Nowadays I would suggest any students who learn liberal arts should learn making video. It could be a total Gesamtkunstwerk experience: you are not only supposed to care about text or image alone, but have to put music, moving graphic, text and images together, formulating a reasonable scene, and therefore a whole narrative structure. Your video as a finished product can convey message that text, audio, image or music alone cannot.

As I worked for a public broadcast network, my approach was pure and orthodox: my programs were to serve the public, instead of entertainment. Public network with public money should provide news service, weather forecast and education. Nothing else.

I refused to become a paparazzi who ran after celebrities, and preferred to interview artists and musicians who really had skills, stamina and fine taste. Perhaps as a video producer, I had this sympathy with musicians and artists who also cared about similar things: how to frame your own idea and message in an artistic way, and achieve high level of dexterity and let the audience savor the deeper meaning.

One of the favorite interviews I made was with Huang Bin, a low profile maestro who won Paganini International Violin Competition in 1994. Humble and a dedicated Christian, Huang Bin had no showmanship when I approached her, as she focused on rehearsing for a recital with some really difficult works, such as Paganini’s caprice. Besides interview, I made a video of her playing Paganini Caprice No.13. I paid attention to capture her breath, her finger movements, and the whole interactions with her Stradivarius violin. As internationally famous, Huang Bin was kind enough to do whatever I told her in front of the camera.

Of course, such approach of making TV program made me a hated figure among colleagues and superior. As a rebel, I was engaged with a prolong battle in the TV station about what kind of programs we should produce. “Remember your main audience are housewives who cook soups who have no patience for art-house films!” my boss once yelled. Till then I realized this Gesamtkunstwerk, the program that you invested so much time to edit and build up into a decent structure, was only an interval for busy housewives who finished some cooking and wanted to sit down for a while.

The post The Experience of Making a TV Program appeared first on Ming Aretê.

The first is the open-ended nature of literary translation, as opposed to the relatively closed requirements of commercial translation. The second is the role of the translator in the translation process.

First, the commercial translator has some very definite success criteria. When you look at a commercial text, it may be complex and multilayered, but ultimately there is an end to those layers. A commercial text is finite. The source text is written with a definite purpose in mind; we generally assume that it successfully fulfills that purpose. If I write a text in the target language that fulfills the same purpose, then my job as a commercial translator is done. For example, I have recently translated some menus: if my menu conveys clearly to the English speaker what the food on offer is, then it’s a successful translation. And there is really no more to be said. A commercial translation can be 100% successful, because the purpose of the source text was limited.

A literary text, on the other hand, is unlimited. It can have echoes and meanings that are infinite in subtlety, and infinite in their reach. A literary text is assumed to have an unlimited audience: it may speak to people that the author has never conceived of, on the other side of the world, or centuries into the future. And so the translator has no set criteria for success. There are various ways in which a literary translation can fail; but there is no way in which it can succeed, in the absolute and closed way that commercial translations can. There will always be the potential for a new translation that brings more value by being better, or just different. For a commercial document, once a successful translation has been created, any further translations (into the same language and for a similar purpose) would simply be a waste of time or money.

Second, the commercial translator for the most part absents herself from the translation process. Of course, we are the doer of the process, but we do not generally inject ourselves into it in any way. In commercial translation, the translator is invisible, because we are unnecessary. The translator’s own perceptions and ideas are not relevant to the desires of the commercial customer – beyond the competences that we must necessarily have. In theory, you could swap us for another translator at any time, and in practice that is often exactly what happens.

In a literary translation process, however, the translator must herself play a role. (It may be that many consumers of translated literature would prefer to imagine that this doesn’t happen, and that the literary translator is an invisible medium, but that’s just not how it works.) We play a role by being readers of the source text. As I translate a poem, for example, from Chinese into English, I examine my own emotions to see how they are being affected by the poem. I ask myself what the words make me feel, and how the rhythms and rhymes intensify the experience. In a commercial translation, I might ask how a scientist would understand this particular technical term, and use my intellectual knowledge and skills to answer the question, then reproduce the understanding in my target text. In a literary translation, I ask myself how I, as a sensitive reader and appreciator of the source literary, feel about this text, then attempt to reproduce that feeling in English. Occasionally, I use other people’s reactions to a literary text – the comments of a critic, or the response of another poet – but for the most part, the way a person reacts to art is so internal and personal, that there is really no way to access any other person’s responses but my own.

I hope that’s a clear exposition of what I think right now. Perhaps in the future my ideas will evolve and I’ll return to this and update or critique it. But this is how the processes feel to me at the moment.

The post Translating Literature vs. Commercial Translation appeared first on Ming Aretê.

