Wang ran through the current situation. Penguin had a valuable Shakespeare backlist centred on the popular paperback New Penguin Shakespeare playtexts, first published in the UK in the late 1960s and extensively reprinted. Imported into China, these sold decently, along with a few works of criticism. Although Penguin didn’t themselves publish a translation of the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare in this territory, the book was still very much in print: new editions had been published as recently as 2004 and 2008.
Translation, Wang explained, was the golden egg. The number of Chinese people who could read English well was still small, perhaps 1 per cent of the population, and fewer still could cope with Shakespeare in the original, even if they had learned the odd passage at school. To be in with a chance of decent sales, you had to put Shakespeare into Mandarin.
Penguin were exploring the possibility of publishing fresh versions of not one but two separate translations of the complete works in 2016. The first was by a translator called Zhu Shenghao, who had rendered a large number of the plays in the 1930s and 1940s in versions that were now China’s most popular. The second – if they could negotiate the rights – would use the newer and more precise translations by the renowned scholar Liang Shiqiu. ‘They have different feelings,’ Wang explained. ‘Readers can choose the original translation, or the imaginative one.’
In the meantime, Wang and Liu were doing their best to marketise the Bard. A display of historic Penguin editions was touring trade conventions and publishing fairs in different Chinese cities, advertising the publisher’s rich Shakespearian heritage. Here in Beijing they were working hard on a strategy to support the 2016 project.
‘Everyone is the player of your own life,’ Liu said. ‘This is the idea we are working on.’
They walked me through the plan – multimedia happenings both on- and offline, reader discussions, public events. The challenge was that Shakespeare was perceived as both old and difficult to read, so they’d come up with an ingenious solution: making Shakespeare into a luxury product, like imported Scotch or Range Rovers.
‘I think in China the best way to talk about Shakespeare is as a lifestyle,’ Wang said.
A lifestyle?
She blinked rapidly. ‘As Chinese people want to be more international, they want to have something to talk about with westerners. This is our message: for this reason you’d better read Shakespeare. It will benefit your social networking, and your lifestyle.’
They were brainstorming a media campaign. Chinese celebrities would be invited to choose a favourite play. A big-name lawyer could talk about King Lear and why it illustrated the need to set up a legally watertight will (a major issue in China, where the rise in the number of people owning property had put huge pressure on the country’s vague inheritance laws). A famous property developer might talk about Romeo and Juliet …
‘We want to say that for the money you spend on a cup of coffee you could buy the greatest love story,’ Wang said.
How about a TV chef talking about Titus Andronicus? A drinks magnate on Falstaff? A female lawyer on Merchant of Venice?
Wang and Liu looked at me doubtfully, uncertain whether I was being facetious. I wasn’t entirely sure myself.
‘It will depend on the resources,’ Wang said slowly. ‘If there is a big production of a play, this can help us very much.’ A wistful look came into her eyes. ‘If there is something like Downton Abbey for Shakespeare …’
This was yet another prestige UK import. Seen by an estimated 160 million Chinese viewers (with many more watching pirated DVDs or downloads), Julian Fellowes’s lumbering period saga appeared to have displaced Sherlock Holmesian fog – or even the royal family – as the vital symbol of Britain in Asia.
‘Yes,’ said Wang. ‘Something like this television series would be very good.’
In the corridor on the way out I saw evidence of a previous marketing wheeze – a bicycle painted a jolly shade of red and covered with Penguin branding. It was a Flying Pigeon, Beijing’s traditional bicycle, thought by some to be the bestselling vehicle of all time. Its design was ripped off from a 1930s British model: a cautionary mascot for a foreign company trying to get ahead in Asia.
As I passed, I patted the saddle. The bike looked as though it would go far.
257 … 272 … 284 … 293
The red numbers on the screen at the end of the carriage flickered and wavered, finally settling at 300 km/h. Outside the window, the scenery had dissolved from a series of identifiable scenes to a soothing and meaningless blur. The noise was barely louder than a hum, like the air conditioning in an expensive hotel.
