The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 2 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator’s Notes

The Apothecary Diaries Diaries

Vol. 2

Fishing for Complements

Welcome once again to the bonus page! (Or the bonus digital space notionally equivalent to a page, since you’re presumably reading this in some non-physical form.) Thanks for joining us for volume 2 of The Apothecary Diaries.

Last time out, I mentioned in passing the range of specialized vocabularies this series dips into, and in this edition of The Apothecary Diaries Diaries, I’d like to talk about some of the challenges these pose for the translation team. In particular, I’d like to focus on how the setting influences how the translation is handled, using one example of relatively basic vocabulary and another, more complex question of how to render a term related to the setting in the English translation.

When I began preparing to translate The Apothecary Diaries, one of the first things I did (after, of course, reading a bit of volume 1 to get a feel for what the writing was like and what level of jargon we were likely to need to be able to handle) was to explore sources for vocabulary related to the setting. While the series isn’t set in a specific era of Chinese history, the environment is clearly Chinese-inflected, and some familiarity with both that general time and place and the language associated with it was obviously going to be crucial.

At first, I was particularly interested in two things: what to call the main setting in English, and how to translate 妃 (consort). “Rear palace” is essentially the literal translation of the Japanese koukyuu (後宮, the same characters as are used in Chinese), but I didn’t know if this expression was acceptable or current, or if there might be a more common way of referring to this place or system in English. I know a smattering of Chinese, and figured it might be more productive to search on the Mandarin term hougong than the Japanese equivalent. The very first hit on my Google search was a Wikipedia page titled “Imperial Chinese harem system.” Like I said in the previous volume, the internet is really a godsend for translators.

This page included a lengthy list of ranking systems for the women of the imperial harem in various eras of Chinese history. Again, The Apothecary Diaries isn’t tied to any one time period, so no single list on the page corresponds exactly with the system present in the series. It gave us a sense of how the rankings worked, though, and what their relationships might be to the emperor and to each other. It helped clarify the reading and meaning of the term 妃 (kisaki or hi in Japanese; fei in Chinese) but didn’t specifically make clear whether “rear palace” was standard English usage.

Okay, I’d do something else, then. To make a long story short, I tried a few different search strings on Google Scholar (a Google sub-service that specializes in academic papers) and found a handful of articles about women in imperial China. These articles helped confirm that the term “rear palace” is used by contemporary scholars. What’s more, the footnotes in one of the articles referenced a book called A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China by Charles Hucker. As tantalizing as that title was, this was one of those out-of-print scholarly books that was going to be too expensive to get a hold of. I decided to do a Google search on the title, too, just on the off chance it was on Google Books or something. It wasn’t—but it was available, seemingly legitimately, via Harvard University’s website.

This book, which includes both translations for and descriptions of a staggering number of ancient Chinese titles and offices, is a treasure trove, and was invaluable as Sasha and I worked out the nomenclature for the various positions mentioned in our series. While we haven’t used all of the dictionary’s translations verbatim—making sure everything fit the intended meaning within the context of the story was our first priority—we couldn’t have asked for a better source to help lay the groundwork for what we eventually came up with.

So that’s how a translator might deal with specialized vocabulary he or she isn’t already familiar with. While we’re on the subject of setting-related lexical items, though, I want to talk about a word that occurs here in volume 2. In an early scene introducing Lakan, we have the following passage (in the final translation): “The man’s name was Lakan, and he was a military commander. In some other era, he might have been considered a sleeping dragon, a great military mind waiting to be discovered, but in this day and age he was just another eccentric.”

In particular, I want to focus on the segment “a sleeping dragon, a great military mind waiting to be discovered.” This entire clause translates a bit that in Japanese merely says, “he might have been called [a] taikoubou (太公望).”