Mihail Sebastian, né Iosif Hechter, was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the Danube port town of Bráila in 1907. In accordance with one of those ironies with which the gods amuse themselves, he managed to survive both the murderous anti-Semitic campaigns that preceded Romania’s entry (alongside Germany) into the Second World War and the war itself, only to be killed by a truck while crossing a Bucharest street in May 1945. Sebastian was only twenty-eight the year he began keeping his journal, but he was already a well-known novelist and playwright.

As Radu Ioanid notes in his lucid introduction, the period spanned by Sebastian’s journal saw the rise of three successive anti-Semitic dictatorships in Romania: the regime of King Carol II (February 1938-September 1940); the regime that Ion Antonescu established in alliance with the fascist Iron Guard (September 1940-January 1941); and the dictatorship that Antonescu set up after he violently suppressed his erstwhile allies in the Guard (1941-1944). Sebastian’s journal allows the reader to trace the impact of these developments, both on daily life in Bucharest and on the world of Romania’s intellectuals.

Sebastian had little interest in religion or Jewish issues per se. He saw himself, and wanted others to see him, as a “man of the Danube”–a Romanian writer who merely happened to be Jewish. Consequently, he watched with stunned disbelief as his closest friends, brilliant writers like the philosopher Emil Cioran and the future University of Chicago scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, one after another declared their admiration for Nazism and embraced the Iron Guard’s fanatical anti-Semitism. Because he stayed in contact with his literary friends over the course of the fascist years, he was able to leave us a precious record of the process by which they embraced a murderous and delusional political religion.

In the early pages of the journal, Sebastian comes off as an aesthete, delighting in Bach and Proust and the joys of private life, and unconcerned—at least to the extent possible—with political matters. There are beautiful entries describing the delight he took in listening to symphonies over the radio, his love of skiing over fresh snow in the Carpathians, and his turbulent, usually unhappy love affairs with stage actresses. (He renders the women vividly, with great sympathetic understanding and a keen eye for their individuality.)

His portraits of his literary friends are equally vivid, but mostly damning. With the exception of the playwright Eugène Ionesco, most of the writers who appear in the book behave appallingly. Sebastian quotes his erstwhile mentor, the philosopher and Iron Guard ideologue Nae Ionescu, boasting like a barroom drunk about his supposed influence on Nazi bosses in Berlin. He shows us Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran praising Hitler’s genius and ranting about Jews. He describes how people who had dropped him when the fascist tide was rising began to make excuses and try to curry favor once it became clear that the Nazis were going to lose the war.

Sebastian’s journal is a monument to the power of culture, if not to console, exactly, then at least to sharpen one’s sense of perspective in evil times. During the early months of Germany’s (and Romania’s) invasion of the Soviet Union 1n 1941, he reads Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The collapse of Athens after the doomed Sicilian expedition of 415-413 BC reminds him of the rout of the French in 1940, while Tolstoy’s account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign suggests the hopeful thought that invading Russia does not always prove to be as easy as would-be conquerors might imagine. He finds sustenance in the rich imaginative worlds of Baudelaire and Balzac. In between bouts of mandatory conscript labor, he translates Shakespeare and Pride and Prejudice. All the while, he remains attentive to the suffering of others, whether they be terrified Jewish forced laborers, widowed mothers, or hungry children.

It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of Sebastian’s journal within the space of a brief review. For obvious reasons, many Romanian nationalists were displeased when it was finally published in 1997. But for anyone interested in viewing those terrible years from the perspective of a talented, perceptive, and deeply humane witness, Mihail Sebastian’s Journal, 1935-1944 is essential reading.

[1] Sebastian, Mihail. Journal, 1935-1944. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Introduction and notes by Radu Ioanid. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

The post A Humane Witness: The Journal of Mihail Sebastian appeared first on Ming Aretê.

To my grandfather’s chagrin, my school performance fell short of his ambitions. In fact, none of my cousins’ scores met the old man’s expectations, either. Exams, exams, exams! “Those who don’t make the cut have no future,” he would admonish us. In his eighties, he mobilized the entire family’s resources to improve his grandkids’ performance. Nevertheless, in the end his regime crumbled.

Sixteen years later, these memories no longer trouble me. I have utterly forgotten how to solve complicated algebra questions or balance the formula of an acid-alkaline reaction. Nevertheless, my passion for language, history, culture, and the humanities survived that grueling exam-preparation regime, and I continue to pursue the subjects that have entranced me since my teenage years. I do not necessarily live any worse than classmates who aced the entrance exam, and I am happy that I can now choose the terms on which I compete.

