月下 | Beneath The Moon

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “月下 | Beneath The Moon” by M.T. Lee. M. T. is from Taiwan and New Zealand, and has lived in many other places since. He holds a Masters in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg and is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Podcastle. This is his first published essay. He is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia, and you can find him on Substack at M. T. Lee.

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I cannot claim to be a skilled translator, but I am a practiced one. Ever since childhood, whenever I read in Chinese, I would invariably attempt an English translation inside my head. Though I rarely wrote them down and they’re never particularly good, I can nonetheless attribute some of my earliest attempts at composition to this early habit, as well as a certain sensitivity to sound and language. And it is a special joy when I chance upon a precise translation that fits smooth like lock and key, especially when - to nab a phrase from Nabokov - that key usually resembles a lockpick.

For annoyances are common. Take 香. An exceptionally common adjective, liable to appear with frequency in any romantic scene. By itself it means sweet-smelling or fragrant. As a noun, it could also mean incense (and tangentially, it is incensing that scent and incense derive respectively from sentire, to perceive and incedere, to burn.). Food, of course, is 香. But you could also describe the manner of eating as 香: wolfing down, or, sexier: ravish. So, too, could sleep be 香, and here we have one of those lock-and-key moments with sleeping sweetly.

So far so good. But like all good things in life, 香 radiates metaphorically: to say someone is well read, you could say they are book-scented; 書香. The artful, well-aged scroll he carries might be 古香; age-scented. Then feminine beauty is also often described as 香, thus proverbially 國色天香; literally meaning “colour of the nation and Heaven-scented” (and note how I must lean on the Christian notion here when no such meaning should be implied) — meaning a beauty beyond compare, or 溫香軟玉; “warm-scented and soft jade,” usually used to describe a maiden’s body when the wuxia hero is forced by circumstance to take her into his manful arms. Perhaps she would then reward him with a 香吻 — a fragrant kiss — or perhaps his arm would be drenched with her fragrant sweat 香汗 — and even if she later perishes, setting up his motivation for Act Three, he could rest well know that her soul is no mere soul, but a sweet-smelling 香魂.

Perhaps now you are beginning to see the problem: there are few usable words in the English translator’s toolkit to articulate “pleasant smelling” except fragrant, which is an awful, clumsy word with an unpleasant shape, visually suggesting some connection to fragment or fragging. And you can’t very well have your hero eat the fragrant rice fragrantly while his fragrant wife plants a fragrant kiss on his cheeks. Rummage further and you’ll find perfumed, which feels artificial; aromatic, which feels unromantic; or the humble, ever-useful “-scented.” However, the trouble is that scented is too neutral, too polite: whereas 茉莉花香 connotes the pleasant scent of jasmine, “jasmine-scented” seems merely scientific: the pleasantness has to be manually injected. Then because you now have to plan around that compound adjective, you get something like “she entered the room, smelling pleasantly of jasmines,” and now the sentence begins to feel overwrought for what should have been quite a subtle scent. If you’re feeling particularly daring, you could reach for top-shelf words like ambrosial (a bit much for jasmine, don’t you think?) or redolent (which lets you use its prettier but etymologically unconnected step-cousin resplendent somewhere down the paragraph), but fancy words are bound to break the flow, and sooner later the impoverished state of olfactory affairs would you have crawling back to fragrant once more, desperate to write anything but the grade school construction of “smelling like.”

Intriguingly, the inverse problem also exists. The antonym to 香 is 臭, and, as with English, can connote a poor reputation or low character. But here the English language shines. Beyond the childish stinky or smelly, you can have a stench, or a funk, or be odious, or fetid, or pungent, or putrid, or noxious, or even, if you were in a particularly bad spot, have a miasma hang about you; all of which can basically only be rendered as 臭 in Chinese. I am not a practicing historian, but the imbalance seems to suggest something about the historical (social, cultural) environments in which these societies evolved, worthy of etymological investigation. (An aside: it is said that Heian courtiers would spend vast sums of money on bark and spices from Southeast Asia to craft personalized scents, such that they could tell who is approaching by their scent alone (and then, in the gossipy nature of Heian courtiers, judge them for their poor taste). Imagine: there, in the dark, the gentle patter of an evening rain freshing the scent of the earth; the shuffling of socks on corridor; a passing shadow, a beguiling aroma, a fragrance unknown, and you fall to your knees in despair, for all the vocabulary you have to describe this encounter have already been used. What an odious state of affairs).

There are more fundamental differences. Chinese characters are monosyllabic. Each character corresponds to one sound, albeit not always one meaning; a word can consist of one, two, three, or more characters. There are no tenses, no conjugation; time is therefore fluid, and there is pleasing ambiguity in not quite knowing whether something occurred/occurs/will occur yesterday or today or tomorrow (you begin to see the limitations of English). As with Japanese, the subject is often omitted: a sentence could happen to you or me or he or she or a universal we without being forced to take a stance. It is irksome when, say, a perfectly transient moment (or memory) of leaning against a windowsill and pining for a lost love is suddenly intruded, in translation, by an I, who has to act out the pining (worse: the desperate translator’s move to preserve the nonspecific with a genderless, identityless oneself — for there is nothing worse than showing up where one is not invited).