Eyes pricking with tiredness, I watched Beijing being dragged soundlessly away. Above were tendrils of cloud, pale mauve, slipping across a bleached sky. It looked like a smoggy day ahead. Not real blue; Beijing blue.
I was on the 0700 G101, the first train of the day to Shanghai. The line had only been open a few years, part of China’s headlong sprint into the twenty-first century. At the behest of the go-getting minister of railways, Liu Zhijun (known as ‘Lunatic Liu’), some 9,000 miles of high-speed track had been laid in the last decade, more than the rest of the world combined. Even when two high-speed trains crashed in Zhejiang province in July 2011, killing forty and resulting in Liu’s high-speed ejection from office, the pace barely slowed.
The line I was travelling had opened that same year. The government boasted that the project had used twice as much concrete as the Three Gorges Dam. In 2004, travelling between the two cities took fourteen hours-plus; this morning, I was due in to Hongqiao station at 12.37. The swiftest trains did the journey in four hours forty-eight minutes.
Unable to look out of the window without feeling seriously dizzy, I returned to my notes. I had been interested to hear that Penguin’s plans included two separate editions of Shakespeare’s complete works in Chinese: Liang Shiqiu’s, published in the late 1960s, and the ‘original’, by Zhu Shenghao, who came from the city I was heading for, Shanghai. I wanted to find out more about Zhu. Both his life and his life’s work seemed to say much not just about Shakespeare, but about China’s turbulent history in the twentieth century.
Zhu had been born in Jiaxing, a town just outside Shanghai, in 1912, the same year the Republic of China was founded. Raised in a middle-class family, he went to the prestigious Zhejiang University, studying Chinese literature and, like many of his peers, developing a keen concern for China’s cultural reformation. After graduating in 1933, he moved into Shanghai and got a job with a publishing company.
After the success of Tian Han’s Hamlet in 1922, something of a translation boom had followed, with versions of the plays already familiar to Chinese readers, such as The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and The Merry Wives of Windsor, all being redone in the late 1920s, this time with reference to Shakespeare’s texts. In literary circles, the next step began to seem urgent: translating the complete works into Mandarin. In 1930, a committee of scholars was set up to address the issue, paid for by American aid money, but struggled to get itself organised. Egged on by his family and his university tutor, Zhu decided to beat the greybeards at their own game. He would do the whole lot himself.
In its way, the project was not dissimilar from the high-speed-rail boom of the 2000s: a way for China to prove that it was the equal of the world. In spring 1935, at the age of twenty-three, Zhu began preparatory work on The Tempest, setting himself the Lunatic Liu-style deadline of translating all thirty-six plays in the First Folio in two years. It was an impossible task, but he nonetheless made impressive progress, translating eight texts in the first year.
His timing, however, was desperately unlucky. In July 1937, China was plunged into war with Japan. Just a month after the declaration of hostilities, Shanghai, a plump and attractive target only 500 miles across the East China Sea, came under attack. Fleeing the Japanese advance, Zhu was forced to abandon the substantial library of texts and critical studies he had acquired. Far worse, th
e translations he’d completed were destroyed when the publisher went up in flames. Undeterred, Zhu seized his one-volume edition of the complete works and a dictionary and found new accommodation, determined to continue his task.
In 1938, he took a job with a newspaper agency, writing anti-Japanese articles during the day and continuing his translations by night. Leading what he later called a ‘vagabond’s life’, he laboriously managed to retranslate the plays he had already done, but in December 1941 Japanese forces swept into the International Settlement. This time, his manuscripts were in the newspaper building. Again, his work was lost.
In 1942, by now married to his university sweetheart, Song Qingru, Zhu devoted himself wholeheartedly to Shakespeare. He and his new wife moved back to Jiaxing and into her family home. Salvaging what manuscripts he could, Zhu redid the comedies for a third time and started work on the remaining texts. Despite poverty and mounting ill-health, he managed to finish a remarkable thirty-one plays in the following twenty months before succumbing to tuberculosis in December 1944, two acts through Henry V.
