Lim Woan Wen is in the middle of an apprenticeship with Shelly Bryant through the Singapore Apprenticeship in Literary Translation (SALT), organised by Tender Leaves Translation and the Singapore Book Council. This is the third of her reflections on her work during the apprenticeship.
You can find Woan Wen’s earlier reflections here and here.
Musings of an Old New Bird #03
A Taste of Flight
Even though I had been immensely inspired by the belief that faithfulness is more important than accuracy, and that capturing the right voice is more significant than harping on the exactness of what has been uttered when it comes to literary translation, the high I had from riding on the inspiration did not immediately translate into a smooth take off when it came to execution.
When I started working on a selection from Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” as my first practical exercise for the apprenticeship, I had a vague picture of where I wanted to head, but I was at a loss about how to begin. The only relevant skills I had were those I’d developed since restarting writing and translation work a year earlier.
There had been minimal interaction with editors in the variety of assignments I had picked up, but through comparing my submissions with published copies, I’d groped my way through a spectrum of embarrassingly clumsy, nearly word-for-word translations to linguistically graceful renderings that were ultimately deemed insufficiently exact, and struggled to find the right balance for each job.
On hindsight, it seemed I had been subconsciously working with the idea that a model answer existed for each piece of writing somehow, and constantly strove to be as close to that “solution” as possible. In some instances I would argue it was necessary, given the context or nature of the platform that had hired me, but it was obviously not the way to go for this apprenticeship. Despite knowing I might be setting off on the wrong tracks, I went ahead anyway. I figured I had to start somewhere.
At first, I fretted over readability and constantly felt the need to break long sentences and large paragraphs up into smaller chunks — an influence that largely came from the general style and preferences of journalistic writing I had worked more with. I recognised quickly enough that I was going against the lyricism of Solnit’s work and corrected myself, but I remained hung up over specific terms she had used, and fussed over details such as the addition of certain words or even conjunctions that did not exist in the original text, carefully marking each one out so that I could seek my mentor Shelly Bryant’s advise and appraisal later on.
When we met up to discuss the first draft, Shelly pointed out that she could immediately tell I had taken the wrong route just from seeing how fragmented the highlights I had made were. I felt embarrassed but unsurprised. What did surprise me, instead, was how one of the phrases which I had most misgivings about turned out to be what had worked best for her.
Having translated “[…] the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” as “是彼岸的颜色,是身所未及之处的颜色,更是肉身永不能及之境的颜色。”, I’d wondered if the words I had chosen were too flowery, too elaborate and thus “unfaithful”, since the original had been constructed so elegantly with the plainest choice of words. Clearly, my understanding of faithfulness needed some tuning.
To show me the way, Shelly took me through some passages of the original text where we picked it apart to see what gave the piece its poetic character, how the river of its words overflowed in fullness, which kind of images were evoked as a result, and where that took us experientially. Those were the crucial qualities I should have been focusing on and needed to stay faithful to.
Again, I understood the ideas conceptually, but on my own I thought I lacked the linguistic and literary skills required to analyse the text as thoroughly as I had been shown. I still felt somewhat lost, but dived back in anyway.
To my delight, this time round I found myself much less chained to the original text. I would still mull over particular terms, but with lesser “loyalty” to the original words. Learning to shift my focus to see the images behind and within words proved to be an important key which helped me gain access to the notion that “languages relate to the world and not to each other” in practice. In the process of translating this “world” made of visual narratives rather than words alone, I felt a sense of vastness and freedom that wasn’t there before. The journey became that much more enjoyable, even if it wasn’t necessarily any easier.
In fact, it was just as, if not more, laborious. At one point, I had become so frustrated with my working speed I decided to just type whatever came to mind no matter how direct, literal or awful the translation was. When I proceeded to edit the results, I realised it did speed up my pace somewhat and freed my mind in another way. It seemed the nonsense draft, terrible as it was, had provided a direct point from which I was able to contemplate the “world” in the target language itself, without being hindered or held back by the source.
All in all, I believe it is safe to say this second attempt at taking off was a vast improvement over the previous. I may not have soared very high, but I’ve certainly had a first taste of flight. And I must say, I really liked it.
©2022 Lim Woan Wen
Learn more about the Singapore Apprenticeship in Literary Translation here.
Lim Woan Wen began her apprenticeship through the Singapore Apprenticeship in Literary Translation (SALT) programme, co-organised by the Singapore Book Council and Tender Leaves Translation, in June 2022. She only started flexing her translation muscles again during the pandemic, after a gap of two decades.
For the last twenty years or so, she has established herself in the theatre as a lighting designer, and has lit more than 200 projects, won multiple awards, and co-founded the design collective INDEX. She was conferred the Young Artist Award in 2011 by the National Arts Council, and made a site-specific and time-based installation Light Matters in collaboration with the sun, in the following year.
Born and bred in Singapore, she is fluent in English, Mandarin and Singlish, proficient in Cantonese, understands Hokkien, and speaks a smattering of Japanese, Malay, and Vietnamese.