‘I seem to be the only Chinese-scots translator in captivity’
If you speak a smaller language there is always another voice shouting louder than yours
◆ For more than 30 years, Brian Holton has been translating the work of Chinese ‘Misty’ poet Yang Lian into English and Scots. The creative partnership, which used to be carried out by exchanging letters, has resulted in more than 15 books and a lifelong friendship
One spring morning in 1993, I was teaching a class when the department secretary came in and announced that I was wanted urgently on the telephone: I followed her downstairs with some trepidation. What terrible news was waiting for me? When I picked up the phone, I heard a rich Beijing voice introduce himself as Yang Lian, changing planes at Heathrow: would I like to translate his selected poems?
I knew who he was. When I was living in Hangzhou in 1988-9, Yang and his fellow Misty poets could have filled stadiums, though, of course, the Party didn’t allow that. At that time, China had almost no pop music, little access to Western music, and no cultural activity not tightly controlled by the Party, but poetry was hugely popular with young people and students. I had read some of Yang in a best-selling anthology, but it wasn’t till a year or two later that I was asked to translate some of his work. Yang had been at a conference in Berlin, where John Cayley had been showing my translations around, and Yang, who at that time spoke almost no English, had been persuaded I was the translator for him. So he asked, and I said yes.
Now, after 31 years, 15 books, several essays, a few prizes, and many public appearances together, we’re the longestrunning poet and translator team in our language pair, and of all the translators who have carried Yang’s work into 30 languages, I am the only one to have translated nearly all of his output. And it all started that day in Durham.
Before 1993 I had published translations of Chinese fiction in Scots, but translating Yang Lian was my first experience of working with a living writer. Chinese wordprocessing software hardly existed at that time, and he had no access to
computers or anything else, so it was all done by handwritten letter. I would laboriously write out my queries for him in painstaking Chinese, and post the letters off to Sydney; two to three weeks later, the answer would come back, and he was wonderfully astute in giving me what I needed. He would write a paragraph explaining a line I hadn’t understood – it’s always the classic language learner’s problem: “I know what he says, but what does he mean?”
Yang’s poetry is difficult, because he wants us to think in new ways. It is grammatically and metrically straightforward, though formally innovative.
Yang was sent to the countryside to dig ditches during the Cultural Revolution, when schools and universities were closed, so he is self-educated, and like many autodidacts his hunger for knowledge is fierce, and his reading vast.
Our first collection Non-person Singular was published in 1994 and launched at the Poetry International in London, which is where we met for the first time. Not only did we have the same Minox camera and the same Pelikan fountain pen, we found to our delight that when we read together my English had captured the rhythms of his Chinese voice, which I had never heard since that phone call.
We’re a great double-act, though, given the peculiar ventriloquism of the translation trade, I’m never quite certain whose hand is up the back of whose jacket…
Chinese poetry in Scots – weill, how no?
Scots, a West Germanic language, has a literature going back over 800 years, yet only English is compulsory in schools, and there are still teachers and others with no knowledge of linguistics who say the Scots language is just ‘Slang’. They’re wrong.
If you speak a smaller language there is always another voice shouting louder than yours. I have heard this from Tibetans, Mongols, and Uyghurs, as well as from speakers of the half-dozen Chinese languages that are as different from Mandarin as French is from Portuguese. In Montreal, a teacher of the Mohawk language once said to me in astonishment, during a discussion of minority languages in Europe, “I never knew white people had the same problem we have”.
Div oo no juist!
Scots is my mother tongue, a flexible, muscular, resourceful language, and an unfailing source of inspiration. It’s “rich in datchy sesames an names for nameless things” as Mcdiarmid said, and it has proved to be equal to anything I throw at it, from mediaeval legal texts to archaic shamanist songs, outlaw ballads, classical lyrics, or the great poetry of the Tang Dynasty. I had few resources when I began, but now the magisterial Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue are freely available online. Forty-odd years on, I still seem to be the only Chinese-scots translator in captivity. My Aa Cled wi Clouds She Cam was published last year by Irish Pages. It’s a collection of lyrics from the 11th and 12th centuries, songs of love and loss, homesickness and heartbreak, parting and yearning, which leap off the page in Scots. Readers have told me the hameliness of Scots brings these longago poets right into their hearts, and as Kathleen Jamie says in her foreword, they show how “[Scots] can reach into subtle emotional registers, into intimacies, into soft musicalities”. My first publication was in Scots, and in the ‘80s I experimented with using Scots for contemporary and classical fiction and poetry: through these I learned how to make Chinese poetry sing in Scots, though little was published until 2016’s Staunin Ma Lane. For many years I was a busy academic, and what spare time I had was mostly taken up by Yang Lian, though there was always time for Scots.
But when I read Yang Lian, I hear him in English.
Heave awa lads, we’re no deid yit!
Ferry Crossing
by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton
is this Lethe? a narrow stretch of water an endless stretch of water the autumn woods’ allure abdicates to the haze mist burned to cinder goes aboard with me a world drifts away
gradually moving in green on the far shoreline on this shore water’s sound a rhyme wooden boat from disappearance to disappearance within a steel towline invisible paddling hands have the course clinched
each person paddles toward their own reflection the pulse of love the pulse of pain in gloaming haze shimmering undulating troubled times soak into the night breeze and find again at water’s edge my departed spirit
weigh anchor inside me blood-drenched Lethe wading in fallen leaves all unforgettable all leaking an instant of no way out
I have come back tempered into riverarching night.
Brian Holton has translated more than 20 books, including A Tower Built Downwards by Yany Lian (Bloodaxe, 2023) which won the PEN translates Award and Anniversary Snow (Bloodaxe 2019) which won the Sarah Mcguire International Prize for Poetry Translation. He is also the translator of Yang Lian’s essay Nightmare Inspiration from Living in Language (£15) which was published by the Poetry Translation Centre in March. The Poetry Translation Centre celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.