Translation is a gift: Creative Nonfiction by brenda Lin

緣

The first word I translated from Mandarin to English for my husband was 緣. We had met on a summer study abroad program in St. Petersburg during White Nights, when, at the end of each day, the sun dipped below the horizon, just grazing the night, before it glided back up into the sky, and we felt as though time belonged to us. Or, maybe what we felt was that we belonged outside the borders of time. We were bright-eyed twenty-year-olds, newly philosophical and contemplative, but also wild and brazen. Billy was foreign to me, as I must have been to him – he had grown up in San Diego and had never eaten fried rice; I had grown up in Taiwan and was afraid to swim in the ocean. But there was a tethering that was happening. And before the end of our St. Petersburg White Nights, before we returned to opposite coasts of the US, where we attended our respective colleges, I needed him to know what I knew – that this tethering was the red thread of yuan. 

I translated, gently pulling him across the threshold between languages. 緣 is not a sentence like fate or an arrow like destiny, both of those concepts having a linear, uni-directional connotation. In fact, one of yuan’s homonyms is the word for round. Yuan has to do with past lives, in whatever form, and can exist between living beings, with objects, and places. 緣 has something to do with karma and cosmic alignment. With each description, I expected Billy to look at me with suspicion, or for my translation to sound feathery and exotic. Neither happened. He seemed to get it right away and I felt I was bearing the meaning across with appropriate gravity and complexity. 

The magic of translation happens when the space between languages is made smaller. In translating 緣 for Billy, I felt the space between us diminish. This act of bearing across was less like laying down a plank to bridge a gap, but more like a piece of cloth folding gently in on itself. Chinese characters are usually made up of two parts – a radical, which denotes the root meaning of the word, and a character part that hints at its pronunciation or deepens its meaning. Characters with the radical 糸 on the left side of the word – as in 緣 – have to do with silk, cloth, thread, or weaving. In addition to being a homonym for the character for round, yuan is also pronounced the same way as the word meaning border, which is why the word 緣 is also used to describe an ornamental border on clothing. 

In fact, I did feel that we were dancing on the border of something that summer – but instead of being hurled outward, we were circling in. 

∞

The first time my mother invited me to write a book with her, it was a translation project that also included my grandmother. This was her idea: Ama, my mother, and I were all to write short essays in the language of our education – Japanese, Mandarin, and English, respectively – and then we would give our writing to my mother, like a translation version of the birthday party game, Pass the Parcel. My mother would translate Ama’s Japanese and my English into Mandarin before handing her translations to us, so that Ama and I could translate each other’s words into Japanese and English, because Mandarin was the lingua franca of the three generations, the linguistic center that held together recent Taiwan history. 

My mother was putting together a book about her collection of handmade baby carriers from China and Taiwan – magazine-quality photos of her collection were accompanied by explanations of the cultural and ethnic groups the baby carriers originated from, descriptions of the embroidery techniques, and the symbolism of particular motifs. Though my mother has a deep appreciation for the arts (she inherited this quality from her father, who was an artist and collector), she has a science background, so her writing tends to have an anthropological tone – she likes to simply allow the history and facts surrounding an object relay its inherent beauty. For example, she can identify where a certain baby carrier is from by looking at its shape, material, the colors of its dyes, and the arrangement of the embroidered motifs. Most of the baby carriers in her collection are from minority tribes or indigenous cultures in China and Taiwan, societies without a written language and for whom embroidery is the mode of record. In Chinese, my mother taught me, embroidery is referred to as 女書, female script, without which there would be no tactile record of these myths and origin stories. Sometimes, fact alone can be poetry. The essays Ama, my mother, and I wrote were interspersed throughout the book; our translated pieces were meant to be the adornment, the 緣, in the original sense of the word, the decorative border of a garment. But our stories of being mothers and being mothered, intermingled in the three languages, the emotional fibers twisting and meshing, became the net that held the rest of the book together. 

∞

The study of gift exchange was first explored in the Western world by French sociologist and anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, whose work, The Gift, was published in 1925. Through studying the gift culture of tribal groups in Polynesia, Melanesia, and the Pacific Northwest, Mauss presented the basic structure of gift culture, based on the three obligations – the obligation to give, receive, and reciprocate. Gift-giving establishes relationships, especially in small communities. In 1979, Lewis Hyde wrote a book by the same name, extending Mauss’ thesis, applying it to art and creativity. Hyde’s premise is that art is a gift. Hyde draws on folktales with gifts as an integral part of opening thesis and illustrates how one of the properties of gifts is that when they are kept in motion – either kept in circulation by gifting to another person, or consumed – their inherent value increases. One important aspect about this perpetual motion is that the gift moves in a circle, always returning and passing back through home, back to its source. 