In retrospect, I think that my grandfather’s mistake was to prepare his grandchildren for a finite battle, when life is actually an infinite totality. This is a common error in East Asian families, where children are pushed from an early age to scramble after high exam scores and certificates. Parents who want their children to live full and happy lives should realize that locking them into finite games on unfavourable terms not only wastes their energy, but can also do unnecessary damage to their kids’ true nature.

Finite Games vs. Infinite Games

In his 1986 book Finite and Infinite Games, the New York University scholar James P. Carse formulated a useful opposition between finite games, in which the competition is between known players, and which have both fixed rules and an agreed-upon duration, and infinite games, in which both known and unknown players contend, and in which the rules are changeable. Whereas in a finite game the only goal is to win the game (which necessarily brings the game to a close), in an infinite game the chief objective is to keep the game going.

A few decades ago, when information and resources for independent study were scarce, children from ordinary families in East Asia had few choices and could only enter college after succeeding in fiercely-competitive examinations. From ages 7 to 18, the lives of many teenagers in this part of the world were utterly dominated by exam preparation.

A journalist from Europe once told me about an experiment he was considering. He proposed to spend three months living the life of a Chinese middle-school student preparing for the college entrance examination. “Three months of harsh training? I guess I can afford that,” he said. “No. You need six years,” I replied. The conversation ended, and his experiment never unfolded.

The purpose of the entrance examination is not to help students to master a set of concepts, kindle a passion for knowledge, or learn how to improve existing structures and practices. The exam’s only purpose is to eliminate and select. It is not enough to thoroughly understand a concept from a textbook; one must learn to recognize the cunning tricks the designers use to trip up the careless and the impatient. The contents of the exam are far-reaching and seemingly designed to suck up mental and physical energy. Those who aspire to become scientists and engineers are required to be able to recite pages of Tang poetry, while those who seek admission to the humanities and liberal arts faculties—i.e., students such as my younger self–must pass exams dedicated to math, chemistry, and physics (including quantum theory).

Once students pass the entrance exam and begin college life, they routinely forget 80 percent of the material covered on the examination. In a gesture that outsiders might consider to be wasteful but that reflects an accurate assessment of the role that the content of their exam-prep materials is likely to play in their future lives, many students tear these volumes to shreds. It is not uncommon for them to give up on books  altogether, and to treat college like a four-year vacation before the gruesome slog of career life.

My grandpa was deeply convinced that this exam regime was the only means by which he could help his grandchildren to rise in the world. He was merciless because he could not bear the thought that we might be distracted from our exam preparations by “lighter,” more frivolous activities. Once, when he discovered that I was writing a short story and that this activity had nothing to do with any examination, he made me shred the draft. Both grandparents refused to speak to me for two months, simply because I had made an attempt to write fiction. When he discovered that I enjoyed listening to music and had a taste for art-house films. my grandpa began regaling me with traditional Chinese set-phrases such as “玩物喪志” wànwùsàngzhì: pleasure seeking undermines lofty aspirations (“pleasure-seeking undermines lofty aspirations”).

Keep Your Hobby Alive, and Find True Passion in Life

My years of preparation for examinations under a humorless grandpa were simultaneously bland and tedious. In fact, in purely strategic terms, they probably did me more harm than good. I was in the danger of being locked into a finite game with rules that didn’t particularly favour me, with my entire life hinging on the outcome of a single exam.

Somehow, I managed to find a balance between what I really cared about and the exigencies that imprisoned me. Without my grandparents’ knowledge, I collected books about world history, western art, and foreign statesmen. I hoarded CDs and DVDs that I knew that my grandpa would hate from his gut. Eventually, I developed a deep interest in what people from other countries and cultures were doing, what they were like, and why the world was shaped the way it was. Preparation for exams was a real concern, and it certainly had an impact on one’s future, but life was definitely bigger than any exam.

My passion for learning other cultures, languages, and history continues to burn bright, long after I consigned my exam-prep books to the trash bin. Unlike so many of my peers, who treated their university years as an extended vacation, I spent those years in full-time study of the things that I really love.

My grandfather never reconciled himself to my exam performance. However, I eventually realized that I would have my own life, not the one that he had dreamed of for me. Moreover, despite the hardship of those years, there is a sense in which I really do embrace what I see as the true legacy of those years of exam preparation. In the end, they taught me that one should hold fast to one’s notion of what one really wants to become; that one must be willing to stand up and defend one’s passions; and that one must search for workable solutions when adversaries—well-intentioned or not–seek to block one’s aspirations.

The post Kids Study Hard, but Still Fare Less Well? – The Real Downside of East Asian Education Approach appeared first on Ming Aretê.