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Eric Reinders, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation, Bloomsbury, 2024. 200 pgs.
The availability of Chinese works of imagination translated into English seems to be growing in North America. 3 Body Problem, the Netflix TV series adapting Liu Cixin’s award-winning science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, is just one prominent recent example. Eric Reinders has written an intriguing book, Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy and Translation, about the flip side of Sino-Western cultural exchange. I hoped that by reading it, I might expand my understanding of the classic Chinese fantasy epic Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, translated by Anthony C. Yu, and perhaps some C-dramas, such as the historical science fiction fantasy, Joy of Life.
The first half of Reading Tolkien in Chinese deals with the broader themes of the subtitle, “Religion, Fantasy, and Translation”. Fantasy, Reinders suggests, involves that which is “normally impossible”. Tolkien argued that reading such material is a matter of “enchantment” rather than simply a “suspension of disbelief”. His The Lord of the Rings practically launched fantasy as an adult genre in the West. I first read The Lord of the Rings in high school, after getting into Dungeons and Dragons with some fellow nerds. Since then, fantasy has become mainstream. Chinese literature appears to have a long and varied history of fantasy, often involving martial arts. The three Tolkien translations in Chinese that Reinders used as the basis for his discussion, however, were all produced in the wake of the global popularity of the films by Peter Jackson.
Religion is also replete with stories of unlikely events, though they are presented as true. Tolkien made a firm distinction between fantasy and religion. Although Christian, he resisted allegorical interpretations of his work. And in Middle Earth, religious infrastructure or beliefs are rarely mentioned. Nevertheless, one of the Chinese translators, who described herself as Christian, felt the victories of good over evil in Middle Earth had a Christian feel to them. Reinders explores the relationship between fantasy and religion with a discussion of a sci-fi/fantasy convention called Dragon-con, which he facetiously describes as a “religious event”. He mentions a group called “Fans for Christ” whose members appreciate the unlikely events of fantasy and religion, while keeping them in separate realms. They distinguish themselves from the fundamentalists who try to suppress any talk of demonic forces.
The story of Journey to the West, however, explicitly involves monks on a quest for Buddhist scriptures, yet does not come across as preaching. Buddhist and Daoist characters appear to mostly get along unless they turn out to be demons in disguise. Perhaps this openness arises from the many gods in Chinese traditions of belief, with their various forms and occupations. Even beastly-looking creatures are entitled to follow a path to righteousness through training and cultivation.
In contrast, creatures in the Lord of the Rings appear to have fixed characteristics, with the light-haired Elves at the top of cultivation down to the horrible, dark Orcs. Japanese anime creator Hayao Miyazaki has gone so far as to claim, “the ones who were being killed are Asians and Africans”. Perhaps this fixed mind set emerged from a monotheistic world view that includes “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me” as one of its Commandments. Certainly, the demise of local beliefs in small gods followed the rise of Christianity and colonialism in other parts of the world. The historic fantasy The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden depicts this conflict of belief systems in Russia.
Translations present text that recreates the original, however impossible that task might be. Reinders describes translation as “language doing cosplay”. Religion, fantasy, and translation thus all blur line between the real and the possible. This notion reminded me of the historical fantasy, Babel, by R. F. Kuang, in which the dissonance between words from different languages becomes the source of magic in the world, which the powerful use to control the less fortunate.
The second half of Reinders’ book deals more specifically with the subject of the title, “Reading Tolkien in Chinese”. Unlike the similar-sounding Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, it does not address experiences of political or social oppression, except in a cursory way. Taiwan and mainland China have different writing systems and “publishing cultures”. For the most part, Reinders chooses significant concepts and words in the work of Tolkien and explores the different ways they might be translated into Chinese. He then back-translates the terms into English to illustrate the effect of the word choices.
Some of the challenges involve the original writing of Tolkien, which could present difficulties for translation in other languages as well. Other issues centre on idiosyncrasies of Chinese, both spoken and written. Reinders is careful to point out that one language is not better than another, simply different.
The very premise of The Lord of the Rings is that it is a translation from the Common Speech of Middle Earth into modern English. Furthermore, it includes snippets from other languages, which Tolkien created. “Elves”, for example, is acknowledged as a “non-ideal” term for the expression in the original language. Tolkien also wrote with the formality of a saga, using Germanic syntax, with verbs at the ends of sentences and so on. Like the difficulty with translating poetry, this sense of formality is not always easy to capture.
Sometimes, rather than translating made-up or obscure words, they are transliterated, so they sound like the original. One of the many differences between written Chinese and European languages, however, is that each character is associated with both sound and meaning. So new combinations can have interesting consequences. For example, the sound of “Coca-Cola” has supposedly been approximated with “Ke Kou Ke Le”, using characters that mean, “Tasty fun”. The Netflix 3 Body Problem uses the term Santi 三體 for the aliens. This was a transliteration of the Chinese expression for “three body”, rather than “Trisolaran”, the word made up for the translation of the books, which implies the three suns that correspond to the three bodies of the problem. For The Lord of the Rings, “necromancer” was transliterated, resulting in simply a nonsensical collection of sounds.
Sometimes the sense of an expression must be rendered in different ways in translation. Chinese does not have a device corresponding to the definite article “the”, nor does it have demarcations analogous to capital letters, which can make it more difficult to share a sense of a specific case of an object and may require more roundabout depictions. In the case of the antiquated use of “Man” to mean all humans, the translation could usually use less sexist terms in its place.
When the Peter Jackson film versions of The Lord of the Rings came out, the title was translated as Magic Ring (“魔戒” in Chinese). This was adopted for the books as well. Although “magic” has a generally benevolent meaning in English, the Chinese term 魔mo has an additional demonic implication, which seems suitable to indicate the ominous power of the ring.
Although I think its meticulous analysis of word after word becomes a bit repetitive towards the end, overall, Reading Tolkien in Chinese did help me appreciate the vision of J. R. R. Tolkien, the scope of Chinese imagination, and the wondrous challenges of translation.
How to cite: Nakamura, Raymond K. “Wondrous Challenges of Translation: Eric Reinders’s Reading Tolkien in Chinese.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 21 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/21/tolkien.
Raymond K. Nakamura is a writer, cartoonist, and educational consultant, when not walking the dog or washing the dishes. He is the author of the picture book, Peach Girl, published by Pajama Press. You can find his daily comics on social media under @raymondsbrain. While reading books, he enjoys drinking cha, tea, or chai. This third generation Japanese Canadian lives with his patient spouse, ambitious daughter, and feisty dog in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
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