Translator's Note

Ma Yuan (1953 -) is one of China’s most important contemporary writers and was one of the first authors within the rise of ‘avant-garde’ fiction in China during the 1980s within China’s transition from socialist realism under Mao to literary postmodernism within the reform era of Deng Xiaoping. Born in Shenyang in the North East of China, Ma Yuan moved to Lhasa in the early 1980s and many of his most famous works of metafiction from this period are set in Tibet and contain elements of Tibetan folk customs and mysticism. Whilst Ma Yuan has often been compared to the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, the author also shares certain similarities with Italo Calvino and was influenced by a broad range of modernist and postmodernist authors. The Khampa Encampment (康巴人营地 Kangbaren yingdi) was published in 1986 when the author was reaching the heights of his critical notoriety as a highly challenging, provocative, and structurally postmodernist author. Ma Yuan has stated[1] that this short story was heavily influenced by a short story by Borges entitled Hombre de la Esquina Rosada which was first published in 1927. However, despite the relative brevity and simplicity of the narrative (in that it contains minimal descriptive text for example and minimal use of idiomatic phrasing) Ma Yuan’s text is situated within an entirely different and extremely complex cultural context which makes the translation of this work extremely challenging. The title of the text alone for example perfectly demonstrates the stages of transcultural mediation that are required within the translation of this text. The first term康巴人 Kangbaren refers to the ‘Khampas’, the inhabitants of Kham, one of the 3 traditional regions of Tibet, alongside U-Tsang and Amdo. Prior to the 1950s the constituent components of what is now Tibet covered a broad territorial area and multiple different ethnic groups across not only the Tibetan Autonomous region but also parts of neighbouring Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu Provinces. The borderlands of the Tibetan plateau in reality were a complex mix of constantly shifting ethnic and linguistic tectonics with many nomadic groups operating between the borderlines of established political and religious settlements. The Kham region was a historically independent region governed by local chieftains with strong cultural links however to the Dalai Lamas. The recent history of the Khampas is one of significant conflict and tension with the central organs of power in mainland China; whilst initially being enlisted by the opposing Kuomintang party before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, within the 1950s and 1960s the CIA funded Khampa militants as part of the “ST Circus” project in an attempt to resist Chinese Communist Party control within Tibet. At the time in which Ma Yuan, a Han Chinese who only spoke very limited Tibetan, was living in Lhasa during the 1980s and wrote “The Khampa Encampment” therefore, the Khampa minority were a relatively small ethnic group within one of the most remote and hostile environments within China who had experienced a significant amount of ethnic tension with the majority Han Chinese and who had traditionally occupied territories which did not coincide with the contemporary political delineation of Tibet.

From a translation perspective the title also demonstrates the weight of implied meaning that has to be transculturated as part of this unique cultural landscape. The second word within the title 营地 (yingdi) literally can be translated as ‘camp’, however within this context this particular phrase refers to the Tibetan concept of gar which is a more permanent collection of dwellings often used in place names and is often translated as ‘encampment’.  In addition, the narrative frequently refers to traditional customs of the Khampa people which would have been assumed knowledge for an implied Chinese reader. The narrator refers to a Khampa man with ‘red tassels’ (红缨hong ying) in his hair, a traditional form of head adornment which would be tied into the hair of male Khampas. I addition, it is customary for Khampas to carry knives and so the stabbing at the end of the narrative therefore operates within a specific set of cultural expectations, not as a random act of violence, but potentially deriving from inter-ethnic tensions within Tibet’s border communities. Furthermore, the geographic references to Lhasa contain highly significant implied cultural and religious connotations. The golden roofed Jokhang Temple is located at the heart of the Barkhor – a network of lanes which circle around this central temple complex. Whilst the Barkhor functions as a central point of business and exchange within Lhasa, it has an extremely large religious significance in that monks, nuns and pilgrims will walk around the Barkhor exclusively in a clockwise direction as an act of religious devotion, the concept of circularity being particularly significant within Tibetan Buddhism. In its most extreme form devotees will “磕长头” (kechangtou) - the core component of this phrase is the Chinese to English loan word ‘kowtow’ which in an English speaking context has the negative connotation of “to show somebody in authority too much respect and be too willing to obey them”. A literal rendering of this phrase is to ‘offer a long Kowtow’ and this term refers to a Buddhist practice of prostration in which devotees will prostrate themselves fully on the ground with each step within a crawling movement as they slowly move around the Barkhor as an act of religious devotion.

The text therefore operates within a very specific cultural and ethnic ecosystem in which the main participants – the Han Chinese narrator, the group of nine Tibetan pilgrims, and the Khampa murderer –  are all operating along the fault lines of cultural and ethnic borders which are not overtly stated within the text. Furthermore, these extra-textual dynamics are functioning within a spatiotemporal context of Tibet in the 1980s which has undergone fundamental cultural, economic and demographic changes with the Post-Deng acceleration of economic expansion and population movements within China. Here the author is offering a snapshot of a Chinese narrator operating outside of his cultural framework, and indeed his insistence that the violent event he witnessed was somehow ‘caused’ by him walking around the Barkhor the wrong way around is a highly ironic attempt to rationalise and place himself within causal connection in an environment beyond his linguistic understanding and control. Indeed, the Han Chinese narrator here refers to the fact that he cannot speak Tibetan, but can tell when he was being sworn at, because “the language barrier doesn’t really exist when you are being sworn at”. The Khampa Encampment therefore is a highly restrained and sparse exploration of cultural borderlands and this text highlights the unique challenges of translating narratives which involve multiple layers of cultural, ethnic and linguistic ‘othering’. 

[1] Within Ma Yuan’s 2015 non-fictional work Escaping which includes memoirs, essays and literary analysis the author states that “I had written a very short story entitled The Khampa Encampment, looking back on it now it seems that the composure of the killer and the sense of foreboding in the story has been copied from Hombre de la Esquina Rosada. No wonder people would very sincerely ask me: how has Borges influenced your writing?” Taoli: Cong dushi dao shiwai taoyuan: Zhejiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 2015, p.123《逃离：从都市到世外桃源》：浙江文艺出版社， 2015, p.123.

Will Gatherer

In the Classroom