Notes Along the Way: On the challenges and contradictions inherent in translating Dick Lee’s Home into Kristang
by Kevin Martens Wong
Kristang is a critically endangered creole language indigenous to Southeast Asia undergoing revitalisation
Dick Lee’s Home has really been the only National Day song I have ever been really able to relate to (and cry along to), and so translating it into my critically endangered heritage language Kristang seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do after my husband and I decided that we wanted to do something a little more patriotic for our series of Kristang-translation covers of contemporary pop songs, Kantah Kristang. But translating into Kristang carries its own very unique set of methodological challenges for any practitioner, especially because the language is a creole and therefore highly context-specific, and also in the process of lexical revitalisation, where new words are being devised in an informal, grassroots-oriented way to supplement gaps that have otherwise emerged due to Kristang’s implicit marginalisation under the colonial British authorities and then under the Singapore government up until the 1980s, and the shift by many Portuguese-Eurasians, including my own family, over to English.
Those gaps are perhaps the first and most compellingly intriguing of the challenges that any Kristang translator will have to negotiate, because although the usual strategy of phrasal paraphrasing or compounding afforded to a translator of any language (i.e substituting a missing lexeme with a string of words or phrase) is absolutely available in Kristang, the revitalising impetus for the language in Singapore, and the community’s openness to the creative and meaningful development of new words that are respectful of the Kristang past and culture, both allow for a translator to propose a new lexeme or even concept to fill that semantic gap, or otherwise (more commonly) extend the meaning of an existing lexeme that can then be derived contextually by a Kristang listener. In my translation of Home, for example, we see this in the extension of the meaning of the word repairu, meaning shelter or refuge; it is known to be used in the context of physical shelters, but whether it can apply metaphorically is not actually well-known; this song is one of the few extant examples of that in Kristang.
The reader embedded in contemporary (and mostly Western) contexts of standardisation and regularisation of language may find this unusual, but this is in fact a very common practice in Kristang that predates the revitalisation effort; many other practitioners and academics have reported (and recorded) earlier Kristang performers literally making up words whenever they could not remember lyrics, had an unusual or extra beat in a song or verse, or were just not as fully conscious as they might want to be while performing, to put it delicately; many of our art forms, indeed, such as the mata kantiga, rely on such traditions of strong improvisational ability and versatility to help the audience not just laugh and enjoy themselves, but to provide a subtle means of psychoemotional relief through the subversions of these so-called ‘fixed standards’ (or as would have been seen in colonial times, colonial approaches to science, rationality and the ordering of what would otherwise be seen as fairly fluid and mutable concepts like language, identity and performance). An word-internal example of this in the translation of Home is the word ilgari, which is a very uncommon spelling and pronunciation of the word that otherwise appears as ilagra or ilagri; this is of course done to fit the rhythm of the translated song, but also because it, as we would say, ‘just seems to fit the vibe better’; as long as the listener can derive the meaning of ilgari, which most Kristang people have been able to do, it is passable. Within the revitlaisation initiative, we refer to this very unusual phenomenon of focusing on the ‘essence’ of lexemes (and other objects) rather than their surface-level / observed structure and contours as Kristang’s status as a polynomic language, celebrating and encouraging variation rather than constraining it through fixed-form standardisation.
That adaptability and versatility inherent in the language also engenders the second major point of unique negotiation that the translator often encounters with Kristang: its very high level of context- specificity. This is first discernible from, for example how subject or pronoun drop is very common in
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both written and spoken forms of the language, which also appears in the translation of Home: the line Sempri lembrah isti sidadi, for example, is supposed to translate technically as ‘I will always (fondly) remember / think of this city’, but the first-person pronoun yo or ‘I’ is elided in the Kristang translation, because after one half-verse of talking about themselves, it is usually clear to a listener that the persona is continuing to do this in the next half-verse. However, we again encounter a fairly unique feature of Kristang, in that translations that encode ambiguity or multiple meanings in Kristang that are not available in the target language often create a great sense of enjoyment and interest on the part of the listener, and tend to be received more positively. In this case, for instance, Sempri lembrah isti sidadi can also be glossed as an imperative or command, to Always recall and think of this city – and can be performed as such, or with both meanings extant at the same time, depending on the performer’s intentions and the audience’s interests. The same exciting ambiguity is also afforded in the rest of the half-verse, where the original lines Nabegah na riu di nus sa bida / Andah na yo sa ila can also be glossed either as subject-dropped first-person statements from the persona, or as (much more intriguingly) commands from the persona.
The word for ‘Home’ in Kristang itself, kaza, also showcases this multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning in reverse: it is somewhat awkward as a title because it doesn’t quite carry the same exact level of connotative meaning of safety, security, stability and inner peace that the English word home does, and which are arguably more central to the ‘essence’ of the song than the word ‘Home’ itself is. In translation, therefore, the equally ambiguous Yo sa tera, which at face value translates to “This is my land” was selected instead: whose land is it really? Whether composer, translator, performer or listener, in the end, if you are Kristang, then that’s up to all of us to decide.
Visit this link to see Home sung in Kristang
Please see these other articles in the Notes Along the Way series:
Reading War and Peace, by Shelly Bryant
Disappearing Pronouns, by Miho Kinnas
Dishes and Places, by Pow Jun Kai
How to Avoid Disrupting the Flow, by Shelly Bryant
The Provincial Capital, by Shelly Bryant