朱纯深：翻译的阴阳诗学：太极推手、浩然之气和纯语言（下）
Towards a yin-yang poetics of translation
Tai Chi pushing-hands, hao-ran
zhi qi, and pure language
Chunshen Zhu
We have [in translation] indeed what may very probable be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.
(I.A Richards 1953)
1.5 Translating with information
focus as the point of contact
Bachelard has given liquidity as the principle of language. Liquidity entails fluidity. And fluidity is not only the nature of water but also of air. What could have captured more aptly the ontological metaphor of ‘language is water’ and ‘saying is air’ in linguistic terminology than information flow, suggesting that the saying of language is something flowing, flying, hence flexible, responsive, and rhythmic?6 For this ‘flowing’, the formulation means and the yet-to-be-spoken information are two facilitators, together channeling the saying of language into an instance of speaking, as banks channel - enabling and limiting - water into a flow in such a way that it becomes meaningful to human beings as a particular river. If in the source text the formulation means and the information have integrated so perfectly well ‘like a fruit and its skin’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 75) in turning the saying of the source language into a particular flow of information as a ‘disclosing design of Saying' (Heidegger 1982: 129 and 134), then in formulating the target text, the target language is working- or speaking- against the odds of an existing 'heavy, alien meaning' (Benjamin 1923/1970:75). As such, freedom becomes a prerequisite in its using formulation means to follow the rhythm of the information flow in the source text.7 According to Benjamin, it is to such ‘linguistic elements and their changes' a responsive translation brings about that pure language 'is tied' (Benjamin 1923/1970: 79-80).
If poets do not transcribe poetry but write it, as Bachelard maintains (see note 7 above), then translators should not be translating the source text; rather, they write a text in response to it. With the information-to-be-spoken and the formulation means for speaking it available to them, translators in their writing listen to their writing for the rhythm of the saying in the way the target language speaks, to maintain an isomorphic coherence rippling, so to speak, through all the textual levels or translation units as the work's internal rhythm or its qi. In this pushing hands between the two languages the translator, by alternately speaking and listening to both languages, serves as a double agent.
However, in getting down from language to text, and to the syntactic design of the saying of language, we need to re-contextualize Heidegger's criticism of the notion of language as information in his essay titled ‘The Way to Language’(1982: 132ff), which we have quoted at various points in this chapter. To sum up, Heidegger argued that it is 'framing' that turns language as Saying into language as information. In his view, framing is in essence a mode of formalization that makes language no longer ‘natural', as 'the calculated availability of Saying' that aims at 'the kind of communication which “informs” man uniformly'(Heidegger1982:132). It is worth noting then that when talking about language as Saying or showing, Heidegger was more concerned with the relation between word (saying/showing) and thing- that is, to say is to show, to make things appear: 'Where word breaks off nothing may be', a line from Stefan George's poem The Word that is cited by Heidegger as the thematic keynote for the essays 'The Nature of Language' and 'Words' in the same collection.
But when going beyond the word, Heidegger in his ‘The Way to Language' has called attention to the existence of a dynamic ‘structure’: ‘the structure of a show’ (1982: 121), ‘the design of language’ (p.124) and ‘[the monologue character of the nature of language finds] its structure in the disclosing design of Saying’ (p.134, italics added). What is truly at issue here, therefore, is the rhythm of the showing in the way language speaks through a human being who is summoned to do the speaking on a given occasion. In Heidegger’s words, ‘language shows itself first as our way of speaking’ and ‘the speakers are present in the way of speaking’ (p.120). To conclude his essay, Heidegger cites a passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ‘The Diversity of the Structure of Human Language’. The following statement in the citation makes a good point as far as structure is concerned, namely: ‘the old laws of syntax are used to hint at a differently graduated sequence of ideas’ (p.134, italics added). Thus in translation, the neither-separation-nor-confrontation correspondence in rhythm between the two languages is observable as a mirror-play between two graduated sequences of ideas: that is, 'the central reciprocal relationship between languages’ striving to say ‘what they want to express’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 72). The reciprocation in translation and by translation is further characterized by Meschonnic (2011) as he observes:
Because it is not a language system that we have to translate, but what a poem does to its language, thus we must invent discourse equivalences in the target language: prosody for prosody, metaphor for metaphor, pun for pun, rhythm for rhythm.
