Malaysia

The Gift of Rain 
Tan Twan Eng

A recent road trip up the coast to the historic Malaysian city of Malacca provided the opportunity to add this country to my list. There are a fair amount of Malay authors available in local bookshops, a few of whom, like Tash Aw, even have international renown. I had particularly wanted to find a book by an ethnic Malay author rather than an ethic Chinese author, for no particular reason other than to set a challenge for myself. All the titles I came across for Malaysia seemed to have ethnic Chinese authors for some reason. 

 In the end, I settled for a book (by an ethnic Chinese author) whose jacket description caught my attention. The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (陳團英) is set in Penang, an improbably Anglo-Malay-Chinese-Indian island entrepôt set in the Andaman Sea. The island and its unique hybrid, hodgepodge culture is the backdrop to the turbulent times of World War II. 

The half-Chinese, half-English protagonist gets caught in a tangle of war-time loyalties and deceits during the Japanese occupation of his beloved island home. There was an out-of-place digression into Chinese history lesson when protagonist’s estranged Chinese grandfather takes a flashback trip down memory lane. But mostly the book does a formidable job in making you question the shifting moral sands of complicated history with frequent what-would-you-do situations where every option is fraught.  

Given the setting, I’m not surprised that I feel I gained insight into World War II in Malaya rather than about the country itself. I’d still like to read a book by an ethnic Malay author at sometime to see if I’d that would offer up a point of view on my northern neighbour.

Canada, French

Le désert mauve
Nicole Brossard

As a Canadian, I was naturally curious to see what Ann Morgan chose to read for Canada. My country, naturally, has a few literary bigwigs of it own, along the lines of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. I don’t know why, but I just assumed she would pick one of them. It certainly never occurred to me that she’d stray from this well-trodden path, and much less that she might read a book by a French-Canadian author in translation. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Consequently, I was more than a bit surprised to see Le désert mauve by Nicole Brossard, and translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as Mauve Desert, under the Canada entry. Reading Ann Morgan’s post about the book made me doubly intrigued because, as a translator myself, the book deals with the act and meaning of translation.

Le désert mauve is a bit confusing to talk about, actually. It’s one book, but three books. It’s a book and its translation, but both are written in the same language. The first book is about fifteen-year-old Melanie coming of age in the Arizona desert. The second book is about Maude Laures, who finds the first book in a Quebec bookstore and becomes obsessed with it, spending two years analysing its characters, events, and emotions. The third book is Laures’ eventual translation of the first book. (An imagined English-to-French translation, as the book in its entirety is French in the original – and wholly English in Mauve Desert). 

This imagined passage from one language to another was particularly interesting to me. I found myself flipping back and forth between the two books to see how Laures had translated passages that we ambiguous. Had a certain lyrical passage become dulled? Did clarity come into any darker corners? – As a technical translator, I don’t have to philosophise about these issues much, but I do constantly wonder what gets lost and transformed along the way despite my every best intention otherwise. It was fascinating to be able to see the translation process and its results in this way.

Burma

Not Out of Hate, Ma Ma Lay
မုန်း၍မဟူ, မမလေး 

I was killing some time in a bookstore in Bangkok recently while waiting to meet up with some friends. By chance I wandered past a shelf and this art deco Veronica-Lempicka-esque cover caught my eye and I happened to pick it up. I nearly fell over when I read the back cover and discovered the book was by a Burmese author, and was the first book published in English translation from the former hermit kingdom of Burma. A country virtually shut off from the modern world for nearly fifty years, there was as little leaving Burma as there was going in, and the country remained a black hole on many world-readers' lists. 

Although one of the country's very few female authors, Ma Ma Lay is widely acknowledged to be one of Burma's greatest twentieth-century writers. Her stories are known for authentic portrayals of modern Burmese society. Not Out of Hate, originally published in Burmese in 1955, explores the impact of the West on Burmese culture and society, as told through the story of a young, small-town woman who marries a Westernised man. The well-written story was made more poignant when post-reading contemplation led me to see the book as an allegory for the country as a whole.

As a translator myself, I found it quite interesting that Not Out of Hate's translator, Margaret Aung-Thwin, made frequent recourse to the use of footnotes to explain contextual and cultural elements of the book. Footnotes are certainly one possible strategy for translators to use when they encounter a concept that's difficult to translate because it doesn't exist in the other language, or a situation the foreign readers wouldn't understand because they lack the same cultural references. The general view is, however, that they are a distraction that breaks the flow of reading the text, and, as such, are rarely used by most translators. It's interesting to see through the use of footnotes here, the details and nuances that must sometimes be left by the wayside when translating otherwise.