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Karen Ma

Artfully rendering a piece of literature into English from a language as culturally different as Chinese is a challenge for any translator.
But for Julia Lovell, 33, a Cambridge-based academic and translator, the task is even more challenging when faced with the work of  Zhang Ailing, or  Eileen Chang, author of the now-famous novella, Lust, Caution.
The work remained relatively unknown to Chinese readers until Oscar-winning director  Ang Lee decided to turn the 1940s Shanghai spy story into a major movie late last year. Zhang's other works, including  Red Rose, White Rose and  Love in a Fallen City, were much better known.
What characterises Zhang's writing, and makes it difficult to render gracefully in English, is its acute sense of imagery, liberal use of cultural references and many fine details,  says Lovell, recently in Beijing on a research tour for a book about the  opium  war.
Lust, Caution is filled with 'ornate' detail and 'innuendoes that are highly indigenous to Chinese culture,' she says.
Lovell cites as an example the opening mahjong scene in the novella (and the film), where four tai-tais  engage in clever retorts about politics and intrigue in war-torn Shanghai, in  the game's strategy.
'I found it very challenging to translate fluently without extensive resorting to footnotes,' says Lovell,  who resisted their use, which would have been one solution, because they tend to interrupt the flow for readers.
'After much thought, I decided that achieving a fluent, idiomatic translation that captures in English the tone and atmosphere of the scene was the most important consideration,' she  says.
Lovell left  out one or two brief allusions that would have required laborious explanation. In her recent English translation of Lust, Caution, for example, she drops a single line of dialogue with a reference to a  Chinese immortal because 'the expression would have required an unwieldy explanation to a quick, throwaway line', thus slowing down the rhythm of the reading.
Lovell, a Chinese history and literature sinologist trained at Cambridge,  began studying Chinese by chance. 'I saw a James Bond film in which James Bond said that he studied Oriental languages at Cambridge University, and I was seized by the desire to follow in his footsteps,' she says.
From there, she became fascinated by 20th-century Chinese history after reading  Jung Chang's Wild Swans. 'I figured that language and literature were a good way of trying to understand more about the place,' she  says.
Lovell has half a dozen Chinese translations under her belt, including  Han Shaogong's  A Dictionary of Maqiao and  Zhu Wen's  I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China. But Lust, Caution, she says, was among the most challenging.
While Zhang is famous for her attention to detail and sparse use of language, the author has taken it to the extreme in Lust, Caution by using 'just a few strokes to complete the political canvas of Shanghai'. This makes the story extremely demanding for the reader and the translator, requiring intense attention to detail, tone and rhythm, and repeated readings to grasp the full meaning.
Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during  the second world war, the book is an intense tale of love and espionage involving  Wang Jiazhi, a politically inspired young woman struggling between love and her ideals. Wang, a patriotic student prepared to give her life for her country, ironically ends up dying after a spur-of-the-moment decision for the illusion of love.
Although Zhang is a controversial figure in China's literary history, she's enjoyed a strong following in China since the 1980s after the ban on her books was lifted. Lovell says the author's popularity is rooted in her deft ability 'in expressing the desolation resulting from the upheavals and cataclysms of her war-torn era', particularly in her earlier work.
Zhang doesn't do this by writing directly about  'big themes',  but through her depiction of the thoughts and feelings of ordinary   people struggling to navigate the dislocations of war and modernisation.
This has struck a  chord with modern Chinese readers because they 'recognise the universal emotions and conflicts, such as social insecurity and envy', in Zhang's stories, says Lovell, which speak directly to their own anxiety as they struggle to redefine themselves in today's rapidly changing China.
Lovell, a part-time history lecturer at London's Birkbeck College and a mother of two  young children, is   now working on a translation of a collection of  Lu Xun's work. She says one thing she noticed about the writing of Zhang and other pre-1949 writers, including Lu  and  Qian Zhongshu, is that it's simply better than their modern counterparts'.
The earlier writers are far more disciplined and tend to make richer use of tone and imagery, she says. Not only were many of them excellent foreign linguists, they were also firmly grounded in China's classical literary tradition.
By comparison, the language and style of many post-1979 writers 'seem more formulaic and cliched', she says, which  paradoxically also makes it easier to translate.
Although some of the harshest critics of modern Chinese literature have criticised post-1979 authors
for their narrow world view, notably German Sinologist Wolfgang Kubin - a great admirer of Lu  and Zhang  - who writes off the younger writers as 'insignificant' and 'backward', Lovell is optimistic about the future of Chinese literature. In particular,  she has high hopes for Li Er,  Bi Feiyu,  Yan Geling and  Yu Hua.
'It's understandable that writers who emerged in the post-Mao period received a less stimulating and well-rounded literary education than writers such as Lu Xun and Zhang Ailing,' she says. 'Chinese literature is still feeling the effects of the cultural ruptures of the communist period, in particular the Cultural Revolution.'
'More time is required for post-Mao literature and its writers to mature, to find ways to work through this subject matter,' she says. 'But this upheaval also provides endless and fascinating subject matter for writers.'



Lust for words