After “After Babel”

I usually use Chinese in the dark of the night: texting people on the other side of the planet, writing diary entries in bed, talking to my cat. During the daytime, when I’m writing emails, teaching classes, reading, working, grocery shopping, chatting, I’m always using English—unless there’s a small animal involved. I work at a bookstore, and whenever a customer brings a dog in I inadvertently start speaking to it in Chinese, usually something like hello, you’re so cute, you little thing… One day a tiny white truck, perfectly square like a piece of tofu, pulled up outside the bookstore. As my coworker and I stood by the entrance taking in its cuteness I started snapping pictures while mumbling in Chinese:“How could it be so small!” My coworker said: “羽辰都讲中文了，（这卡车）就是这么可爱。”

我的朋友F最近对我宣布：“英语不是一门语言，因为它不天然。”另外一位大概10年前从以色列移居美国的朋友告诉我，她发现她只会用希伯来语和自己刚出生的孩子说话。“英语不适合对婴儿说话，那是一种事务性的用语。”​尽管我们的友谊建立在英语的基础之上，而且并不全然是事务性的——但不得不承认，我们在研究生院的“事务”中结下了盟友般的情谊，后来又延续到了在纽约各项生存攸关的“事务”。不过我们还共享彼此生活中的痛苦与快乐，大大小小的事我们都会谈。为此，我俩都需要付出努力，因为我们有限的词汇量以及各种不尽准确的语法，它们携带着我们各自母语的痕迹，就像大脑上的胎记。但我仍然可以轻易地与其他离散的人产生共鸣：当我们交谈时，不止是那些可识别的语言在表达和交换，错误也是交流中的有效货币，它们诉说着挣扎和妥协、自相矛盾和暧昧不明、狡诈和滑稽。我们完全理解对方的感受。

Sometimes I also worry, given that English is after all not my native tongue, does my extended use of it limit the depth and scope of my thinking? In 1984, the elimination of the word “freedom” erases the possibility of even so much as imagining the concept, which in turn curbs any possibility of it ever becoming reality. If the English vocabulary at my command is already so limited, what untouchable concepts and realities hide in those words I do not yet grasp? For instance, I came to the US as a graduate student studying art, meaning that I could read Adorno but did not know the names of ordinary vegetables. In high school I had enjoyed reading about medical history, but in English I knew little medical vocabulary. My English is best described as a dialect consisting solely of art history and leftist theory jargon, while sounds expressed outside this dialect truly mean nothing to me. To invent a new life in a new language is not unlike writing fiction: what I cannot write naturally will not be included.​

我稀松多孔的英语过滤了我的知识与话语，它只能捕获我心仪的事物，放走我不在意的。相应地，这种过滤也发生在了我的社交生活中：现在我的身边没有家人，没有乡亲，没有高中同学。目前活跃在我生活里的人，都是因为这几年来共同的兴趣和想法。是的，不用和亲戚们在聚餐时自证生活的意义让我免受挠人压力的打扰，但我也时常纳闷自己是否因此失去了什么。我曾经拥有、某次搬家时弄丢的一本书《卡夫卡的亲戚：他们的生活和他的写作》中，作者把卡夫卡小说里令人眼花缭乱的奇特意象归功于他的家人们各不相同的职业和命运，其中有律师和政客，还有一位为比属刚果工作的铁路承包商，曾经去过中国。在我最近欲罢不能的美剧《黑道家族》里，宗教般的家庭观念像一个难以抗拒的引力场，迫使所有人依它的轨道运行，不是不像中国。背负着甚至带有一丝叛国意味的罪恶感，我却仍然难以自拔地向往着“轻举而远游”的意象。我脱离了亲缘关系的轨道，就像我离开了那由熟悉的形状、声音和语调所编织而成的母语的巢。​

Perhaps, deep inside my heart, I feel that silence is more reliable than words, and confusion more authentic than comprehension. No matter the language, however much I appreciate reading, writing and talking, I am firmly aware of the limitations of “pointing my finger at the moon”. 1A Buddhist koan from Chapter 2 of the Surangama Sutra (楞严经): “This is similar to a person pointing his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, the other person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? Because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.” (如人以手指月示人，彼人因指，当应看月，若复观指，以为月体，此人岂唯亡失月轮，亦亡其指。) English translation from: Link.​ The garrulous me is less me than the quiet me; more than what’s already uttered, what remains unsaid always feels truer and more refreshing. To express one’s inner feelings in language is to first choose between states of contradiction, then arrange entangled chaos into order and rhythm, before finally forcing the most earnest and passionate feelings into forms and phrases that have been circulating for thousands of years—this is already a kind of translation. As for the contradictions and chaos abandoned along the way, the intensities that cannot be translated into words, they stay hidden in the pauses between one syllable and another, ghosts between the lines. Even when two people speak the same language, their understanding of a word can differ drastically due to position, profession, gender and class. Not to mention all the deliberate false displays of emotion, substitutions of one thing for another, pretending to start along one path while secretly taking another, and innuendo—we tend to use our most intimate languages to camouflage ourselves, not to expose.​