My parents did not read to me when I was little. The stories they shared were from their own childhood, which I adored listening to, but my parents weren’t the ones from whom I learned about traditional myths and folktales. When my children were born, and my parents became grandparents, I witnessed a softening – the way my mother cradled my babies and sang to them as she looked into their faces, a physical intimacy I have often felt my own childhood lacked – or perhaps it was the memory of being held that I yearned to remember. When my oldest was a toddler and we were living in Singapore, I flew home to Taiwan one summer to spend time with my parents; on that visit, my mother told him the story of Momotaro-san, the baby borne from a giant peach. I listened, rapt – both because it was my first time hearing the Japanese folktale and because I realized my mother was, in fact, a wonderful storyteller. 

The Tale of Momotaro-san, my mother’s version, as told to my son in Mandarin, translated into English: 

Once upon a time, there was an old childless couple who lived in the woods. One day, when the old grandma was washing clothes by the stream, a very, very, very large peach tumbled down the current and onto the shore by her pile of laundry. The old grandma was so excited by this peach she hurried home to tell her husband and told him to come quickly. The old grandpa ran to the stream and saw that what his wife said was true. He hoisted the giant peach onto his shoulder and the old couple walked home in wonderment at their good fortune. When they got home, the old grandpa brought out a large knife and cut into the giant peach, the fruit immediately split into two and at the center of the fruit was not a large pit, but a ruddy-faced, chubby baby boy. The old couple held each other and wept with joy. They finally had the child they had always wanted. They named the child Momotaro. In Japanese, momo is peach; taro is first-born. 

The old couple doted on Momotaro-san. He was a pleasant and docile child and treated his parents with respect. He grew quickly and the family soon realized that not only were his origins mysterious and fantastic, he was also bestowed with superhuman strength. When Momotaro-san was a young boy, news spread across the local villages that there were awful demons, known as oni, up on the mountains, threatening to descend the mountain to terrorize the villages below. Immediately, Momotaro-san volunteered to hike up the mountains to fight against the oni. Even though the old couple did not want to send their only child into danger, they were also proud of Momotaro-san’s courage and willingness to protect the villagers. With a heavy heart, the old grandma packed her little boy a bag of rice balls and the old couple held their son and wept, pleading for him to return home safely. 

On his way to the mountain, Momotaro-san was approached by a talking dog, who kept eyeing Momotaro-san’s bag of rice balls, complaining of his empty belly. Momotaro-san hesitated, knowing that he only had a limited supply of his mother’s food to get him up the mountain to fight against the oni, but he also took pity on the hungry dog. So Momotaro-san proposed that he share one of his rice balls with the dog, in exchange for his help to fight the oni. The dog eagerly agreed and after finishing the delicious rice ball, trotted alongside Momotaro-san in the direction of the mountain. Soon, the boy and the dog were approached by a talking monkey, who kept eyeing Momotaro-san’s bag of rice balls, complaining of his empty belly. Momotaro-san offered the monkey the same arrangement and after the monkey was satiated, the boy, the dog, and the monkey continued onwards towards the mountain. Not long into their journey, the three travelers were approached by a talking bird, who was also hungry, and the same promise was exchanged, as Momotaro-san handed over his last rice ball. Finally, the four companions – the boy, the dog, the monkey, and the bird made their way up the mountain, where they found the band of oni. With their bodies nourished by the old grandma’s rice balls, Momotaro-san and his new friends successfully defeated the oni and triumphantly returned to the village. 

Momotaro-san went back to his home in the woods, where he and his parents lived together in happiness and peace. 

∞

The first time the labor of translation made me weep was when I translated an essay my father had written. It was titled, “Growing Pains.” He had written it a month after dropping me off at college. He wrote about how, when he was little, he couldn’t wait to become an adult so that he could be independent and free. He writes, “When our car left the university parking lot, leaving our daughter there, waving goodbye to us, my heart did not feel carefree and my tears betrayed me. Could this be the freedom and ease of adulthood I had been yearning for?” In fact, our parting that day was also a moment I had written about in my first book, and though his writing precedes mine, I didn’t know his essay existed until recently. I also recalled, in great detail, how their car rolled away from me – I wrote about not being able to see through the windshield as the car backed out, so my parents’ faces were obscured by the reflection of the trees overhead. This moment had been pressed, hot, into my memory because the year that followed was an intensely lonely one for me. And now, reading – then translating my father’s essay so many years later felt like I was going through that pane of glass so that I was sitting beside my parents as they watched my figure become smaller and smaller. It was a moment of confluence – like time was being origami-ed. 

