Translator: Mui Poopoksakul | Author: Prabda Yoon | Work: Kwam Na Ja Pen | Original Language: Thai | Genre: Short story

… ฉันนั่งเฉยๆอยู่ได้ไม่กี่เดือน ดั้งจมูกของฉันก็ต้องทำหน้าที่รองรับแว่นกรอบดำ เพิ่มความมั่นใจให้ฉันเป็นกอง ใครถาม ฉันก็บอกว่าจู่ๆสายตาของฉันมันก็เล่นตลก เกิดผิดปกติขึ้นมาเองโดยไม่คาดฝัน ไม่รู้เหมือนกันว่ามันสั้น หรือยาว หรือเอียง แต่ที่แน่ๆคือมันมองอะไรไม่ค่อยชัด ยิ่งเวลาต้องมองผลิตภัณฑ์สินค้าที่ฉันมีหน้าที่ต้องขาย สภาพสายตายิ่งขุ่นมัวอย่างไรชอบกล ไม่ได้ไปถามความเห็นจากจักษุแพทย์ที่ไหนหรอก ตัดสินใจซื้อแว่นใส่เองเลย ถือเป็นเรื่องของจิตวิทยามากกว่า ใส่แล้วโลกทัศน์ชัดเจนขึ้น ทำงานสะดวก ขายของเก่ง เจอใครๆก็เรียกพี่ ฉันเพิ่งรู้สึกถึงรสชาติของการได้เป็นพี่ของคนที่ไม่ได้เกี่ยวดองปรองญาติ ช่างเป็นความรู้สึกที่สร้างพลังลึกลับมหาศาลระหว่างทรวงอก ช่วยเพิ่มเติมความฮึกเหิมให้กับชีวิตประจำวัน แต่บางทีฉันก็ต้องระงับความรู้สึกนั้นเอาไว้ ไม่ให้ประเจิดประเจ้อจนออกนอกหน้า ฉันต้องแกล้งบอกไปว่า ไม่ต้องมาเรียกพี่หรอก อายุก็ไล่เลี่ยกัน แต่ในใจของฉันบอกว่า ถ้าเจอกันคราวหน้าแล้วมึงไม่เรียกกูว่าพี่ละก็ กูจะไม่คบกับมึงอีก …

… I sat there for no more than a few months before the bridge of my nose acquired the job of holding black-rimmed glasses. They gave me loads of confidence. Whenever anybody asked, I said my eyes suddenly started playing tricks on me. They went bad out of nowhere. I didn’t know if I was nearsighted or farsighted, but I knew for sure that I couldn’t see very clearly. My eyes were suspiciously blurry in particular when I had to stare at the products that I had to promote. I didn’t consult any doctors. I just decided to buy my own glasses. It was more of a psychological matter. When I wore them, my view of the world was clearer. It was easier to work with them on. I was better at selling. People showed respect and called me pi as if I was their big brother. For the first time, I experienced the taste of people addressing me as pi despite a lack of actual relation. It put me on a high horse. My chest was mysteriously pumped up. But sometimes I had to hold those feelings in and not flaunt them in people’s faces. I had to pretend to say, There’s no need to call me pi. We’re not far off in age. But in my head I’d be saying, If you don’t fucking call me pi next time we run into each other, I’m done with you…

In Thai, forms of address and pronouns are extremely nuanced. There are more ways to say “you” or “I” than one could productively count, especially since a person, in specific circumstances, could use his or her own first name to mean “I” without creating the effect of referring to oneself in the third person as would happen in English. To give a very general flavor, when not using the formal form of address, which is khun (roughly equivalent to Mr. or Ms.), Thais often address others using words that indicate familial relationships such as older or younger sibling, aunt, uncle, grandma, etc., depending on the addressee’s age relative to the addressor’s, and the addressee’s gender. It would be uncommon and impolite not to use these honorifics before a person’s first name when addressing an older person. I am grouping pronouns and forms of address as constituting the same problem because in Thai, a particular form of address usually comes with a specific set of pronouns. For example, if someone addresses you as khun, you would use the (more) formal pronoun for “I” depending on your gender, and khun also becomes the term for “you.”

In contemporary Thai author Prabda Yoon’s short story “Kwam Na Ja Pen” (which I have translated as “Pen in Parentheses”), the narrator revels in the fact that people at his office start calling him pi (meaning older sibling) after he starts wearing glasses. The use of pi often connotes seniority and respect which can somewhat be detached from age, and so the narrator starts gloating after he earns the honorific, as relatively young people sometimes do when being addressed as pi for the first time outside of family relationships. Since this specific concept does not exist in English, it was a difficult point in the translation to choose the appropriate solution. I toyed with the idea of using a footnote to explain the concept, and I then thought about eliminating the Thai word altogether and using a different narrative gesture. In the end, for the version that ran in Asymptote, I kept the Thai word but put in a few in-text explanatory words in hopes of maintaining a Thai flavor in a non-didactic manner. Still, because there is no perfect solution, there is not one “right” answer (but perhaps better or worse ones depending on the text being translated and the translator’s aim).

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator promoting Thai literature through translation and writing. She is currently wrapping up an M.A. in cultural translation at the American University of Paris and previously studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College.