(Meschonnic 2011: 71)
And ‘it is rhythm that governs the meaning and movement of discourse’ (p.73). In this light, observing the ‘graduated sequence’ in which ideas or things are structured into a flow of information to appear in the speaking of language, to be sure, is not a process of ‘formalization’ per se but rather a mode of theorization about human experience of the world, if, following Halliday, we see the lexico-grammatical system of human language as a theory of human experience (Halliday 1999: 92). To account for the functions of the ‘graduated sequence of ideas’ as the structure of information, Systemic Functional Linguistics has provided us with a linguistic model in terms of the three meta-functions of language: that is, the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual.
First, at the ideational level there is an isomorphism between clausal transitivity on the one hand and textual narrative on the other; for, like a text, what a transitivity process tells about is in essence a story about who does what to whom, how, where, when, and why. And different types of transitivity work to ‘frame’ the same story in differently graduated sequences. At the interpersonal, insofar as the language speaks through the ‘storyteller’- that is, the author or the translator - the story in a clausal transitivity is always projected, by various devices of modality or modulation, at a certain distance from its co-texts within the text and from the situational contingencies of the speaking beyond the contour of the text. In this way the projection is indicative of the speaker’s position on the story. No matter how a language tells the ideational story through a particular speaker, and at whatever level of the text, the elements of the story, or the ‘ideas’, are inevitably presented in sequence with their interpersonal distance textually measured or ‘graduated’. That is to say, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the ‘differently graduated sequence of ideas’ is structured or designed, hence realized, via the language’s textual function.
According to Systemic Functional Linguistics, information flows basically along a series of given-new information alternations, in which the new information, once spoken, becomes a ‘given’ to usher in further new information. And in the new information, there is always a focal element, or information focus, where the articulate energy or qi of the sentence converges. If we liken a sentence to a human body, the point where the given information and the new information are interactively connected can be regarded as its dan-tian point, with the given supporting the new information in its discursive performance. And the information focus, on which the desired expression of both the source and the target text focuses, is the contact point between the two languages engaged in their pushing hands. As our examples below will illustrate, an awareness of the given-new information progression and alternation as well as the position of the information focus is key to perceiving the rhythm of the sequence of ideas that has been graduated as such, in an effort to ensure a bu-diu-bu-ding pushing hands between the two languages in translation (see for example, Xu 2005: 17; and Zhang 2006: 181,182-3 for discussions of information focus).
Various studies of information distribution in the English language have identified the last lexical clement in either the tone group or the rheme of a clause (where the new information is) as the unmarked focus position (see Gomez-Gonzalez 2001, for example pp.264-5; and Butler’s (2003) critique of Systemic Functional Grammar, for example, p.164). On the Chinese part, the development of a similar awareness as to the informational significance of the clause-final position can be exemplified by the increasing attention accorded to the verbal complement. For instance, in his (1984/1992) paper, Li Linding was arguing that the complement, instead of the verb, in the Chinese V-C construct should be regarded as the key component. Two decades on, Zhang (2006) has not only unequivocally asserted that the complement is the structural focus of the sentence, but also established the sentence-final in general as the position for the context/situation-independent ‘static’ focus of the sentence. According to Zhang, such a type of focus is ‘conventional’ and 'natural' for asserting conspicuity, as against the ‘dynamic’ or contingent type of focus whose positioning depends on the communicative situation and serves the purpose of contrast (see Zhang 2006,esp.pp.62,181-3,194 and 197-8).
The impact of the positioning of information focus on the rhythm of the saying of language, however, may not have a significant bearing on a non-listening translation driven by the intention of 'rendering the sense', since, as Xu (2005: 23) observes, differences in focus positioning will not affect the truth-value, hence the semantic sense, of a sentence.
1.6 English-Chinese translation: a few examples
A few examples are now in order to illustrate the applicability of this seemingly abstract notion of listening to the rhythm of language in the ‘differently graduated sequence of ideas’ in translation.
