問我anything with bokane

[Yadang]

Hey everyone,

We're continuing our 問我anything series with bokane. Remember that bokane can choose not to answer any of the questions posted.

You can check out the rest of the 問我anything topics here.


A few questions to get us started:

 

1. You mentioned in this interview that flashcards aren't your thing... That brings me to ask, (1) why, and (2), when it comes to studying, what is your thing? Textbooks? Podcasts? Shadowing? Something else?

 

2. I've heard rumors that you're a PhD student these days. What are you getting your PhD in?

 

3. Looks like you had been learning Chinese for about 5 years before you started doing translation work, is that right? How does one know when they are ready to start doing translation work? How good was your Chinese at that point?

[bokane]

Hey, thanks for asking me here! 

 

1) Flashcards aren't my thing basically because I'm lazy, and because I was lucky enough, when I started learning Chinese,  to have the sort of junk-drawer memory that works well for pub quiz trivia and Chinese characters. Now that I'm learning Japanese as part of my PhD program, I've been giving the flashcards a bit more attention -- basically dumping stuff into Anki and then reviewing on my phone in my downtime. I'd be lying if I said I loved it, but at least it's better than lugging around boxes full of index cards.

 

2) The rumors are true! I'm doing a PhD at Penn, back in my hometown of Philadelphia. Still figuring out exactly what I want to be when I grow up, but these days I'm interested mainly in late-Ming vernacular literature and popular culture.

 

3) It was about five years between the time I started learning Chinese and the time I started doing translation, but the schedule's all screwy: my first couple years of study were pretty halfassed, on the one hand, but on the other hand by the time I started doing translation work I'd been living in China for almost two years, and was coming to the end of a year at Beida. So my Chinese was not super-hot or anything, but I was able to read stuff (with regular dictionary lookups) and more or less get around in Chinese. Also, the stuff I started with was not all that challenging -- I think the first few things were real-estate contracts -- and once I got started on more interesting stuff, I was working with a more experienced friend (Kaiser Kuo, who was but a humble freelancer at the time) who held my hand as necessary.

I'm not sure there was ever a moment when a light came on and I thought, "OK, I'm ready to do translation now." It was just a matter of a job coming along and being within my ability to do. Having good dictionaries and internet access helps a lot too; the latter is especially good when you're dealing with something like a contract, where the language is basically formulaic and the odds are good that the sentence or term you're looking at has been translated well by someone else in the past.

[roddy]

Thanks for coming along, Brendan, good to see you online here lately. 

 

Brendan and I know each other from way back (2003? 2004? Some of my earliest translation work also came via Kaiser) in Beijing, and have seen each other fall asleep in a pub armchair with a bottle of beer glugging happily down our clothes more often than.... ok, actually, it was just me that did that. As far as I can recall. But anyway, I'll skip the embarrassing questions I could ask such as 'have you yet acquired even a vague sense of the value of punctuality?' and 'do you owe me a curry? Who here owes me a curry?'

 

When you were looking at doing a PhD, was it always inevitable that you would head back to the States? Was the mainland, Taiwan, elsewhere, considered? 

 

Late-Ming vernacular literature sounds like the kind of thing that could be really interesting, if you manage to introduce it in an accessible and entertaining format. Would you like to try? (actually, that's a good idea for a new feature: "Dumb Down Your PhD")

 

Since moving back, have you returned to Beijing much? Do you miss it terribly? Do you foresee extended stays in China again?

 

Edit: And feel free to ask me some questions back. Not that I'm...y'know... interesting. 

[bokane]

Pretty sure I owe you more than a curry, Roddy. I'll plead the fifth on punctuality.

 

Running out the door now, so fuller answers once I'm back from class, but:

 

1) The US wasn't inevitable, but it was always likelier. I spent some time trying to talk myself into doing a PhD in China, and I just couldn't do it. I actually came here for a one-year MA initially, as a sort of toe in the water to see whether or not I wanted to go all the way. I'd also looked at SOAS, and had applied to another school but ended up liking Penn enough to stick around. I'm still interested in Taiwan, having never been there, and will probably spend at least a semester there at some point during this thing.

 

2) Sex and violence, basically. And early Mandarin -- though over the winter break I read 山歌, a wonderful collection of (largely smutty) folk(-ish) songs in Suzhou Wu collected by Feng Menglong, and it's kind of fabulous.

