Chaos and All That (review)

Reviews 491 between a "Eulogy," which is characteristically full ofpraise, and an "Elegy," which is more mournful. IfLin thinks that "Eulogy" is more appropriate for shang (grief), then she should argue her case. William A. Callahan University of Durham, United Kingdom William A. Callahan is a lecturer in EastAsian International Relations in the Politics Department, and is workingon a book titled Confucian Ideology and Greater China. Liu Sola. Chaos and AU That. Translated by Richard King. Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 1994. 134 pp. Hardcover $19.95, iSBN 0-8248-1617-x. Paperback $11.95, isbn 0-8248-1651-x. Freshness is a good thing, but freshness must soon fade. It often happens that a new work is welcomed because it speaks in a fresh voice, talks ofthings formerly suppressed, and represents characters that the reader has never met in print before and outlooks that have changed because the times have changed. But when the novel has become familiar, it may suffer the fate ofan old newspaper, to be consigned to the library archives, having had its day. Liu Sola's novelette Chaos and All Thathad all the qualities of freshness just mentioned when it was published in Hong Kong in 1991. It spoke for a generation ofChinese women who grew up in a world ofright and wrong that snuffed itselfout, leaving them to make their own rules, ifany. In the new world ofinsouciance that it pictured, if people were not kinky they were cranky. In the London to which the narrator had moved and where she wrote, one would not have expected anything different; but applied to old Peking, to which her thoughts transported her and whence she received messages, this perspective was something new, hence the interest in it at the time from China scholars. The question is, does it have enough going for it to make it still a good read, and to justify translation? My answer is yes, but less for what it says than for the way it says it. Chaos andAll That—or, to give it its Chinese title, Hundunjia ligeleng—was not Liu Sola's first work. She hit the headlines with Ni hie wu xuanze (You've no© 1996 fry University other cnoice) in 19g5) and f0nowed that with shorter stories, some ofwhich were of awan resstranslated byMartha Cheung in Blue Sky Green Sea (Renditions Paperbacks, Chinese University ofHong Kong, 1993). While these were in no way inadequately expressed, they used an educated language that did not draw attention to itself. 492 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Chaos, in contrast, closes the gap between written and spoken language, using halftones, catchwords, dialectisms, vulgarisms, and obscenities, besides quoting snatches of songs and variations on a long traditional ballad. All these lend character and flavor to her writing. At the same time they make severe demands on the translator. Readers of translations put their trust in the translator. They expect the translator to understand correctly all that the original text says. They also trust the translator to render the text stylistically in more or less the same way as it was written in the original language. One does not want to undermine that trust unduly , but the truth is that translations from the Chinese rarely fully satisfy expectations in either respect. The clues as to how an utterance is to be understood are generally more subtle in Chinese than in English, given the sparseness of grammatical signs. Individual translators are almost sure to miss some. The individual's background knowledge is also almost certainly bound to be lacking in some respects , and that will lead to more misinterpretation. Richard King's translation of Chaos does not exactiy disprove the rule, in that it does have some mistakes, but they are few and trivial enough for it still to count as superior in terms of accuracy . And stylistically it reads very much as one imagines Liu Sola would have written had she been writing in English. Ergo, success. In his "Translator's Postscript," King says that he first translated from the author's manuscript draft, and then revised his translation to match her prepublication revisions. Some discrepancies between the translation and...