The first example is from the Ming Pao’s English Corner ‘Ask and Learn’ (Lu 2008). The author gave two Chinese translations for comparison in explaining the following English sentence,
1. The hostages stuck hastily written notes in the windows pleading for help.
1.1 人質匆忙在窗上帖字條求救。
[Syntactic gloss] The hostages hastily on the window stuck written notes pleading for help.
1.2 人質匆忙把求救字條貼在窗上
[Syntactic gloss] The hostages hastily ba the plead-for-help written notes stuck on the window.
After discussing the grammatical status of the phrase ‘pleading for help’, the author recommended (1.2) as the more desirable version because it is ‘more succinct’: ‘Chinese translation can disregard this analysis of the English sentence; instead, we may go for (1.2), which is more succinct’ (my translation). The author gave no further explanation as to why this should be the case, but we can see a stylistic presumption was at work: that is, being succinct was deemed more desirable. If we put aside this presumed stylistic preference and listen to the Chinese versions as against the English, we can hear a story of WHO-HOW-WHERE-DO-WHAT-WHY in (1.1), and one of WHO-HOW-ba-(WHAT-KIND-OF-) WHAT-DO-WHERE in (1.2). In a normal wave –like reading of the sentence, in which one starts with the initial theme of WHO as given information, at each juncture the subsequent new information, once taken in, turns into the given, until at last the final element of the story is reached. And the final element will propel the reading onto the next sentence. This final, and thus the newest, element of information, as confirmed in Li Ziyun, is where the focus is (Li 1991:266, see also Zhang 2006, above). As such, the focus in (1.1) is on the purpose WHY (‘pleading for help’), powering the reading on, as the English version does, to find out whether the help will arrive or not. The focus in (1.2), however, is on the location WHERE (‘on the window’). With the WHERE as the pointer, the text would apparently encourage an interest in why the notes should have been put ‘on the window’. And a separation, or diu, occurs as a result of the mismatched contact point.
Our next example is the opening line of the song lyrics of ‘Never on Sunday’:
2 Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday, a Monday [/A Monday is very, very good]
In this line, the DOING, that is, you kiss me, is the given information with the modality can to project it as a hypothetical and perhaps desirable scenario. With this information given, both the language and the music of the song insist that the focus be placed on the end-positioned new information of WHEN: ‘on a Monday’, to set the tone for the rest of the lyrics before it turns into given as the theme at the beginning of the second line. In the following Chinese translation, with the WHEN element shifted to the pre-verbal position, the focus falls on the DOING (‘kiss me’) and a separation occurs:
2.1 噢！你可以在星期一的时候吻我[/星期一是很好的選擇]
[Syntactic gloss] Oh, you can on Monday kiss me [/ Monday is a very good choice]
(安德森translation at wwwзu.homeip.net/lyrics/ show.php?fname=n24, asscssed 16 March 2008).
Arguably, the rendering honours a presumption in Chinese grammar that the circumstantial elements of WHERE and WHEN should normally be placed in a pre-verbal position as a (potential) ‘topical focus’(Zhang 2006:194), while in English they are more likely to be placed post-verbally as the (potential) end-focus. By putting aside this grammatical presumption, however, we may listen more ‘lovingly’ to the rhythm of the story, following it to the sentence’s dantian point where the given information you kiss me meets the new, on a Monday, and use this focal information as the contact point between the source and an emerging target text. The pushing hands may lead to a translation as follows:
2.2 噢！你吻我，可以在星期一，星期一[/星期一可是个好日子]
[Syntactic gloss] Oh, you kiss me [it] can [be] on Monday, on Monday/ Monday is a good day.
Our final example is the opening paragraphs of a tourist information flier in English and Chinese, ‘Celebrating a Great Man’(Cooks’ Cottage at the Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne 2006):
3 The Cottage and its surrounds commemorate the life and achievements of the man today celebrated as Britain’s greatest explorer. Captain James Cook was a skilled navigator, cartographer and astronomer.
In three voyages of discovery around the Pacific, he solved many geographical mysteries and proved the mythical ‘Great Southern Land’ did not exist, although he did ‘find’ Australia.