 

3) Haven't been back since I left, though there's a pretty good chance that I'll go back to Beijing this summer for a visit. (And Li and the cats are still there, of course, as are most of my books.) I've been sort of surprised by how much I haven't missed Beijing: I think I'd been ready to leave for a while. No idea whether or not I'll be back in China for an extended stay again -- it's not impossible, but I don't see it happening within the next few years, and I would probably want to look somewhere other than Beijing if I were to do it. 

[Angelina]

You said you are interested in vernacular literature. Are you interested in the 变文？If so, have you published anything related?

 

How would you compare American PhD programs in Chinese literature with those in the PRC/HK/Taiwan/Singapore? 

 

Do you write fiction yourself? 

 

How long did you stay in Beijing? What makes you not want to choose it again if you were to go back to living in China? 

[roddy]

For everyone who's never heard of you - who are you?

[imron]

When are you going to update your blog?

[bokane]

Yow. OK, in order:

 

1) I've read about 變文 texts but haven't really dealt with them much myself, though they're a specialty of my adviser's. It's probably something I'll look into at some point, but at the moment my interests lie more in the neighborhood of late imperial stuff -- though I am doing a seminar in Tang vernacular texts this semester, so who knows. 

 

2) I don't know all that much about non-US programs (or even US programs other than my own), I'm afraid, so I probably haven't got anything useful to say on the subject. One thing I will say is that at my program, at least, they're pretty serious about making sure that people have access to Japanese scholarship, so a reading knowledge of Japanese is a requirement for anyone doing anything in Sinology -- something I don't believe is the case in PRC programs. 

 

3) Maybe someday.

 

4) I was in Beijing for nine of my ten years in China. (The first year was up in Harbin, which was great for my Chinese but not great for much else.) I haven't actually got much against Beijing -- I enjoyed most of my time there, and got an awful lot out of it -- but it's a different city now than it was when I moved there, and I think it's both more expensive and less fun. I'd like to give somewhere else a try -- Chengdu always seemed like a pretty livable town.

 

5) Oh, right. So hi, I'm Brendan O'Kane. I wrote a blog back in the days when people still wrote blogs, and I spent a few years working as a freelance translator in Beijing. I had a small part in a couple of projects while I was there, including the translators' collective Paper Republic, the Chinese-teaching podcast Popup Chinese, and Pathlight magazine.

 

6) Hey, Imron! I still owe you a reply to your email from this summer. Not really sure about the blog: I probably will update it at some point, but I think I might wipe it and start afresh before I do so. Either way, I doubt I'll actually get around to doing anything within the next four or five months.

[ChTTay]

"Welcome to pop up Chinese ... I'm David... and I'm Brendan ... 大家好我是Echo"

 

Oooohhhh! I know who you are now...

 

How did you get involved in Pop up chinese?

 

I always wondered, what's the set up like for recording this kind of thing. When you were there was it done in some kind of studio or did you just had some equipment set up in an apartment somewhere?

 

Of the Chinese members, are they language teachers or friends of people on the show? I really liked Echo's voice from pop up chinese, so listenable.

[Bad Cao Cao]

Whose idea was it to have all those zombie episodes over at popup? 

[roddy]

You mentioned over here that Y.R. Chao is one of your heroes - who was he and why is he a hero? Also, I think we're trying to get Jerry to participate in our next one of these (Yadang, is that right?) so hopefully you'll get a chance to ask him all about it. 

[Kobo-Daishi]

I've read about 變文 texts but haven't really dealt with them much myself, though they're a specialty of my adviser's.

 

 

Is your adviser Victor Mair?

 

Kobo.

[bokane]

Merging the Popup questions into one: I'd known David and Echo for a few years before they started Popup, and I think I'd spent enough time complaining to them about the awfulness of Chinese teaching materials that they sort of decided that I should put up or shut up. Popup was very much their baby -- I just showed up every now and then, listened to the dialogues they'd recorded, and then poked holes in whatever lesson Echo had planned out. References to Popup Towers notwithstanding, it was and is basically a mom-and-pop operation: the studio was the spare bedroom in their old place in an alley behind Gui Jie, and then the spare bedroom in their nicer place in an early-90s cinderblock housing compound at Chaoyangmen Nei, and is now a room in a much nicer place off of Chaowai. David and Echo always oversaw the dialogue recording, so the blame for the zombie/pirate/etc. episodes is allllll theirs. Mostly David's. 

 

Y.R. Chao: god, where to begin? The inventor of the baroquely ingenious Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system, and then of the less well-known General Chinese (通字方案) diasystem; the Chinese translator of Alice in Wonderland (and of the ingenious, brain-melting version of "Jabberwocky," complete with invented characters); the author of the "Lion-Eating Poet Named Shi in the Stone House" piece that people who don't do their homework keep using as an argument against romanization; for a brief time in 1923 the world's only speaker of Standard Mandarin...the list goes on. What an absolute dude. 

