Wang Yuanyuan

    cheekywang@hotmail.com

    AMERICAN writer and translator Bruce Humes, who lives in Shenzhen, has had his translation of Chi Zijian’s “The Last Quarter of the Moon” published. It is now available on Amazon.com.

    Narrated in the first person by the elderly wife of the last chieftain of an Evenki clan, the book spans the 20th century and tells the story of the decline of reindeer-herding nomads in the sparsely populated, richly forested mountains that border with Russia.

    “The Evenki people’s history and tragic stories are similar to the inhabitants of Europe and Africa as well as Native Americans. I want foreigners to know that China is not just Beijing and Shanghai. There are many non-Han people and they also have their unique culture and lifestyles,” Humes said.

    Humes has been involved with Greater China since 1978 and this is the second full novel he has translated after “Shanghai Baby” by Wei Hui.

    “My blog has always paid close attention to the latest Chinese publications. When I started the blog three years ago, I bought about 10 books. Some were given up after I read several pages, but I finished this book in only one week. It was very impressive and moving, so I decided to translate it into English,” he said.

    When translating the book in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Humes found that the biggest problem was figuring out how to translate local terms, such as names of people, places and household products.

    “The Evenki don’t have a writing system, so they ‘borrow’ Chinese characters to pronounce their language. In an Italian translation, these terms were translated directly into pinyin, but I found it was no good,” Humes said. “These minority languages are not Chinese, so translators cannot use Chinese when translating as foreign readers would get confused, thinking that their languages are the same as Chinese,” he said.

    To make the language more authentic, Humes, advised by an expert who is the only Evenki person to hold a doctoral degree, spent a lot of time looking up the exact pronunciation of Evenki words, writing them down with international phonetic symbols and rewriting them into English.

    Another challenge was rewriting the dialogue in the novel.

    “Chi is a wonderful writer. She uses indirect speech perfectly,” Humes said.

    Indirect speech is a means of expressing the content of speech without quoting it directly.

    However, many overseas translators and even Humes’ publisher suggested he rewrite the indirect speeches into direct speech as Westerners were more used to reading direct speech.

    “This was a huge and difficult task. In the end I chose to translate it partly into direct speech and partly into indirect speech,” he said.

    “From my point of view, I preferred using indirect speech like Chi’s because if I rewrote them, the book would be like a completely different, more conventional novel. This novel is narrated by a 90-year-old woman who is telling her life story. It seemed like Chi had entered this woman’s head and knew exactly what she was saying,” he said. “When I was translating, I tried to be as faithful as possible to the spirit of the original,” he said.

    Humes also had a trick to deal with Chinese words which he found hard to understand. “I was learning Chinese in Kunming at that time and read ‘Shi Ji,’ a famous book about ancient Chinese history, with my teacher every day. I asked him to read Chi’s book to me. It is very important to listen to it being read aloud because I may read a sentence in a wrong way, such as stress or pause in the wrong place. In Chinese, different stress and pauses may produce different meanings,” he said.

    He also hired an editor from China Daily to proofread.

    “Some people say that translation is lonely work, but I don’t think so. Many people will be invited to participate in the work, but of course, all the drafts are from my hand,” he said.

    Humes first came to Shenzhen in 1985 and lived here for the first time in 1993. Over the past 20 years, he has lived in most of the major cities across the country and translation and writing have been his main interests.

    “There are many people translating Chinese literary works into English and I wanted to be more competitive, so I chose to focus on non-Han groups. China is a very hot topic around the world, and I hope that more people can learn about the lifestyles and culture of non-Han people who live in China,” he said.