The second edition of Principle of Decision—our column that highlights the decision-making processes of translators by asking several contributors to offer their own versions of the same passage—demonstrates translation’s capacity to reveal shades of meaning in the source text. Here, Xiao Yue Shan poses to the translators a passage from Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao.
轻而又轻的一天。时隔多年，那轻而又轻的一天生机犹在。如果你推却一切责任，对他人的痛苦视而不见，去拥抱巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、寂静的自我，你就能短暂地占有那种轻而又轻。
qīng ér yòu qīng de yī tiān
轻而又轻 的一天。
A light and light day.shí gé duō nián
时隔多年
After many years,nà qīng ér yòu qīng de yī tiān
那轻而又轻的一天
that light and light dayshēng jī yóu zài
生机犹在。
still exists.rú guǒ nǐ tuī què
如果你推却
If you push asideyī qiē zé rèn
一切责任，
all responsibilities,duì tā rén de tòng kǔ
对他人的痛苦
to the pain of othersshì ér bù jiàn
视而不见，
turn a blind eye,qù yōng bào
去拥抱
go to embracejù dà de míng liàng, míng liàng de jì jìng
巨大的明亮、明亮的寂静、
the enormous and bright, bright silence,jì jìng de zì wǒ
寂静的自我，
the self of silencenǐ jiù néng duǎn zàn dì zhān yǒu
你就能短暂地占有
you can also briefly possessnà zhǒng qīng ér yòu qīng
那种轻而又轻。
that kind of light and light.
This passage is taken from the Chinese writer 林棹 Lin Zhao’s debut novel, 流溪 Liu xi, published in 2020. Its narrative takes place throughout Lingnan, a region on China’s southeast coast, weaving through dense urbanities and viridescent ruralities, the subtropical heat and myriad languages, to tell the story of a young woman whose daily life, from its very earliest days, is inextricable from violence, metamorphosis, and fantasy. A tribute to high Nabokovian style, Liu xi is a stunning, inimitable example of what is possible in the Chinese language—the music it pronounces, the visions it conjures, the delicacy and intricacy that can be excavated from its logograms.
In choosing Lin Zhao’s work for this exploration of translation, my intention was to elicit wide differences from each of the participating translators. Lin Zhao’s style is singular, and simply because it is so outstandingly unique, it has the capacity to prism out into a countless variety of interpretations—to seek an equally unique counterpart in English, birthed by each translator’s own language. One of the consistent frustrations I have with Chinese literature in translation is that, out of all the countless—and I mean really countless—incarnations that could be presented to the Anglosphere, publishers and editors will often opt for the simplest, most “readable” text. What results is a plateau of Chinese-language literature, an almost uniform presentation of voices, styles, and techniques that doesn’t truly engage with how differently Chinese writers are using language. This column is an exercise in transparency, an effort to lift the curtain and show the undercurrents of the translator’s mind, and as such it is also an opportunity to hint at how wide Chinese in translation can be—how it operates alongside an immense constellation of possibilities. My hope was that in presenting four discrete variations of this complex line, the reader will also be engaged in the brilliant, jarring puzzle that is Chinese-English translation.
Above, I’ve hazarded a word-by-word translation, with the original accompanied by phonetic pinyin. My reason for selecting this extract in particular—amidst a bevy of dizzying, endlessly unravelling lines—is for its exemplification of how such possibilities in Chinese can shrink into dead-ends in English. To give a simple example, in writing to the participating translators, I had mentioned how in Chinese, the word 轻 is one that has given me countless headaches in the past; it is typically translated as the English word light, but whereas light in English refers to both a lack of weight and a brightness, the Chinese word only designates the former. Thus, something as simple as 轻的一天, a light day, becomes a quandary. How do we evoke weightlessness without evoking radiance? How do we have the delicacy of a light day without the lucency of a bright day?
Each of these translators have their own brilliancies in methodology, perspective, thinking, and imagining. What results are four parallel universes, four wondrous demonstrations of what the Chinese language can inspire, what it can put into motion, what it can do. The Chinese of Liu xi is so beautiful—you likely have a sense of it even from the rough translation above, but it is not limited to a single beauty. Thus, it is with the most tremendous gratitude and joy that I present you with these four versions of this line—each with its own wonders, each with its own . . . light.
—Xiao Yue Shan
Liuyu Ivy Chen
A light and buoyant day. Even years later, that day still feels light and buoyant. If you shed all responsibilities and overlook the suffering of others—so as to embrace a vast brightness, a bright stillness, and a stilled self—you will briefly have that light and buoyant feeling.
