Scales of Injustice by Loa Ho, translated by Darryl Sterk, Honford Star, 2018
It is never easy to translate a founding figure in a literary field, let alone a pioneering writer who has been translated by influential translators before. Such is the tricky task assigned to Darryl Sterk of translating Loa Ho’s (賴和, “Lai He” in Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, 1894–1943) complete fiction collection, which includes twenty-one novellas composed by the “Father of New Taiwanese Literature.” Entitled Scales of Injustice and freshly published in May 2018 by the London-based publishing house, Honford Star, the book features Loa Ho’s fiction in Sterk’s brand new translations from vernacular Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese (the “Taiwanese varieties of ‘Southern Hokkien’,” as explained by the translator) into English. The mixed use of languages in Loa Ho’s writing reflects the historical background in which the Hakka author lived when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. While Japanese was the official language, Taiwanese people with Minnan heritage still spoke Taiwanese at home, even as the Japanese government enforced an assimilation policy around 1937 and banned the use of Taiwanese island-wide. The use of vernacular Chinese in Loa Ho’s fiction, on the other hand, stemmed from the New Literature Movement in China. In addition to Japanese and Taiwanese, Austronesian languages were spoken by the aboriginal peoples.
Due to this complexity, Sterk confesses at the beginning of his Translator’s Note that he was “foolish to accept this case,” since he knows nothing about Taiwanese and that his knowledge regarding the history of colonial Taiwan is insufficient. To tackle these problems, the translator turned to his family and friends who speak Taiwanese fluently, as well as to experts of Taiwanese, and previous translators of Loa Ho, including his teacher of translation studies at the National Taiwan Normal University, Joe Hung. Considering the level of difficulty in translating Loa Ho, Sterk has completed an admirable work and presented readers a different facet of Loa Ho. As Sterk reveals in his note, several characteristics make his translated version distinctive. The first difference is also the most noticeable, the romanization of written Taiwanese and Japanese in Chinese characters of similar sounds. Most of the Japanese can be romanized, so the difficulty lies mainly in the transliteration of the Taiwanese sounds and the decision of whether to sacrifice the meaning or the form of Taiwanese phrases, a frequent dilemma faced by a translator during the practice of literary translation in any given language.
For instance, “Raising Hell” (《鬥鬧熱》, Dou Nau Re) was originally published in the Taiwan People’s Journal (《台灣民報》) in January, 1926, as Loa Ho’s first novella written in vernacular Chinese. The piece depicts the festive scenery in a small town during the Taoist festival held for the Goddess of the Sea. In the middle of the narrative, a Taiwanese idiom with strong visual effect is exerted by the author to emphasize the extent of the efforts made by the town people, which is translated as follows: “would pinch their bellies as they scrounged for scraps of tripe, doing whatever it took to triumph over the folks who lived in the Four Fortunate Quarters of the town” (「儉腸捏肚也要壓倒四福戶」). The Taiwanese idiom vividly describes people who are penny-pinching and yet so ostentatious that they would use every possible means to make themselves look better-off than, or equal to, the rich people in the town. While the English translation inevitably loses the sound and rhyme of Taiwanese, it successfully preserves the lively expression of the idiom and conveys the essence of “mianzi” culture, the Taiwanese and Chinese habit of “saving face,” which has also been harshly criticized by Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881–1936), an eminent modern Chinese literary figure, in his writings. Lu Xun was one of the leaders of the New Literature Movement during the May Fourth Movement and has been hailed as the “Father of Chinese New Literature,” who forsook medical practice to become a writer.
Translating Loa Ho requires the translator to be more involved and creative because the languages and content are relatively local while the period is specific. Without certain knowledge about Taiwan’s colonial past and literary imaginations, it is impossible to translate Loa Ho with a new perspective. Examples can be found in almost every piece in the collection, such as the translation of colloquial Taiwanese in conversation. Most difficult of all is translating the poems Loa Ho interspersed in his fiction. Loa Ho was erudite in classical Chinese, and he sometimes would insert a poem in his fictional lines. For example, in “Three Unofficial Accounts” (《浪漫外紀》, Lang Man Wai Ji), amidst the dialogues, a Taiwanese poem carved on the wall is read by one of the participants of the ongoing conversation:
Been two years or more since ya went on the lam,
My field is so weedy it’s not worth a damn,
Come back here this instant, or so help me ma’am,
I’ll find some young farmer to come plant his yam.自君一去兩年餘，田裏雜草全無除，
接信若不返鄉里，明年贌人種蕃薯。
The original poem adopts the form of a four-line, seven-character regulated verse, or the so-called jueju (絕句) form in classical Chinese poetry. Since the tone of the poem is informal, the translation is also as colloquial as possible. This is where the translator’s creativity must spread its wings. Sterk has performed a fine job in finding a proper rhyme in English, the “am” scheme, for the original “yu,” “tsu,” “li,” and “shu” rhymes in Chinese. Three other jueju poems appear together at the end of “Going to the Meeting” (《赴會》, Fu Huei). Although “poetry is something lost in translation,” through Sterk’s translation of Loa Ho’s poems, the readers can get a taste of the original.
