Introduction to the Translation
I am not, I should say at the outset, the greatest authority on the Chinese language that the science-fiction field has ever produced. That would be Cordwainer Smith. I may not even be the second best: Charles G. Finney spent more time in China than I did. I do, however, have one excellent qualification for translating this Chinese SF story into English. Here it is:
I have never read Frederik Pohl's story "The Wizards of Rung's Corners" in its original English. I had never even heard of it, in fact, until I had already translated enough of the Chinese version back into English for Fred to figure out which-the-hell one of his stories the Chinese publishers had gotten hold of. (They didn't tell him!) Thus, my translation into English of the Chinese SF story "Péng-shĭ Jiăo dí Wū Shī" is unprejudiced by any previous knowledge of Frederik Pohl's English-language version; I ain't never seen it. The story you're about to read, therefore, is a direct translation of what the Chinese SF readers saw . . . to the best of my fumble-thumbed ability to translate it.
A few signposts to help you hack your way through the verbal underbrush: Chinese, whether spoken or written, is an extremely redundant language. So many Chinese words have such similar pronunciation (which makes Chinese the ideal language for pun lovers!) that the Chinese like to tack several synonyms onto key words to clarify their meaning. Where the English-speaking writer would say "war," a Chinese writer would say "battle-war fight-situation." What you or I would describe as "green," the Chinese would identify as "green-colored." In Chinese one must say "he nodded his head", rather than the simpler and more elegant "he nodded", because the Chinese verb diăn, which means "nod," also has at least seventeen other meanings depending on which noun it is appended to. Applied to the noun for "head" it means "nod," but applied to the noun for "wine" it means "pour." Remove the noun altogether, and the verb becomes ambiguous. So Chinese authors—in a valiant attempt to prevent their characters from nodding their wine and pouring their heads—resort to redundant syntax. Don't ask me what the Chinese would be for "he poured the wine over his head and nodded." I have tried to remove most of the unwieldy syntax from the following translation, but if you trip over the odd oxymoron or dangling participle here or there, don't pour any wine over my head. A phrase that seems ungrammatical in English may be perfectly correct in Chinese.
Ditto the punctuation. In recent years, Chinese publishers have made increasing use of English-style punctuation . . . but they don't use it in quite the same fashion as we do. I have kept the punctuation used in the Chinese version as intact as possible in this translation, changing it only where absolutely necessary. If I have used a semicolon where Fred Pohl's original story used a comma, or a colon where Fred used no punctuation at all . . . well, I did the best I could. Most of the punctuation appearing in my translation was taken intact from the Chinese version of the story.
Now we come to the wax tadpoles. In Chinese, most pictographs work overtime. Not only does every pictograph have one or more possible phonetic values (i.e., the way you would pronounce it), about ninety-five percent of the written characters in Chinese also have three or more dictionary meanings distinct from their phonetic values. Confusing? Well, consider the English-language symbol "I." We use it for its phonetic value, as a letter in words like "Ice," but it also has a specific meaning distinct from its phonetic value, as a word: the personal pronoun "I." Likewise, the symbol "A" does double duty: as a phonetic, in words like "Able," and for its meaning, the indefinite article "A." In Chinese, this conflict between the letter's phonetic value and the letter's specific meaning crops up all the time. The result? When Chinese writers translate an English-language name into Chinese—by employing Chinese pictographs that have phonetic values similar to the original English-language pronunciation of the name—they run the risk of using a combination of pictographs that link up to form a ludicrous—and sometimes downright pornographic—dictionary meaning. I call this the Wax Tadpole Principle. A few years ago, when the Coca-Cola Company first sold their product in mainland China, they marketed the soda in Coke bottles bearing a string of Chinese pictographs with the phonetic value KO-KA-KOH-LA. Unfortunately, those four pictographs have specific dictionary meanings unrelated to their phonetic values: KO-KA-KOH-LA in Chinese means "Bite the wax tadpole." See what we're up against?
The wax tadpole rears its ugly head again, not once but many times, in the story that you're about to read . . . and the results may prove rather amusing. The main female character, for example, has a Chinese name that translates into English as "Horse-forest-grid-that-can-resemble-birdsnare." Another character mentions a popular breakfast cereal with a Chinese name that translates into English as "The son has approval to tie the Buddhist nun to the hermaphrodite." Wherever a proper name is introduced in the translation that follows, I've appended a footnote symbol (those little numbers up in the air) so that you can refer to the notes section following the story to get the precise translation. Some of the proper names in this story have translations that are, I think, quite chuckleworthy.
To give you the fullest possible comprehension of the linguistic subtleties in this Chinese text, I've included 88 footnotes explaining specific thorny points in the text.
Wherever I give the pronunciation of a Chinese word by transliterating it into English-language phonetics, the spelling and the diacritical marks are those used in the Hanyupinyin system, as developed by Professor Wu Jing-rong of the Foreign Languages Institute, Beijing.
This story should—I hope—give you all a pretty good idea of what Chinese SF fans are reading these days. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed translating it. Perhaps SF will provide a link between the Chinese and American cultures, and bring about better Sino-American relations. Until that day arrives, we'll all just have to bite the bullet.
Or, if no bullets are handy, we may have to pour Coca-Cola over our heads, nod, and then bite the wax tadpole.
Live long and prosper!
—F. GWYNPLAINE MacINTYRE
December, 1983