Dear you - The Horoeka / Lancewood Reading Grant

Transcription

Dear you,
/1
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I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know
what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to ‘master’
or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in
fragments. That we may learn from spaces of silence as well
as spaces of speech. That in the act of being patient as we
hear another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist
frenzy and consumption that suggests all desire must be
satisfied immediately or disrupt that cultural imperialism
that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks
in standard English.
– bell hooks,
“this is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to
talk to you”: Language, a place of struggle
Dear you1, I am writing to you from the tautness between giving up and pushing on. The cat sniffs my pile
of books and walks away. The night is quiet; the three stillbirths of this essay quieter / still / borne on the
tongues of the inbetweens2, the elsewhere3, are stones and razor/blades4 / fall; legs guillotine: to write
calligraphically5 is to choreograph a body to move ink. A hanzi character6 can be a meditation. My father
and I went to see 雲門_Cloud Gate perform《狂草_Wild Cursive 7》for one of my birthdays. I remember
rapture. Remembering, I think about weightlessness8 and weightiness9 and what it means to have short
legs10. My father said he didn’t understand what it was all / about / myself: I am bilingual11. I have feelings
about living under a state of uni-directional bilingualism12. I am not / (a loan) / word is a unit of language
A grafted onto and budding hybridities in language B. A return graphic loan is a specific category of loan
word that occurs between Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji and English. To articulate modernity, the Japanese
translated English words into kanji terms derived from classical Chinese hanzi. To articulate modernity,
the Chinese reintroduced these hanzi-derived-kanji-translations-of-English-words into modern Chinese.
It is a deceptively transparent case of cultural translation; a return graphic loan can easily be mistaken
as never having left. In this game of semantic rebus, beware the body snatchers. Beware socio-linguistic
changelings13. Beware illusive orthographic coinciden/詩/集用康熙體14排版會不會太矯/情/glish is a thing,
like Chowick15 is a th-/Ying/elishi is to hear ‘the opening of Chinese vibrations beneath the surface of each
English word’ (Stalling, 2011, p. 1). There exists an openness before a sound is delimited by writing. If a
language claims for itself the flirtations of a cat, it stakes this claim with the strokes of its script: miaow,
miaow, 喵喵. Close your eyes to relinquish languaged and proprietary claims to a sound – is it English? Is it
Chinese? It is both and neither. The poet Jonathan Stalling bids us to ‘remember that every line’s assumed
intelligibility (as English) comes as the result of the reader’s cultural imposition upon the sounds [and] that
profound meanings exist elsewhere in another language that speaks with the same voice’ (2011, p. 9). You
once asked if I use my poet voice in bed. I / do / not force hanzi or kanji typefaces into false italics16. This
makes typographers17 cr-/I / call up garden centers asking if they stock worm farms. No one understands
me. Warm fawns. Worn forms. I enunciate and enunciate and suspect I went to sleep and broke my English.
It’s okay. I haven’t. People still tell me ‘oh, your English is really good’. I collect microaggressions 18 like candy
wrappers. My favourite remains ‘I can’t imagine you learning English’ because it amuses me to imagine
myself as some kind of robot-baby born fully configured with standard-english.exe19. Every body learns
language. Some bodies learn more than one. There exist assumptions between how you look and which
language(s) you speak. Non-conformity is judged. There also exist assumptions that bi- or multi-linguals
warmly embrace ideas of the mother tongue, of an indissoluble tie to their first language, of a unique
intimacy with their first language. It is okay to feel differently. It is okay to choose the languages you live in,
mindful of the conditions of this choice. Why do you choose the way you do? What motivates your choice?
Which power structures influence you? What are the consequences of your choice20 for yourself? What are
the consequences of your choice for / others (?) / are often curious about which languages I use for which
activities. Someone asked which language I pray in. The answer I made up was a l-/I / wrote and bound
my first book in Year 4 with Mrs. Green. My grasp of English was wobbly, so she said it was okay to write in
whichever language I had the words in. She said a book is a book is a book. So I wrote a book in Mandarin
about elephants. I am beginning to understand what a radical gesture she made. Maybe Mrs. Green is an
experimental poet/ry / is non-/fiction / is seeing your peripheral twin and imagining they were actually /
you / are trying to tell the checkout attendant something. There is something you want. Ho-li-day hu-lu,
ho-li-day hu-lu, hu-lu twen-ty-five. There is something you want and you can’t make yourself understood.
You are working yourself up. You look at me. 你要買什麼? 買菸。I translate: a 25-pack of Holiday Blue. You
leave quickly, no thank you. The checkout attendant asks if I am Filipino. No. I see you around – sometimes
older, sometimes younger, frequently with a prop, a child, an umbrella, a shopping-bag-on-wheels-thing – in
situations that seem to call for translative intervention. Intervention can feel like betrayal. I don’t know why.
I think of you often. Love, Ya-Wen21
1
you:
以文會友需要互通的語言;在這遇見你真好。
我對你很好奇。
我在奧克蘭的街頭上，常常碰到你。你的髮或黑或棕或紅、或五顏六
色、或直或捲、或長或短、或隨心隨意。你或老或幼、或男或女、或中
性、或無性、或多性。排隊時、等紅綠燈時、擦身而過時，我聽見你的
聲音，看得見你的身影。
但我是個宅女，我與人的交流大多是字面的，一貫的讀讀讀、寫寫寫。
我在奧克蘭的主流出版內容裡找不到你的書寫、你的字體，好像你不
存在一樣。我猜，你隱遣於無國界的網路吧，為你的喜怒哀樂找最適
合你的語言，最適合的去處。
和實體分離的文思雖然很自由，有時也很沒有溫度。如果你我都在
這，或許哪天可以碰個面?
you / 1
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you / 2
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the inbetweens:
Being in-between is a study of to versus back to.
I go back to Taipei; I go to Auckland.
I go to Taipei; I go back to Auckland.
inbetweens / 1
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inbetweens / 2
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the elsewhere:
Being elsewhere is experiencing a shift in the language I yearn for.
In Auckland, I yearn for Mandarin-print. I discover, when I start this
reading grant at the 大東文化藝術中心圖書館_Kaohsiung City Dadong
Arts Centre Arts Library, I yearn for English-print.
The library is different from what I know. No English-language book
is for loan. Nor a significant portion of the Mandarin-language books.
The librarian explains this policy arises from a scarcity of copies: any
title that is the library’s only copy is not borrowable.
Scarcity is a way to understand yearning.
elsewhere / 1
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razor blades:
In cultural-linguistic discourses, the tongue is a recurring metaphor. Figure 1. Excerpt from
《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
So is the razor.
Graphic novelist 林莉菁_Lin Li-Jing uses these metaphors to record
her experiences under the uni-directional language policies enforced
in Taiwana from 1949 to 1986.
頭》
_My youth, My FORMOSA I: Sew on a
new tongue
Source: Lin, 2012, p. 47
In Figure 1, Lin draws her younger self rejecting her vernaculars with
the bodily vehemence that comes easily to a child – she coughs up
台語_Southern Min, gags on 客語_Hakka, and crushes under her heel
日語_Japanese.
razorblades / 1
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Her tongue, her teeth, her lips become flesh-tools disassociated from Figure 2. Excerpt from
her personhood, her tongue a red carpet path to success, as long as 《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
頭》
she speaks the correct language.
new tongue
razorblades / 2
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Success requires sacrifice, so Lin cuts off her tongue and grafts on a new Figure 3. Excerpt from
tongue, a new language, a powerful language spoken by the powerful. 《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
There is no hysterical spray of blood, no mimetically furious line work
to suggest struggle or anguish; Lin draws only a speck or two of blood
with the resolute calm lines of a child who has internalised colonial
discourse. Upgrade complete, she discards her vernacular tongue,
quivering on the ground, for the sanctioned, nationalistic tongue of
國語_guoyu.
razorblades / 3
頭》
new tongue
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The metaphoric power of the tongue and the razor comes from the
potential for this abstract adversity to find bodily expression – consider
the Chinese history of cutting out dissenters’ tongues, or this video work
《从平渊里4号到天桥北里4号_From No.4 Ping Yuan Li to No.4 Tian Qiao
Bei Li》by contemporary artist 马秋莎_ Ma Quisha.
Figure 4. Screenshot from《从平渊里4号
到天桥北里4号_From No.4 Ping Yuan Li
to No.4 Tian Qiao Bei Li》
Source: https://vimeo.com/126577240
The work is seven minutes long. Ma narrates how she came to study
art in the United States in slightly accented Mandarin. She speaks
of disjuncture between who her parents expect her to be and have
sacrificed much to support, and who she is.
She speaks slowly, cautiously, determinedly. Sometimes, she pauses.
At the end, she opens her mouth and removes a razor. There is blood.
Her tongue is not a metaphor.
Her razor is not a metaphor.
razorblades / 4
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Damn enemies!
!
ww
E
rn
the
Sou Min
Hakka
Japanese
Guoyu
yu
Guo
From a young age, I knew which side to take.
Farewell, the languages of my parents and my grandparents,
those coarse vernaculars. It is better for my future career and
advancement to speak Mandarin well. I don’t want this goddamn
Southern accent.
I want to become properly Chinese, so I can live the good life.
I am a Taiwanese child wearing a Chinese mask.
Guoyu
oyu
Gu
Tranlated captions by Ya-Wen Ho
razorblades / 5
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Tongue, teeth, mouth …
They work hard together to create the perfect Mandarin
enunciation, and I am the outstanding manipulator of
these organs.
I continuously train these organs and become an adept
technician of language.
Path of
Success
razorblades / 6
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Everyone, come
speak Mandarin …
Hakka
Southern
Min
Guoyu
razorblades / 7
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razorblades / 8
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calligraphically:
You see the power for a language to symbolise ethno-cultural identity
in the popularity of extracurricular Chinese-language schools, to which
many migrant parents diligently send their banana children (yellow
on the outside, white on the inside). Yet, Chinese languages scholar
Perry Link observes such schools ‘do not emphasize oral Chinese, and
usually do not teach it very well, if at all. To learn Chinese, and to absorb
Chineseness, is to learn characters.’ (2006, p. 56, italics original)
What interests me is that writing a hanzi character calligraphically
amplifies its power to symbolise Chineseness.
In Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, John
DeFrancis defines full writing as ‘a system of graphic symbols that
can be used to convey any and all thought’ (1989, p. 5). There is no
prescription to how such writing is rendered: scratched in sand, tattooed,
stitched, chalked, grown-with-moss, printed, typed. How writing is
written does not affect its status as writing. How writing is written
generates semiotic meaning, which Nina Nørgaard terms ‘the semiotics
of typography’b.
Calligraphy is semiotically loaded. Can I become more ‘white’ if I write
English with a feather quill instead of a keyboard? If that seems an
absurd question, why does it seem so plausible that I can be more
‘Chinese’ if I write hanzi characters with a calligraphy brush instead
of a ballpoint pen?
