Translator’s Note

The Book of the Orangutan《阿猩》was originally published in China by Ding Cheng, in Dec. 2023. This book was inspired by a baby orangutan named Chestnut (毛栗子), who was born in Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo on August 31st, 2022. The endangered orangutan stands as one of the three great apes surviving on earth, sharing 97% of their DNA with humans. However, their numbers today are extremely rare. The Book of the Orangutan “translates” the cooing and snores of Chestnut collected on the 63rd and 68th day of his life. These sounds were transformed from sound to text and then translated across 200 human languages through a software application, creating a database of linguistic raw materials that the poet used to reproduce this collection of poems. During that process, Ding purposefully made use of the ever-expanding translation errors across different languages and the mistranslations generated by translation software. Bringing the environment, technology, and literature together, The Book of the Orangutan opens up an interdisciplinary experiment that integrates the human world with its orangutan counterpart, pushing the boundaries of poetry writing in the midst of the extinction crisis.

This collection is about making sense out of the nonsensical, while acknowledging the potentiality of the nonsense. It is a playful performance of infidelity, while directing its allegiance elsewhere, to the unclaimed wilderness of poesis. Of the 1000 poems, I have chosen 7 for this submission. In Ding’s manuscript, footnotes are scattered across the poems, signifying an authorial departure from the animal’s unfathomable oratory. Despite heavily editing some of the footnotes, I kept them mostly in place because they form part of the poem’s ecology. I see them mimicking a nonplussed, slightly pedantic human voice peeking through the orangutan’s, acting as if they are desperately trying to make sense of Chestnut’s “oracle”, yet fall short of doing so with every attempt. In other words, they are performative, rather than just informative. In translating and editing these footnotes alongside the poems, I find myself navigating the tension between human-animal relationships across cultures. There are only so many layers of mimetic removal a reader can reckon with before art collapses back into nature, but this project questions whether that collapse would be such a bad thing. This is both the ruse and the earnestness of the poems, and it’s up to the reader to decide which side they want to take. 

I started a translation of this project with the awareness that it is already a product of translation–with 200 human languages and the original sounds of an orangutan flowing through its veins. Yet among the many layers of translation embedded in the making of this book, my translation is perhaps the most faithful—not in the sense of preserving the original words verbatim, but in my attention to “meaning”, the bogeyman that this project is trying so hard to take down. Even as I admire the iconoclast spirit of this project, I could not help but be intentional in the choices I make: selecting words, highlighting imagery, negotiating rhythm, editing footnotes, and curating which poems to include. I was faced with the rather impossible task of maintaining the nonsensical, anti-syntactical form of the poems while upholding the basic rules of translation, which is to make sense with another language. I originally debated about my own intervention in this project because it seems to defy its whole setup. But I’ve come to realize that this is precisely a project where translation brings it full circle, standing as the final (counter)act that resists any easy deconstruction of meaning. After all, we already live in a time where meaning can be manipulated in concerning ways. The tension between “good” and “bad” language (fidelity and infidelity) is a predicament of my translation; it is also a predicament for meaning-makers (across species) living on a planet haunted by loss. 

I would like to thank Xuelan Su 苏雪兰 (fellow translator based in Seattle) for her interest, insights and helpful feedback on my manuscripts.

—Kexin Song