3.1 庫克農舍及其周圍環境是這位如今被譽為英國最偉大的探險家之生平及功績的紀念物。詹姆斯·庫克船長是一位高明的航海家、地圖測繪家和天文學家。
在三次探險遠航太平洋中，他解開了許多地理之謎，雖然他「發現」了澳大利亞，但卻證實了神話中的「南天樂土」并不存在。
[Syntactic gloss] Cook’s cottage and its surrounds are this today celebrated Britain’s greatest explorer’s life and achievements’ memorial. Captain James Cook was a skilled navigator, cartographer, and astronomer.
In three expeditions sailing around the Pacific, he solved many geographical mysteries, although he did ‘find’ Australia, yet [he] proved the mythical ‘Great Southern Land’ did not exist.
The English text begins by telling us what the cottage is for, with the end focus of the first sentence on [Britain’s greatest] explorer. Textually, it echoes the end focus of the second sentence, [skilled] navigator, cartographer and astronomer, which, in turn, leads the reader on to the second paragraph whose focus is on ‘finding Australia’ in the second clause.
The Chinese version, however, following the ‘correct’ grammatical order of modifier-head in the language, presents the ideas in a sequence which has the focus on ‘memorial’. Another presumption of correctness, that is, the requirement in Chinese that the although clause appear before the main clause (even though it is not always the case), is apparently responsible for the translation of the second paragraph which directs the reader’s attention away from Australia to some ‘mythical “Great Southern Land”’
Putting the presumed grammatical correctness aside and listening to the rhythm of the story being told in the source text, we may tap further into the target language’s depository of its past saying, especially that of the ‘run-on’ pattern (aptly called the ‘flow-water sentence’ in Chinese), and come up with an alternative rendering that reads:
3.2 庫克農舍及其周圍環境紀念的是詹姆斯·庫克船長的生平與功績，如今他被譽為英國最偉大的探險家，是一位高明的航海家、地圖測繪家和天文學家。
在三次遠航探險太平洋期間，他解開了許多地理之謎，證實了神話中的「南天樂土」并不存在，然而卻「發現」了澳大利亞。
[Syntactic gloss] Cook’s cottage and its surrounds commemorate de shi Captain James Cook’s life and achievements, today he is celebrated as Britain’s greatest explorer, [he] was a skilled navigator, cartographer and astronomer.
In three voyages of expedition around the Pacific, he solved many geographical mysteries, proved the mythical ‘Great Southern Land’ did not exist, yet he ‘found’ Australia.
1.7 Concluding remarks
The philosophy of Tai Chi as manifested in pushing hands points to a yin-yang isomorphism that sustains the Daoist cosmology. The isomorphism provides a new perspective on Benjamin’s metaphor that human languages are fragments of the vessel of pure language. In this light, translation on the one hand reveals the ontological equality among human languages in their ‘kinship’ rather than ‘likeness’ (Benjamin 1923/1970:73 and 74), as much as in their individuality and complementarity, and on the other asserts the filiation of human languages to pure language, their common divine origin. As much, no matter how self-sufficient each of the language may appear to be in their own terms, as fragmentary parts none of them can represent the vessel in total. Along this line of argument, no translation, as far as it is an artwork of linguistic re-creation in its own right, should be viewed as an epigone to the source text. For, like the bu-diu-bu-ding pushing hands in Tai Chi as a mode to cultivate one’s hao-ran zhi qi, translation with a higher-order mission of linguistic re-creation—instead of communicating the sense or biased knowledge and judgment that has rendered human languages impure—is using the source text as a catalyst to trigger an endeavor to achieve an enriched, grander identity with a view to cultivating its language for an ultimate redemption in the divinity of pure language (see also Meschonnic 2011: 61, especially his argument of translating ‘as an experimental poetics). To realize this mission, or its ‘tremendous and only capacity’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 80), translation urges the target language to put aside its assumed linguistic ego and take it what has been a ‘foreign’ saying to it, by ‘lovingly and in detail incorporat[ing] the original’s mode of signification’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 78). In other words, it is not grammar nor information but the rhythmics of the structuring of information that matters.8
If the flowing of water the Way becomes ‘almost’ perceivable (ji yu dao ‘幾於道’, Laozi: 30) and by the drifting of clouds the rhythm of air is visible, then through the local rhythm of sentences in structuring information the internal rhythm of the text should be observable, albeit in an ex pede Herculem manner, which, in turn, bears out the rhythm of the language the text is written in. Translation brings into contact individual languages in their rhythmic presence in the presentation of certain information to let the rhythm of pure language be perceived, but ‘only in symbolized form’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 79). Probably that is why Benjamin regards interlinear translation as an ideal mode of translation in which ‘literalness and freedom are united’, and in which ‘language ang revelation’ – not meaning or information to be sure – ‘are one without any tension’ (Benjamin 1923/1970: 82).