I feel calligraphy is over-represented in English-language literature
about Chinese writing, given digital type is the lived experience of
Chinese writing today. The non-hanzi-reading person is more likely to
encounter hanzi as printed type on signs or posters visible in shared
public spaces, not as calligraphy.
Perhaps calligraphy is a particular form of character fetishisation,
defined by Edward McDonald as ‘an exaggerated status given to Chinese
characters in the interpretation of Chinese language, thought and
culture’ (2011, p. 91) – it certainly is given an exaggerated status among
the various technologies and ways of writing hanzi. McDonald argues
the Chinese writing system has been historically misrepresented as
pictographicc, the orientalisation of hanzi characters so thorough that
even the Chinese view hanzi as a product of aesthetics to be studied as
an artform rather than as a writing system like any other language. The
conflation of calligraphy – a practice closely aligned with the fine arts
– with hanzi reinforces the misconception of Chinese writing as image.
My point of contention is not that designers use calligraphy, or
calligraphy-inspired typefaces, to signify Chineseness, but that designers
need to critically examine why calligraphy signifies Chineseness more
resonantly than other technologies of writing hanzi.
Let us not fetishise.
···
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Calligraphy and digital type do not have to be oppositional binaries.
In 字型散步_A Chinese font walk, typographers 柯志杰_Ke Zhi-Je and
蘇煒翔_Su Wei-Xiang present a case study demonstrating calligraphy and
digital type as ‘visual signifiers in a continuum rather than as separate
semiotic systems’ (Nørgaard, 2009, p.143):
Figure 5. 《四庫全書》裡的館閣體
Guan-Ge-Ti from Siku Quanshu_
Complete Library in Four Sections
Source: Ke & Su, 2014, p. 51
從明朝初年開始，文人間漸漸流行一種極為端正的楷體，是為
「臺閣體」
。這種字體講究結構的平穩，大小也要一致，好像是
在有框框的稿紙上完成的那樣，不會有飛白，過長的撇捺等性
格表現；不同人寫的字體看來也差不多。這種字體到了清朝，
演變為「館閣體」
：讀書人考科舉，大臣上書給皇上，都要以館
閣體書法行文。畢竟讀公文不是在欣賞書法藝術，重點是立刻
看得懂，不誤會意思 […] 在現代人看來，館閣體讓整體版面平
穩得好像印刷出來的一樣，讀來也堪稱舒服。
但書法藝術界對館閣體就沒很欣賞了。這種字體過於工整，理
性，用清代文人的話來說，就是「土龍木偶，毫無意趣」
。
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 50-51)
The existence of Guan-Ge-Ti (Figure 5), a calligraphic response to the
typographic need for legibility and readibility, destablises the calligrapyas-aesthetic vs type-as-utilitarian binary and offers possibilities to
re-examine stereotypes about calligraphy.
In trying to untangle the practice’s semiotic nuances, the term
‘calligraphy’ itself surfaces as fraught with trans-cultural tension:
The term ‘calligraphy’ is more unsuited to the Chinese art
of writing as it conveys by its etymology the idea of ‘fine
handwriting’ or of ‘prettified handwriting’. The Chinese do
not speak of ‘fine handwriting’, but simply ‘the art of writing’,
shu-fa. In classical Chinese they merely say shu, ‘writing’, as
we say ‘dancing’ and ‘music’. In English ‘the art of writing’
would be much more suitable than ‘calligraphy’, and I should
have preferred to use it not only in the title but in the text
Beginning in the early Ming dynasty, a
very standardised regular script, known
as Tai-Ge-Ti, grew popular among the literati. This script demanded characters be
structurally balanced and of a consistent
size, as if written on grid-lined paper. Individualistic and expressive gestures such
as the raspy blanks created by a drying
brush and extended strokes were suppressed to achieve a degree of uniformity
across different writers. This script developed into Guan-Ge-Ti in the Qing dynasty.
Scholars sitting imperial examinations
or ministers submitting documents to
the emperor had to write in the GuanGe-Ti script. After all, reading an official
document is not art appreciation – the
key requirement is legibility and a clarity
of meaning. [...] To the modern eye, the
Guan-Ge-Ti script reads almost as regularly and comfortably as a printed page.
But this script finds no favour with those
who appreciate calligraphy as an art form.
Guan-Ge-Ti is too regimented, too rational, or in the words of the Qing literati, it
is a clay dragon, a wooden mannequin,
devoid of sensuality and refinement.
(Ke & Su, 2014, pp. 50–51)
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of this book. I have decided not to, because ‘calligraphy’ is
a handier term and has derivatives like ‘calligrapher’ and
‘calligraphic’ which it is difficult to dispense with.
(Billeter, 1990, p. 12)
How has translation and its representation in the English language
shaped, or perhaps contributed to the yoking of calligraphy with
Chineseness? I find a key idea in Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice to be
useful:
What is the Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic equivalent(s) of
the word ‘self’? This troublesome question rests on the
assumption that equivalence of meaning can readily be
established between different languages. [The question]
overlooks the fact that the ‘trope of equivalenced’ between
the English word ‘self’ and the Chinese ji, wo, ziwo and other
words has been established only recently in the process
of translation and fixed by means of modern bilingual
dictionaries. (1995, pp. 7–8)
Liu argues for translation to exceed labelling the same world in different
languages, to reveal there exist different worlds altogether. The English
term ‘calligraphy’ fails to make apparent the different world in which
the practice 書法_shufa_the art of writing occurs.
This failure – this mislabelling of not-A-as-A – is recognised but accepted
as necessary. The imperative for comprehension and equivalence
prioritises the conjugation of nouns and adjectives above the integrity
of understanding a practice on its own terms.
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hanzi character:
In Mouth: Eats Colour, by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa,
the poem
Promenade[p.07]
プロムナード[p.09]
Promenade[p.11]
Promenade (Puromunaado 1)
プロムナード (Puromunaado 2)
[p.14]
[p.16]
[p.18]
[p.20]
[p.22]
[p.24]
[p.26]
[p.28]
[p.30]
Promenade (A)
[p.40]
Promenade (B)
[p.42]
Promenade (C)
[p.44]
Promenade (Pろめなで)[p.47]
Promenade (露命撫で)[p.49]
Promenade (Pass the hand over
a life as fleeting as the snow)
[p.51]
Promenade[p.55]
プロムナード[p.57]
is translated, anti-translated, and re-translated
twenty times. Hiragana, katakana, kanji and
English letters mingle wantonly.
In the end matter, the poets ask ‘Are “プロムナード (Puromunaado 2)”
and “プロムナード (Puromunaado 4)” in Chinese or are they not.’ (2011,
p. 86)
The question reads like a play on the Sorites Paradox: take away a grain
of sand from a pile of sand – is the pile still a pile? Repeat. When does a
pile become a non-pile? Take a poem set in hiragana, katakana and kanji,
and take away one hiragana character – is the poem still Japanese? Take
away one katakana character – is it still Japanese? When there are only
kanji characters left – is it still Japanese? Or, given kanji derives from
classical hanzi and is mutually intelligible, is the poem now Chinese?
I propose we may answer this question typographically.
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Kanji, traditional hanzi and simplified hanzi all trace back to classical
Chinese forms, but these scripts have diverged over time. Some
characters remain relatively unchanged and common across the
languages, others took on regional variations that manifest as subtle
differences in the language-specific typefaces.
Table 1 displays each of the characters in Pumorunaado 2 set in four
typefaces identified by designers Ke Zhi-Jie and Su Wei-Xiang as
representative of their respective region: STSong (China), MSungHK
(Hong Kong), MingLiu (Taiwan), and Kozuka Mincho Pro (Japan).
It is clear from comparing the scanned originals A7-A12 with the STSong
characters B7-B12 that Pumorunaado 2 is not set in simplified hanzi and,
therefore, not of the Mainland China version of Chinese. But could it be
Chinese in the way Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan interprets Chineseness?
Also unlikely – the dots of the 雲_yun_cloud (D11) and the radical ⺿
of 花 (D22) are telltale clues that reveal Pumorunaado 2 as not set in
MingLiu, and therefore, not Taiwanese. Unique matches between the
scanned characters A12-A15 with the Kozuka Mincho Pro characters
E12-E15 show Pumorunaado 2 to be Japanese – its body language, its
typeface, tells us so.
These differences may appear trivial, especially to a non-hanzi reader,
but ‘script is a badge’ (Bringhurst, 2002, p. 13). Taiwanese poet Chen Li
believes ‘the Chinese language used in Taiwan has some sort of vitality
different from that used in mainland China’ (2010, p. 470) and identifies
the script as an important contributing factor:
Chinese – with its pictographs, monosyllables, homonyms,
and characters with multiple meanings or similar
pronunciations – has a savor that is rarely found in other
languages. A Chinese poem written in traditional complex
characters is likely to lose part of this savor if transcribed
in simplified characters. Thus I feel that the Chinese poem I
write in Taiwan has an essential quality that may be absent
in works written by users of other languages or Chinese
speakers in other areas.
(2010, p. 470)
Beyond poetics, the choice between simplified and traditional hanzi is
used to establish, and sometimes enforce, a socio-political demarcation
between Mainland China (simplified), and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan
(traditional). As Bringhurst observes: ‘the number of languages actively
written in two scripts is not, at present, very large, but the tension that
exists where several of those languages are spoken is enough to give
one pause’ (2002, p. 14). This is certainly the case between mainland
China and Taiwan, and simplified and traditional hanzi.
···
hanzi character / 2
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Table 1. Typographic analysis of the hanzi characters in Pumorunaado 2
Source: Nakayasu & Sagawa, 2011, p. 16
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
A Original scan of
Puromunaado 2
B 華文宋體
STSong
China | hanzi (s)
C 蒙納宋
MSungHK
Hong Kong | hanzi (t)
D 新細明體
MingLiu
Taiwan | hanzi (t)
E 小冢明朝
Kozuka Mincho Pro
Japan | kanji
hanzi character / 3
埋
埋日
日午
午白
白黑
黑束
束
云
云
埋
埋日
日午
午白
白黑
黑束
束節
節
埋
埋日
日午
午白
白黑
黑束
束
後
後季
季手
手覆
覆暮
暮幕
幕
三
三時
時雲
雲約
約
報
報三
三
後
後
約
約
These scanned Pumorunaado 2 characters (A7-A12) are significantly different to simplified hanzi (B7-B12).
No conclusions can be drawn about whether
Pumorunaado 2 is Chinese or not.
Therefore, Pumorunaado 2 is not Chinese, not the Chinese
of mainland China anyway.
Pumorunaado 2 is also not Taiwanese. The character 雲_yun_
cloud set in MingLiu (D11) differs from the scan and the other
three regional variants with its four angled dots, instead of
four parallel cross strokes.