其实，有好友曾说他觉得我过于直接，我难过地心想：他永远无从知道，当我用中文去包装自己的真实意图时，是如何的灵巧干练。在这语言的异域，我没有装饰的奢侈，没有富足的储备，也没有精雕细琢的技巧。我意识到自己的言谈愈发踌躇，而我的句子总会在结尾时挑高音调——因为，除了正被我说出口的话，我还同时始终在自问：我是在说我以为我在说的吗？在美国生活的第十年，我发现自己没有精通英语，却精通了如何在劣势中自处，精通了词不达意的艺术、莽撞发问的勇气，精通了如何拉伸一个瞬间：在一句话中，为了搜寻那个刻意回避我的单词，我会容许自己停顿很久很久，所有人都得等，包括时间。​人人都说脑海中的意识流是不可阻挡的，但它不得不为我停顿驻足，那些没有名字的念头究竟是什么呢？我常常失败，我的探寻会终结于深渊，可是想法仍旧难以名状。它们没有姓名，但生动鲜活，就像泪水淤积在胸口，永远沸腾。

It’s like how as a solo moviegoer, I’m used to having my emotions packed up by the time the light turns on. I take them away in a hurry so I don’t need to name or define them on the spot. When I occasionally hear people whispering to each other in the audience I tend to flee from it: when the language is razor-clear, I worry it will pierce through the fog that cloaks the flickering image and kill its magic. 从这重意义来说，带着让舌头陌生的语言生活不失为一种至幸，因为人的意识总是同时存在于语言探照范围的亮处和暗处，​人们以意义作为基石进行表达，同时对基石之下深不可测的地层保持敏锐和警觉。舌头没法全然洞悉我的灵魂，而带着这样一具灵魂，就好像囤积着无法被转化成资本的宝藏。它极度的安全、私人，因为它无法被系统识别。

Last March I did a residency at a museum in a remote town, with nothing but mountains and snow outside my window. Because of the pandemic, the residency lasted longer—and felt more isolating—than expected. I started reading thick books, including George Steiner’s After Babel.2Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1998)​ There were so many feelings I wanted to write down immediately, but I couldn’t bring myself to begin. Aside from the turmoil of the world and my penchant for procrastination, this long hesitation was caused by my inability to decide whether to write in Chinese or in English. Each option had its pros and cons: what feels natural about English is the consistency between input and output, whereas what feels natural about Chinese runs deep in my blood and heritage. However, at this point, I can no longer tell which “natural” feels more natural. Both options also already involve translation—not just in the sense of the labor of the translator to whom I will pass the finished piece; to me, all writing and talking and every second of breathing is translation, or an attempt to mend a crack. On February 1, 2020, I returned to New York from Beijing by way of Hong Kong and entered self-quarantine in Brooklyn, where everything was still business as usual. Amid jetlag and grief I chased short-lived articles and reports on Chinese social media, with the radio playing news of Trump’s impeachment day and night. Occasionally I would hear the word “coronavirus” in international news coverage—the word COVID-19 had yet to enter the English lexicon.

从我想要写下这些文字开始已经过去了一年，眼前这个google文档已然成为我私人的巴别塔，存放自身的混乱与歧义。最近我重读了本雅明的《译者的任务》。3本雅明文选《启迪》，Schocken Books出版，1969年。​ 2013年初读时，我无法将其写作的精巧架构细分拆解，所以带着一种恍惚入迷几乎在全文都标注了下划线。​我轻轻地重翻已经略微变脆的书页，发现自己当时留在空白边角的三幅图画，尽管模糊但它们应该从那时起就深深地印刻在了我的脑海中：1. 一个残破花瓶的碎片；2. 一条切线与圆形相交；​3. 满是树木的山脊廓型。这正是我一直在思考的翻译的另一个维度：阅读时，我自然是在用自己的读写力、记忆力和我整个的存在方式对他的书写进行着翻译；而阅读之后，我是否也在将他的书写翻译成我的行动、我的理念和我的未来？​

Let me project this metaphor even further, and more elusively: beyond reading, every conversation and encounter—getting to know a stranger, moving into a new environment—is perhaps an act of translation of sorts, a transcoding between systems, a battle of adaptability. The process is certainly filled with loss and disappointment; but if you tire of the attempt to restore or faithfully render the original, a glitch may also bring its own kind of joyful surprise, resistance, or even a productive tool. Now, in February 2021, as I come to the end of this piece, I find myself immersed in the Sinosphere on Clubhouse. In this social media platform of pure audio, the speech act has slipped from the echology of the speaker; like a wandering satellite or racing electron, it is justifying its existence and vitality in every spark of collision with another.