According to his widow, Zhu said, ‘Had I known I would not rise again after this illness, I would have exerted all my efforts to complete this translation.’ Seven decades on, his versions are still regarded as favourites, endlessly praised for their ‘poetic’ and ‘timelessly Chinese’ qualities.
Zhu’s story was reported in every book I had read about Shakespeare in China and had often been recirculated by the domestic media. Obviously, irresistibly, it was a David and Goliath tale – a heroic solo effort completed (or very nearly completed) in the face of near-insurmountable odds. It had, too, a strong strain of nationalism; it seemed entirely to the point that Zhu had been a passionate patriot who nobly continued his work despite the depredations of the Japanese.
But was it really true? From the fragments I had gathered, it seemed there was now some kind of museum to Zhu in Jiaxing. The city was only an hour or two outside Shanghai, and I was hopeful that a contact at a university would be able to help. I’d promised to call him as soon as I arrived.
In the meantime, I returned to a subject I’d encountered many times during my travels: the question of translation. How did one actually translate a writer such as Shakespeare? Could one really do it?
The English way of looking at it was roughly: no way. The language in which Shakespeare wrote was highly characteristic and particular, a bubbling stew of Anglo-Saxon, legal French, half-remembered schoolboy Latin and Greek, Warwickshire dialect, as well as vocabulary borrowed from the many corners of the world London was beginning to do commerce with.
Then there was what Shakespeare did with the tools at his disposal: his eye and ear for multiple meanings, half-buried senses, assonance and rhythm, beguiling imagery and metaphor. Scholars have long been obsessed by the question of how many words Shakespeare had invented (excitement, frugal, lacklustre, savagery: there are more, many of which haven’t stuck), but – as with his deft skill at working with pre-existing sources – it was his facility with the language he heard around him that I found more remarkable. He had a sly skill at reanimating ossified meanings, an eagerness to push the most humdrum nouns and verbs in novel directions. His use of the language was so intricate and specialised that it had spawned what was in effect a customised dictionary, C. T. Onions’s A Shakespeare Glossary (1911), 259 densely packed, double-columned pages.
And that was just vocabulary: things got still more complex when one considered sentence structure, or investigated Shakespeare’s remarkable skill at conjuring voices and accents, each as distinct as an inked fingerprint on the page. Then there was his handling of verse, the surge and snap of the iambic line, the complex fugues of rhythms, and more. Although many lines were perfectly comprehensible on the surface, the more one teased apart their warp and weft the richer and more soaked with meaning they seemed. Not for nothing did his Elizabethan contemporary Francis Meres call Shakespeare ‘mellifluous and honey-tongued’.
I pulled my copy of the complete works out of my bag and plucked a line almost at random:
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done […]
Macbeth, act four, scene one. Eleven curt monosyllables, spoken by Macbeth as he decides to storm Macduff’s castle and murder his family. I copied the line into my notebook. What mysteries did it contain?
For forty-five minutes, I attempted my own timid piece of translation, from English into English. The closer one analysed the line, the stranger and more slippery it got. Although its gist seemed clear (‘To follow up my thoughts with actions, I’ll attack Macduff’s castle’), its deeper meaning kept slipping out of focus, like the illusory dagger that leads Macbeth to Duncan’s bedchamber.
‘Be it thought and done’ was a pat phrase, the equivalent of ‘no sooner said than done’, but, doubleness being a major theme in Macbeth, the line also seems to toy with the double meanings of the words crown (the verb ‘to add the finishing touch to’ and the noun ‘royal crown’) and act (‘actions’ but also, metatheatrically, ‘performance’). But it was the sentence structure that caught the ear, a weaselling piece of subjunctive grammar (‘be it thought’) that announced Macbeth’s intention to make his intentions actions without ever fully admitting ownership – arguably the play’s dominant theme. Spoken in a handful of seconds, the line was nonchalant in its brilliance. I couldn’t begin to imagine how one might do it justice in another form.