花
花道
道
手
手
埋
埋日
日午
午白
白黑
黑束
束節
節報
報三
三時
時雲
雲
Some scanned Pumorunaado 2 characters are common
across simplified hanzi, traditional hanzi, and kanji.
手
手覆
覆暮
暮幕
幕
季
季手
手覆
覆暮
暮幕
幕
However, some scanned
characters are unique to
kanji.
Not only are there differences between simplified hanzi,
traditional hanzi, and kanji, but there are further regional
differences within traditional hanzi.
Characters A13, A14, and A15
find unique matches in the
kanji characters E13, E14,
and E15 respectively.
MSungHK and MingLiu are both traditional hanzi typefaces,
but notice how the radical ⺿ in characters D19-D22 (MingLiu/
Taiwan) differ from characters C19-C22 (MSungHK/Hong
Kong). Instead of one unbroken cross stroke, the radical is
broken into two discrete units.
道
道
花
花
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Figure 6. (From top to bottom) The
number of typefaces developed in
Japan, mainland China and Taiwan in
the last decade.
Source: justfont, 2015
To further complicate the power dynamics between these typographies,
there exists an imbalance between the number of choices available to
designers across the languages.
justfont, a Taiwanese web font design firm, recently crowdfunded
a project to design a uniquely Taiwanese traditional hanzi typeface
金萱_Jin Xuan. In their crowdfunding pitch, justfont claims that there
have been 3000 kanji typefaces, 300 simplified hanzi typefaces, but
only 5 traditional hanzi typefaces developed in the last decade (2015).
In light of this, designers Ke Zhi-Jie and Su Wei-Xiang report many
Taiwanese designers opt to use kanji typefaces in their work, which is
not without its problems:
但畢竟這些是日文字型。並不是說不能用在中文上，但有些字
可能寫法不符合中文習慣，且用在內文相當容易缺字，這是要
注意的地方。
事實上不只是書籍封面，台灣街上近年的建案廣告幾乎也清一
色的小塚字體。或許是因為長期以來繁體中文字型的缺乏，讓
設計師只好開始動腦筋到漢字圈其他字型身上。
想想這樣也滿悲哀的，一直以來台灣的設計界相當忽略明體與
黑體這些最基本的字體，明明是內文最需要的字體，但國內能
選擇的字型可能用一隻手數得完。反觀日本，光是內文用的細
明體就超過100種可以選擇，可見日本有多麼重視明體了。就連
簡體中文市場，內文明體的類型選項都比繁體的選擇更多了…
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 165)
The 金萱_Jin Xuan project’s $NTD 1,500,000 target (≈$NZD 68,000) was
fully funded within hours, and the project raised a final total of just
under $NTD 26,000,000, approximately 17 times the target.
In this, I see a people’s hunger for a script to call their own and a script’s
power to be an expression of identity.
Ultimately, these are still Japanese typefaces. This is not to say it cannot be used
for work in Chinese, but the way some
characters are written may not be what
Mandarin readers are used to. Also, if [a
Japanese typeface] is used to typeset
body text, it is extremely common to find
characters missing. These are problems
to look out for.
In fact, it’s not just book covers, but the
real estate advertising on Taiwanese
streets recently are almost all set in Kozuka Gothic. Perhaps designers have had
to resort to typefaces from other hanzi
regions to cope with a pervasive shortage
of traditional Chinese typefaces.
It’s quite sad if you think about it. The
Taiwanese design industry has been very
neglectful of mingti and heiti, which are
the most fundamental typefaces indemand for setting body text, but the
choices available to us in Taiwan can be
counted on one hand. Looking to Japan,
there are more than 100 options for just
body text mingti alone, and we can see
how much Japan values this typographic
category. Even the simplified hanzi typeface market offers more variety than what
is available in traditional hanzi …
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 165)
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《狂草_Wild Cursive》:
7
Typography historian Robert Bringhurst defines writing as:
[…] the solid form of language, the precipitate. Speech
comes out of our mouths, our hands, our eyes in something
like a liquid form and then evaporates at once. It appears
to me that this is part of a natural cycle: one of the ways the
weather forms on the ocean of meaning. What else are the
words we drop like pebbles in that ocean if not condensing
droplets of evaporated speech, recycled bits of the ocean
of meaning itself? Yet language can also solidify – into
iridescent, sharp, symmetrical crystals, or into structures
more like hailstones or shale beds or mud. In solid as in
liquid form, the intersecting meanings may reinforce each
other or rub each other out.
To bring the metaphor ashore, writing is language displaced
from the mode of immediate gesture or speech to the
mode of the memento – something like the seashells and
the driftwood and the footprints on the beach.
(2002, p. 3)
《狂草_Wild Cursive》is the sublimation of writing – the solid form of
language made air.
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Figure 7. (左起) 依屏，立祥，怡彣演出《狂草》
(from left) Yi-Ping, Li-Xiang, Yi-Wen
perform Wild Cursive
Photography: 劉振祥_Chen-Hsiang Liu
Source: H. M. Lin, 2007, p. 15
Wild Cursive / 2
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Wild Cursive / 3
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8
weightlessness:
我愛你。
weightlessness
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9
weightiness:
I have never said I love you in Mandarin.
weightiness
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short legs:
While on tour in Sydney, 林懷民_Lin Huai-Min, the director of Cloud Gate
Dance Theatre, remembers an epiphany sparked by a conversation he
overheard at an Australian ballet company's 1966 performance in Taipei.
I draft and redraft responses. It becomes clear I simultaneously occupy
contradictory positions .
Where does Lin's epiphany sit, really?
Nativised
orientalism,
internalising nonChinese stereotypes
of ‘Chineseness’
Cultural
reclamation,
reappropriating a
cultural stereotype in
meaningful ways
×
忽然，一個拔尖的女聲說：
「不過，我們就是永
遠跳不出這種水準。」眾人靜默。她繼續說：
「因
為我們腿太短了！」
那年我19歲，滿心不服，覺得只要用功，當然
可以做得到！
多年之後，我意識到那位太太所說是智慧的
真知灼見。
芭蕾是線條的藝術，腿長的確搶眼，輕輕一跳
硬是比我們高。
如果我們的腿短，幹嘛不學由短腿的人創塑、
傳承的肢體訓練？
九十年代起，雲門有幸請到熊衛先生啟蒙「太
極導引」
，徐紀先生指導拳術。從蹲馬步開始。
蹲下來，鬆胯，上半身忽然得到前所未有的自
由。由丹田出發，轉移重心，舞動奔躍一也變
得輕易自在。
更有趣的，某種集體潛意識的美學觀似乎也
泉湧而出。
(H. M. Lin, 2007, pp. 14–15)
···
Suddenly, a shrill female voice said: ‘But,
we can never dance as well as they.’ The
crowd quieted. She continued, ‘Our legs
are too short!’
I was nineteen at the time, and wholly
unimpressed – I could achieve anything
if I worked hard enough!
Years later, I realised the woman spoke
true.
Ballet, an art of lines, favours long limbs.
The longer-legged effortlessly out-leap
us.
So, given our shorter legs, why not study
the traditions founded and passed down
through generations of the short-legged?
Since the 90s, the Cloud Gate company
has been privileged to study tai chi under Master Xiong Wei and the art of Chinese boxing under Master Xu Ji. Practice
started with the fundamental stance: the
馬步_mabu_squat.
Sit into a deep squat, relax the hips, and
the upper body gains an unprecedented
freedom of movement. Begin at the diaphragm, transfer the center of gravity, and
vaulting leaps become natural and easy.
More interestingly, some kind of aesthetics latent in the collective subconscious
seems to surface into expression when
we dance this way.
(H. M. Lin, 2007, pp. 14–15)
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In asking his dancers to explore traditions of movement different to
classical ballet, Lin acknowledges the futility of equivalence between
different bodies. It is not that Cloud Gate cannot dance ballet well, but
that the company can dance other forms better relative to the Australian
company.
Linguist Charles Hockett thinks similarly of languages, that ‘languages
differ not so much as to what can be said in them, rather as to what is
relatively easy to say.’ (quoted in DeFrancis, 1989, p. 244).
In this vein of thought, artist and poet 蔣勳_Jiang Xun suggests '漢字
的特殊構成，似乎決定了早期漢語文學的特性。[…] 漢字文學似乎更適合
「領悟」而不是「說明」
。_the hanzi script seemed to have shaped the
stylistic features of early Chinese literature [...] Literature written in hanzi
appears more adept at imaginative inference rather than exposition'
(2009, p. 12). Rephrased in Hockett's construction, Chinese literature
can be expository, but it is relatively easy to be inferential.
How valid is this deterministic relationship between language, writing,
and thought? My responses are fractal.
It is easy to seek to explain the differences between societies through
differences in their languages. Too easy. DeFrancis 'strongly rejects the
attempts to find in language and writing facile answers to enormously
complicated problems regarding differences among various societies.
(1989, p. 244). Liu agrees comparative questions can be futile:
The subtle or not so subtle bias that informs certain
comparative questions – Why is there no epic in Chinese? Is
there a civil society in China? etc – often says more about the
inquirer than the object of inquiry. As [Eugene] Eoyang puts
it well, 'The obverse questions are rarely, if ever, asked. Why
are there no dynastic histories in the West? Why has the West
produced no counterpart to Shijing? Are there equivalents
to the lüshi and zaju forms in the West? If these challenges
to lacunae in the West strike one as slightly absurd, then
we must consider the possibility that the original questions
might be equally pointless.' (Liu, 1995, p. 7)
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11
bilingual:
I am bilingual. One of my languages, English, is easy to name. Its naming
is immediate, unmediated by translation, and the various strains of
English are distinguishable through adding geographical markers.
Standard English or American English or New Zealand English are all
Englishes.
In trying to name my other language, I am confronted with a range of
terms, each with its own socio-political connotations. The deceptively
simple act of naming this other language suddenly becomes a reexamination of my allegiances to those lands, so close yet so foreign
to me.
Chinese The term ‘Chinese’ is ‘an umbrella designation for at least
eight present-day varieties of what are usually called ‘dialects’
(DeFrancis, 1989, p. 94). However, given these ‘dialects’ are
mutually unintelligible, DeFrancis suggests these varieties
may be considered as parallel to the various languages that
constitute the Romance group of languages (Italian, French,
Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, Catalan, Provençal, Romansh).
The main varieties of Chinese are
Cantonese, Wu/Shanghainese, and
Wu/Shanghainese Mandarin. But even these terms are
imprecise, and the study The Four
Mandarin
Languages of ‘Mandarin’ teases out
further subtleties. ‘Mandarin’ is itself
an umbrella designation for:
Cantonese
普通話_putonghua
國語_guoyu
官話_guanhua
× 中文_zhongwen_
the central language
× 漢語_hanyu_
the Han language
× 華語_huayu_
the Chinese language
Idealised Mandarin
Putonghua ‘Common Speech’
Guoyu ‘National Language’
(DeFrancis, 1989, p. 94)
Imperial Mandarin
The largely uncodified language spoken
by the scholar-official class in imperial
China. (DeFrancis, 1989, p. 94)
Geographical Mandarin
The invention of twentieth-century
linguists, created in an effort to delineate
the language of a particular area sharing
certain common phonological traits.