I wept as I translated my father’s writing because I felt, with acute awareness now that my oldest child is 17 and his imminent departure is often on my mind, that as parents, we must suffer our worries quietly. Freedom in adulthood is a misconception. If, to be Buddhist, we need to part with our attachments to relieve our suffering, then I choose to be tethered to my children, to let my tears betray me, alone inside the car. 

∞

Gift-giving is a big part of Taiwanese culture. Historically, the two main occasions for gift-giving are Mid-Autumn Festival, to celebrate the fall harvest and admire the full, autumnal moon and over the Lunar New Year, to sweep out the old year and welcome in the new. In both cases, the gifts that are exchanged are consumable (either edible or usable): moon cakes, turnip cakes, fish, and red envelopes filled with crisp new bills. The social structure of Taiwanese society is based entirely on relationships, in which gift-giving plays an integral part. Gifts are given to extended family, friends, teachers, bosses, doctors, and work colleagues to solidify one’s relation with each. Of course, there is a negative side to gift-giving, which involves pressure and burden, but for the most part, Taiwanese people are a generous people, who genuinely delight in gift-giving. Today, gifting is not only limited to Mid-Autumn Festival and Lunar New Year. Gifts are exchanged all the time. It is so customary to show up with something to give that on the occasion you do arrive empty-handed, you can instead offer this joke: lift up your hands with fingers pointing down and shake them to and fro, saying that you’ve brought two bushels of bananas with you (note how, even in this joke, the gift of bananas is consumable). And not only should you show up with a gift, if you are the host, you should send your guest off with something to take away – boxed up leftovers count. I have a friend who always has to send me off with something, often grabbing whatever is on her dining table. From this friend I have received, while I had one foot out the door: a chocolate bar, a tube of hand cream, a bar of soap, a bag of chips, a blank journal, a glass vial of powdered incense. Whenever I leave my parents’ house, my mother will pack me fruits and vegetables, savory scallion pastries, cartons of eggs, sweet custard bakery buns, rice, even her own takeout leftovers to bring home to my children. But even though Taiwanese people are always in the habit of gifting each other consumables, and sending people off with something more to eat or use, we rarely give each other things – things like birthday presents, as is customary in the West. On the occasion I have received a present from family, it is significant. 

The first book I received as a gift from my parents was a Webster’s Collegiate English Dictionary. They gave it to me when I was 17, as I was about to leave Taiwan to go to college in the U.S. The hard cover was dark blue and the pages thin and crackly like garlic skin, the edges of the book mottled with mold. The original receipt was still taped to the inside back cover; it had been bought in Hong Kong in December of 1957. I used this dictionary all throughout college and graduate school. Looking up words in the dictionary has always held a sense of magic for me – that the meanings of words can be so precise and full and fit so snugly next to other words and strung together to make sentences, and those sentences woven together to make a story! It feels important that I received a book of words and their meanings from my parents before I left home for New York to study literature and writing. Especially because, when I left, I had no intention of returning home when in fact, the longer I stayed away, the closer I moved towards home. Distance and time had initiated my internal homing device. 

∞

The first work of literary translation I performed was a book of essays by an Indigenous writer in Taiwan about homecoming and language and borders. The writer, Apyang Imiq, had grown up swimming in the streams and hiking up and down the mountains of Taiwan’s east coast without being taught the language of his tribe and after years away in Taipei, finally realized he did not feel at home in the city, in the language of his colonizer. He writes about farming and hunting and working the soil of the land of his ancestors, he writes with heart-aching honesty about the challenges of asking to be let in, of doing the work to be in. He wrote his book in Mandarin. 

I didn’t notice how much of my Mandarin and Taiwanese I had lost during my years of absence until I came back and heard how stupid I sounded each time I opened my mouth to speak. I sputtered, garbled, tangled my native languages and resorted to English to complete sentences, which sounded like a betrayal. Reading and writing in Chinese proved even more difficult. I felt deeply embarrassed. When Imiq returns to his native Hualien and starts to farm, neighbors walk by and scoff at his greenness, offering advice and ridicule. He works for hours in the sun, his back in spasms as he crouches over to dig his fingers into the soil, feeling its material weight and texture and moisture and possibility and nestles seeds into the soil, laying down roots. 

