CHAT: Philip Glass Knockin'/ Goedel, Escher, Bach

dirk elzinga wrote:

> Hang on there, big guy. I *am* a big fan of Philip Glass (especially
> the early stuff).
As it happens, Philip Glass lives on my block (East 3rd St. between
2nd Ave and Bowery, Manhattan), on the other side of the street.  We
are also on opposing sides in neighborhood politics.

But I have never met him.

> I'm not sure I would agree though that there is an "Asian-sense" to
> Glass' music (early or late). In fact, I see Glass, Reich, Riley, and
> Young as being proto-typically Western in their willingness to plunder
> foreign traditions and appropriate their material and techniques and
> call it their own. What a Western thing to do, after all!
From _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ (pp. 148-49, 152, 168-69), Douglas Hofstadter's
latest book, on the translation of _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, his first book,
into Chinese (and tying together two Conlang threads to boot):

# David Moser [aka Mo Dawei, the xiang1sheng artist], freshly arrived in
# Beijing, had begun reading the various translated dialogues in the Chinese
# GEB manuscript in order to see what kinds of things had been done with them.
# One [...] was the "Magnificrab, Indeed" (modeled in some ways on Bach's
# Magnificat in D).  Toward the start of this dialogue, one character
# says "Speak of the devil!" [... which] had been rendered as "Shuo1 gui3, jiu4
# lai2 gui3! [... meaning] "Mention the demon, then comes the demon!"
#
# Always eager to learn new idioms, David asked Liu and Yan [the translation
# team], "Is this a stock phrase in Chinese, something that everybody's
# heard before?"
#
# They replied, "No, but a reader can easily imagine what it means."
#
# David then inquired, "But does there exist an idiomatic way of saying
# [this]?"
#
# "Oh, yes," they replied, "Shuo1 dao4 Cao2 Cao1, Cao2 Cao1 jiu4 dao4!"
# And they explained to David that this famous phrase involves Cao Cao,
# a prominent character in the famous Chinese historical novel _Romance
# of the Three Kingdoms_, and means "Mention Cao Cao, and Cao Cao then
# shows up!"
#
# "Well then, how come you didn't use that phrase instead?", asked David,
# somewhat at a loss.
#
# "Oh, but we couldn't do *that*! [...] The Cao Cao phrase is so steeped
# in Chinese culture that only a Chinese author could have thought of it,
# and since readers will know that the book is by an American, it would
# strike them as all wrong!  How would an American know about Cao Cao?"
#
# This was a fascinating point of view, which caught David quite off guard.
# After stirring it around for a while, he countered as follows: "But
# readers will obviously know Hofstadter didn't write the book directly
# in Chinese --- they will know it was translated.  Hofstadter simply
# wants his book to seem graceful and totally natural --- not at all foreign
# --- to Chinese readers.  In fact, his goal is precisely for it to feel
# as if it had been *written originally in Chinese!*"  And yet this idea,
# so obvious and so appealing to both me and David, seemed utterly alien
# to Yan and Liu.
#
# Their protestations were vehement:  "If we adopt your strategy for
# rebuilding the book in a pure Chinese style, then readers will feel the
# book is no longer by Hofstadter."  And yet from my perspective, it was
# precisely the reverse --- I would feel the book was no longer by Hofstadter
# if the team *failed* to adopt the translation strategy advocated by
# Hofstadter.
#
# Could it be that the very idea of transculturation [Hofstadter's neologism
# for mapping source cultural references to the target culture] itself is
# a Western one, and strikes the Oriental mind [sic!] as alien?  In that
# case, paradoxically, the most deeply Chinese-style translation of GEB
# would be an ultraconservative [i.e. literal] one in which all Chinese
# idioms and metaphors were carefully eschewed, in which all Chinese
# vignettes or situations were strictly shunned, in which all references
# to the Chinese culture were religiously avoided --- in short, a translation
# in which the book's rootedness in America was as blunt and stark as a
# good slap in the face.  Conversely, and equally paradoxically, a
# translation of GEB such as I myself was so keen on --- keen to the point
# of having sent, at my own expense, a personal emissary over to China
# to help realize it --- in which every English-language pun and structural
# game was ingeniously re-created in flawless, sparklingly witty Chinese,
# in which all references to American geography, history, or culture
# would strike Chinese readers as being a weird, trumped-up, artificial,
# "foreign-style" translation.  By virtue of being overly Oriental, it
# would be extraordinarily disorienting!

In the end the translation team saw the virtue of the Moser/Hofstadter
approach for this particular book, at least --- most of whose message is
primarily independent of culture, using its native culture as a source of
analogies and examples only --- and it was translated in "a pure Chinese style"
after all.  As Hofstadter points out, "[I]t would make no sense whatsoever
to 'transculturate' a history book; if one were to do so, a history of
France written in French would become a history of Germany written in German!"

# The [Chinese translation] group got so much into the swing of
# transculturation that one day Liu Haoming blurted out to David Moser,
# as they were looking back at how things had evolved over the years,
# that the products of their initial highly conservative style of
# "faithfulness" had been "like Szechuan food without any spice".  This
# spontaneously generated Chinese image was a superb transculturation of
# my American image [in reaction to the original translation proposal]
# "as flat as a Coke that's lost all its fizz", yet totally unintended
# as such: Liu had never once heard that phrase.

The translation appeared in China in 1999:

# The Chinese version's subtitle, Ji2 Yi4 Bi4, gives a little taste of its
# translators' freshness and verve: the three characters, when said aloud,
# sound [...] like the English letters G-E-B, but what they mean is
# "Collection of Exotic Jade", echoing the semantics of the [original
# English subtitle] "An Eternal Golden Braid".

--
There is / one art                   || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
no more / no less                    || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things                   || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness                 \\ -- Piet Hein