And how did one do so in Chinese? Mandarin wasn’t even the most complex of Sinitic languages, and, from the little I understood of its make-up, already seemed forbiddingly remote; not only because of the 20,000 characters regularly in use (with another 60,000 in reserve), but its strict tonal system, its huge variety of syllables, its thickets of compound nouns (‘wash-hair essence’ for shampoo, ‘separate/combine device’ for a car’s clutch, ‘protect risk’ for insurance).
The great literary critic William Empson – also, as it happened, a devoted sinologist who spent years in China – produced a witty catalogue of Shakespearian language in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), attempting to unpick every meaning of the word ‘sense’ in Measure for Measure. Ingenious as he was, Empson cheerfully admitted one could never quite get to the end of sense’s senses, which ranged from ‘sound good sense’ to carnal sensuality, with every shade of meaning in between. ‘Almost all of them,’ he wrote, ‘carry forward a puzzle which is essential to [the play’s] thought.’ Surely that puzzle would be utterly insoluble in Chinese?
Zhu Shenghao, writing in the months before he died, had been clear about what he had tried to accomplish, and even clearer on what he could not:
I did my best to conserve the flavour and features of the style of the original. In case I failed to reach this goal, I would try to communicate the ideas … clearly and faithfully in an elegant and comprehensible Chinese. I considered it indecent to translate word for word without expressing the ingenuity and vigour of the original.
Whenever I felt unable to render an English sentence into Chinese adequately, I would work a long time on it, and strive to reveal the English poet’s ideas clearly, risking a completely different arrangement of the words of the original sentence. Every time I finished translating a paragraph, I used to read it carefully as [if I were] the first reader … [to see] if there were any ambiguities, and at the same time I would consider myself an actor for examining if the tone of the version was harmonious and the rhythm agreeable.
This is a thoughtful and flexible philosophy, unusually alive to the fact that Shakespeare’s texts are scripts designed to be performed. But Zhu was working at a fearsome pace – twenty-five-odd plays in under two years, if the stories were to be believed – and whatever agonising he did must have been cursory at best. Also, he was vague on the details: what did ‘features of the style’ mean when one was transforming Early Modern English into Modern Standard Chinese? How was it possible to paraphrase ‘clearly and faithfully’ if the English version, as I’d discovered, was often
anything but clear? The ‘ingenuity and vigour’ of Shakespeare’s language one could certainly agree on, but it demanded as much ingenuity again from the translator, if not many times more.
I looked up from my tray-table. By now we were well south of Nanjing. The Yangtze river, the colour of mulligatawny soup and crowded with barges, flashed by faster than I could reach for my camera. The journey had been so smoothly rapid that whenever we paused at a station I had the vertiginous sensation that the landscape was continuing to move. Buried in my books, I had failed even to make it to the dining car.
*
When the doors hissed open, the humidity was like being smothered by a warm, wet sponge. It had been late winter when I’d got on the train. In Shanghai, the best part of a thousand miles south, we’d skipped to early summer. As I pulled my case through Hongqiao station, appallingly vast, I found myself shedding clothes. By the time I had got up to ground level, my jacket was gone; a half-kilometre further, so were my jumper and overshirt. By the time I settled myself into the ripped mustard upholstery of an elderly Volkswagen taxi, I had an armful of redundant clothes. The driver eyed me dubiously. It looked as though I had attempted a striptease on the concourse.
At the hotel I made enquiries about a trip to visit the museum at Jiaxing, but in the meantime I had an appointment with a modern Zhu Shenghao: Professor Zhang Chong of Fudan University, one of China’s most august academic institutions. Zhang was part of the team behind yet another complete works. First published under the general editorship of the respected Chinese scholar Fang Ping in 2000, it had recently been updated.
I found Zhang in a spartan, modern office on the main Fudan campus. Like the office, Zhang was neat and unshowy, a slim figure in a dark checked shirt with sleeves folded tidily above the elbows. High eyebrows and a bald crown gave him an expression of polite, mole-like surprise. Every so often, the eyebrows would jump far above his glasses and he would look sorely troubled; more often, his enthusiasm was difficult to contain. He was that rarest of creatures, a scholar who was also a born teacher.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 50