Translator: Vanessa Weller | Author: Julia Franck | Work: Der Hausfreund | Original language: German | Genre: Short story

…Am Alex steigen wir um. Hanna und ich würden gerne dableiben. In dem Brunnen baden Kinder, und wir wollen auch baden. Aber unsere Mutter sagt, wir würden erst zu Thorsten gehen, da gebe es auch den Stabilbaukasten, den wir so mögen. Wir wollen lieber mit unseren Fahnen zu der Musik und da sein, wo alle anderen Menschen sind. Unsere Mutter verspricht uns, dass Thorsten bunten Puffreis zu Hause hat. […] Thorstens Wohnung ist klein, und es riecht. Das sind die Mülltonnen, erklärt Thorsten und zeigt nach unten in den Hof. Ich glaube, es ist Thorstens Fellweste, aber das will er natürlich nicht zugeben. Hanna und ich bekommen eine Schale mit Puffreis auf den Küchentisch gestellt. Wir teilen sie nach Farben auf. Rot ist meine Lieblingsfarbe, Grün ihre. Thorsten nimmt meine Mutter an die Hand und zieht sie in sein großes Zimmer und schließt die Tür…Wir können hören, wie meine Mutter und Thorsten kichern. Da hätten sie gar nicht die Tür zumachen müssen. Hanna ist langweilig, sie hat keine Lust zu spielen. Wir wollen endlich los. Ich gehe zu der Tür, hinter der Thorsten und meine Mutter Verschwunden sind. Sie klemmt, ich versuche mehrmals die Klinke, aber die Tür will nicht aufgehen.

…At Alexanderplatz we change trains. Hanna and I want to stay there. Children are swimming in the fountain, and we also want to swim. But our mother says we have to go to Thorsten’s first, where there is the Stabil construction set we like so much. We would rather be here with our flags and the music, where all the other people are. Our mother promises us that Thorsten has colored Puffreis at home. […] Thorsten’s apartment is small and it smells. Those are the rubbish bins, Thorsten explains and shows us in the back of the courtyard. I think it is Thorsten’s fur vest, but of course he would never admit that. Hanna and I take the bowl of Puffreis placed on the kitchen table. We sort it by color. Red is my favorite color, green is hers. Thorsten takes my mother by the hand and leads her into his big bedroom and closes the door […] We can hear my mother and Thorsten giggling. They definitely should not have closed the door. Hanna is boring, she doesn’t want to play. At last we want to go. I go to the door, where Thorsten and my mother disappeared. It sticks. I try the handle many times, but the door will not budge.

Nostalgic and bitterly ironic, Julia Franck’s short story of a child forced by her mother to confront an adult world is charming, shocking, and utterly 20^th century. In German, the title is a double entendre, meaning both the obvious and platonic “family friend” and the more secretive lover of the mother. This relationship between the mother and Thorsten, seen through the eyes of the young narrator, deals with the necessity to confront her allegiances: both to her father and to her Fatherland. “The ‘Family Friend’” is a story about innocence and betrayal. A German reader would immediately identify that the action takes place in East Berlin, with the mother and her lover trying to escape with the children to the West. Certain markers, such as the flags the children pasted in school, Erich Hoenecker, and the layout of Berlin’s public transportation, are all too obvious. How do these nuances that need no explanation in the original remain without hitting the reader over the head with a footnote or other heavy-handed articulation, especially for an English-speaking audience with few contemporary clues to the Cold War and the GDR? I chose to keep as many words as I could to squarely root the story in 1970s East Berlin. Although the theme is universal, the story must be represented as it was intended. The mother and her lover would speak Russian, not French or another Western language, to keep secrets. The girls would play with a Stabil rather than an ERECTOR set. They would eat Puffreis, not Rice Krispies. Even Thorsten’s dreaded fur vest is a men’s sartorial habit from the 1970s that arguably should have stayed there. The little girl has a command of her words that seemingly derives from her emulation of her mother. Of course, she is precocious, but parroting her mother—and her father—gives her a certain edge, a wisdom beyond her years that almost guesses what her mother and Thorsten are really up to. The subtlety of language in the German forces us to question just how much the girls really know. Metonymically associating Thorsten’s ugly vest with his character, and the knowledge that a secret is being kept from our narrator by her mother illustrates an instance of precociousness, but also of learned behavior, of playing the adult to shield the child from the necessity of seeing what the mother really is. Grammatically, the subjunctive case is far more common in German than in English, for example in: Da hätten sie gar nicht die Tür zumachen müssen. Readers of both will notice that I favored the indicative in English to realistically portray the narrator’s precociousness. My aim in translating was to keep the essence of the story’s time and place, and of the narrator’s character by retaining the elements of simplicity and sophistication which Julia Franck has powerfully established in her German prose.

Vanessa Weller earned her Bachelor’s degree in French and German from Lawrence University in 2009 and is currently a candidate in the Master’s program in Cultural Translation at The American University of Paris. She has been writing creatively for several years, receiving honorable mentions for her poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Young Writers contest in 2004 and for her creative nonfiction in the Columbia College-Chicago’s Young Writers Workshop in 2005.