Roman Polanski at the BFA.

The event began with a promising screening of Polanski’s student films, including “Two Men and a Wardrobe” and “The Fat and the Lean,” the former of which Polanski later attributed to his success in securing funding for his first feature film, the Academy Award-nominated Knife in the Water. The showing of these student films—perhaps a bit unsophisticated by current standards—served as an excellent impetus and inspiration for the BFA students present. Unfortunately, the promising start quickly unravelled. The event suffered from:

1) The poor behavior of the press. A massive number of people in the front snapped pictures of Polanski throughout his interview and during the screening of his film, blinding the man and blocking him from view.

2) The poor behavior of the audience, who embarrassingly stormed the stage at the end, mobbing the elderly Polanski and greedily grabbing at him for autographs and pictures.

3) The idiotic usage of pre-written questions as opposed to audience interaction. The questions were largely read aloud from notes by non-Chinese international students who seemed to be under the impression that their questions were actually letters to Mr. Polanski. The translator could not read the hand-written questions so Mr. Polanski was forced to read the questions, which led to one of the most amusing/embarrassing situations of the afternoon: A “question” began, “Dear Mr. Polanski, not sure if you remember me but I met you last week and gave you a copy of my student film. What do you think of my chances of getting into a film festival?”

Cringeworthy.

The mob descends.

There were a few gems, though. After the diminutive Polanski’s arrival on stage, he attempted to hide behind the comically massive bouquet of flowers placed on the table before him. He also articulately and charismatically responded to questions from the arbitrator. Polanski aimed to inspire the students present, advising them to avoid “chopping your films into fruit salad,” and discussing his rambunctious beginnings as a director in film school: Polanski invited hooligans to a conservative school party to liven up his one and only “documentary,” which almost got him expelled and turned him off of documentaries for life. However, Polanski’s love of film kept the school authorities from expelling him, and it was his education and support at the Polish Film School that led to his momentous success as a director.

There were moments of exasperation—when asked about the film Tess, Polanski irritably recalled the fact that Chinese censors chopped the film from two hours and forty minutes to an hour and a half when it was released in China in the early 80’s. But for the most part the director was patient and elegant, and showed a propensity for telling stories and for providing great sound bites. On the responsibility of the director, he said, “The atmosphere on the set depends on the director. If he knows what he’s doing, the crew immediately respects him. If he has passion, they will follow him. If he has a sense of humor, the crew will laugh. [But] if he is depressed, they will be as well.” With regards to film theory, he scoffed, “What is film theory? Tell the story, and if you don’t have anything to say, shut up! Asking a director about theory is like asking a centipede which leg he moves first.”

Overall, Polanski’s Q&A was a great opportunity which was somewhat wasted. With less bureaucratic planning and a more relaxed Q&A, the session would have been more insightful, and allowed the BFA students to show off its best assets: its students.

The author of this article was a former student of the Beijing Film Academy. The author requested that the article be published anonymously. Any e-mails responding to this post will be forwarded to the author.

Howard Goldblatt, who was a guest last week at the Bookworm’s International Literary Festival, would certainly agree. “Translation is inadequate, but it’s all we have if good writing is to have its life extended, spatially and temporally,” he wrote in a Washington Post article six years ago. Goldblatt, a research professor at Notre Dame, has published over thirty translations and is largely credited for bringing contemporary Chinese fiction to an English-speaking audience. In his hour-long session at the Bookworm, Goldblatt talked about his path to becoming a translator and his philosophy on translation. (For those not present, many of the questions asked during the evening can be found in this interview from Full Tilt)

Like many late-blooming intellectuals, Goldblatt was a “terrible, terrible student” and almost flunked out of college. But he graduated, and after graduation he made the “irredeemably stupid” decision to join the Navy. It was during his first tour that he was sent to Taipei but it wasn’t until he was redeployed to Taiwan after a brief stint in Vietnam that he began to study Chinese and found that he had an ear for the language. After completing an MA at San Francisco State University and a Ph.D at Indiana University, he began his career as a translator.

Although the night was billed as “Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” the moderator, Eric Abrahamsen from the blog Paper Republic, kept the questions strictly to translation after admitting he had a vested interest in the subject, which left little chance for Goldblatt to expound on the state of contemporary Chinese fiction apart from debunking exaggerated criticisms that there was no good fiction coming out of China. The evening proceeded with a careful prodding of what Goldblatt considered was a translator’s role and several anecdotes that illuminated the sometimes-rewarding, sometimes-punishing process of translating a novel.

Goldblatt believes that as a translator he has a duty to three things: the author, the text, and the reader–and the most important of these is the reader, whose understanding of the text trumps all other considerations. Indeed, what good is a translation if no one wants to read it? He acknowledged that translation was a losing game, but it had to be done for people who were unable to read the original text and to allow the text a new life in a new language. In rare cases he admitted he had the chance to breathe new life into the text, adding a pun here or a joke there that wouldn’t have worked in the original language. But his loyalty to the reader has gotten him in trouble, with authors and editors alike. Some authors have been unhappy with his work, claiming that it sounds too foreign, while others (he mentioned Mo Yan specifically) gave him free reign and were happy to answer questions when they arose.

He told a story about a detail in one of Mo Yan’s stories. There was a scene where an automobile was driving down a bumpy road, making a certain sound. Goldblatt felt the detail was extraneous and asked the author whether the fact that the road was bumpy was important. Mo Yan responded, of course it was, because it shows that the villagers by the road are so poor they scrape the road to make it uneven so that when coal trucks pass, the shaking will knock some of the coal off, which they then gather and use to heat their homes. Without a careful translator and a willing author, a minute detail like that surely would have been lost on its way into English.

Another anecdote about translation revolved around a cliché in Su Tong’s My Life as Emperor. Su Tong took the phrase “lick his wounds” and translated it literally into Chinese which Goldblatt then translated directly back into English. This small gaffe (a choice between fidelity to the text and fidelity to the reader) did not escape the practiced eye of John Updike who, in his review in The New Yorker, called the choice of wording “just plain tired.” Updike, of course, could not be expected to read the original Chinese for his review. Goldblatt chuckled as he retold this story, saying that maybe it was an instance where he was too faithful to the text. It seemed to me that, after so many years, he had come to terms with the paradoxical nature of his work.

During the hour-long conversation, Goldblatt shifted effortlessly between English and Chinese and at times he would say whole sentences in Chinese if it better suited his meaning. It made me think that Chinese literature, in the hands of someone who not only spoke, but clearly understood both languages, was safe for years to come, although he called for new translators after admitting that he couldn’t go on translating forever. Other than an apocryphal assertion that Murakami Haruki has had more short stories published in The New Yorker than any other author (he could have been joking because Murakami isn’t even close), Goldblatt was humorous and self-effacing, nothing like I’d imagined a notable scholar would be (a professor in college told me horror stories about Donald Keene).

Goldblatt, who at times seemed beleaguered by his chosen profession, in the end praised his job and said all the choices he made in his youth were worth it if they had brought him here. Many times during the night he would ask rhetorically why anyone would want to be an translator. Oddly enough, it was a question he had answered six years ago:

Because I love it. I love to read Chinese; I love to write in English. I love the challenge, the ambiguity, the uncertainty of the enterprise. I love the tension between creativity and fidelity, even the inevitable compromises. And, every once in a while, I find a work so exciting that I’m possessed by the urge to put it into English. In other words, I translate to stay alive.