Local Mandarin
Every locale, because of its unique
linguistic composition, treated as
an independent speech community.
And these are just the English terms. There is a cluster of Mandarin
terms, some of which map directly onto English terms (putonghua,
guoyu, guanhua), some of which do not (zhongwen, hanyu, huayu).
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Sometimes the mapping is multiple to one, that is, more than one
Mandarin term maps onto a single English term, and this conflation
obscures the tension inherent in calling the same language different
names. Mandarin is called putonghua in Mainland China, but guoyu in
Taiwan, and in the same way a New Zealander may spot an American
by their calling the ‘boot’ the ‘trunk’, a Mainland Chinese person can
recognise a Taiwanese person, and vice versa, based on how they name
their language.
Where do I find myself then? If I am to be accurate in the naming of
my language, I must know if I am Taiwanese or mainland Chinese. But
what do I know of China, what do I know of Taiwan, really? New Zealand
is home. My knowledge of those places, those cultures, is inherited,
fragmented, naive.
Nonetheless, I was born in Taiwan and my first Chinese-language
textbook declares its subject to be guoyu, so I shall name my other
language as such.
I am bilingual, my arsenal consists of:
國語_guoyu / 透過教育，媒體，社會名流，一層又一層壓過
Standard English / is not the speech of exile. It is the language
母語，取得絕對的優勢 (Zhou, 2012, p.3) 在戒嚴時期，不
of conquest and domination. In the United States it is the
只是福佬話，客語，原住民語言也受到很大的斵傷。幾年
mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those
前，我在網路上，看到魏德聖導演二分鐘的《賽德克‧巴
sounds of diverse native communities we will never hear,
萊》短片。那是我第一次聽到賽德克語，那種顯然舌頭轉
the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other
動方式很不一樣的語言，讓我潸然落淚。後來我認識幾
unremembered tongues. […] When I realized how long
位同年齡層的賽德克朋友，他們的兒女都已經無法講賽
it has taken for white Americans to acknowledge diverse
德克語 – 講幾句寒暄話不算，一個語言要能用來表達思
languages of native Americans, to accept that the speech
想和感情，才算「健在」
。我的一位語言學家同仁預測，賽
their ancestral colonizers declared were merely grunts or
德克語將在五十年內消失。[…] 如果以台語為母語的台
Guoyu overpowers mother tongues, again
and again, through education, mass media, the social elite. (Zhou, 2012, p.3) During the martial law era, not only did the
Hô-ló and Hakka languages suffer, but so
did the aboriginal languages.
A few years ago, I saw the two-minute
trailer for Seediq Bale, directed by Wei
Te-Sheng, online. That was my first time
hearing the Seediq language, a language
in which the tongue clearly moves in very
different ways, and it moved me to tears.
Later, I became friends with several Seediq people similar in age to me, and their
children can no longer speak Seediq. It is
not enough to be able to use a few phrases
in small talk; one must be able to use the
language to express thoughts and emotions for that language to be considered
alive and well.
A linguist colleague of mine predicts
that the Seediq language will disappear
within fifty years. If the Taiwanese whose
mother tongue is Southern Min cannot
use Southern Min to express thoughts
and emotions, then, its extinction is also
a matter of time.
(Zhou, 2012, p. 6)
gibberish were indeed language, it is difficult not to hear
灣人，無法用台語來表達思想和感情，那麼，它的死亡也
in standard English always the sound of slaughter and
是指日可待。(Zhou, 2012, p. 6)
conquest. (hooks, 1995, p. 296)
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As I read about guoyu through writings by sinologists and Chinese
language scholars, I am taken aback by my ignorance of its histories.
For each hurt hooks names in the history of Standard English in the
United States, a comparable injury can be found in the history of guoyu
in Taiwan.
In Taiwan, guoyu is the mask which hides the loss of Southern Min, Hakka
and the aboriginal Austro-Polynesian languages. It took four decades for
外縣人_waishenren_Mainlanders to acknowledge the diverse languages
of 本縣人_benshenren_indigenous Taiwanese in the late 1980s (Tsao,
2008a, p. 274), to accept the wrong of naming indigenous languages
‘base and vulgar’ (Tsao, 2008a, p. 256) and shaming entire generations
of indigenous-language speakers into silence.
There is horror in such new knowledge. To know the language I have
always considered benign, a fond familial thing, was once used – and is
still used, to an extent – by a government to oppress, and consequently
cause the demise and eventual extinction of aboriginal languages. To
know guoyu has left generations of linguistic trauma in its wake – there
is horror in this.
While bell hooks qualifies ‘it is not the English language that hurts […],
but what the oppressors do with it’ (1995, p. 296), I must acknowledge
my languages as grenades.
This I must always know, so I may speak and write responsibly.
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uni-directional bilingualism:
I have feelings about uni-directional bilingualism, a non-reciprocal
convergence towards a dominant language.
In Taiwan, this manifested as policies which mandated ‘all speakers of
a local language […] learn to speak Mandarin, the national language,
[while] the Mainlanders, many of whom could speak some form of
Mandarin were not required to study a local language’ (Tsao, 2008,
p. 365).
While New Zealand has no uni-directional bilingual policies per se,
English is the most widely used of the three official languages (Māori
and New Zealand Sign Language being the other two), and prospective
immigrants need to prove ‘a reasonable standard of English’ (New
Zealand Immigration, n.d.) in their applications. The New Zealand
Settlement Strategy also lists ‘speaking and understanding New Zealand
English’ (Department of Labour, 2007, p. 15) as one of the seven indicators
of successful migrant settlement. The expectation is clear: if you are
coming to live in New Zealand, you should know how to speak English.
This is fine. It is okay to be upfront about expectations. I imagine life in
New Zealand without a working grasp of English would be a difficult
and isolating affair.
What is not fine is riding the expectation that the general population
be fluent in English down the slippery slope to the expectation that the
general population live and work in exclusively English public space.
Allow me to elaborate.
In 2012, Massey University researchers Robin Peace and Ian Goodwin
studied 500 photographs of Asian language signs taken from areas in
Auckland that have high concentrations of Chinese speaking settlers,
and the official press release summarises the key findings:
1) ‘The proliferation of Asian language signs in Auckland creates a sense
of belonging for new migrants, and a space for others to experience and
learn about migrant cultures that contribute to the city’s cosmopolitan
character’, and
2) ‘some English speaking Kiwis may react negatively to finding
themselves surrounded by signs they cannot translate or understand’
(Massey University, 2012).
New Zealand First party leader Winston Peters, being Winston Peters,
saw an opportunity and said ‘You’ve got to wonder what’s going on with
our immigration programme when you have so many ethnic restaurants
down Dominion Road. If the advertisements are all in a foreign language,
tell me what’s happened to the English language test? Clearly they
haven’t required it to be met’ (Trevett, 2012). Peters’ equation of ‘nonEnglish signage’ with ‘not knowing English’ is fallacious: the existence
of foreign-language signage and the English proficiency of the signagemaker are independent issues, one does not entail the other.
The New Zealand Herald followed the article up with a poll asking
‘Should all business signs be in English?’ (2012), which generated 327
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comments. I did not read the entire thread (there’s a fair bit of ugliness),
but of the comments I did read, many in favour of the mandatory
inclusion of English appeal to a monolingual sense of entitlement over
public space:
English is the main language that is used in NZ, so I consider
it discrimination that businesses are allowed to advertise
without including it. The average NZer has the right to
understand all advertising in their own country. It should
be compulsory for the main language of the country that
a business is residing in to be included in all advertising.
···
I think sign posts should be in English, the fact that some
Chinese Migrants who don’t display their shop signs in
English is not respecting the country and the culture and
the fact that the National language is English. Immigrants
should realise that living in NZ is a privilege no something
to take advantage of. […] It seems like by not respecting the
culture they are insulting NZ.
···
I don’t begrudge other races their rightful place on this
planet. I guess, as an English-speaking white New Zealander,
I’d just feel like I was being embraced by immigrants more
if they made more effort to embrace me – and language/
communication is the best place to start – isn’t it?
Discrimination. Right to understand. Compulsory. Respect. Privilege.
Should. Should. Should.
These are angry, demanding, anxious comments – I have always been
able to understand everything, everything, everything, how dare you not
make everything immediately accessible to me! These comments place
conditions on cultural understanding – new migrants must understand
us, but our understanding of migrant culture is optional – and create
ugly double standards. These are arguments for the English language,
and the white New Zealand culture it represents, to be the universal
point of convergence. Yet, it was only a few hundred years ago that
the English-speaking settlers arrived on these shores: the point of
convergence is not fixed, it shifts.
Perhaps it is small of me to be secretly mirthful that the Chinese signs on
Dominion Road have told an entire demographic of monolingual Englishspeakers to check their privilege, but all linguistic access is privileged.
bell hooks proposes ‘think[ing] of the moment of not understanding
what someone says as a space to learn’ (1995, p. 299) – so if you are
thrown by not understanding a Chinese sign, perhaps you can learn.
Meaningful linguistic access does not happen spontaneously on demand,
not for all the translation apps, no matter how entitled you may feel.
You humble yourself and learn your way in, one word at a time, just like
all the migrants who learnt English.
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socio-linguistic changelings:
These words …
分析_analysis
藝術_art
權威_authority
資本_capital
文明_civilisation
意識_consciousness
文化_culture
經濟_economy
倫理_ethics
希望_hope
歷史_history
人道_humanity
… are all return graphic loans that have passed through
the constructs of power and meaning-making that
governs translation.
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康熙體_TypeLand KhangXi Dict:
Sometimes, a typeface becomes a cultural phenomenon. Think Comic
Sans, Helvetica, or 康熙字典體_TypeLand KhangXi Dict. As its name suggests, Typeland KhangXi Dict is a revival of the type
in the KhangXi Dictionary, a milestone text with 47,035 entries that
remained the standard Chinese dictionary from its publication in 1827
through to the end of the 19th century.
Figure 8. TypeLand KhangXi Dict: a
revived Chinese typeface
Type designer 厲向晨_Li Xiang-Chen undertook this revival project as
academic research, and thus prioritised fidelity to the historical artifact.
Each character was scanned, digitally traced over and vectorised with
minimum retouching, resulting in a slightly distressed typeface full of
quirks and character.
So far, so good.
Two years after its 2010 release, KhangXi Dict was everywhere – ‘它像病
毒一般感染了整座書櫃_it infected entire bookshelves like a virus' (Ke &
Su, 2014, p. 118). Even the Community Languages shelves of Auckland
libraries have the bug too (Figure 9).