 

And yes, my adviser is Victor Mair. With whom, speaking of, I've got a seminar this afternoon, so I'd better run for now.

[Kobo-Daishi]

 

And yes, my adviser is Victor Mair. With whom, speaking of, I've got a seminar this afternoon, so I'd better run for now.

 

 

 

I thought as such.

 

I've been going through my copies of Mair's T'ang Transformation Texts (A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China) and Stephen F. Teiser's The Ghost Festival in Medieval China, ever since Angelina's post, to refresh myself as to what transformation texts were (the only thing I remembered was the story of Mu-lien's journey through Avici Hell to save his mother who'd been sent there because she was an avaricious shrew of a woman in life) when I noticed on the back inner fold of the Mair book's jacket that "Victor H. Mair is Associate Professor of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania" (my copy's from 1989) and remembering that you said you were at Penn.

 

And putting two and two together...

 

Kobo.

[bokane]

Ha! Funny you should mention those books: the seminar I'm doing with Mair this semester is on the vernacular 傳奇 《遊仙窟》(and also other vernacular texts from that period, including 《百喻經》 and some 禪語錄 if we get to them): not 變文 by a long shot, but roughly in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, I'm preparing to give a presentation on the Teiser book for another seminar this coming Thursday.

[Lu]

- Speaking of Zhao Yuanren, did you know this exists?

- Which book would you like to translate if a publisher gave you free reign?

- Which is your favourite book (or author), Chinese or non-Chinese?

- Which modern-ish Chinese novel(s) would you recommend (as if my list of books I'd like to read needs further additions...)?

[bokane]

Nice! I'd heard of 教我如何不想他 before, but never actually heard the song.

 

- Re: translation: tough to say. In terms of things I think other people would enjoy, I'd say the works of Wang Xiaobo, who I think is one of relatively few Chinese writers who would work well in translation for an audience that wasn't necessarily interested in China. (A Yi's writing would probably work well in translation too -- I believe Anna Holmwood is signed up to translate some of it, and I'm sure she'll do a good job. ) I'd like a chance to redo Wang's novella 黃金時代, which currently has a pretty clunky English translation, and would also translate the novellas 2010 and probably 白銀時代. Unfortunately, the rights to these are owned by Andrew Nurnberg, and the last time I attempted to get in touch with his agency about the rights, the answer -- after about a year and a half of unhelpful, noncommittal e-mails -- was that they would rather squat on the rights and do nothing with them. 

I'd also love the chance to retranslate Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged, which also has a bad, clunky English translation, but although it's definitely a greater work -- and a more challenging one -- I don't think it would generate as much interest, or be as easily readable for pleasure, as Wang Xiaobo's stories. 

 

- Favorite books/authors: Too hard to pick, and the answer probably depends too much on my mood at any given moment. At this moment, I'd recommend Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker: a really extraordinary book that tends to pop into mind at strange moments -- Hoban's Kleinzeit has the same quality -- and it's also a nice example of the sort of writing that is literally impossible in Chinese. I'm also thinking of John Crowley's Little, Big, a strange, dreamlike book whose not-all-that-great Chinese translation (最後的國度) my wife is currently reading. 

 

- Depends what you're looking for, I guess. (Disclaimer: I've never been all that up to date on modern-ish Chinese novels; mostly I waited for jobs to come to me.) I'm currently translating a collection of short stories by Diao Dou (刁斗) for Comma Press, and have mostly been pretty pleasantly surprised by his writing. He has a nice way of turning language on itself and piling on 熟語 to create a sort of claustrophobic effect, and it's been interesting to try to replicate that effect in English. 
Most of Wang Shuo's stuff is worth reading, especially if you're a fan of 北京話. I'd start with 頑主, whose film adaptation is basically a shot-for-shot transfer of the book to the screen. Haven't seen the film version of 看上去很美, but I really enjoyed the book when I read it. And of course his novella 動物兇猛 is the basis for the movie In the Heat of the Sun.
Han Shaogong (whose A Dictionary of Maqiao was nicely translated by Julia Lovell) is someone I've been meaning to read (and translate) more of: a while ago I got permission from him to translate his short story 方案六號 from the collection 報告政府, but I never got around to doing it. May try to do it this summer -- it's a sharp, funny little story, and it has unusually good dialogue.