When I read the first sentence, I saw the sky: pale, blue. Then, Prince Andrei (in War and Peace), when he fell during a battle and saw nothing over him but the sky, which is “lofty”, “gray”, “quiet”, “calm”, “solemn”, “infinite”. But in the end, none of these words were useful because the text breathes a life of its own—it’s not necessarily describing the sky, but an unburdened feeling. Single-word repetition is elemental to the beauty of the Chinese language, which is not the case in English, so I added “buoyant” after “light” to reiterate the feeling of lightness.
Dave Haysom
A day without weight. A day that remains vivid, even after all these years. Reject responsibility; look past the pain of other people; embrace the vast radiance, the radiant silence, the silent self; and this weightlessness can be briefly yours.
When struggling to find a word with just the right cluster of connotations, I sometimes find it helpful to try flipping a positive into a negative, or vice versa. If “you’re right” seems like an awkward remark for your character to make, “you’re not wrong” might be worth a try. In this extract, any variation of “light” felt a bit too general for the repeatedly stressed quality of 轻而又轻, and after trying out multiple alternatives, I settled on “weightless”, an absence rather than a presence. I chose “radiant/radiance” and “silent/silence” for 明亮 and 寂静 to try and preserve the smooth polyptoton of the original (in which there is no difference between the adjective and the noun), by limiting the shift between parts of speech to the single closing consonant.
Na Zhong
A day of feathery freedom. Its freightlessness lives on in my memory after all these years. Untether yourself from obligations; turn a blind eye to others’ miseries; embrace the colossal brightness, the bright silence, your silent soul; and you will be, however fleetingly, the owner of that feathery freedom.
For me the biggest challenge in translating this paragraph is how to handle the repetition. Lin Zhao is very much influenced by Vladimir Nabokov; in fact, Liu xi is a direct tribute to Lolita both thematically and stylistically. Not a stylist myself, I derived much joy from inhabiting the mind of a “fancy prose writer,” mimicking Nabokov’s characteristic use of alliteration, elevated diction, free-flowing syntax, and “repetition with variation” to recreate Lin’s voice in English.
In the original text, the phrase 轻而又轻 appears three times. While I translated it into “feathery freedom” the first and the third time, I decided to translate its second appearance as “freightlessness”, both to avoid repetition and add one more layer to its meaning.
Another principle that guided my translation is to choose words that can collectively evoke an image central to the scene. The selected paragraph comes right after narrator Zhang Zhao-er’s recount of her first plane ride away from home, and her sense of 轻, which literally means “lightness,” echoes with the plane’s ability to break free from the gravitational pull. To capture her sense of liberation, I chose words associated with flying, travel, and burden, hence “feathery”, “freightlessness”, and “untether”.
Mike Fu
That day of supreme lightness. Many years have passed, and yet that day of supreme lightness remains vital and raw as ever. Only when you refuse all responsibilities, shirk the sorrows of others, and reach for that great brightness, that bright serenity, that serene self, are you able to fleetingly grasp such supreme lightness.
I initially tried to come up with a construction that would allow me to keep both the adjectival form and repetition of the Chinese phrase 轻而又轻, but couldn’t quite get this to work in English. I settled on the “easiest” translation of 轻 as “light(ness)” because it ultimately fit with the diction of the rest of this passage. I also tried out “utmost” and “inordinate” in place of “supreme”; maybe I just like the word I landed with. It expresses the idea of excess without a feeling of oppression or judgment.
Brightness/lightness made a good rhyme! And a pleasing resonance even when the noun forms denote different things. I have a tendency to overuse light-related terms in my own writing: glimmering things, incandescence, the luminous, etc. But sometimes simpler is better.
I initially rendered the second sentence as a more direct if/then statement, but ultimately realized that the conditional notion being expressed here is not about the potentiality of doing X then Y; rather, it’s from the writer’s lived experience of having done X and seeing it result in Y. I also felt like “reach” and “grasp” became a felicitous pair for the more distant “embrace” and “possess” in Chinese.
Liuyu Ivy Chen is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn.
Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (Bloomsbury, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Prose. He is currently a PhD candidate at Waseda University.
Dave Haysom was joint managing editor of Pathlight from 2014 to 2018. Recent translations include Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree by Li Er, Nothing But the Now by Wen Zhen, and Against the Body by Yu Yoyo (with A.K. Blakemore). His essays and reviews have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, The Millions and China Channel, and his portfolio is online at spittingdog.net.
Na Zhong is a fiction writer and literary translator based in New York. A 2023 MacDowell Fellow and 2021–2022 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, she has published with Guernica, Carve, A Public Space, Lit Hub, The Millions, among others. Hailing from Chengdu, China, she is the co-founder of Accent Society and the Chinese translator of Sally Rooney’s three novels.
Xiao Yue Shan is a writer and editor. shellyshan.com.
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