‘Ulysses’ a Daring Endeavor for Chinese

It’s not surprising that the Chinese translators of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” are stumped by strange words like waxies and dargle and shaughraun.

The surprise is that they don’t face a government ban.

After all, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique has been condemned by the Communist Party as too subjective. Only one well-known Chinese writer, Zhang Xianliang, has used it extensively, and the novel in which he used it most, “Getting Used To Dying,” was banned.

“Ulysses,” Joyce’s allegorical story of a day in the life of Dublin salesman Leopold Bloom, is full of obscure references, complex puns, ribald jokes and scatological descriptions--a far cry from the simple, morally correct tales that the party favors.

But while controls on Chinese authors remain stringent, there seem to be few limits to what can be translated from abroad, short of outright pornography or calls to revolution.

“As long as you don’t challenge the leadership of the party, you can translate what you like,” said Xiao Qian, an 82-year-old writer who together with his wife, Wen Jieruo, is translating “Ulysses.”

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Xiao’s not sure if authorities will approve of the sexier parts of “Ulysses,” which caused U.S. authorities to burn it in 1919.

But at most, Xiao said, Chinese officials might insist that two editions of the book be issued: a complete version for use by scholars and an expurgated version for sale to the general public.

It’s hard to quarrel with his optimism. The evidence is in bookstores all over Beijing--thousands of foreign books that, if written by a Chinese author, would be doomed to a desk drawer.

Foreign books are a weak link in the Communist Party’s battle to control the cultural arena and fend off anti-socialist ideas. In part, this is because of an explosion in translation, from a few hundred books a year in the first three decades of Communist rule to several thousand a year now.

Publishers, knowing foreign books usually sell, gamble that officials will overlook anything sensitive until it’s already on bookstore shelves. The tactic usually works because few party officials read foreign languages.

Beijing bookstores and stalls are selling the memoirs of Lech Walesa, whose Solidarity free trade union inspired dissident Chinese workers; “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s novel about a teen-age girl who seduces her middle-aged stepfather, and books by Soviet political scientists searching for an alternative to communism.

There are the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lee Iaccoca and Boris N. Yeltsin.

“This is very different from China of the 1950s (when) only Russian literature was translated,” said Xiao, who remembered working then as a translator at the state-run Foreign Languages Press.

Xiao read a little Joyce during two years of study at Cambridge University in the 1940s but was never a fan.

“I was frightened by Joyce,” he said recently, speaking fluent English with a British accent.

But he and his wife, who generally translates from Japanese into Chinese, agreed to tackle “Ulysses” last year at a publisher’s urging. Only very brief excerpts of the novel had been published in Chinese before.

“This is a book only for the highbrow,” complained Xiao, a stout man with wispy white hair standing up straight from the top of his round head.

Wen exhibited a long list of queries they’ve sent to the British and Irish embassies. Sample: “What is meant by ‘on the shaughraun?’ ” and “What is the meaning of waxies?”

The words don’t appear in the dictionary and might be made up. Joyce frequently coined his own words, especially those involving puns and mixtures of different languages.

Xiao said he agreed to the project because he thought a dose of Joyce would be good for Chinese literature, which he said was “too utilitarian” and needs more depth.

He added with a small grin, “There’s something akin between the Irish and the Chinese. I don’t know--something impractical.”