Distant Sunflower Fields

Description

Distant Sunflower Fields eBook : Juan, Li , Payne, Christopher : desertcart.co.uk: Kindle Store Review: Atmospheric - Beautifully written book, even in translation. Vivid descriptions of the inhospitable desert environment in which the very resilient protagonists play out their lives. Detailed descriptions of animals and nature on the edge of the Gobi desert where the people remember Genghis Khan. The story mainly describes three seasons of sunflower cultivation by an unrelentingly tough mother and grandmother from the daughters point of view. Beautiful book but not for those who want a strong plot line! Review: Five stars for the book, three stars for the translation. I'm only on page 2 and have already spotted several translation problems. There is at least one mistake (where the original says 电台 or "radio," it becomes "television" in the translation). There are also borderline problems. For example, 罕有的旱年 "a rarely-seen draught year" becomes "this year has been strangely dry--a rare occurrence." Moreover, the translator consistently inserts his own phrases, perhaps to make the English flow better. Sometimes the insert is an explanation that the readers do not really need. Sometimes the explanation creates more problems. For example, 然而，正是这一年，我妈独自...种了九十亩葵花地, which can be directly translated as "Yet, precisely in such a year, my mother singlehandedly...planted 90 mus of sunflowers," is rendered as "Yet this was the year my mum, mostly by herself, set out... to plant sunflowers... She'd rented 90 mu...a rather small amount." 1 mu= 0.165 acres or 666.7 square meters. Is 15 acres a small amount? Is it a small amount for a person to plant singlehandedly? Why not let the readers decide? I understand the translator's desire to make the English more readable. Li Juan's prose is spare and her sentences tend to be short. Translated into English they might sound a bit choppy. But that is no reason to "fill it out," just as one would not, for example, want to make Marguerite Duras sound smooth. Here is an example to illustrate my point. On page 5, 这片大地广阔无物，其实，与浓密的森林一样擅于隐瞒 which can be directly translated as "this land seems vast and empty; in truth, it is just as good at concealing things as a thick forest," is rendered as "On the surface, the steppe seemed to stretch for as far as the eye could see, but in truth there were knotted and somewhat luxuriant forests nestled here and there, groves of trees that were adept at concealing myriad things..." Adding "forests" and "trees" changes the meaning. The original is thought-provoking and paradoxical--Li Juan's prose, like the land, is also hiding things in plain sight. The translation fails to catch up with the speed of her thought.