I grew up in downtown Taipei in the 80s and 90s, in the real time, rapid speed of time-lapse videos one can watch on city planning and construction. In the twenty years I spent away from Taiwan, I lived in cities even more intense in its urban spirit and busyness than Taipei – first in New York, then Singapore, then Hong Kong. I have always loved living in apartments and high rises, knowing that I shared a wall with strangers, simultaneously in close proximity to and welcomed distance from other people’s lives and stories. Spending time in nature was never a big part of my upbringing, nor did I yearn for it to be. So I did not expect to be moved by detailed descriptions of farming and the physical labor of working the land. I was rapt with attention to learn about the process of turning soil, and how many fists Imiq had to leave between each divot when planting millet, the grain of his Truku ancestors. His labor in homecoming laid bare the ways I was not working hard enough to return home. I had arrived, but only insofar as an address change; I still needed to figure out the linguistic, cultural, historical, and emotional coordinates of home. I wanted something akin to digging my fingers into the soil, something that felt like I was sinking into the loamy softness of the mud, reaching out my arms and legs to make angels in the soil. 

I say I performed the translation of Imiq’s book because it was so much more than a language exercise, so much more than simply replacing an English word for its Chinese counterpart, because the mathematics would not have worked out, as there is no direct counterpart. Translation is an interpretive dance, speaking in another person’s voice, moving through the world through their gestures. There is an intense becoming that happens, a settling into, a rooting down. And all of this action occurs in the liminal space between languages. 

I performed this labor of translation alone at my desk, for no purpose other than to nestle in that space, where I didn’t have to apologize for my lack or excess in any language, where being neither/nor, but also and, and, and felt just right. It was how I could root in. To translate is 翻譯; 翻 is to flip, to turn, as one does with soil. 

∞

According to Marcel Mauss, in order to keep the spirit of a gift alive, gifts should circle back to its source, “to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.” In the story about the boy and the giant peach, Momotaro-san gifted his rice balls to the dog, monkey, and bird and in turn, the gift’s value increased in the form of their friendship and loyalty, as well as nourishment for them to be able to defeat the oni. Ultimately, Momotaro-san returned home to his parents, the original rice balls having long been consumed, now transformed into Momotaro-san’s continued presence in his parents’ life at home. Momotaro-san’s return closed the circle of the gift of his mother’s rice balls. 

The premise of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (itself an extension of the original gift of Mauss’s essay by the same name) is that an artist’s creative spirit is a gift. Laboring in the details of craft and the tools of their artistic trade is part of the practice, but artists are humbled to the fact that there is a creative spirit much more powerful than the physical work of doing, a spirit that they are sensitive and attuned to channel. Artists work in solitude and for nothing more than to commune with their gift. But then there comes a moment when they feel compelled to offer their gift to an audience because the gift must be kept in motion so that it may retain its spirit. Hyde quotes the poet May Sarton, who writes, “There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most…The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.” A gift must be shared – if it is hoarded, its spirit dies in solitude and silence. 

Creativity is shared, in the most obvious way, in public with an audience that appreciates the artist’s work – as in a painting that is displayed or a piece of writing that is published. But to go further than that, the creative gift should be able to make its way home, to close the circle, the way Momotaro-san, having fought off the oni to protect his village, returns home to his parents. Artists will often acknowledge and direct the spirit of their gift back to its source – be it geographical, familial, or spiritual. Pablo Neruda has said that his gifts were bestowed upon him by his people and to honor that gift, he writes, “I have attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood.” We tend to think of the creative spirit as something willowy and ethereal, elusive and diaphanous, when in fact, it springs from earthly material – the mossy softness of soil, the hard determination of seeds, the alertness of cool river water, the warmth of a mother’s touch. 

∞

In his 1921 essay, “The task of the translator,” German philosopher Walter Benjamin proposes the idea that translation is itself a creative mode, rather than merely a mechanical tool. Translation is the closest form of reading, and for many writers who are also translators, the most intimately they can come to know the spaces between languages, the meaning-making that occurs beyond language. Through the act of translation, we can experience the interconnected tissues between languages, flickering and vibrating with life and the energy of renewal. The language with which Benjamin writes this essay – which I read in translation, by Harry Zohn – is magnificently maternal and life affirming, with words and phrases like – embryonic, continued life, maturing process, renewal, mother tongue, birth pangs, ever-renewed, abundant flowering, nature, kinship, interrelated, afterlife, creation, posterity, fruitful, seed, nucleus, eternal life, a constant state of flux… 

Hyde’s book, The Gift, is separated into two sections – the first discusses the tradition and practice of the gift economy in different cultures and in folktales, while the second applies this practice to the gift of the creative spirit. A quick scan of the first few pages of the second section on the gift of creativity produces these words – materia, body, creative, energy, flow, fruit, renewal of spirits, fertility of nature, fertility of the imagination, womb, labor, the thread of zoe-life, relationship, bonding, transformation, everything in the poem happens as a breathing… 

It should not come as a surprise that Lewis Hyde is a poet and a translator. 

