In the same article, Birch talks about the importance and the danger of using footnotes in translation. Herbert Giles‘s use of footnote in his translation of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai) is the object of Birch‘s critique, in which Birch indicates:
He [Giles] also had a rather idiosyncratic way with a footnote. I remember laughing out loud in the hush of a college library when I was looking through some translations from old tales—I think it was probably Giles’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, his Liaozhai selections. The charm of a fai r maiden was being catalogued in conventional fashion, and when the text arrived at the slenderness of her tapering finger, the usual “onion-shoot”
simile was used. At the point the translator—as I say, I think it must have been Giles—supplied a footnote. I don’t have it at hand, but approximately it read:
“Onion-shoots: when sautéed lightly with a little ginger, these are esteemed a particular delicacy by the Chinese.” Now, I am all for adding local color. One great virtue of footnotes is that they can help bring to the outsider some of the cultural advantages enjoyed by the native reader. But Giles is far from the only translator who has included wildly incongruous or irrelevant material in footnotes. (Birch,1995:4)
In this excerpt, footnotes are the tool/Helper in translation as a knowledge attribution process (‗One great virtue of footnotes is that they can help bring to the outsider some of the cultural advantages enjoyed by the native reader‘), whose syntactical structure can then be illustrated as:
Footnote →cultural advantage of native reader →outsider [Sender] [Object of desire: knowledge] [Receiver]
This simple syntactical structure is further modalized by the vouloir-dire of the translator (i.e. footnotes are used ‗a rather idiosyncratic way‘). But before the
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translator acquires the desire to provide footnote, he must first possess the competence to accomplish the task, which are the pouvoir-dire and savoir-dire (i.e.
the ‗local color‘; knowing what to bring across the cultural barriers). It can be seen from Birch‘s description that when footnote is guided by the vouloir-dire of the translator, it may very like fail the task of knowledge attribution, leaving the footnotes being ‗incongruous or irrelevant‘.
But to whom the footnotes may seem ‗incongruous or irrelevant‘? Such an assertion implies a reader. The information in the footnote is neutral. It takes a reader to decide whether the information in the footnote is relevant or irrelevant. In this vein, the correspondence between vouloir-dire and devoir-lire decides whether the task of bringing the cultural advantage of native readers to target readers is successful or not.
But if we take a look at how Birch and Giles use annotations, a different picture emerges.
After criticizing Giles‘s use of irrelevant footnotes, Birch proposes to ‗keep footnotes to a minimum‘ by incorporating ‗explanatory information in the text‘
(ibid.:4). He takes one of the arias in his translation of Mudanting as an example to demonstrate how to add explanatory information to the text, which is accompanied by another translation without explanatory information:
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Does the difference between Giles‘s footnote and Birch‘s explanatory information lie in how and where the information is presented? Are footnotes and explanatory information nothing but two modes of the same text function in translation? The following analysis of the isotopies in Giles‘s and Birch‘s translations indicates that footnotes and explanatory information are different in nature.
First, to compare Giles‘s use of annotation in translation with that of Birch‘s, I first go back to Giles‘s translation and try to locate the footnote ‗onion-shoot‘ in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. However, no such footnote was found in the whole book. As Birch specifically mentions about Giles‘s strategy for annotation, I choose one short story from Liaozhai, ‗The examination for the post of guardian angel‘ 考城隍, as an example to illustrate Giles‘s use of footnotes. In this short story, five footnotes are used, which are:
1) Explanation of nomenclature:
a. Guardian angel:
‗the tutelar deity of every Chinese city‘ (p.1) b. The God of War:
‗The Chinese Mars. A celebrated warrior, named Kuan Yu, who lived about the beginning of the third century of our era. He was raised after death to a rank of a god, and now plays a leading part in the Chinese Pantheon‘ (p.2)
2) Explanation of institutions:
a. graduate:
‗That is, he has taken the first or bachelor‘s degree. I shall not hesitate to use strictly English equivalents for all kinds of Chinese terms. The three degrees are literally, (1) cultivated talent, (2) Raised Man (3) Promoted scholar‘. (p.1)
b. yamen:
‗The official residence of a mandarin above a certain rank‘ (p.2)
3) Explanation of the plot
a. ‗…he had been dead three days‘:
‗Catalepsy, which is the explanation of many a story in this collection, would
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appear to be of very common occurrences amongst the Chinese. Such, however, is not the case; in which statement I am borne out of my friend, Dr. Manson, of Amoy, who, after many years‘ of practice among the natives of that port, and also of Formosa, informs me that he has never even heard of a single incidence o f this strange complaint‘ (p.4)
At the first sight, the footnotes may seem to be supplementary information that is not essential to the main text. But the examination of the story‘s isotopy reveals the indispensability of these footnotes.
Figurative isopoty of Actors
My eldest sister‘s husband‘s grandfather Sung Tao
Graduate Mr. Sung
Official messenger Grand examiner Ten officials God of War A candidate Presiding deities Graduate Chang Mr. Chang
Chang Ch‘i of Chang-shan Guardian angel
Aged mother Mr. Sung‘s mother His mother His wife‘s family Spirit
In the actorial isotopy, two sets of opposition can be found, which are ‗deity‘ versus
‗men‘ and ‗official posts‘ versus ‗family‘:
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Deity versus Man God of War Sung Tao/Mr. Sung Presiding deities Graduate Chang Guardian angel
Spirit
Official post versus family
Official messenger aged mother/his mother/Mr. Sung‘s mother Grand examiner his wife‘s family
candidate
The two oppositions can be put into a semiotic square:
Man Deity
Official post Family
As can be seen from the square, the positive schema represents filial piety while the negative schema stands for the loyalty/dedication to the community. The tension in the story lies in two elements: the institution of imperial examination and the presence of the deities, both of which force Sung Tao to choose between filial piety and loyalty.