KhangXi Dict's popularity in itself did not cause the online backlash of
heckling, parody and boycott-it memes . Misuse did.
Each typeface has its own voice, and good typography is knowing when
to use which. KhangXi Dict is a typeface for speaking of poetry, languid
autumn days and milkshakes in mason jars. It is not a typeface for
speaking of career ladders, corporate management or military histories
as Ke and Su report some did.
Much abused, KhangXi Dict became something of a designer’s in-joke,
something to be used ironically or not at all. But too few alternatives
of the same semiotic register exist, and designers still need a typeface
to talk about hipster and twee.
Ke and Su see the overuse of KhangXi Dict as the inevitable result of
meeting a desperate typographic with one typeface:
2008年，隨著金融海繡席捲，
《海角七號》走紅後，台灣民眾沒
有什麼大確幸可以期待，轉而追求小確幸。
「幸福慢活文化」
越來越火熱。
「文創」成為流行詞，
「古早味」
，
「復古」變成廠商
趨之若驚的產品趨勢。但設計師就開始煩惱了：要用什麼字
型包裝比較好?
正好，康熙字典體出現了，在發表後的一，二年間便紅極一時。
本來，康熙字典體只是少數設計師的新寵。它古拙的質感滿富
人情味，正好填補了中文字型市場上的一大空缺。
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 116)
中文字型選擇過少也是大問題。當設計師需要足以詮釋小確幸
潮流的字體時，我們的字型公司還無動於衷。設計師也只好勉
強使用這個看來不太安全但切合題旨的字體。
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 119)
I think about what it means to have too few typeface choices – it would
be akin to having too few words. Type foundries develop and publish
康熙體_TypeLand KhangXi Dict / 1
In post-financial crisis 2008, the Taiwanese people had no macro-level prosperity
to look forward to, and so sought joy in
little things.
The cultural shift towards living slower,
better, happier gained momentum. Creative capital became a buzzword. Vintage
and retro became trendy and businesses
sought to capture these qualities in their
products. But designers were stuck:
which typeface(s) to use as the face of
this movement?
KhangXi Dict arrived just in time. It rose
from the new favourite of a few select
designers, to the ‘it’ thing in no time: its
rustic texture and humanist warmth perfectly satisfied a huge unmet demand in
the Chinese typeface market.
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 116)
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new typefaces just as popular culture invents and circulates new words
to talk about our ever-shifting world, but typefaces take significantly
more time and investment to make than a new hashtag.
A typeface is also a commodity; language is free. There are weaker
profit incentives to develop new hanzi typefaces – especially traditional
hanzi – relative to Latin typefaces: it's more resource-hungry but
remains vulnerable to piracy and also faces more complex license fee
negotiations.
It is a huge problem to have so few Chinese typefaces to choose from. When designers had need of typefaces relevant
to the joy-in-little-things trend, our type
foundries did not respond to this need.
Designers had to made do with this irregular-looking but aptly topical typeface.
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 119)
I think of what it means for a mode of meaning-making to be subject to
capitalistic imperatives and the other-languaged designers who have
too few typefaces.
I might console myself with a type poster.
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Figure 9. Examples of covers
sporting KhangXi Dict in
Auckland libraries
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Figure 7. Distribution of of PRC-born in Auckland
15
Chowick:
Howick, an eastern suburb of Auckland, is sometimes referred to as
‘Chowick’, a pun on the high percentage of Chinese residents (see Figure
10) and the ching-chong Chinaman jokes of old.
Figure 10. Distribution of PRC-born in
Auckland
Source: Friesen, 2015, p. 24
For the first few years in New Zealand, my family and I lived in Howick,
one house down from my grandmother. My grandmother’s home was
sold after her passing, but my mother still points it out when we drive
past – look, do you remember how she loved her garden?
I think of her when I overhear ‘Chowick’, and wonder what she would
have thought of the term. I also think of the other suburbs marked on
this map, and experience a weird sense of pride that only Howick puns
so effortlessly.
Chowick / 1
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Asian Auckland: The multiple meanings of diversity 24
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Chowick / 2
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false italics:
Italicisation is an important means of semiotic communication in
English-language typography. I am whispering. I am defining a term. I
am being sarcastic. I am emphasising this, not that. The 'italics mine'
notes in academic citations acknowledge its semiotic power: italicisation
can change meaning so much that we must make clear its authorship,
lest we put words in other people's mouths.
But not all orthographies, represented in print by typefaces, support
italicisation. If non-equivalence between languages is interpreted as a
'lack' (Liu, 1995), I hypothesise non-equivalence between typographic
practices is also interpreted as such.
False italics force an unsound equivalence between hanzi and Latinscript typography. False italics compromise optimal readability by
distorting the proportions of strokes and the balance of counters within
a hanzi or kanji character, the way a corset compresses internal organs
and chokes off breath.
We can ask typographers of Chinese and Japanese traditions how
their scripts communicate semiotically – it would be fallacious to
suggest italicisation is the only typographic means of indicating hushed
reverence, definition, sarcasm and emphasis.
Yet, the imperative to participate in the economies of English is driving
hanzi-using type designers to experiment with creating Chinese and
Japanese italics.
郭家榮_Guo Jia-Rong, a design student at Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, presented two experimental italic fonts at the 2014
Outstanding Chinese Character Design Works exhibition. Of Experiment
#01 (Figure 11), Guo writes:
這個字體是希望保留黑體同等粗幼度的特色而同時加入手寫
的風格。筆劃的傾斜切口，橫劃的10度傾斜度和筆劃上的改變
令字體具有手寫的味道。
This typeface is intended to intimate the handwriting
style of Chinese while keeping the same line width and
Hei feeling. The terminals were slant cutted to create the
calligraphic touch. The horizontal strokes were incline 10
degrees anti clockwise and strokes were modified to create
the handwriting style.
Figure 11. Experiment #01, designed by
郭家榮_Guo Jia-Rong.
Source: Ke & Su, 2014, p. 185
(quoted in Ke & Su, 2014, p. 185)
I don't know what to think of this.
I am excited, because oh my god, new typefaces!
But in the back of my mind, I also think oh no, this is typography in
its most matchy-matchy outfit. Is this a kind of blandness? Is this the
technical imperialism of the English language at work?
I don’t know what to think of this.
false italics / 1
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false italics / 2
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17
typographers:
In 字型散步_A Chinese font walk, there is an ernest grappling to find the
equivalent of ‘typography’ in Mandarin:
Typography這個字在中文一直沒有很準確的翻譯，有人翻譯
成「字體排印學」
，因為這是一門涉及字體，文字大小，行距，
字間，縮排等排版技巧，甚至選紙，裝幀整套流程的工藝。不僅
是書籍排版，舉凡海報設計，廣告，書法，街頭塗鴉，碑刻，公共
空間標示商標，凡是需要用到「字」的地方，都跟typography脫
不了關係。
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 20)
I wonder why it seems so natural for Ke and Su to use the English
term 'typography', set in Latin letters, throughout the book when the
converse seems so impossible – will there ever be an English-language
publication on 書法_shufa that opts to use hanzi characters instead of
the misleading English translation ‘calligraphy’ (see calligraphically)?
typographers / 1
The term ‘typography’ has never been
translated very precisely in Chinese.
Some translate it as ‘the study of setting
type’, because the craft involves typesetting skills such as typeface choice, font
sizes, tracking, kerning, and indentation.
Typography can even extend to include
paper selection and binding processes.
It is not limited to book design: any use
of the written word – poster design, advertising, calligraphy, graffiti, plaque
engravings, public signage – is a case for
typography.
(Ke & Su, 2014, p. 20)
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typographers / 2
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18
microaggressions:
The microaggression ‘oh, your English is really good’ implies:
1. You assume there exists some deterministic relationship between
an individual’s proficiency in the English language and their
ethnicity (Which tint of whiteness were you thinking of?)
2. You have observed I am not white-looking.
3. You are surprised that a non-white-looking person can do
something as well as a white-looking person.
I shrug these off like glass dust.
But I don’t quite know what to do when another Mandarin-speaker tells
me ‘妳的中文真好_your Mandarin is really good’, you whose voice I long
to hear when living in English gets lonely.
Why are you surprised I speak Mandarin well? I am curious what unyokes
your expectation that a Chinese-looking person speaks some strain of
Chinese.
A 1996 survey lists four salient factors of identifying as Taiwanese (Tsao,
2008a, p. 277):
1. being born in Taiwan
2. living in Taiwan
3. regarding oneself to be Taiwanese
4. having Taiwan listed as ‘native place’
Tick.
No-tick.
It’s-complicated-maybe-tick?
No-tick.
Ah, only one out of four.
I hypothesise you don’t consider me Chinese/Taiwanese enough to be
proficient in the language – is this true?
Remind me to ask when I next see you.
microaggressions / 1
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microaggressions / 2
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19
standard-english.exe:
Someone once told me ‘I can’t imagine you learning English’.
I learnt my first English words with my mother’s self-made, crayoned
flip cards. I came home with vocabulary lists from school for spelling,
appended with my parents’ extended lists. I went to extracurricular
language classes. I did reading comprehension exercises, sat more
spelling tests, memorised tables of irregular verbs and wrote an essay
a week.
In brief, my parents made certain I did everything someone seriously
invested in acquiring a language would do.
All operating systems have an intallation process.
standard-english.exe / 1
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standard-english.exe / 2
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20
consequences for your choice:
When I was a teenager, I used to overhear my mother’s friends tell
her how their children refuse to learn Mandarin, how they cajole or
discipline, and how effective or ineffective their efforts.
One mother pretended not to understand her daughter if she spoke
to her in English – if she wants her favourite pork dish for dinner, she
knows how to say it in Mandarin, the mother said.
I don’t hear such conversations anymore, circumstantially because I no
longer live at home, but more likely because mothers of adult children
have other things on their minds.
Perhaps when there are grandchildren.
···
Chinese studies lecturer Edward McDonald argues disjunctions between
one’s assigned ethnicity and one’s sociolinguistic repertoire – ethnically
Chinese people who do not speak Chinese, ethnically non-Chinese
people who do speak Chinese – can be mitigated if one acknowledges
‘that of equal importance to your native socio-cultural background,
which is to a large extent given, are the new areas you move into by
choice or circumstance’ (2011, p. 215, italics original).
The idea of ‘choice’ in language maintenance interests me, because
this is a ‘choice’ I witness my English-Mandarin bilingual peers make
each time we gather. We get a little tipsy and no one ever seems very
thoughtful about the relationships they have with their language(s).
Our choices aren’t always rational. We do not always know what we are
choosing. Perhaps we are all adrift, coasting on circumstance.
Or perhaps we have yet to be confronted with the consequences of
our choices, as graphic novelist 林莉菁_Lin Li-Jing was. She chose,
at a young age, to speak 國語_guoyu, the language of the ruling elite,
rather than her native 台語_Southern Min, and illustrates a moment in
which she was mistaken as 外省人_waishengren, a term referring to the
Mainlanders who arrived in Taiwan in 1945 after the Chinese Civil War.
