If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific

In research that focused on the practice and theorization of interlingual translation, equivalence was a central theoretical notion well studied in the burgeoning phase of translation studies under the wings of linguistics in most of the second half of the twentieth century. Since the many so-called turns in the young discipline, equivalence was phased to the margin of the current purview of translation studies research despite its historical significance. Tze-Yin Teo's If Babel Had a Form: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific refreshes the epistemology of equivalence by moving away from its previous theorization based on language transference. Teo's monograph boldly investigates the equivalence of abstraction in twentieth-century transpacific semiotic translations that “collapse the concrete into the abstract, and the abstract into the concrete, especially when trading in the name of poetic writing” (20).Teo's book opens with a comparison between American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa's influential essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” and Chinese writer Hu Shi's progressive literary theory in the early twentieth century. Fenollosa's insight into the ecological empiricism of Chinese ideographs conducive to imagery making central to Anglo-American modernist poetics is juxtaposed with Hu Shi's advocating “plain speech” (Teo's translation) vernacular as a form of written Chinese. Teo emphasizes their similarity of theorization that ideographs (images) and speeches (sounds) fade away from the concepts they refer to. The ephemeral relationship between the signifier and the signified underlies Teo's renewed understanding of equivalence, which spotlights how an image or a sound signifies rather than what it means in the transpacific translational context, raising the question as to “how an untranslatable poetics of sound and image directly participates in the replay translation of literary modernity across the Pacific” (24). With this carefully theorized question, Teo enters her meticulous readings of the works by modern Chinese writer Eileen Chang, Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian, respectively.In the second chapter, Teo discusses Eileen Chang's Mandarin Chinese and unfinished English translations of Haishanghua liezhuan (Biographies of Shanghai Flowers), a late-Qing Shanghainese Wu novel by Han Bangqing, and her ensuing reflective discussions. Teo points out Chang's unconventional approach to translating Wu interjections at the acoustic rather than semantic level, brilliantly illustrated by Teo's analysis of Chang's discussion of 嗄 (sha or ah; 89–94), and points out that such sound-translation strategies “emerge as a nostalgic force that confronts the linguistic sediment of her transpacific exile” (26). While this point is well argued, considering Wu as an independent language by default and identifying Chang's translation from Wu vernacular to Mandarin Chinese as translingual confuses, to a certain degree, the conventional boundary between intralingual and interlingual translation. In addition, the reviewer also wonders to what extent Chang's approach of sound-translating individual words or characters could be applied to analyze her translations of larger linguistic units further.In the third chapter studying Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's works of various genres, Teo singles out the influence of the Brazilian concrete poetry movement on Cha's transpacific temporal and spatial aesthetics, especially in her “concrete translations”—“the arrangement of many moving parts to compose a translation” (110). While amazed by the cases of intersemiotic translations read partially in light of Brazilian concrete poetry, translation studies scholars might wonder about the absence of in-depth discussions of Haroldo de Campos's concept of “cannibalism,” which has been one of the touchstones for studying postcolonial translation. This absence might have been why the connection between transpacific studies and translation studies at the theoretical level is less visible than the introduction implies.In the fourth chapter, Teo's analyses of the micro intersemiotic translations between sound and image in Yang Lian's Tongxinyuan (Concentric Circle) are exemplary. Building on Lydia Liu's concept of translingual practice, Teo argues that Yang Lian has developed a “translingual erasure . . . via a harmophonic and visually driven poetics” (28). As Teo notes, since Yang Lian was exiled to Europe in 1989, it is unclear to what extent he falls into the area of transpacific studies, except for the fact that Yang makes an inapt comparison between his poetry and Ezra Pound's The Cantos. Despite Teo's critical elevation and trustfulness, Yang's comments on Yunte Huang's Chinese translation of Ezra Pound's heteroglossic Pisan Cantos appear questionable, if not ostentatious. The writing of The Cantos spans half a century, and Pisan Cantos is only one part of it. Other cantos also feature Pound's experiments incorporating various kinds of temporality to The Cantos, though never a linear one.1 Moreover, while Yang asserts “the Cantos is not an epic” (quoted on 135), Pound intended for his cantos to inherit the epic tradition from Robert Browning, as he revealed to René Taupin through personal correspondence in 1928.2 Time is not nowhere but everywhere in Pound's The Cantos; Huang's thick translation inevitably bears the marks of time through numerous footnotes to Pisan Cantos.Teo's four case studies of transpacific semiotic translations ably disrupt conventional understandings of equivalence in translation studies. The book powerfully invigorates the humanities research on the conceptualization of equivalence by coupling translation studies and transpacific studies. In addition to interdisciplinary research innovation and excellence, the book is a wealth of graduate-level teaching materials for various arts and humanities disciplines.