Chinatown
I love thinking about language, although — sad face — I’m only fluent in English. (This could’ve gone differently. Dear young people: Take advantage of your ability to converse and get around in a different language and keep using it lest you become like me…aaaaaand probably a large swath of Americans.)
I’ve been re-reading Thank You, Mr. Nixon by Gish Jen to prepare discussion questions for MetroWest Readers Fest. Jen references “language” quite a bit — idioms, in particular — and it makes me think about how multilayered fluency is. A one-to-one translation doesn’t always convey what you want (think: Google translate), and so long to nuance.
This is why I was so intrigued reading Chinatown by Thuan. This novel was originally published in 2005 in Vietnamese and translated to English by Nguyen An Ly just this year.
Structurally, this is a very meticulous novel; phrases are purposely repeated and the entire “plot” takes place as a memory in the narrator’s head during the two hours she waits with her son on the Paris Metro as police investigate an abandoned package. Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) describes Chinatown as a “fever dream.” There are no paragraph breaks except for the sections when the narrator loops into the novel she herself is writing. Within this two-hour wait for the Metro (which the reader soon forgets about), we learn about China-Vietnam relations as well as the narrator’s absent husband, her time studying in Leningrad, and her current life in Paris.
How does a translator do her work so successfully? I can’t even imagine…this isn’t like translating a children’s book or a news article. She must catch every linguistic intricacy in both languages and ensure that the author’s intent is preserved. I reserved Chinatown at the library about over a month ago, but I discovered last week that August is actually Women in Translation Month here on #Bookstagram. So here’s my small offering.
And a thought for closing: Is effective and meaningful communication the same as knowing vocabulary?
originally published on instagram