selling records. It’s about reach and relevancy, and pretty ain’t got nothing to do with it. Otherwise, well, y’know.

Seems to be a Wikipedia-heavy day. Should really get back to actual translation contributionisms.

Paid to look pretty

People like to look at pretty things. There’s a market for the makeup artist and the model, but I’m beautifully confident there’s no market for the “authentic.”

At the same time, there’s a market for mirrors, or as the kids call it these days, “filters.” Now some people may tell you the yearning for difference is a yearning for the authentic, but they are lying to you. People want Game of Thrones because it tells the exact same story as all the other stories, with a filter (an occasional trill, pseudo old language, “oldish” costumes.) But have no doubts, Game of Thrones is 90210 with all the sex and violence you always craved. And in 10 years you’ll get even more of the sex and violence you’re missing now.

So the next time you’re thinking about trotting out your version of the “real world”, think about how many successful ad campaigns have been based on reality in the past 60 years. How many used models without makeup? How many didn’t use models?

Translation is a catch-all. In a non-command world, people need to have a reason to keep on reading or listening, market or not. Actions and results speak louder than the occasional call from the wild about “authenticity.”

I wish I could remember what I wanted to write about ‘strongly-typed languages.’ I’m pretty sure I had more and more interesting things to say about that.

The booger king

《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》

著 九把刀

第二章，最後一段

Animal was my best friend back then, and his family had a lot of money. He’d always have a new copy of the Youth Express each week which he’d let me look at. We’d read about Super Saiyans and Frieza and whatever new things were happening in the Blast Limit Saga. I knew that stuff cold, just as well as he did. Where my confidence came from, however, always remained a mystery.

He lived in a small town in Lugang. After class we’d read comics together while we waited for the bus.

“You’ve been talking to Jiayi a lot recently,” Animal said, sitting under a tree, looking up at the sky.

“Yup,” I said as I kept on reading his magazine.

“You don’t think that’s a little weird? I mean, what do you even talk about?” he said, still looking up at the sky.

He was always staring up at the clouds. It eventually got me thinking something’s just not right with people who do that.

“You know, whatever,” I said, making a face before getting back to the magazine.

“I mean, she’s got really good grades. What could she possibly want to talk to you about?”

You’d think his neck would get sore eventually.

“Animal,” I said, picking my nose without putting down the magazine.

“Goin’ fishin?” he said, still entranced by the clouds.

“You know, I’m not just some ordinary guy,” I said, admiring the snot on my finger.

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. Sometimes I even scare myself with how incredible I am,” I said, placing the booger on his blue backpack.

“原文” http://giddens.twbbs.org/story/21girl/s_girl03.htm