If you look up the word taikoubou in an ordinary Japanese-English dictionary, you’re likely to find that it means “a fisherman,” maybe even “an avid fisherman.” Searching in Japanese makes things clearer: taikoubou refers to one person in particular: a historical figure from ancient China. In English, the most common names for this person are Lu Shang and Jiang Ziya. (Like in many cultures, in ancient China people frequently changed their names or took different names or titles in response to events throughout their lives.) The story goes that King Wen of Zhou (a very ancient Chinese state) found Lu Shang fishing, and was impressed by the man’s unusual method: he didn’t use a hook at all, but simply recognized that the fish would come to him when they were ready. Because King Wen had been hoping for someone insightful and astute, just like this, to be one of his ministers, he hired Lu Shang and gave him the title Taigong Wang, or roughly “the Great Duke’s Hope”—in Japanese, taikoubou. It’s from this story that the word has come to refer to a devoted fisherman.

There are a couple of ways to handle the translation of the word in our passage. One would be to utilize the historical referent directly and render it as something like “he [Lakan] might have been called a regular Jiang Ziya.” One issue with this approach, though, is the question of how literally “Great Duke’s Hope”/Jiang Ziya is being used in the source text. Japanese readers might well recognize the reference; “Taikoubou” appears as a character in other pop culture sources, notably the manga and anime Hoshin Engi/Soul Hunter. But are we to take Jiang Ziya as a figure who in fact existed in the world of The Apothecary Diaries, who’s just as prominent an exemplar of military virtue in this world as he is in ours? 

I suggest that’s not the intention. Jiang Ziya is being invoked, in essence, metaphorically. In other words, the point isn’t Jiang Ziya personally, but rather the idea of a brilliant strategist, perhaps one who could easily be overlooked. As such, it would have been possible to leave out the reference entirely and go with just the gloss we ended up putting on it: “In some other era, he might have been considered a great military mind waiting to be discovered…”

Having said that I don’t think the historical referent is the main point, though, I do think it’s probably a secondary point. Is it entirely coincidental that this Chinese-inflected series uses a term with a Chinese historical referent to make its point here? Probably not. That suggests it would be nice to include the reference somehow in English, but what’s the best way to do it? In the Japanese, Jiang Ziya isn’t referred to by his proper name, but by a prominent sobriquet, which somewhat blunts the force of the question about his historical existence in this setting. By contrast, no English equivalent (Taikoubou, Great Duke Wang, the Great Duke’s Hope) has the same combination of currency and meaning. (When making this decision, I was also considering what would enable people to easily search for the reference if they wanted to look into it.)

My solution was the expression “a sleeping dragon.” This was the nickname of Zhuge Liang (sometimes known by his courtesy name Kongming), a military strategist and advisor to Liu Bei, the ruler of the state of Shu Han in the early third century. Kongming is most famous from the stories in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and he remains a proverbial and popular figure in both Chinese and Japanese culture today. Despite being a brilliant strategist, he kept to himself until Liu Bei personally came to request his assistance. (He was called a “sleeping” dragon because he remained quiet and inconspicuous.) Although from a different time period and source, Kongming’s story is very much like that of Lu Shang; both stand in the grand Chinese tradition of great strategists who wait like a jewel buried in a field for the right ruler to find them.

With this move, we get many of the same virtues as the Japanese taikoubou: an indirect reference to a famous ancient Chinese strategist discovered by a discerning ruler; using his sobriquet rather than his actual name and therefore skirting the question of exactly how “real” the character is in this setting. Like taikoubou, “sleeping dragon” is an evocative and interesting phrase with a Chinese provenance and which, incidentally, interested readers can easily look up on the internet. Finally, I added the clause “a great military mind waiting to be discovered” because I suspected Japanese readers would understand at least this much from the term taikoubou, so there was no reason to deny English readers the same knowledge, even if they didn’t necessarily stop to look up the reference. (It doesn’t hurt that the clause has a nice heft and rhythm to it, giving the sentence some balance.)

To be clear, this kind of translation, where the rendering in English is inspired by but tangentially related to the Japanese, is not common; in fact, I can’t think of another case where I’ve had to make a lateral move quite like this. But I think it’s a good illustration of the kinds of intuitive leaps translators sometimes have to make, and of the extent to which a bit of knowledge in the subject area can help when making those choices.

Thanks again for reading The Apothecary Diaries—hope to see you in volume 3!