My Journey as a Translator

Chinese was my first language. Before the age of six, I remember speaking it fluently. Then I began school, and immersed in an English environment, I forgot all of it. 

Since I was a child, my parents told me I should learn Chinese. “China is a country on the rise,” they said. “Someday, knowledge of this language will help you find work.”

Since they were so insistent, I refused to speak a single word of Chinese. My grandparents harangued my parents to speak Chinese to me at home. “If she doesn’t speak Chinese, don’t say a word to her,” they said. But I spoke English to my parents so insistently that they were trained into speaking English at home instead. 

My parents sent me to Chinese school. I remember the best part of learning under that dragon-tongued teacher was the snacks we would receive after the class ended, and the feeling of sitting in the car on the road home, free at last. I used to get up at dawn on Saturdays before class, wake up my parents and force them to do my homework for me. One day when I was twelve, I lay in bed on Saturday morning and refused to get up, pretending I was asleep as my parents shook my shoulder. That was the day I quit Chinese school.

I continued my life, mastering English, learning every obscure word and honing my craft as a poet. By the time I was eighteen, I had written over a thousand poems.

This lasted until 2019, when I watched the 魔道祖师 Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation 动画 donghua when it first came out. I read the 漫画 manhua. I read the half of the novel that had been translated online. 

I found a thousand other Chinese webnovels, and cursed at the fact that the translators would sometimes update once a week, sometimes once a month, and sometimes vanish into the ether without warning. 

If you want something done well, do it yourself. So I began translating, with the knowledge of about six Chinese characters, though I could understand spoken Chinese, making liberal use of Google Translate and the YellowBridge dictionary. It took me thirty-six hours to translate my first chapter, which was five thousand words.

Five years later, I have translated two novels and am now on my third. It now takes me three hours to translate a single chapter. I have worked on a Chinese medicine book translation as well, and have translated dozens of Chinese poems. 

I believe the aim of translation is to capture the spirit, not the letter of the original. I do not want to replicate the original work, but to create a natural version of it in the English language. 

Through translation of Chinese novels, I discovered a love of Chinese literature. I am now on a second draft of a translation of the 道德经 Dao De Jing, and this, I feel, is the most important translation I will complete in my lifetime. 

The 道德经 Dao De Jing is not the only seminal work of Chinese literature I intend to translate. I also intend to translate the four great classical novels: 水浒传 Water Margin, 三国演义 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 西游记 Journey to the West, and 红楼梦 Dream of the Red Chamber. Translation of these masterpieces will come hand in hand with analysis and research. I have always felt that in order to truly read any piece of Chinese literature, I must translate it myself. Only then can I be sure that I understand every word and phrase.

When I was fifteen, I bought Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology off of Amazon and read it through. One of the lessons I remember from that book is that every poet in the canon was at least bilingual. It is of great importance to have more than a single perspective on literature, and language itself. 

There are no two languages more opposite than English and Chinese. This only makes the interaction between them more fascinating. 

I am pursuing a type of poetry that is truly Chinese-American; it combines Chinese and English, playing off of both languages, with puns, riffs and rhymes. On the left is a column of Chinese poetry; on the right is an English poem. Being Chinese is my advantage. I have the accumulated virtue of five thousand years of poetry behind me. But before I become a Chinese master poet, I must read all the masterpieces that have come before me.

It is as if all my life, I had been climbing a white mountain. Now that I near the summit, I see, in the distance, a golden mountain that looms higher than mine. There is another realm of literature out there, waiting for me to explore it. This is like coming home. 

I do not regret the years I spent mastering English alone. Nor do I think I was entirely wrong when I rejected Chinese before. I always had the desire and the potential to learn Chinese; it is only that the method I was taught with was wrong. Now that I undertake this journey of my own will, I can make far more progress than when I was pushed to learn.

I am proud of my motherland and my mother tongue. I intend to master my first language, and contribute to its literature, even if it takes a lifetime.