Carlos Rojas Lecture + Readings - Suis

 I felt that Carlos Rojas was a bit unorganized with the things he talked about. He spent a lot of time speaking about the novel by Xiaolu-Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), then of the language register changes in Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman (1918). He criticized the three translations of this text to English, that the translators didn’t adequately translate the change from high register, formal Chinese to colloquial, spoken Chinese. He finally touched briefly on his own translation of Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke. He posed one issue he encountered (made up words), and his solution was to use neologisms, which is a pretty obvious and straightforward solution to that problem. I wish he spoke more about his translations (such as the ones we read), his career in translation, and more of his personal philosophy on these things. I must admit, he is not my favorite speaker, however, his discussion on seal script was interesting.

The Azure Cloister was an interesting read. The inverted word order, “Gongoresque syntax,” and the interesting enjambments gave the poems a foreignized feeling. Despite these complexities in the original, I found that the translation reads very well. I like the way “pues de la tierra al cielo voy y vengo” is translated into “as I go skywards, earthwards, to and fro.” I feel the words “skywards” and “earthwards” give a naturalness to the poem that “from the earth” and “to the sky” wouldn’t have given. However, I wonder why he switched the word order there. As a general rule, I think one should keep the word order of the original in the translation. Also, “to and fro” is an interesting domestication of “come and go.”