Loa Ho is crucial to the development of modern Taiwanese literature, introducing the written vernacular Chinese to Taiwan. Having been influenced by the writers of the May Fourth New Literature Movement in China while practicing medicine in Amoy in 1918, such as Lu Xun and Hu Shih, Loa Ho was determined to make the first attempt to compose in vernacular Chinese among the Taiwanese writers as well as to integrate Taiwanese dialogues in his writing. Interestingly, Sterk also translates all of Loa Ho’s nom de plumes, including “Tsau-Ke-a-Sian” (「走街仔仙」), an impolite way of referring to a wandering healer in Taiwanese, “Lazy Cloud” (「懶雲」), a pseudonym often used by Loa Ho, “An-To-Se” (「安都生」), “Ash” (「灰」), and “Puh-Sa” (「甫三」). While it is unclear why the author decided to adopt so many pen names, it is possibly due to the strict censorship of the colonial government.
The opulent use of Japanese romanization in Loa Ho’s novellas is another challenge confronted by the translator. Loa Ho primarily transliterated the Japanese phrases into Chinese, so his translators would have to identify the original Japanese by themselves. Sterk’s approach is to present Japanese romanizations and offer their explanations through notes instead of translating the meanings directly in the texts. This strategy emphasizes the Japanese colonial presence in Sterk’s translated versions as, from time to time, the readers are reminded of the temporal setting and political situation in which the author wrote. To name a few, “hosei” (「保正」) is a policeman guarding a certain area; “bakkin” (「罰金」) indicates an amount of fine; “tegata”(「手形」) refers to the negotiable instrument; “namaiki-na” describes people treating others with brotherhood and loyalty. To comprehend the romanized Japanese phrases, readers who do not speak Japanese would have to rely heavily on the annotations. On the other hand, these romanizations are shadows of Taiwan’s colonial history and a great hint to the Japanese education Loa Ho received during the colonial period.
As a compassionate doctor-writer and promoter for the spiritual and political liberations of the Taiwanese people, one of the recurrent themes in Loa Ho’s novellas centers on the lives of lower-class Taiwanese people oppressed by the Japanese colonizers. The protagonist of A Lever Scale (《一桿秤仔》, Yi Gan Cheng Tzai), from which the title of the book is inspired, Chin Chit-chham (「秦得參」) is a representative of such groups of Taiwanese people. Unlike Lu Xun, whose fictional protagonists were created to manifest the corrupt characteristics of Chinese people or the pitfalls of Chinese “national characteristics,” Loa Ho’s writings, while sometimes satirizing the Taiwanese, focus more on criticizing the colonial rulers. The pronunciation of “Chin Chit-chham” in Taiwanese is similar to the Taiwanese pronunciation of “really miserable” (「真的慘」). Sterk spells the name in Taiwanese romanization to preserve the effect. Another example can be found in “Hope for the Future” (《未來的希望》, Wei Lai De Shi Wang), in which the translator’s involvement is active while translating the protagonist’s name into “Bigshot Bruin” (「阮大舍」).
If comparing Sterk’s translations with those of Howard Goldblatt’s published in the fifteenth issue of UCSB’s Taiwan Literature in English Translation Series, the former is more localized linguistically. While the targeted audience of Scales of Injustice is the English readers who do not read the original languages, through the perspective of the “trans-editor” Sterk, this latest and comprehensive translated version of Loa Ho’s short fictions has opened a window for those curious, both in and out of Taiwan, to empathize with the weak and needy throughout Loa Ho’s lifetime.
Vivian Szu-Chin Chih was born and raised in Taiwan. Having studied in Taipei and the U.K., she is currently a PhD student in Literature at UCSD. Her research focuses on Taiwanese cinema and literature studies. Vivian is a yoga practitioner and is passionate about global environmental issues. She has been with Asymptote as the Editor-at-Large for Taiwan since 2013.
*****
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