Language speaks by way of the speaker’s speaking it. In translation, while the source language speaks by structuring information through the source-text writer, the target language does the same through the translator, the writer of the target text. To the extent that ‘the speakers are present in the way of speaking’ (Heidegger 1982: 120), a language with an enriched, grander identity will enable the community that speaks it to augment its capacity for the understanding of humanity by listening to language as language, and language as saying, without an assumed ego. Translation as pushing hands, while pointing to a way for language to reach for the divine being of pure language, will lead the speaker to an elevation beyond the confines of one language into the belongingness within another, and therefore promises a better understanding of others’ words and a greater readiness for associating one’s qi with the cosmic hao-ran zhi qi.
To put translation as linguistic re-creation in cosmic perspective, we may perceive it as a qi-like bond connecting God’s and Adam’s fingers in Michelangelo’s (1510) The Creation of Adam: like God, the source language, with its advancing energy in the guise of a ‘pointing’ source text, turns the silent essence of the target language into the sounded words of text when the call in the source awakens the saying of the target language; and like God too, the target language – in its response, in its pointing back – gives the source text an afterlife in the form of a new text. Between the two languages, or in that critical gap between the two pointing fingers, there is a perpetual reciprocation and alternation of the yin-yang chiaroscuro.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Professor Douglas Robinson for his very helpful comments on the first draft of this chapter. The author also appreciates very much the useful feedback from audiences of the 2008 conference and various seminars afterwards at which this topic has been presented. The author, however, is responsible for any errors that should occur in this text.
Notes
1 A word in Chinese that captures this mutual projection is hu-ying (呼應), in which the hu means breathing out, shouting, and calling and the ying means responding. In English, apart from atmosphere, we may note such words as inspire and aspire, which, as with the Chinese qi, relate both spirituality and interpersonality etymologically to breathing.
2 The relevance between understanding others’ words and cultivating the hao-ran zhi qi can probably be seen with reference to Confucius’ acquisition of ‘a ready ear to the world’ (er shun, ‘耳順’) at the age of sixty, to be followed by the attainment at seventy of what may be called a consummately great understanding of humanity in which the heart and desires with their unbridled freedom do not transgress (cong xin suo yu, bu yu ju, ‘從心所欲，不踰矩’). Leading up to these two achievements, Confucius’ life is said to have undergone four progressive stages of development: that is pursuing learning (zhi xue, 志‘學’), obtaining independence (er li, ‘而立’), acquiring discernment (bu huo, ‘不惑’) and realizing a ‘heavenly destiny’ in the order of nature (zhi tian-ming, ‘知天命’) (see Lun yu 1997: 22).
3 This understanding, however, is perpetually caught in what Heidegger calls a ‘two-fold of presence and present beings’; in his words:
to pursue more originally what the Greeks have thought, to see it in the source of its reality. To see it so is in its own way Greek, and yet in respect of what it sees in no longer, is never again, Greek.
(Heidegger 1982: 39, 40)
4 In Heidegger, language as ‘saying’ is not the same as ‘speaking’. What is unspoken in a particular language does not mean it is unsaid in language or not shown to us. As Inwood (1999: 190) has noted, ‘Saying is a showing that is prior to speaking’, or for that matter prior to stating or asserting in a particular instance of saying.
5 This ‘his own language’ can refer wither to the target language as a ‘communal system’ the translator shares with other speakers of the language, or, perhaps more meaningful to the actual activity of translation, literally to ‘his own language’ as an individual sub-system within the communal system. This individual sub-system is activated and actualized in each instance of translation (see Zhu 2002: 29). As such, any revelation of the divinity of language can only be the revelation his target language may lead, and has led, him to.
