YES I SAID: TRANSLATING ULYSSES INTO CHINESE
by Jim Di
Poets and Writers, November/December 2002
Joyce’s deliberately repeated use of yes, as what he called “the woman word”, in the final episode to characterize Molly’s mentality is at odds with the genius of the Chinese language, which requires lexical adjustments to express the multitude of ideas carried by the English yes. There is not one Chinese term, much less the standard “counterpart” — shi-de — that can in a Chinese version of the novel more or less consistently replace yes. This contrasts with such European language counterparts as si, oui, ja, and so on, in their versions. If I followed Joyce’s lead and repeated one Chinese term in all the eighty-odd occasions in the chapter where yes is found in the original, I would most certainly ruin the end text with expressions that would sound idiotic to most Chinese readers. Joyce’s demand for emphatic repetition runs headon into a conflict with the genius of the Chinese language.
After a long and careful study I decided that a large number of Mollys’ yeses do not serve as much more than a kind of emphatic affirmation of the speaker’s own sincerity. There is hardly any other substantive content to those yeses, so it is possible to choose a Chinese term of affirmation that sounds natural on such occasions. This decision meant fewer repetitions of Joyce’s yes, but enough to produce an impression of a habitual locution in someone’s mouth, as “the woman word” must do.
The repeatable term of emphatic affirmation I chose is zhen-de — “really” — which is a kind of habitual locution with some speakers of Chinese. It is repeated dozens of times in my translation of the last episode, and like Joyce’s yes, it does stand both at the beginning and the end of it, conspicuously but quite naturally. At the same time, the other yeses are rendered flexibly, each in a way that suits its particular context. Some of the yeses in the final passage of the episode, for instance, involve the very serious matter of accepting a marriage proposal, for which neither shi-de nor zhen-de will suffice. My rendering for that is yuan-yi, a formal term that means “I will”.
Yet in its Chinese form the pronoun I is understood, and the ending of the novel becomes “yuan-yi wo yuan-yi zhen-de.” I believe this carries the same emphasis as Joyce’s original yes I will Yes. — which in fact happens to be its only back-translation.
