Category: translation

I love fountain pens. I don’t actually write by hand much. But when I sell books at conventions, its expected I sign books, so I always make a point of having a nice fountain pen that is appropriately inked before I go.

Several years ago, when I needed to get a new fountain pen, I had gotten a beautiful Jinhao pen with a porcelain barrel showing an image of delicate plum blossoms. I’d really liked that pen. When I needed a new one a few years later, I looked again, but couldn’t find the same pen. I found a similar pen, however, (pictured above) which was absurdly cheap, so I bought two:

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When the pens arrived (after about a month, shipped surface via container ship) they were perfectly satisfactory. But I noticed that they had some Chinese script that, interestingly, wasn’t shown in the promotional image. It made me wonder… What does it say? Is it the name of some bank? Does it say “Death to America”? I kept meaning to get it translated but not getting around to it. This morning I finally found time.

I took the picture above and fed it into Google Translate. I usually leave Google Translate set to translate between Japanese and English and it does provide a translation in Japanese, but what it said seemed rather cryptic:

Mai Muroto Ikatoide

Plum Blossom Palace Jiku Kanta

I set it to Detect Language and let it try again. Then I set it to Chinese (Traditional) to confirm that they were the same:

The sword dance in the room is sharpened by the deer.

Plum Blossom Palace is cold and beautiful.

The first seems like some kind of proverb or saying, but one that the English Internet seems unfamiliar with. Plum Blossom Palace similarly doesn’t seem to return any obvious hits.

So now I know, anyway, for whatever good that does. I still like the pens and it makes people happy to have me use a pretty pen to sign their books.

potsherds

I attended a craft workshop organized by the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild about translating poetry by Jesse Lee Kercheval. She’s Zona Gale Professor of English Emerit at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The workshop had to be rescheduled when she had computer difficulties several weeks ago, but it was still pretty well attended for a Zoom event on a rainy Saturday morning.

She talked a bit about her path to translating poetry. She grew up speaking French, but learned English in her childhood. For the past 15 years, she’s been going to Uruguay and learning about the language and literature of the region. She’s published both original poetry and poetry in translation.

She brought several examples to show the kinds of choices translators make when trying to share a poem from one language to another. They were fascinating and gave the audience the opportunity to discover how choices throw cultural and linguistics aspect of both the original and target languages into relief.

One poem, translated by her and by another poet was particularly fascinating to me, as I could see how the other poet created a more masculine take on the poem showing cultural differences in how men and women speak. It reminded me of how in Japanese, men use a much rougher, more clipped, kind of speech.

Another poem showed the challenges — and limitations — of trying to bring a cultural construct from one language into another without intersecting with different cultural biases in the target language. The word “barrio” has different cultural connotations in the two communities: do you try to translate it or leave it in? Even the title of the poem, which was purely metaphorical: do you translate it literally? Or try to capture a corresponding metaphorical meaning in English? Choices!

For many, many years, (more than 30!) I have been writing poetry in Esperanto and trying to translate it into English. I’ve also done some limited translation of English poetry into Esperanto. And as an undergraduate, I studied Spanish for many years. So this was just a perfect fit for my interests and needs. I’ve been thinking about making a new chapbook of Esperanto haiku and now I’m even more excited to get started.