6 From the perception of water to the perception of air, rhythm becomes all the more important in capturing their presence and meaningfulness. In the Tai Chi philosophy of qi, water and air are united in their dynamic rhythm: xing yun liu shui (行雲流水, drifting clouds and flowing water). Similarly, the rhythm of speaking requires a unity of sonic fluency and information flow in which, to borrow Meschonnic’s words, ‘rhythm for the eyes and rhythm for the ears meet’ (2011: 134). If the drifting makes the rhythm of air perceivable, the rhythmic unity in speaking makes the rhythm of language as saying meaningful to human beings.
7 This freedom can be seen in Bachelard’s Water and Dreams (1983) in the moulding hand that ‘has its dreams and its hypotheses’ (p. 107), which is more explicitly expounded in part I of the conclusion chapter of his Air and Dreams (1988), titled ‘The Literary Image’, where Bachelard describes poets and their work as follows:
[poets] hear what they are creating in the creative act itself…. They also hear what they write at the same time as they are writing it, in the slow cadence of written language. They do not transcribe poetry; they write it…. [As] for them, they savor the harmony of the written page on which thought speaks and the word thinks. They know before they scan and before they hear it that the rhythm that they have written is certain. They know that their pen would stop of its own accord if it encountered a hiatus, that it would refuse to write unnecessary alliterations since it would no more want to repeat sounds than thoughts…. By virtue of written poetry’s slow pace, verbs rediscover he fine points of their original movement…. And when an adjective makes its object blossom, written poetry, the literary image, allows us to live slowly the time of its blooming…. Poem: a beautiful temporal thing that creates its own tempo.
(Bachelard 1988: 247, 247-8, 248, italics added)
A translator may feel a similar power of the pen in following the source text’s tempo. In the doctoral thesis, Sorby (2014: 43) reports an interesting case in which a Chinese translator of Western musicals recalled a ‘weird’ feeling that at times occurred in the process of translation: that is was a ‘force’, so to speak, from the source text that did the writing of the target text, of which the translator was ‘just a zaiti (carrier)’.
8 As Andrew Benjamin (1989: 101) remarks: being ‘not a language on its’ own[,] “Pure language” has no grammar’. And as far as language-neutral stylistic effect is concerned, irrespective of grammatical particulars, syntax is generally regarded as semantically meaningful and syntactic iconicity cognitively powerful.
References
Chunshen Zhu. 2016. ‘Towards a yin-yang poetics of translation: Tai Chi pushing hands, hao-ran zhi qi, and pure language’. Douglas Robinson (ed.) The Pushing Hands of Translation and its Theory: In Memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953-2013. Routledge. 60-81.
朱纯深：《翻译的阴阳诗学：太极推手、浩然之气和纯语言》，见道格拉斯·罗宾逊主编，2016年，《翻译推手及其理论：张佩瑶（1953-2013）纪念文集》，路特里奇出版社出版，第60-81页。
福建莆田人，1966年初中二年级之后于1969年上山插队，在父亲指导下通过翻译自学中英文，1978年春以英语几近满分成绩考入福建师范大学外语系七七级，1979年秋考入该系硕士研究生班，攻读英文与翻译，1982年硕士毕业并留校任教。1987年底赴英国留学，继续翻译研究，1993年获诺丁汉大学博士学位。其后分别任教于新加坡国立大学（1993-1998）与香港城市大学（1998-2017），现为香港中文大学（深圳）翻译学教授、北京外国语大学客座教授及香港浸会大学翻译学中心荣誉研究员，并担任The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 和《中国翻译》编委、中国译协理事会理事；研究兴趣涵盖翻译学、诗学、语言学、文体学和机助翻译教学等，研究成果有《翻译探微》及各种论文，自1986年起先后发表于《中国翻译》、British Journal of Aesthetics、META、Target、Multilingua、TTR、Journal of Pragmatics, 以及ITT等学刊，分别于2000、 2001和2006年获得宋淇翻译研究纪念奖；译著包括《短篇小说写作指南》、王尔德《自深深处》、《古意新声 – 中诗英译今译（品赏本）》和《夜莺与玫瑰：王尔德短篇小说及童话全集》。
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