{"id":1204,"date":"2021-05-12T12:20:11","date_gmt":"2021-05-12T12:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2021-05-12T12:20:11","modified_gmt":"2021-05-12T12:20:11","slug":"break-on-the-beat-translating-chinese-rock-n-roll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/break-on-the-beat-translating-chinese-rock-n-roll\/","title":{"rendered":"Break on the Beat: Translating Chinese Rock \u2018n Roll"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Share<\/a><\/p>\n

Written by Canaan Morse<\/span><\/p>\n

Four years ago, International Poetry Nights Hong Kong commissioned me to translate a packet of song lyrics by Cui Jian, the undisputed godfather and original megastar of Chinese rock \u2018n roll. Cui Jian is a bona fide rock artist of international quality whose voice embodied a cultural moment \u2013 the wave of experimentation and rebellion in mid- to late eighties in China, when in students sang Cui\u2019s ballad \u201cNothing To My Name\u201d in Tiananmen Square \u2013 to a degree that no international renown could match. Yet instead of quitting, self-sanitizing, or repeating himself after that moment was forcibly ended, Cui kept evolving, as so many great artists have done (I think of the changing work of Robert Plant, Prince, Stevie Nicks, et cetera). So, while I would like to talk generally about rock \u2018n roll and being on the other side of the freedom conundrum in translation, I have to say what little I can about Cui Jian\u2019s music first.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m no historian, and so don\u2019t feel qualified to represent Cui\u2019s decades-long career in a fully accurate fashion, but I will say that his music immediately evinces the stubborn roughness of an artist determined to push an individual voice against the more polished mainstream. He is tonal but growly, melodic but also chuggingly rhythmic, his lyrics both personal and intensely abstract or thematically charged. One old example might be the beginning to \u201cA Strip of Red Cloth,\u201d the 1994 song that got his first post-Tiananmen national tour cancelled:<\/span><\/p>\n

That day you covered up my two eyes<\/span><\/p>\n

Covered the sky with a strip of red cloth<\/span><\/p>\n

And then you asked me what I saw<\/span><\/p>\n

I told you I could see happiness<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh this feeling is so positive<\/span><\/p>\n

Makes me forget I\u2019ve no place to live<\/span><\/p>\n

You asked me where I want to go<\/span><\/p>\n

I say I\u2019m on the road to you<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t see you, I can\u2019t see the road<\/span><\/p>\n

My hand in your hand is tightly held<\/span><\/p>\n

You ask me what I\u2019m thinking of<\/span><\/p>\n

I say I want you to take the lead<\/span><\/p>\n

Sing along here<\/a> (the translation is crafted to fit the melody). See how the darkness in the lyrics changes the feel of that pastoral guitar? This isn\u2019t John Denver. A newer example is \u201cFrozen Light,\u201d from 2015-16:<\/span><\/p>\n

On that evening with the sun and the moon<\/span><\/p>\n

We froze together in one line<\/span><\/p>\n

Light was heavy flesh was too soft<\/span><\/p>\n

And my breath came shallow<\/span><\/p>\n

I closed my eyes moonlight passed through ice<\/span><\/p>\n

And twisted on my body<\/span><\/p>\n

It was covered in a hardened shell<\/span><\/p>\n

That made air feel like a prison<\/span><\/p>\n

(first refrain)<\/span><\/p>\n

Open your eyes open both eyes<\/span><\/p>\n

Come to the core of the light<\/span><\/p>\n

Now close your eyes now close both your eyes<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is the heart of the ice<\/span><\/p>\n

The 2016 concert version (a duet with the utterly badass Tan Weiwei) begins around 1:30 here<\/a>. Again, Cui crafts a song directed at the typical rock \u2018n roll romantic thou into something much more emotionally and intellectually difficult. He builds up a grim energy that carries him from one album to the next (of which there have been seven so far, plus multiple films). The fact that I am contractually prohibited from saying anything further should suggest that said energy has not yet diminished.<\/span><\/p>\n

I mentioned wanting to discuss the process of translation and what I call the freedom conundrum of translating for music, in which one finds liberty amid stricture. We often think of freedom as a state of non-restriction \u2013 no rules, no boundaries, no limits on capability. In literary translation, this sort of freedom often manifests itself to the translator as an electric anticipation (or anxiety) over the immutable choices we must make in order recreate a thing made of writing across cultural boundaries. When translating contemporary literature \u2013 poetry especially \u2013 that courts ambiguity, plays with unwritten space, or resists a unifying voice, the vastness of the translator\u2019s field of choice can be paralyzing if no lightning-bolt answer arrives. It might feel like staring down a whole aisle of nut milks at the grocery store \u2013 that is, if every carton was the painstaking work of a respected artist who was offering it to you for free.<\/span><\/p>\n

After years of translating written poetry, I discovered that working with rock \u2018n roll was utterly different, for the obvious reason that the music held me to a clear and unbending standard. Formal poets and art teachers are already nodding in anticipation of my point, namely, that formal restrictions bestow a different kind of freedom on the creator by establishing a clear finish line, but let me suggest \u2013 even to them – that song is significantly more difficult. Even the most ornate metrical schemes in poetry (and most are not that ornate) are regular, involving lines of repeated feet that guide the reader\u2019s outer or inner voice. The translator of a song, however, has another voice to follow. That voice has arranged stress and non-stress, syllabification and elision in a certain way across a web of tone and beat that can\u2019t just be translated; it has to be mirrored. The nine \u201cbeats\u201d of the first line of \u201cA Piece of Red Cloth\u201d mirror the nine characters of the Chinese source, which look regular enough on the page, but then shrink or expand as the music dictates. I make no pronouncement on whether it\u2019s permissible to, say, translate a snappy ten-beat lyric into a four-beat lyric of stretched syllables \u2013 perhaps a more talented musical translator than I could justify it \u2013 but to do so with Cui Jian\u2019s music would be an affront to his style.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the task was exhilarating. I stomped my feet, strummed an air guitar, and crooned lines over and over in the living room of my ground-floor apartment. Sometimes I started crafting a line with the words, sometimes with the melody, or the rhythm. More often than not, I found myself letting go of my conceptual intellect and seeing what the music drove out of me. I did that over and over until I got an accurate and musically acceptable version of the line. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever had so much fun doing my job as a translator. The whole project f—ing rocked; that\u2019s the only way I can describe it. It rocked.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Canaan Morse is a lite<\/span><\/em>rary translator, poet, and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where he researches ancient Chinese vernacular fiction and oral storytelling. His translations of contemporary Chinese prose and poetry have been featured in Kenyon Review, Southern Review, The Baffler, and many other journals, while his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in No Contact, The Curator, and Subnivean. His translations of the novels The Invisibility Cloak (winner of the 2016 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation) and Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei are available via the New York Review of Books Classics Series. Image credit: “Cui Jian”<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0courambel<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY-NC 2.0<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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