They motivate Sung to accomplish the quests (e.g. test-taking as qualifying test;
negotiation with deities as decisive test; performing his promise as glorifying test) and they also create ‗a special perception of uncanny events‘ which endows the short story with the nature of the fantastic (Todorov,1973:91). With these in mind, if we look at Giles‘s footnotes again, we will notice that these footnotes are not merely supplementary in nature. For instance, the ‗guardian angel‘ and the ‗God of War‘ are respectively the Object of desire and the Sender of the narrative. Meanwhile, the God of War is also a symbol of loyalty in Chinese culture, which further contributes to the tension between family and community. The term ‗graduate‘ represents Sung Tao‘s
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competence in participating in the examination on one hand, and, on the other hand, helps construct the institution of imperial examination in the narrative (as the Helper), which, in this respect, has the same the function as ‗yamen‘. In this case, if these footnotes are not present in the text, then the isotopy of the story may disintegrate as the strong tension between filial piety and loyalty will not be come ‗marked‘ in the narrative.
With regard to Birch‘s practice, he uses both explanatory information and footnotes. The example of explanatory information he gives in the keynote speech is the aria sung by the Daughter (Bridal Du) when offering the wine to her parents. In Mudanting, Birch translates this aria by adding information which specifies the lily and cedar are Bridal‘s mother and father. In terms of the isotopy in this aria, the actors are: lily, cedar, fairy peach and child. And if we compare the translation with explanatory information with that without explanatory information (which is also provided by Birch in his speech), we can see that with or without the explanatory information (please refer to the underlined part in the following table), the isotopy of the text still remains the same.
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vouloir-dire of the translator. As mentioned, in addition to explanatory information, Birch also uses footnotes in his translation. In what follows, his use of footnotes in the Peony Pavilion is analyzed to see if the functions of footnotes and explanatory information are the same with regard to knowledge attribution.
The seventh scene, The Schoolroom, is chosen for the analysis. In Scene Seven one footnote is used in the following context:
Source text 春香取文房四寶來模字。(貼下取上)紙、墨、筆、硯在此。(末)
Birch‘s translation [The teacher, Chen, was asking the Bridal about her ‗four jewels of the scholar‘s study‘ for calligraphy]
Chen: What sort of ink is this supposed to be?
Bridal: Oh, she [the attendant] brought the wrong thing. This is
Bridal: Notepaper woven by the Tang courtesan Xue Tao.
Chen: Take it away, take it away. Bring such was woven by the noble inventor of paper, the ancient Cai Lun. And what sort of inkstone? Is it single or double?
Bridal: It‟s not single, it‟s married.
Chen: And the “eye” patterns on it—what sort of eyes?
Bridal: Weeping eyes.
Chen: What are they weeping about?—Go change the whole lot.
In Birch‘s translation, the footnote is added for the term ‗weeping eyes‘, which states:
Inkstones of a highly prized variety made at Duanxi in Guangdong were
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decorated with patterns of ―eyes‖ carved to follow the natural grain of the stone. If the ―eyes‖ were not ―bright eyes‖, clear-cut, they were known as
―weeping eyes‖, or worse, ―dead eyes‖ (p.27).
Why would Birch choose to use footnote here? The following analysis demonstrates that the footnote is indispensable to the isotopy of this excerpt, which is achieved by the two types of objects—tools for calligraphy and tools for makeup:
Tools for calligraphy
four jewels of the scholar‘s study for calligraphy ink
brushes
notepaper woven by the Tang courtesan Xue Tao
paper woven by the noble inventor of paper, the ancient Cai Lun ink stone
Tools for makeup snail black
mascara brushes
The opposition between the two types of objects reflects the tension between the two statuses of the Subject (the Bridal): one is a well-educated lady and the other is a desirable object for romance.
lady woman
outer beauty inner beauty
(love) (education)
Hence, the attendant‘s mistaking makeup tools for calligraphy tools implies the
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tension between these two identities. The term ‗weeping eyes‘, which has the connotation of both the quality of inkstone and the image of a lady bothered by love (‗weeping eyes‘ are conventional usage in Guiyuan 閨怨 poems in Chinese poetry), is the place where Bridal‘s two identities meet. Hence, if the term ‗weeping eyes‘ is not annotated, it may leave the readers with the literal meaning (i.e. eyes that are weeping), which would not only cause misunderstanding, but more importantly, may disintegrate the tensive structure between ‗woman‘ and ‗lady‘—what the isotopy of the scene hinges on.
The analysis of Birch‘s use of footnotes suggests that in the case where the footnote is used, the information in the footnote is indispensable to the text. It is something the translator has to say (devoir-dire), which comes from something that readers have to read (devoir-lire); otherwise the text‘s isotopy would disintegrate. By examining the isotopy of the three excerpts from Giles and Birch, we can see that with regard to knowledge attribution, footnotes and explanatory information are decided by two different modalities in the excerpts. While the use of explanatory information is guided by the vouloir-dire of translators, that of footnotes is determined by the devoir-lire of readers. The different modalities we find in Birch‘s critique of Giles and in his real practices, if put together with his reflections in section 2, demonstrate the tug-of-war between Birch‘s two identities in his translating Chinese literature: a sinologist and a translator.