Bridging the gaps to arrive at the truth

I had not yet been born when China and France issued the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between China and France in January 1964.

But, as I passed through the gates of the Nanjing Foreign Language School in 1983, where I was "assigned" to major in French, I had a hazy idea that this momentous occasion would have a huge impact on my own life.

The opposite was also true: my fate might be intricately tied to an alternative form of mutual understanding that this event would eventually lead to.

So, what precisely is this other method of comprehension? It could have been explained easily, but it would have taken an inordinately long time for us to completely appreciate its true meaning, just as we will eventually get at the essence of translation after thousands of years of practice and development.

When General Charles de Gaulle's government decided to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, he was well aware of the vast differences between the two countries, peoples, languages, and cultures – differences that were more significant 60 years ago than we can imagine today – though this decision in the Cold War era could only have been based on one enlightened concept: understanding is attainable.

It can be achieved not for the sake of unity but to enrich each other by building on the differences.

It is easier said than done. Only in retrospect, and after many decades, we did realize the tremendous effort of putting understanding into reality. It felt strange that in 1983 when I first began learning French, there wasn't even a decent French-Chinese dictionary we could refer to from time to time.

Although the first edition of the French-Chinese dictionary was released in 1982 by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, it was not available in local Xinhua Bookstores until two or three years later. The distribution of books in those days was slow and time-consuming.

The 7-yuan (US$1) dictionary with brown covers has been my constant companion for well over a decade.

One of the best things about a foreign language dictionary is that it allows two languages to coexist, with the entry word in one language and a string of interpretations in the other. The length of the explanation may sometimes strike you as a reminder of how dissimilar the two languages are: we can only imagine the linguistic truth by contextualizing its various significations in considerable detail.

First travel to France

After studying French for 10 years, I traveled to France for the first time as the recipient of a prize for a novella I had written in French. Winning the award was nothing short of amazing. The story was completed in 1991, just in time for the Prix du jeune écrivain. I sent my story using the then-expensive international Express Mail Delivery service.

I'm not sure if I used the wrong pen, whose ink was incompatible with the EMS envelope, but the written address vanished totally during the delivery procedure. The mail arrived at the award committee after many vicissitudes and difficulties that were unknown to me. Anyway, I had completely forgotten about my first French story until the following year, when I was notified that it had won a prize.

I had to first pick up my paper ticket at Air France's Beijing office and then fly to Toulouse, where the award was presented, after a stopover in Paris. I was only 20 at the time and naive. Although there were only two flights each week between Beijing and Paris at the time, the flight was relatively empty, and passengers could lie down during their 10-hour journey. I even made it into the cockpit, where the entire flight crew seemed completely relaxed and reassuring. Finding a Chinese girl who was fluent in French was a welcome surprise for many French people 30 years ago.

The attention I got upon arriving at Toulouse was equally curious: why did I choose to write a novel (a typical Chinese story), why did I do it in French, and why should I try to construct a universe strange to them in a language and lexicon known to them? Curiosity, in reality, is always a reciprocal emotion, coming from novelty but also implied in the attempt to comprehend. This search for understanding was both poignant and exciting, a sentiment we have grown distant from as globalization intensifies.

More understanding

I'm not sure if it occurred to me as a result of this prize-collection event that I should put in more effort to gain more understanding. This provided me with several opportunities for spiritual interaction with people. My literary translation career began in 1994 with the translation of La Guerre by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, long before the author earned the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008.

Among the contemporary authors whose works I have translated, Le Clézio is one of the few who interacts with me on esoteric issues in a daily-life setting. My relationship with other authors, including Nobel laureates such as Patrick Modiano and Annie Ernaux, is limited to the written word, demonstrating that the desire to comprehend and the respect born of aloofness are not mutually exclusive in terms of translation.

After establishing "diplomatic ties" on a personal level for 30 years, my understanding of George Steiner (1929–2020) deepened. As he stated, with translation processes crossing time, distance, and boundaries, this transformation is always interpretive and creative, to the point that it can give all expressions a vital duration that outlasts the act of utterance.

True, human civilization is a series of writings that are either directly or indirectly related, and our Present and Here is, in some ways, a reinterpretation of the Past and There, albeit in a different discourse.

As long as the human race exists, this relationship will never be obsolete because we have not yet arrived at the spoken truth.

(The author is professor of French Literature and dean of the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities with East China Normal University. Wan Lixin translated the article.)