Then there is of course the visual element. A cultured scholar such as you will know that there is a pictographic element to Chinese characters: thus 火 is fire and 川 is river and 木 is tree and so on (and it will delight you to know that 林 means wood and 森 means, you guessed it, forest). There are of course abstractions. 雨, for example, is rain. You see the sky, droplets beneath looming clouds. But look how it also shows up in 雷, thunder, and 電, lightning (note the forked tail): visually symmetrical and, as in English, often paired. And then it occurs again in 雪, snow, in 雹, hail, and in one of my favourite characters, 霜, meaning frost. Even though rain does not feature in the meanings of the words, it is implied by the characters themselves a tidy etymological set. Thus Chinese poetry contains beauty in not only form and sound, but also in image, and thus, like all poetry of all languages, remain in my estimation fundamentally untranslatable.

We continue now to matters of the heart (or literally 心事 — another of those lock-and-keys). Love is, I believe, the single most overworked word in the English language. You love your dog and you love your job and you love your mother and you love cheese and I am led to believe that these are all the same type of love. Certainly you could care for things and be passionate about and feel deeply for and admire and sympathize and whatever you do with limerence, but none of them really quite have that four-letter, 24-carat, one-syllable punch. In this the Greek had the right idea, and so do, I venture, the Chinese. A few words fairly translatable as love include 戀, a pink-ish, perhaps slightly youthful kind of love, something between a crush and affection and desire (and do you see, in that character, those slight blushing cheeks?); 情, a deep bond, usable also for family or friendships, and describing something willful, perhaps stubborn, yet also somehow fated; and finally 愛, the closest direct translation to love, including not only joys but all the sorrows and responsibility also. Look closely, and you’ll find the heart 心 buried within. Thus you can have your 愛人, which translates to lover, but you can also have 戀人, bashful still from the excitement of it all, or a 情人, which implies a paramour, or even the partner in an affair. True to form, these terms co-mingle: thus 愛情 is different from 情愛 and different again from 戀情 or 戀愛. Yet for all this it is rare to hear the words 我愛你 — I love you — unless in the subtitle of a translated film, or during the age-honed tradition of flirting through language teaching. For a culture that values the unspoken, such directness is corny at best and vulgar at worse — hence the Natsume Soseki anecdote about the proper way to translate the phrase into Japanese: “The moon is beautiful tonight”. Voiced yet unvoiced; shared, but only momentarily, and all the more fragile, because. In this way, even fundamental feelings are ever-shifting, and thus the very lives of people such as I are an act of constant translation — a fact I understood long before I read a word of theory.

Having lambasted English I now feel the need to rally to its defense. After all, (shamefacedly, despite), it is the only language I can write in with passing grace. Visually and semantically, Chinese is a relatively stable language, perfected by literati over thousands of years, and its classical forms can be fairly understood even by unstudied reprobates such as I. However, this also means that creating new characters is almost impossible (though those who have tried range from ambitious noodle merchants to the only Empress of China, and You’ll Never Guess Who Was More Successful!), and translations of new words or concepts can often feel awkward, with visual consistency usually an afterthought to phonetic or semantic fidelity. English, unburdened with visual elements, suffers no such compunctions, and freely ransack words with such diverse backgrounds as jungle or tsunami or ketchup or pogrom or kowtow or schadenfreude, a fact probably more attributable to the power of the English navy than that of the English language. The result is a rich and diverse set of synonyms capable of evoking exact tones and timbres. An eddy is not a whirlpool, and an ebbing tide feels somehow more mysterious than one that merely recedes. Those stark, simple Anglo-Saxon words — needle, elm, yew, brand, hawthorn, blood, kin — practically imply an old magic all on its own. But then for your dark academia you’ll want instead the Latinates — symposium, dementia, daemon, pact, virtue, pandemonium. Your rustic farmhand carries a dirk, his assassin girlfriend a dagger, but their mentor, a weathered hunter, wields a carving knife, and only the fanciest contessa could get away with carrying a stiletto. The flexibility self-perpetuates: through the magic of grammar, you could pressgang any word into verb service, shamelessly adjectivize, or even conjoin two unrelated nouns into a viable clusterfuck.

But here we start to centre around a worrying thought. If we accept that all words carry the semiotic weight of its culture and history, then isn’t all translation essentially a reconfiguration? And, and, you (or he or she or they or I) begin to fret: if all of us have our individualized experiences for whom home or taste or love mean different things, then are we not each of us speaking a dialect of one; forced to never truly understand the myriad intents behind each of our carefully curated words?

But no. You know what a tsunami is, see, perhaps, the curve of its blue-white waves. And you understood beauty in its many forms long before you studied aesthetics. A new dish. A pleasing scent. The sound of snow on snow. Moments like these are transcendent. The words will come later, but there are dewdrops on the banisters, frost in the air. The moon is beautiful tonight.