By Shelly Bryant

Short Tongue
Wang Mun Kiat, translated by Daryl Lim Wei Jie
Rosetta Cultures (2023) / 140 pages / SGD 18

Wang Mun Kiat's poetry collection Short Tongue (短舌), translated by Daryl Lim Wei Jie, marks something of a breakthrough for TrendLit Publishing, in that it is their first foray into publishing in English (through their imprint, Rosetta Cultures). The choice to present a bilingual edition, with each of Lim's translations sitting alongside Wang's original, is a welcome one. Lim notes in his introduction to the collection that the audience Short Tongue anticipates and invites is twofold: "the reader with no knowledge of Chinese" and "the all-too-common Singapore reader with a limited, occasionally functional competence in Chinese (the 'need hanyu pinyin to read Chinese kind of Chinese,' to quote singers Benjamin Kheng and Annette Lee from their hit song 'We Are…')" (p. 11).

A group notably missing from the audience the translator had in mind as he worked is the readership which prefers Chinese – in other words, Wang's primary audience – and who might be prone to being overly critical if a particular word or nuance has been missed in the translation. This, too, is a welcome aspect of this volume, at least for me, as what too often happens when the translator has this latter group in mind as the primary audience is that the translation ends up stilted and overly laden with cultural references that, while subtle in the original, become attention hogs that ultimately detract from the poetry of the poems.

TrendLit's decision to publish both versions together plays a part in helping to alleviate this problem, as the translator is here freed from the burden of considering an original audience and its reception of the poems, with his work instead being a part of what is presented to the "original" readers. Lim's ability to embrace this decision and not give undue consideration to readers who will prefer reading Wang's poetry in Chinese anyway has freed him to focus on the poetic sensibilities contained in the Chinese poems, rather than worrying about criticism his translation choices may attract.

I think the most significant choice Lim has made in his translations is to focus on a particular tonal aspect of the work – their light playfulness – before considering how to render specific words. He states in his introduction, this is not so much the approach of a "professional translator", but of a poet. The process this has lent itself to is described by Lim in these terms: "I tried as best I could to inhale and internalise the spirit of each poem, and then to breathe it out, an expression that is undoubtedly embedded in my own sense of the poetic" (p. 11). Fortunately for those of us who read these translations, Lim's sense of the poetic is rich and profound (as evidenced elsewhere in his own original poetry). The main difficulty he points to in the introduction to the collection is that of capturing the sardonic humour so typical of Chinese poetry, which Lim rightfully notes can too easily come across as "just plain corny" (p. 12) if not handled well when translated into English. His choice to "map that humour to a kind of wryness in English" (p. 12) was a perceptive move, and one that paid off. For the most part, Lim has very deftly avoided the "corny" pitfall, while still capturing the light, humorous tone of the Chinese poetry, even (or maybe especially) when addressing the heaviest of topics.

One example of this successful approach is the poem entitled "Drunk" (醉, in Chinese, p. 118–119):

From the Southern Hemisphere
I use a straw,
to drink up all the Northern Hemisphere's wine

Physics says – that's absurd, that's too far
Literature says –
Cheers!

The translation has a bounce to it that echoes the tone and feel of the Chinese. What is interesting to me is that there is not much difference in the wording between the two versions, except in the third line, which could have been rendered literally as "to drink the Northern Hemisphere's wine". The choice to instead emphasise the line with a more playful "to drink up" and the inclusion of "all" makes for a very different tone to the entire poem, and it ties the whole together with the title, 'Drunk', more neatly than the blander rendering would have done. This choice to add a little kick to the language of that line – a small step away from the literal that surely no one would point to as "inaccurate" – is what makes the poem work. This is then reinforced by Lim's use of punctuation to make the tone set by the third line consistent throughout the poem. In the Chinese version, there is only a single punctuation mark, a comma between "(that's) absurd" and "(that's) too far" ("that's" being the other added word in Lim's rendering). In the English, we have the additions of a comma at the end of the second line, a dash after "says" in both the fourth and fifth lines, and an exclamation point to draw the poem to a close. The choice to punctuate the poem in this way in English opens up space for the light tone found in the Chinese. Like the additions to line 3, these are the lightest of changes, but they have a profound impact on how the poem reads. Look at how much flatter it sounds without these slight tweaks to allow the verse to sit more comfortably in English:

Drunk

From the Southern Hemisphere
I use a straw
To drink the Northern Hemisphere's wine

Physics says absurd, too far
Literature says
Cheers

Even if we make a small modification here, changing line 4 to "Physics says it's absurd, too far" to accommodate for differences between Chinese and English grammar, it does little to help this rendering become livelier and more inviting to the reader. Without the little tweaks Lim has opted for in his translation, the poem reads flat and dull, if not quite to the extreme of "just plain corny."

I could have selected a number of other examples from Short Tongue to discuss how neatly the English reads alongside the original, but I think it is perhaps more useful to examine the subtle choices made in this single poem to demonstrate the impact Lim's poetic sensibilities have had on this book. It is very easy, when translating, to fall into the trap of the overly literal or, in the opposite direction, to become so untethered from the original that it ultimately gets lost. Lim has done an outstanding job of navigating the space between these two temptations, letting his sense of the poetry of the poems guide him to successful translations of them. While it might be possible to nitpick and pinpoint the less satisfactory translations in the collection, I think it is much more helpful to focus not only on the more successful translations, but even more, on the approaches that have made them successful. This is a volume I will use with students in future courses on literary translation, pointing out how the smallest choices can make or break the translation – and this is exactly what is literary about such translation practices.

It is perhaps fitting that I am sitting in Shanghai with a pot of longjing tea as I write this – just down the road, in fact, from the spot where I shared a similar pot of tea with Daryl when I first learned of his interest in translation. I have been waiting for this book – not Short Tongue precisely, but the first book of Daryl's translations – since that day several years ago. Perhaps that explains why the review has been so stubbornly focused on the question of translation in the collection. But I hope that in these comments on translation, the reader has been able to pick up observations about the collection as a whole: that it is a light, even playful collection, even/especially when it is at its heaviest and most poignant. That is the quality that has kept me returning to read and reread Short Tongue in recent months, and I believe it will hold similar appeal to other readers as well.

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