The Douban “Truce” incident reminds me of an old story in the translation world.
Mr. Lu Xun also gave the translator “two stars” because he was dissatisfied with the rigid “machine translation”.
By “two stars”, I mean “one star” twice.
In 1927, a collection of Chekhov’s short stories translated by Zhao Jingshen was published, and the famous work “Fan Kai” was among them.
Fankai is now more widely known by the translation “Vanka”. If you have not yet returned your language knowledge to your elementary school teacher, you will still remember the young apprentice who writes to his grandfather on Christmas Eve.
Vanka writes the opening lines and looks out the window melancholy. Today’s textbooks describe it this way: “The sky was scattered with stars that blinked merrily, and the river of heaven looked clear, as if someone had polished it with snow for the holidays.”
And Zhao Jingshen translated the sentence at that Time as, “The sky shone with bright, bright stars, and the buttermilk road was white, as if it had been polished with snow on Sunday.”
The original phrase “the Milky Way” was mechanically and directly translated by him as “buttermilk road”.
Lu Xun discovered this problem when he was reading.
He was familiar with Greek mythology and knew very well that “milk” here did not mean cow’s milk, but the milk of the Queen of Heaven, Hera. The legend says that Hera’s big stud husband, Zeus, had an illegitimate son named Hercules. Hera, unaware of his identity, mistook him for an abandoned baby and was kind enough to pick him up and nurse him, only to be met with a star-sucking blow, and when she pushed him hard, the milk spurted into a galaxy.
In December 1931, Lu Xun published an article entitled “The Wind Horse and the Cow”, pointing out that Zhao Jingshen had not only mistranslated the “divine milk” of the Queen of Heaven as “milk”, but had also mistranslated the magical creature “Der Zentaur” as “Centaur”. He also mistranslated the magical creature “Der Zentaur” as “half-human, half-cow monster” and unceremoniously spat out that he was “dizzy when he met a horse and loved cows” and that the translation was “wrong for the horse’s head”. At the end, he also derisively shouted the slogan: “Long live the chaotic translation!”
After a full year, in December 1932, Mr. Lu Xun was still not satisfied and wrote a small poem: “The poor Vega was transformed into a horse’s wife. The magpie is suspicious of not coming, a long way to milk.” Once again, he made a mocking face at Zhao Jingshen.
In fact, a year or two before the publication of “The Wind and the Horse and the Cow,” Zhao Jingshen himself may have realized that something was wrong, and took the initiative to revise that line to “The sky shines with stars, and the sky is so clear that it seems to sweep away the snow on the road on holidays.
This newly revised version was mostly not seen by Mr. Lu Xun, and Zhao Jingshen always suffered in silence, not publicly defending it.
In fact, there were always differences in translation views between Zhao Jingshen and Lu Xun. The two had a number of written battles.
At the beginning of 1931, Zhao Jingshen wrote an article advocating that the fluency of translations should be more important than accuracy, and believed that the correct order of letter, da and ya should be da, letter and ya. Lu Xun, on the other hand, believed in “direct translation” and “only the letter is superior”, so perhaps he felt challenged, and thus launched two bad reviews of Zhao Jingshen.
After being badly criticized by Mr. Lu Xun, Zhao Jingshen should have accepted it frankly and reflected on it, and for a long period of time, he temporarily gave up his translation work.
In February 1936, in an article about Lu Xun and himself, he wrote: “He put more emphasis on the letter than on the letter in his translations of novels, and I put more emphasis on the letter than on the letter, but now his translations also put more emphasis on the letter, and I feel that it is not quite right not to put more emphasis on the letter, although I have put aside my translation pen long ago.”
He did not feel resentment for this, but instead he treated Mr. Lu Xun with respect. He was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Youth World, and he asked Lu Xun many times for articles. When he was in charge of editing high school extracurricular books, he selected more than twenty articles from Lu Xun in a row. Until the eve of liberation, when Mr. Lu Xun had already died many years ago, he was still working on the editing and publishing of the English-Chinese bilingual version of Lu Xun’s novels.
However, Mr. Lu Xun certainly could not have predicted that his poor review would have a profound impact on Zhao Jingshen.
Nor could he have imagined that a bad review from decades ago would find its way into the school and turn into tremendous political pressure.
Lu Xun once said that Zhao Jingshen “loves cattle as a nature”.
Perhaps due to his influence, Zhao, then a professor at Fudan University, was dubbed “Professor Niu” by his students during that turbulent decade.
It is said that on one occasion, Zhao Jingshen was detained in a student dormitory, and the students who were guarding him tied him to the bed and locked the door. During this time, someone knocked on the door and asked if there was anyone there. Zhao Jingshen replied, “No one is there. The visitor was curious and said, “Aren’t you a human being? Zhao Jingshen laughed at himself and said, “I am a cow, bound to the bed, and cannot open the door.”
One of the major charges against him was that he was “uneducated and unskilled”. Mr. Lu Xun’s writings became the most authoritative evidence, and the juniors would always bring out the original text and recite it, proclaiming that he had criticized this “reactionary academic authority” long ago.
They often asked their teacher why he had only a secondary school Education, yet he was able to get a university professorship.
Zhao Jingshen bowed his head and gave an honest account, saying that the degree was forged by himself with a carrot engraved seal, with a fake diploma, and then by publishing more articles to accumulate fame, after a small fame, specializing in some vertical segments, and then get professional certification, fame will grow, which is opportunistic to do a professor.
The students look at his humble attitude to cooperate, and achieved the purpose of humiliating him, after taunting, will not let him suffer more flesh and blood.
And once the meeting adjourned, the old man, who had just cried and vowed to clean up his act, ran to the Food stall at the entrance of the school and, like nothing else, smiled and chewed up a small dumpling smash.
Zhao Jingshen is indeed not highly educated and has no experience of going abroad, let alone from any professional course.
Some people say that Lu Xun at a friend’s party, and shake out the old “milk road”, and then heard people say that Zhao Jingshen did not have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense, English all by self-learning, suddenly silent, never mentioned again.
At the age of 28, Zhao became a professor at Fudan University and the editor-in-chief of Beixin Books.
He was the first person in China to translate Chekhov’s complete works, the first person to translate all of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the first person to introduce the translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. According to statistics, he has translated 147 kinds of works during his lifetime. In addition to translations, he has made many achievements in other fields as well.
On January 7, 1985, Zhao Jingshen passed away, and his Family‘s collection of more than 26,000 books was donated to the Fudan University Library.
Even though the two poor reviews in his Life have become the classic laughing stock often mentioned in the history of translation, they cannot in any way take away his efforts and achievements.
Such reviews should have been like the wings of a butterfly, the breeze brushing his face, not enough to be feared.
What is really fearful is that someone who does not know the power of wind disaster always tries to trigger a hurricane.
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