In Figure 12, Lin draws herself paying for some sweets at a dairy. The
exchange is initially unremarkable, her face lit up with anticipation for
the treats, but quickly spirals towards self-doubt and ‘bitterness’(2012,
p. 55) after the dairy owner asks if Lin is a 外省人_waishengren. As the
exchange progresses, the character’s mouth moves from a wide smile,
to a warier, less open smile, to a pursed dot, and then a full erasure of
not only her mouth, but all her facial features. Being asked whether
she is a waishengren not only wiped the smile from the character’s
face, literally and metaphorically, but Lin’s change in illustrative tone
indicates how deeply affected she is by the question.
The question divides the earlier, detailed and literal frames from the
latter abstracted and metaphoric frames (Figure 13 and Figure 14), in
which Lin’s character is drawn in fewer and fewer lines, less and less
present. The character’s body disintegrates and becomes four discrete
components – a hat, a faceless head, two arms with hands – like a paper
doll, or a young girl suddenly outside of herself, adrift, uncertain. As
consequences for your choice / 1
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these body parts are lifted by a force shown as ragged, dark lines, Lin Figure 12. Excerpt from
asks herself ‘Why would he ask me this question? I’m not a waishen 《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
child. […] Is it because my Mandarin was too proper, so that’s why he 頭》_My youth, My FORMOSA I: Sew on a
new tongue
asked? Or was he just curious, and meant nothing by it?’ (2012, p. 55).
The body parts eventually land, and a mouth reappears on the blank
face. The new mouth is not drawn in the same style as her old mouth
– it is not an abstracted line, it is an anatomically descriptive organ,
with fully delineated lips and teeth and tongue, in the same style as
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the mouth-organs Lin drew earlier when her character cut out her Figure 13. Excerpt from
tongue (see Figure 2). The final frame shows the new mouth reciting 《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
頭》
the bopomafo phonetic alphabet designed for learning Mandarin rather new tongue
than speaking in words. Read together with the accompanying text ‘I
diligently learnt Mandarin, and became mistaken for a waishen child, Source: Lin, 2012, p. 54
so theoretically I should be happy – this means I’m properly Chinese. So
why do I feel this bitterness?’ (2012, p.55), Lin makes clear that choices
about one’s language can have heart-rending consequences, leaving
one feeling disembodied and erased.
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···
The other day, I bumped into A, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, and
there was a moment of uncertainty: which language should I greet her
in? We used to speak to each other in Mandarin, when we were little,
but she spoke first, in her fluent, sing-song English. Hi, she said. It’s
good to see you, she said.
Figure 14. Excerpt from
《我的青春我的FORMOSA:Ⅰ 縫上新舌
頭》
new tongue
Erosion is a slow process, one awkward run-in at a time.
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rn Min)
(Southe
r
re is you
Here, he .
candy
(clearly enunciated Mandarin)
Then, I want this kind of
candy, and that kind…
(correctly accented Mandarin)
Thanks, here’s the money.
(Southern Min)
Thanks.
Just a
second,
kid…
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(Southern Min)
… are you a
waishengren?
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Why would he ask me this question?
I’m not a waishen child.
My ancestors migrated to Taiwan centuries ago, who knows,
some may have intermarried with the Aboriginal peoples…
My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother and I were all
born and raised in Taiwan.
Is it because my Mandarin was too proper, so
that’s why he asked? Or was he just curious,
and meant nothing by it?
I, I tried to meet the expectations of social norms
and values …
… I diligently learnt Mandarin, and became mistaken for a weishan child,
so theoretically I should be happy – this means I’m properly Chinese.
So why do I feel this bitterness?
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21
Ya-Wen:
How should I introduce myself to you, from one language to another?
賀雅雯
I can be a trans-cultural translation …
Jenny Ho
When we immigrated from Taipei to Auckland in 1995, my parents
thought English names would make our lives easier. I don’t remember
choosing Jenny, or even browsing for an English name, but I do
remember we had matching initials: my mother’s Jane to my Jenny,
my father’s Kelly to my brother’s Kevin. A family of monograms.
I wonder if my parents used new names to mark our inevitable reversion
to an infantile state of re-learning everything in a different place. We
were baby-like, and babies get new names.
I lived as Jenny until it was time to get my university student ID. I had
grown out of the name. One of my highschool teachers advised against
outing myself as ‘Ya-Wen’, claiming a non-English name would hurt my
employment prospects. An ugly truth, she called it.
But I have always been clumsy, and cannot help falling through the
paper-thin façade of whiteness, of being Jenny.
賀雅雯
… or a phonetic translation …
Ho Ya-Wen
Phonetic translations are imperfect. I notice the infidelities when I
introduce myself in Mandarin to another Mandarin speaker, always
pausing briefly to re-calibrate my sounds.
Some phonetic translations approach perfection. I once dated someone
whose name was simultaneously a phonetic and trans-cultural
translation, 力友_Li-You_Leo. I thought that quite perfect, his havinghis-cake-and-eating-it-too name.
賀雅雯雅
jubilant elegance, a rippled cloud
亞
… or a semantic translation.
A name can be a poem.
ya
While context is usually sufficient for aural comprehension in Mandarin,
a homophone-rich language, one often needs to disambiguate when
introducing oneself.
A Taiwanese name is typically three syllables, each syllable visualised
by a hanzi character. However, the writing system is such that any given
syllable maps onto more than one hanzi character (Figure 15) and it is
difficult to know how to write someone's name just from hearing it.
Ya-Wen / 1
啞
氬
雃
亚
Figure 15. The syllable ya can be
visually represented by several
different hanzi characters
厊
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Thus, just as how one might use the word 'wear' in a sentence to
distinguish it from the word 'where' in English, it is common practice
to contextualise the hanzi characters in one's name in brief epithets or
phrases. If the hanzi character does not readily exist in a recognisable
phrase, it is sometimes described according to its deconstructed
graphemes.
In this way, an introduction becomes a poetic exercise. Syllables are
added to and become words, coaxing semantic meaning from sound.
My mother taught my name to me as:
恭賀新喜the ho from
的賀 gong ho xin xi_jubilant new year wishes
優雅the ya from
的雅 you ya_elegance
雨文雯the wen written as
的雯
yu wen wen_rain-above-words
A name can be a poem.
Ya-Wen / 2
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A note on the type
This essay is typeset in Source Sans and Source Han Sans.
Source Han Sans is co-developed by Adobe and Google, in collaboration
with three region-specific type foundries – Iwata (Japan), Sandoll
Communication (Korea), and Changzhou Sinotype (China). The new
typeface family provides full support for Japanese, Korean, Traditional
Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Thus, a designer may transition
seamlessly across these languages with just one typeface rather
than selecting four complementary typefaces, one for each language
respectively.
Ryoko Nishizuka, a Senior Designer on the Tokyo-based team, designed
the underlying ‘look’ of Source Han Sans to complement Adobe’s Source
Sans and Google’s Roboto and Noto Sans, leading to ‘a typeface that is
moderately modern in style, with simplified strokes and a monolinear
quality’ (Belohlavek, 2014).
I see in the development of Source Han Sans an acknowledgment of the
increasing importance and influence of East Asia, and subsequently, the
increased profile of its scripts. The ‘need for an open-sourced typeface
that covered a broad set of East Asian languages’ (Belohlavek, 2014)
may have been identified in the early 2010s, but designers working in
Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese would
have been grappling with bi-lingual typesetting for years prior to this.
The need is not new; what is new is prominent parties committing
vast resources to address this need – recognition that multilingual
environments create typographic problems worth solving.
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References:
Belohlavek, C. (2014, July 15). Introducing Source Han Sans: An open
source Pan-CJK typeface. Retrieved from http://blog.typekit.
com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/
Bringhurst, R. (2002). Voices, languages and scripts around the world. In
J. D. Berry & International Typographic Association (Eds.), Language
culture type: International type design in the age of Unicode (pp. 3–23).
New York: Graphis.
Chen, L. 陳黎 (2010). Traveling between languages. Poetry, 195 (6),
470–478.
DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech : The diverse oneness of writing
systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Friesen, W. (2015). Asian Auckland: The multiple meanings of diversity.
Asia New Zealand Foundation. Retrieved from http://asianz.org.nz/
reports/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ANZF1033-Auckland-Report_-FA2.pdf
hooks, bell. (1995). “this is the oppresor’s language / yet I need it to talk
to you”: Language, a place of struggle. In A. D. Needham & C. Maier
(Eds.), Between languages and cultures: translation and cross-cultural
texts (pp. 295–301). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Jiang, X. 蔣勳 (2009). The aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy: Dancing
cursive 漢字書法之美 : 舞動行草. Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing.
Jin, S.-H. 金聖華 (2008). Towards a way of translation 齊向譯道行. Taipei:
San Min Book Co.
justfont. (2015, September 8). 金萱，新時代中文字型，培育新鮮台灣文
字風景. Retrieved October 29, 2015, from https://www.flyingv.cc/
project/8250
Ke, Z.-J., 柯志杰 & Su, W.-X. 蘇煒翔 & (2014). A Chinese font walk 字型散
步: 日常生活的中文字型學. Taipei: Faces Publishing.
Lin, H. M. 林懷民 (2007). On the road with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre:
Seven weeks, eight cities, diary of a Continental tour 跟雲門去流浪：
七周八城的歐洲巡演日記. Taipei: Locus Publishing.
Link, P. (2006). Whose assumptions does Xu Bing upset, and why? In J.
Silbergeld & D. C. Y. Ching (Eds.), Persistence-transformation: text as
image in the art of Xu Bing (pp. 47–57). Princeton: P. Y. and Kinmay W.
Tang Center for East Asian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology,
Princeton University, in association with Princeton University Press.
Lin, L.-J. 林莉菁 (2012). My youth, My FORMOSA I: Sew on a new tongue《
我的青春我的FORMOSA》Ⅰ 縫上新舌頭. Taipei: Mobius Publishing.
Liu, L. H. (1995). Translingual practice : literature, national culture, and
translated modernity, China, 1900-1937. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press.
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Maier, C. (1995). Toward a theoretical practice for cross-cultural
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and cultures: Translation and cross-cultural texts (pp. 21–38).
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
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里4号到天桥北里4号》
. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/126577240
McDonald, E. (2011). Learning Chinese, turning Chinese: Challenges to
becoming sinophone in a globalised world. London: Routledge.
Nakayasu, S., & Sagawa, C. (2011). Mouth: Eats color : Sagawa Chika
translations, anti-translations & originals. Tokyo: Rogue Factorial.
Nørgaard, N. (2009). The semiotics of typography in literary texts: A
multimodal approach. Orbis Litterarum, 64 (2), 141–160. http://doi.
