Voice of the Translator: Lu Xun in Armenian

In sharing my experience of translating the foremost Chinese author Lu Xun’s 魯迅 (1881–1936) sole prose-poetry collection, Wild Grass (Ye Cao《野草》), serialized in the magazine Yusi 語絲 between 1924 and 1926, into Armenian, expressions of admiration are often accompanied by a layer of doubt. While admirations serve as encouragement for a rare and difficult undertaking, doubts stem from the intricate nature of the task. In these prose-poetry texts, Lu Xun crystallizes his language and thought to the brink of a psychic cataclysm, mourning, and despair, as recognized by various scholars from Leo Ou-fan Lee and Tsi-an Hsia to Zhang Jieyu 張潔宇 and Nick Admussen. More crucially, Armenian, the language into which I am translating Lu Xun, found itself in a precarious state during a roughly similar historical period— the beginning of the 20th century—and since then has not had a rich experience in translating foreign literature. One of the reasons is the structural domination of the Russian language during the Soviet era.

The presentation explores some linguistic and hermeneutic issues in translating such cryptic Chinese text into Armenian: two languages that are strangers to each other. While English benefits the direct use of pinyin romanization, we have yet to create a standardized romanization system in the Armenian language for Chinese. What choices does a translator make when there is this absence of rules, at the same time freedom to create rules? How to translate the title of Yecao is a debate “even” in English, as the collected articles in the 2014 special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese demonstrate. The translator into Armenian faces fascinating challenges, and this presentation is about facing these and other paradoxes.