英文阅读：From Kundera to Dostoyevsky
You may have never known how much Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Milan Kundera hadin common - until an Ang Lee movie changed one name for the other.
In "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman", a story set in Taiwan, Lee's home province,
local bookworms are nibbling at the novels of Kundera. But when the script
reached James Schamus, Lee's New York-based writer-producer, Kundera morphed
into Dostoyevsky.
It's not because the two novelists shared thematic or stylistic traits, but
because the Russian writer occupies a place in the minds of American readers
similar to that of the Czech-French in all parts of the Chinese reading public.
An allusion to Kundera - or being caught reading his book, possibly in a
fashionably decorated caf - gives one a certain cachet, an implication that you
are cool and belong to the hip crowd.
This is what I call a cross-cultural conversion.
A dictionary may help you translate words and names, but no tools -
old-tech or hi-tech - can help you interpret the finer nuances of culture such
as this one. All it takes is tons of knowledge and hands-on experience.
That is why Ang Lee's biography, recently published in the mainland after
being reprinted 13 times in Taiwan, stands out so prominently. The book, which
contains the above episode, brims with acute observations and sagely
insight.
Even if you haven't seen any of Lee's movies - or if you don't like them -
you'll find his words full of revelations. He is simply a marvel of
cross-cultural jaywalking. He observes rules when he sees fit, but more often he
creates new rules by opening up worlds we didn't even know existed.
A culture is like a universe all its own - a person can live in only one
culture at any given time. But with the rapid pace of globalization, we need
people who can hop between two universes and find parallels so that people from
both sides can penetrate the glass partition of differences and communicate in
meaningful ways.
"Meaningful" communication suggests more than the surface meanings of words
being uttered. I remember a speech President Clinton gave during one of his
trips to China. It sounded great in English, but once rendered verbatim into
Chinese, it was basically a jumble of gibberish.
A translator for diplomatic occasions does not have the leeway to change
Kundera into Dostoyevsky. And I'm not implying formal speeches given by Chinese
leaders are easily accessible to a Western ear either.
When we speak or act, we invariably take a position that conforms to our
own culture. It takes an expert like Ang Lee, who straddles both cultures and
knows the strengths of each, to communicate in a meaningful way. When you read
the English subtitles of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", for example, you're
actually not reading a word-for-word translation of the original Chinese, but
what the characters might say if their native language were English.
Now, I must add that we don't even have enough good translators who are
able to convert Kundera's works into Chinese. Our "proctology hospital" shows up
as "anus hospital", and "spring chicken", a popular item in Chinese restaurants
overseas, is decoded into "chicken without sexual life".
But we need people who are able to decipher the nuances of culture, who can
translate the cultural significance of Kundera into Dostoyevsky. Hunan Satellite
Television has grasped that skill - it makes huge hits by localizing foreign
reality programming. The Chinese hosts of David Beckham, on the other hand, have
not. They treated him to a lavish banquet full of outlandish dishes like fried
scorpions. The football star didn't even touch it.
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