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article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10806008#comment-form
Stalling, J. (2011). Yingelishi: Sinophonic English poetry and poetics.
Denver: Counterpath Press.
Takagi, M. (2014). Hanzi Graphy: a typographic translation between Latin
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Tsao, F. (2008). The language planning situation in Taiwan. In R. B.
Kaplan & R. B. Baldauf (Eds.), Language Planning and Policy in Asia
(pp. 237–284). Bristol, UK ; Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters.
Xu, B. (2009a). The making of Book From the Sky. In Katherine Spears
(Ed.), H. Drew (Trans.), Tianshu : Passages in the Making of a Book
(pp. 51–63). London: Bernard Quaritch.
Xu, B. 徐冰 (2009b). Tianshu de guocheng《天書》的過程. In Katherine
Spears (Ed.), Tianshu : Passages in the Making of a Book (pp. 41–49).
London: Bernard Quaritch.
Zhou, W.-Y. (2012). Lán ê chheng-chhun, lán ê Formosa, lán kiōng-tông
ê bī-lâi 我們的青春，我們的福爾摩沙，我們共同的未來. In My youth,
My FORMOSA I: Sew on a new tongue《我的青春我的FORMOSA》Ⅰ
縫上新舌頭 (pp. 2–10). Taipei: Mobius Publishing
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a Taiwan:
To understand Lin’s account of linguistic trauma, it is necessary to
know about Taiwan’s ‘complex and bitter’ (Tsao, 2008, p. 238) ethnolinguistic history.
The ethnic composition of Taiwan’s population (Figure 16) informs the
distribution of linguistic power: of the fourteen official languages, the
Austro-Polynesian languages remain the most marginalised despite
being a mandatory part of the school curriculum.
The language policies of past governments have also contributed to
the erosion of indigenous and minority languages (Table 2):
Table 2. Overview of language policies in Taiwan
Austro-Polynesians arrive in
Taiwan
60008000
years
ago
The Dutch colonises southern
Taiwan
16241661
•• Non-discriminatory, nonoppressive language policies
The Spanish colonises northern
Taiwan
16251648
•• Missionaries create a writing
system for Siraya, an indigenous
language used as the lingua
francua in the south
Zheng Cheng-Kong drives out
the Dutch and rules
16621683
•• The Southern Min dialect is
brought to Taiwan by Zheng and
his personnel
Qing governmental rule replaces
Zheng’s rule
16831895
•• Immigration from mainland
China to Taiwan brings:
-- Southern Min (Zhangzhou)
-- Southern Min
(Quanzhou)
-- Hakka (Hai-lu)
-- Hakka (Si-hsien)
Qing government loses SinoJapanese war and cedes Taiwan
to Japan
1895
Figure 16. Ethnic composition of
Taiwan’s population
73.7%Taiwanese_Minnanren_
Southern Min people
13.0%Mainlanders
12.0%Hakka
1.7%Austro-Polynesians
Atayal
Saisiyat
Bunun
Tsou
Ruikai
Paiwan
Amis
Puyuma
Yami
Source: Tsao, 2008, p. 238,
visualised by Ya-Wen Ho
Stage 1: Pacification (1895-1919)
•• Private Chinese schools are
tolerated
The Japanese undertake a language program to integrate Taiwan into the Japanese Empire
18951945
•• Chinese is taught as a mandatory
subject in public schools, to
which the public are encouraged
to send their children
Stage 2: Assimilation (1919-1937)
•• Private Chinese schools are
banned
•• Chinese made an elective subject
in public schools
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Stage 3: Complete Japanisation
(1937-1945)
•• Chinese is banned in all public
domains
•• Launches ‘only-Japanesespeaking-families’ campaign to
drive indigenous languages from
the family domain
Taiwan returned to China
1945
•• Mandarin becomes lingua
francua for interdialectical
communication for the
non-homogenous group of
Mainlanders
Nationalist government loses
Mainland China to Chinese Communists, retreats to Taiwan and
rules by martial law
19451986
•• The language policy is unidirectional bilingualism: nonMandarin speakers are expected
to learn Mandarin, but Mandarin
speakers are not expected to
learn another language
•• Mandarin is promoted as the
國語_guoyu_national language
•• Use of indigenous languages is
severely restricted in mass media
Source: Tsao, 2008, p. 238-242, visualised by Ya-Wen Ho
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b semiotics of typography:
How the visual representation of text constructs meaning wanders into
the realm of the semiotics of typography.
Is it handwritten or is it a typeface? Is it angular or round? Extended or
condensed? Is the x-height raised or lowered? What colour is it? Serif?
Sans serif? A typeface comes loaded with its own histories, references
and non-textual information which contributes to the meaning of
the text. Nina Nørgaard argues ‘there is a general tendency in literary
criticism to disregard the semiotic potential of typography in literature
by focusing monomodally on word-meaning only’ (2009, p. 141). I agree.
Typography is a site of potentiality; meaning is malleable via typographic
puns. Typographers 柯志杰_Ke Zhi-Jie and 蘇煒翔_Su Wei-Xiang call
typography the 'fastest and most effective way to transform a somber
public memorial into a festive celebration'(2014, p. 29) (Figure 17).
Semiotic communication through typography is culturally specific.
The designer/reader needs a certain level of contextual knowledge to
compose/decode a typographic message. In the work 析世鍳– 世紀末
卷_Mirror to Analyze the World: The Century’s Final Volume, better known
as 天書_Tianshu_Book from the Sky, artist 徐冰_Xu Bing uses typographic
semiotics to bolster the ‘absolute bookness’ of his non-book:
我不能用楷体，因为任何楷体都帶著書寫者介人风格，风格是
一种信息，既有內容，就違背了《天書》
“抽空”的原则。我决定使
用略微偏扁的宋体，扁会融進些汉隶之感，但不能過，有一点
感覺就够。
(Xu, 2009b, p. 42)
For my work, I could not use the standard Regular style
typeface because it derives from an individual writer’s style.
Style is a kind of information with a content that would be
contrary to the criterion of ‘emptiness’ in Book from the Sky.
So I decided on a slightly compressed Song style typeface.
The mild compression invokes the feel of Han ‘Clerical style’
calligraphy, but only slightly so. A slight feeling of the sort
is enough.
Figure 17. Both encircled characters
read 祭_ji_ceremony.
(left) This character is set in
DFKai-SB, the typeface mandated for
all Taiwanese government agencies.
The white text on a blue background,
together with the circular outline,
indicates a public memorial service to
Taiwanese audiences.
(right) This character is set in Kanteiryu,
a style originating from the Japanese
kabuki tradition and now commonly
used to signify festivities.
Source: Ke & Su, 2014, p. 29
(Xu, 2009a, p. 53)
In contemporary multi-lingual spaces, the semiotics of typography can
extend beyond the question of which typeface to which language, as
visually represented by its script. Designers are no longer necessarily
just choosing between Times New Roman or Garamond, but between
English or Hindi or Chinese or any other combination of scripts.
In her study of the orthographies of Delhi, Viniti Vaish found that
advertisements use the English script to ‘provide symbolic evidence that
the [client] is “ultra modern” (2013, p. 53). Each script has developed
its own semiotic value: ‘English is mixed into Hindi with the goal of
appearing modern, western and scientific, Sanskrit is mixed to appear
reliable and traditional, and Persian or Urdu is mixed for the product
to appear luxurious’ (Vaish, 2013, p. 44).
semiotics of typography / 1
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Vaish adds:
[...] by using English words, even when Hindi or Urdu
equivalents are available, the [client] projects a bicultural
identity, one which is rooted in the national language but
global enough to understand key English words associated
with middle class lifestyle.
(2013, p. 56)
New typographic challenges arise as different languages increasingly
co-occupy the same mediums of communication – how do you typeset
a multi-lingual page harmoniously? What factors should a designer
consider when choosing typefaces from multiple languages? Can
multilingual typesetting be more than a discrete block of language A set
next to a block of language B? Since writing is the visual representation
of language, and typography is the systematic study of type, a subset
of writing, it follows that emerging trends in language use will find
expression in new typefaces and typographic experiments.
I encounter hybridised script on K’Road. The signage for an Indian
restaurant, Kati Grill, splices English letters with the horizontal ligatures
of Devanagari script (Figure 18).The letters are legible as English, but
the curves of the loops and the slants of the ascenders are Devanagari.
To understand how two vastly different scripts may be seamlessly spliced
together in this way, I find DeFrancis’ careful explanation of the frame,
distinct from the grapheme, useful:
(1) The meaningless graphic unit that corresponds to the
smallest segment of speech represented in writing. This is
the basic operation unit without which a script simply could
not function. I call this unit a grapheme.
(2) The basic unit of writing that is surrounded by white
space on the printed page. I call this unit a frame […].
Figure 18. Kati Grill logo..
Source: katigrill.co.nz
English graphemes are letters that either singly or in
combination represent phonemes (e.g. s, sh). They may
themselves constitute frames (e.g. I and a in “I have a
dream”.) or combine to form frames representing words. It
has become the convention, especially since the advent of
printing, to separate words by white space[…].
Chinese graphemes are characters that singly represent
whole syllables. They may themselves constitute frames
(e.g. the character for ma ‘horse’), or combine with other
nonphonetic elements to form more complex characters
representing frames (e.g., the character for ma ‘mother’).
It is important to note that in English, apart from a few oneletter frames such as the pronoun I and the article a, frames
always consist of more than one grapheme – as many as
twenty-three in a long word like disestablishmentarianism.
In addition to differing in number of phonetic components,
the graphemes and frames also differ in the amount of space
that they occupy. These self-evident disparities bring out in
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strong relief and constantly reinforce the difference between
the two units in English.
In contrast, Chinese frames invariably contain only one
grapheme and are so written as to occupy exactly the
same amount of space as an independent grapheme (e.g.
the characters for ‘horse’ and ‘mother’ [Figure 19]). These
obvious but secondary similarities between the two units
contribute to the general failure to make a clear distinction
between grapheme and frame in Chinese, which in turn leads
to the common mistake of concentrating on the frame as
the more conspicuous and ubiquitous unit.
The Kati Grill example is feasible because Devanagari and Latin script
share a compatible grapheme-frame logic. Despite the significant
differences in each grapheme, the two scripts nonetheless form words,
each demarcated by a size-variable frame, by adjoining graphemes in
a horizontal sequence. Thus, it is possible to incorporate Devanagari
characteristics into English letterforms.
‘horse’
‘mother’
grapheme
grapheme
frame
nonphonetic
element
frame
Figure 19. Analysis of the characters
馬_ma_horse, and 媽_ma_mother
Source: DeFrancis, 1989, p. 54,
visualised by Ya-Wen Ho
Is this level of hybridity possible between Latin script and hanzi? The
Latin-script frame varies in size according to the number of graphemes;
the hanzi frame is fixed in size, regardless of the number of graphemes.
