通事

Twenty-eighth of December, 2036, the kitchen table in New Jersey: a laptop, the Essentials, and my high-school English–Chinese dictionary with my name on the cover in my mother's hand. Sixty-four pages, fourteen methods, forty-one names. The first page has one line: all the drawings in this book were made in drying houses; anywhere else, look at your own ground first. I typed "drying houses" and deleted it. In Fresno they would think of a kiln, a machine. So: mud-brick houses with holes all through the walls, where grapes hang in the wind and out of the sun. One word became a sentence.

The first method: before weighing each day, pinch sample bags one and five. Half an hour on the word "pinch". Pinch is two fingers, too light; squeeze is a fist, too heavy; press goes the wrong way. Yiming uses three fingers, thumb below, two above, a soft closing, a pause, a release. No English word is that movement. Fourteen characters of Chinese became eighty-seven words of English.

At noon my mother put a bowl of noodles by my hand and asked if it wouldn't go across. The hardest word, I said, is shougan, the feel in the hand. Half the methods end in it, and English doesn't have it. "It does," she said. "Hand." The man who handed out the piecework would rub a cloth between his fingers and say: this one has a good hand; that one has no hand. It is a textile word: the feel of a fabric under the fingers, soft or stiff, thick or thin, slick or dry, whether it falls. Thirteen years in the basement; she learned it beside the sewing machine. "When your father first came his English wasn't good; I did the talking to the outside. My English came from the machine, one word at a time, all of them cloth words. Selvage is the edge. Bias is cutting on the slant. Hand is hand. The rest I don't say well."

That night at one in the morning, stuck on sparrows, not because I couldn't translate the line but because I didn't know whether there are sparrows in the vineyards of Fresno, a man sat opposite me with a face darkened by sea wind, a patched gown, a cloth bundle with a water-wrinkled scroll. He pointed at the two characters for sparrow: "Are the sparrows where you're going the same bird as the sparrows here?" I said I didn't know. He nodded as if that were the right answer. Ma Huan, interpreter to the fleet: first ashore, first to look at their scales, because until their pound and ours agree nobody knows who has been cheated. "Then you're an interpreter too." — M.

Memo to file. New Jersey, 28 December 2036 – 4 January 2037. Translating the Essentials, and what didn't cross.

1. One word, one sentence. "Drying house" means a kiln to a Californian. It became a description. Where the thing exists on only one side, don't translate the name. Keep it, and describe what you saw. That is what the interpreter did with fruit his readers had never tasted: their name for it, then its size, colour, taste and how it's eaten.

2. The three-finger pinch. Pinch is too light, squeeze too heavy, press goes the wrong way. Fourteen characters became eighty-seven words. Some movements have no word anywhere; you describe the hand.

3. Hand. My mother's word, from the garment trade: the feel of a cloth between the fingers. She learned her English beside the machine, one cloth word at a time. The best translation in the book came from the basement. Where the thing exists on both sides under different names, you find the other name. That is the easiest case and the most satisfying.

4. He can see where things break. When my father went for the job at the box factory my mother went with him to translate. Asked what he could do, he said: I can look. At what? At where things break. She put it into English, the man laughed and took him on. "The best sentence I ever translated." In the afternoon she had me read the first method aloud: eighty-seven words, half a minute. "Too long. Your father would say: if one sentence will do, don't use three." Cut to forty-one words and a drawing of the three fingers.

5. Sweating. Aynur checks at night which bunches "sweat". Nora, unprompted: in Fresno, dried raisins go into big wooden bins to even out their moisture, and the bins are called sweatboxes. The Pacific between them, nobody taught anybody, and both call it sweating.

6. The ninth question. "The book says to ask Yiming about this. Who is Yiming? Can I call him?" He is seventy-one, in Kuqa, no English, not much Mandarin. In Turpan and Kuqa a name after a line is the why: if you don't understand, you go and ask the person and he pinches it for you. Across the sea the name survives and the why is lost.

7. The interpreter's line. "A method translated without its why arrives as an incantation." My father's tenth column turns up again: the Chinese edition never needed a why because it said who. The English edition must.

8. Fourteen whys. Why pinch one and five first: the bags at the two ends drift fastest; if your hand has changed overnight they tell you first. Why the holes in the walls: wind through the house, grapes in shade, and sun would take the green away. Why the back of the hand for sweating: the palm is damp itself. Why sparrows: when they come, the grapes are sweet; added, where you are it may be a different bird, so look at what lands on your own ground. Three of fourteen I could not explain. Written as it is: we don't know why; it has worked in Turpan for years; if you find out, please tell us.

9. Forty-one names. Asked each how to spell it in Latin letters. Alim. Eli, with a question mark. Yiming, through Kamil: "Write it however you like. Whatever you write is me." The English edition runs to seventy-one pages, seven more than the Chinese; the seven extra pages are almost all Why.

10. What the interpreter feared. "Not failing to understand. Both sides thinking they have understood: they say a pound, we say a pound, nobody asks which pound, and when the cargo has changed hands there's a thirty per cent gap." And on rules nobody could explain: write that it's done that way and the why wasn't found. "Don't invent one for them. An invented why is worse than none." Of my three: Abdurehman's first pinch of a berry from the doorframe each morning, for which he wrote one character with his left hand, habit, and I added that it may be more than habit; the doors left open the night before taking down, still on trial since a rain once ruined a whole house; hanging a little soft and taking down two days early, to be tried in house two next year. Rose's postscript: do you get rain in September? Hardly; Turpan's whole year is under twenty millimetres. "Grandma says: then you don't understand September."

11. Next. Rose, ninety-one, through Nora: "Our grapes don't go into a house. They lie on the ground and look at the sky. You wrote your whys. Ours you haven't seen. My son prunes in January. Come." Five days. My mother: go, see how they dry theirs, come back and tell me. I arranged for the neighbour's son to shovel the step; she said there was no need. At four she went to the switch, stopped, looked back: "While you're away I'll switch it on at four as usual. This time you know who it's for."

"A method translated without its why arrives as an incantation."
Ma Huan sailed with the Ming treasure fleets in the early fifteenth century as an interpreter. In the preface to his account of the countries he visited, he says that as a young man he read an earlier traveller's record of distant lands and could not believe the world was so various; only after seeing those places with his own eyes did he know the record was true. His own book is careful about what travellers and traders actually need: local products, weights and measures, money, and what each is worth in the units of home.
Translation of practice has three cases. Where the same thing exists on both sides under different names, you find the other name: the Chinese word for the feel of a material in the hand becomes the garment trade's "hand". Where a thing exists on only one side, you keep its name and describe it. And where a rule depends on a person, you face the hardest case. A local manual can say "ask Yiming", because Yiming is down the road. Abroad, Yiming cannot be asked, and a rule without its reason turns into ritual.
Documents written for colleagues can rely on shared context. Documents that must travel have to carry their reasons with them.
"Write it however you like. Whatever you write is me."