∞

For my grandmother’s 90th birthday, my mother gathered the short essays Ama had submitted to Pinzette, the periodical published by her classmates from the Tokyo Women’s Medical University and translated them from Japanese into Mandarin, collecting them into a slim volume. Pinzette is the German word for tweezers, an instrument that all doctors depend on; the journal’s title is in German because most of the medical texts my grandmother used at that time in Japan were from Germany. 

The bulk of Ama’s essays were written after she had retired from being a doctor for close to fifty years and was living in San Francisco, reveling, for the first time, in homemaking. “Each day,” Ama writes, “I enjoy quiet conversations with my husband of 53 years, with whom I still have endless things to discuss about life. Recently, we dined while re-listening to ‘Chinese Art History’ on cassette tape – it was the most extravagant and elegant feast for the heart.” 

In the collection are essays on cooking, her travels with my grandfather, acupuncture (which Ama practiced, alongside ophthalmology), naming her youngest grandchild, childhood snacks, movie reviews, Buddhist philosophy, losing my grandfather, attending my brother’s college graduation in Ithaca, suffering a bone fracture in her left wrist. The list reads like Sei Shonagan’s Pillow Book, occasional ponderings on seemingly mundane, everyday things – everyday things that glisten like the amber surface of tea in a tiny ceramic cup, each detail a gift. 

Ama writes (translated from Japanese to Mandarin by my mother, which I’ve translated into English): “I like to cook (especially 3-minute meals), often trading recipes with my group of old friends here; sometimes, I make extra and share with young people who work and don’t have time to cook; being able to do housework, work my muscles a bit, I pass the days feeling fulfilled and happy. 

“After retirement, my journey in Buddhist philosophy began in earnest, I have a deep interest in reading sutras and interpretations of the sutra from the wise, and I try each day to put Zen theory into practice. 

“I am so thankful for this time in retirement when I can savor ‘being myself,’ I don’t force myself to do things beyond my capabilities, I feel it is a true blessing to be an ordinary person!” My mother published this volume of essays as a 90th birthday gift to her mother, gifting the book to family, friends, and of course, to Ama’s medical school classmates – to whom the essays were addressed for publication in Pinzette. 

Benjamin wrote that translation is a mode. I think translation is a gift. Like a creative gift, it begins with a body of work and through the performative act of translation, the original work is infused with new energy and flow. A translation transforms, but it also returns the creative spirit to the original, circling back to its source. This is something physical that happened to me when I was translating my mother’s translation of my grandmother’s essays. By gathering up the folds in the fabric of language, I felt as though I were reaching across to hold my mother’s and my grandmother’s hands; or, it was as though we were nested inside one another like a linguistic Russian doll. If a female baby is born with all the eggs she will ever produce in her lifetime, does that mean that when my mother was still in my grandmother’s womb, I was there, too, as a follicle of the future? And does that mean, when I was still physically bound to my mother by our umbilical cord, the promise of my future daughter already glowed inside my mother’s belly, like a little bag filled with stars from the night sky? 

∞

I remember once, watching my mother trim Ama’s toenails – Ama sat on a step of her carpeted stairs, while my mother sat a few steps below, cradling Ama’s outstretched foot in her hands. By then, Ama’s feet were perpetually swollen, the skin around her ankles transparent, revealing the complex web of blue vessels underneath. My mother held her foot in the palm of one hand, as one might hold up the head of a baby when her neck is still too weak, and with her other, confidently clipped Ama’s nails. Ama caught my eye and smiled, a mixture of mild embarrassment and pride. “Your mother is so good,” she said to me. 

What gift will I give my mother? If mothers are the original source of one’s creative gifts, what can I return to her? Will I be able to take her swollen feet in my hands and translate the pain into gestures of love? 

brenda Lin is a writer, literary translator, and educator based in Taipei, Taiwan. She is the author of Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound (University of Indianapolis Press, 2004). Her writing has appeared in Fourth Genre and WSQ; her translations of Taiwan Indigenous writer, Apyang Imiq’s essays have appeared in Asymptote, Gulf Coast Journal, and The Kenyon Review. brenda is currently working on translating Imiq’s essay collection, Growing Up in a Tree Hollow. She is also writing a second book of essays on homecoming, motherhood, and the intersection between text and textile. She writes occasional, short pieces on https://b-lin.ghost.io/

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