How can you splice together a thing that expands and contracts with
a thing that is invariably still? Furthermore, while an English word is
a horizontal sequence of graphemes, a hanzi character organises its
graphemes and non-phonetic elements in a grid, in which designer
Mariko Takagi identifies 23 possible modular constructions (Figure 20):
Figure 20. 23 ways in which a hanzi
character may be organised.
Source: Takagi, 2014, pp. 88–89
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In addition to differences in frame variability and grapheme organisation,
the ultimate problem is the uncertainty of the material to be spliced.
The English alphabet is fixed, but the twenty-six letters combine and
recombine to generate a vast number of words. With no hanzi equivalent
of the alphabet letter, we may not be able to create a working spliced
Latin and hanzi font. But it is possible to splice frames together.
At the 2015 好漢玩字_The Delight of Chinese Character exhibition, I
came across the work of two designers, 陳秀真_Chen Xiu-Zhen and
蔡長青_ Tsai Chang-Qing, in a collection of type posters of fortuitous
sayings for the Chinese New Year.
Tsai’s poster reads 迎春_ying chun_welcoming spring. Figure 21 shows
how the entire frame of ‘iN’ has been embedded within the frame of the
hanzi character 迎 by substituting the strokes and with the letters ‘i’
and ‘N’ respectively. The embedding of ‘iN’ in the hanzi character does
not render the character unreadable as Tsai has abided by the hanzi
character’s internal logic: the vertical stem of ‘i’ occupies the same space
as would have been occupied by , and the capital letter ‘N’ approximates
the shape of . The bilingual reader is also impressed by the cleverness
of playing on the English sound ‘in’ and the Chinese sound 迎_ying. The
addition of the English preposition is also a semantic pun which builds
on the meaning of 迎春_‘welcoming spring’ to generate the readings
‘welcoming spring in’ or ‘welcoming in the spring’.
Chen’s work is more ambitious in scope, although it works in similar
ways. The poster reads 長壽_chang shou_long life, and the elongated
frames mimetically show this longevity (Figure 22).
If ‘LONG’ and ‘LIFE’ were to be set horizontally, as Tsai’s ‘iN’ is, the width
of the Latin-script frames would far exceed the width of the hanzi frames,
resulting in an inelegant splice. Chen solves this problem by rotating
the English words 90° clockwise to read vertically, in line with the hanzi
characters. Like Tsai, Chen also plays up the similarities between the
English letterforms and the strokes in the hanzi character. For example,
all the letters are capitalised to achieve a consistent x-height and better
mimic the consistent width of the hanzi cross strokes. The ‘L’ in ‘LONG’
is a high fidelity replacement for the upper left angle of 長_ chang, and
the vertical stems of the rotated ‘N’ form the new cross strokes of the
hybridised 長_chang.
Figure 21. 迎春_ying chun_welcoming
spring, by 蔡長青_ Tsai Chang-Qing.
Source: The Delight of Chinese Character
exhibition, 2015, Kao Hsiung
In the character 壽_ shou_life, Tsai manipulates capital ‘L’ to more
closely resemble the hanzi angled cross stroke by adding an angle
to the typically non-angled terminal of the vertical stem. Tsai’s pun has
no aural resonances, but splices the translation into each word.
As these two examples show, it is possible for Latin-script and hanziscript to be spliced at an intimate, stroke-t-stroke level. Yet, such puns
are context-specific one-offs: not all Chinese words and their English
translations will pair so seamlessly.
Figure 22. 長壽_chang shou_long life,
by 陳秀真_Chen Xiu-Zhen.
Source: The Delight of Chinese Character
exhibition, 2015, Kao Hsiung
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c misrepresented as pictographic:
The Chinese writing system is not pictographic.
To insiste a hanzi character is a picture is to buy into an incorrect
stereotype about the Chinese language. Designer and typographer
Mariko Takagi calls the misconception of Chinese as ‘a mysterious
and inconvenient language of logograms’ (2014, p. 12) out as the
‘most damaging Eurocentric [stereotype]’ (2014, p. 12). German
linguist Christian Stetter describes Latin letters and the alphabet as
‘transcendent, expressive and abstract’ (quoted in Takagi, 2014, p. 12)
and Chinese characters as ‘secular, denotative and pictorial’ (quoted
in Takagi, 2014, p. 12). Takagi believes Stetter’s view – the rational West
versus the aesthetic East – remains representative of the world view
of Chinese writing.
To insist a hanzi character is a picture is to undermine the validity of
Chinese orthography as writing. Takagi points out that only a very small
percentage of Chinese characters – approximately 600 – are pictograms,
and that ‘possibilities of this category is limited’ (2014, p. 15). Poet and
typographic historian Robert Bringhurst distinguishes drawing from
writing with four characteristics, one of which is that writing is abstract.
Bringhurst explains:
Pictures can be made by playing games with writing, but
in writing itself no significant pictorial content remains. In
Eric Gill’s famous phrase, ‘letters are things, not pictures of
things’. Some very eminent non-readers of Chinese have
wanted to think otherwise, but this is true for Chinese
characters as well as Latin script. Non-readers seek out
every wisp of pictorial residue in the characters because
looking at the pictures is much easier than learning to read
in Chinese. For those who read and write with ease, these
associations vanish. Fluent readers of Chinese do not in
fact see pictures of horses and mountains in their texts any
more than fluent readers of English see pictures of I-beams,
D-rings, T-squares, vees of geese or S-shaped links of chain.
Such child’s play intrudes upon the reverie of reading.
(2002, p. 6)
To insist a hanzi character is a picture is to other Chineseness, to cast
a culture as so fundamentally different that Chineseness is forever
impenetrable.
misrepresented as pictographic / 6
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misrepresented as pictographic / 7
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d equivalence
I am starting to notice my desire for equivalence between worlds,
between languages.
The idea that languages are commensurate and equivalents
exist naturally between them is, of course, a common illusion.
[…] The thriving industry of bilingual dictionaries depends
on the tenacity of this illusion – its will to power. It is the
business of this industry to make sure that one understand
'that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms'.
The implication for cross-cultural comparison is that one
relies on a conceptual model derived from the bilingual
dictionary – that is, a word in language A must equal a word
or a phrase in language B; otherwise one of the languages
is lacking – to form opinions about other peoples or to lay
philosophical grounds for discourses about other cultures
and, conversely, about one's own totalised identity.
(Liu, 1995, pp. 3–4)
I notice my desire for – and the failure of – equivalence when I try to
tell my cousin about the pohutukawa_桃金娘科常綠樹. I notice it also
when I try to tell an Aucklander about the 桂花_guihua_sweet olive.
Translated labels cannot make known the crisp summer light that
illuminates a pohutukawa, nor the fragrance of 桂花_guihua_sweet olive
in my grandmother's dessert. You can pin labels in different languages
on these trees, but each tree grows in its own soil, separated by seas.
Translator 金聖華_ Jin Sheng-Hua experiences a connundrum in
translating the tulip. In the naming of a flower, equivalence forecloses
creative possibility:
在白先勇的名篇〈永遠的尹雪艷〉當中，主角尹雪艷是個活色生
香的人物，她一出場，就令人印象難忘。
「那天尹雪艷著實裝飾
了一番…。為了討喜氣，尹雪艷破例的在右鬢簪上一朵酒杯大
血紅的鬱金香，而耳朵上卻吊著一對寸把長的銀墜子。」
（
《臺北
人》
，香港：中文大學出版社，2000,頁21) 這「鬱金香」三個字的
確用得妙。
「鬱」點出了神態，
「金」代表了「色澤」
，
「香」帶出了「
氣息」
，可是一譯成英文，就變成了“tulip”，不但是個雙音節字，
而且語音急促，絕無「鬱金香」三字引發的美感可言，這可如何
是好?譯者商討之下，決定改譯為 “camellia”（茶花）
，取其音
節綿長有致，婉約動人之故。誰知後來《臺北人》出了中英對
照版本，這樣一來，不得不把「鬱金香」還原成 “tulip”，免得讀
者諸君以為這個「翻譯團隊」
，竟連這麼淺顯的花名也譯錯了。
(Jin, 2008, pp. 73–74)
Jin writes wistfully of her and her team's decision to prioritise equivalence
above the re-presentation of poetic Chinese prose as poetic English
prose, on the terms of the English language.
We could have had poetry; we have matchy-matchy instead.
equivalence / 1
In Bai Xian-Yong’s acclaimed story The
Eternal Snow Beauty, the protagonist Yin
Hsueh-yen epitomises beauty and charm.
Her entrance is unforgettable: ‘That evening, Yin Hsueh-yen had taken extra care
to dress elegantly. […] To attract good
fortune, for once she wore a blood-red tulip the size of a little wine cup at her right
temple, and long silver pendants hung
from her ears’ (translation from Taipei
People, Hong Kong, Chinese University
Press, 2000, p.20).
The [Chinese] diction – 鬱金香 – is ingenious: 鬱_ yu_melancholy alludes to her
manner, 金_jin_ gold shows hue, and
香_xiang_fragrance gives perfume. But
not only is its English translation ‘tulip’ a
brief, two-syllable utterance, the English
term preserves no aesthetic allusions.
What is to be done? After a team discussion, we settled upon translating ‘鬱金香'
as the ‘camellia’ for its soft-spoken and
subdued sounds. But the publisher Taipei
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This example illustrates translation theorist Carol Maier's point that
equivalence is a constrictive, loss-inducing binary:
In the case of translation, however, the strongest associations
of loss prove not to lie in the impossibility of transferring
a given 'meaning' from one language to another. Quite
the contrary, the loss that beginning translators articulate
concerns the practice of translation itself. For what impresses
them is not so much the difficulty of finding 'equivalents'
as the opportunity to explore available possibilities and to
discover new ones.
lingual edition. Under these new circumstances, we had to revert to ‘tulip’, lest
readers accuse the translation team for
mistranslating a simple botanical term.
(Maier, 1995, p. 21)
Expected by readers and publishers to provide the results of
translation rather than a record of their explorations, they
assume the translator's nearly habitual stance regarding
translation that, however productive in theory, must be
abandoned in favor of a solution. […] consequently, flux
becomes identified with defeat rather than with discovery,
and translator's notes are often written in apology, as asides,
endnotes or footnotes, introductions or afterwards, rather
than communications from the 'space between'.
(Maier, 1995, p. 22)
If this capitalistic imperative for translation to deliver a consumable
product depresses you, read Mouth: Eats color, by Sawako Nakayasu
with Chika Sagawa. Their defiance uplifts.
Nakayasu translates, and re-translates a cluster of poems;
a cluster of poems, re-translated;
a cluster of re-translated poems;
poems, re-translated, a cluster;
再次翻譯那首詩。
Non-equivalence is not a lack.
equivalence / 2
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Dear you - The Horoeka / Lancewood Reading Grant

Transcription

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