Translation of Culture and Custom

Once Upon a Time in Ulaanbaatar

The summer after my freshmen year, I went on an eight-week trip the with a friend from Hong Kong. When summer began, I stayed with my family in Korea for a month, flew to New York to spend a week with other high school friends, and then went over to meet up with him in Prague. And from there, we traveled all the way to Vladivostok by train. My outbound flight from Korea was 14 hours, the return flight 1.

 

More than halfway through the Trans-Siberian Railway, we took a detour to Mongolia for a couple weeks. Our plan was to go on a minivan tour of the Gobi Desert arranged by our guesthouse and then spend a few days in Ulaanbaatar, the country's capital, before hopping back on the tracks. This short glimpse of Mongolia left the strongest-ever imprint of globalization in me.

 

As we passed by many nomadic communities as well as small towns across the desert, I was astonished by the amount of Korean stuff that repeatedly caught my sight out of nowhere. In this country with the lowest population density in the world, the predominant cultural influence seemed to be Korean. In both the gers and the settled cities we visited, I could always expect to find a Korean product—snacks, toys, cosmetics, burners, trucks and (in Ulaanbaatar) pop culture references. An American guy we ran into in Ulaanbaatar said to me, "you're so lucky, they'll love you automatically. They love all things Korean here". 

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At the end of the minivan

tour, we left the desert and

visited the Tsenkher Hot

Springs. As we were

relaxing, a tour guide from

another company heard us

talk in English and

approached us. He turned out to be just a few years older than us, working as a tour guide for the moment to hone his English. When he played music on his phone to accompany the conversation, I recognized Lounge Act by Nirvana and pointed it out to him, and it delighted him.

 

He love of rock music was noticeable, not least because of the tattoo that stretched across his forearm; according to him, it was the face of a Mongolian rock musician and political activist (whose name I missed) who was incarcerated for whatever it was that he advocated. He offered to meet up with me and my friend again in a few days and show us around Ulaanbaatar at night. When we reunited in an Irish pub, he brought along a friend of his on the back of whose hand was tattooed "NIRVANA" with the smiley face logo. 

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Unlike what generally seemed to be the case by the looks of numerous shops, advertisements and merchandise throughout the city, these two friends did not much care for Korean culture. It was the English-speaking world that inhabited their hearts. Every time I think about it, their English still amazes me. Although they could not talk like they were in a lecture hall, they could talk like they were at a back alley near a block party. For many of us Asian international students in the U.S., it is more often than not the other way around.

 

They never learned English at school. Aside from occasionally conversing with Western tourists (and maybe, according to them, brawling with Russians), they picked everything up from the Internet and the English-language popular art they love. They could roast each other in English slang better than my friend and I could. Alas, it was they who told me what Rick and Morty was.

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I would keep forgetting that these men had never

been educated in English and were likely never

going to be. It felt like there was a chasm between

the cultural references that filled our conversations

and the sights around us. Every other block, there

were either policemen breaking off brawls with

tasers or quick exchanges of unprocessed,

freshly-picked cannabis plants from the wild. They

even took us to a bootleg supermarket they

frequented to get smuggled imports cheap. It was

basically a silent underground Seven-Eleven with

no lights on except from the refrigerators, packed with young people yet thoroughly quiet. As we descended the entryway, my friend and I were told not to speak to or make eye contact with anyone. We got Kit Kats and water.

 

The two Mongolian friends, however, were experiencing nothing out of the norm. As I got to hear more about the stories of their past and the plans for their future, I realized two important things that stuck with me ever since and are directly related to what I've been writing about for this project. First, Nirvana is as central to the ethos of many youths in Ulaanbaatar as it is in Seattle. That is, the band is leading multiple lives as it resides in geographically disconnected groups of people who share the love in different ways.

 

For these two, English-language rock is not exotica but the very stuff of their cultural life. They were not reenacting a Western experience with literal fidelity; they have formed a regional sect of an international tradition—their own translation. In some hour of the night, we all felt tired from walking, so we sat in the car that belonged to one of them and played music. At some point, when Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis played, the one with the Nirvana tattoo stopped whatever conversation we were having and said, "I'm sorry. Here, when this song plays, you know you have to stop everything. You have to stop everything and sing the whole thing. We always sing this song. We have to!" So we did.

 

The other realization I had sounds incompatible with the first. When the Mongolian friends asked about our plans after the trip, my friend said he would return to Hong Kong to prepare for an internship, and I told them that, in a few days after I get home, I was going to a rock festival in Korea that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were headlining. The usual unapologetically vigorous expression on their faces was instantly replaced by something else. "You are living the dream, man!" This was the moment that divided our worlds. It occurred to me that the chasm I felt earlier was not entirely an illusion, either.

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Adaptation of an Adaptation 

In the previous chapters, we have seen that neither liberty nor fidelity can transfer the whole of the original untouched, and that a translation of an artistic text can be but a "creative transposition" at best. We have also seen that close translation stretches beyond grammar and reveals the differences in cultural perspectives underlying the languages involved. Such limits in the extent to which language can capture everything signified in another language suggest that fundamental belief systems are far from fully homogenized by globalization.

 

Insofar as language tells us about something, it is not just the grammatical rules of language that make texts from other cultures hard to understand. Even if we disregard the form of a text, when we read translations, which are now in the languages that we do know how to speak, our reading experience cannot be the same as the original audience, because, well, culture is a thing.

 

And again, insofar as culture engenders different kinds of life experiences, an artwork inspired by foreign precedents are, in a way, a highly domesticated interpretation. Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006), which won Best Picture at the 2007 Oscars, is a remake of Infernal Affairs, a 2002 Hong Kong film directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. There is an interesting chain of inspiration and adaptation here that exemplifies how vast and complex the global network of artistic influence has grown.

 

Infernal Affairs was a latecomer in the celebrated

tradition of 'Hong Kong noir', which refers to a number

of crime films from the region that bloomed in the 80s

and the 90s and remain favorites in East Asia to this

day. But it seems that the term 'Hong Kong noir' was

coined and popularized mostly within Asia and is not a

familiar to Western audiences. For instance, a 2006 

interview with Scorsese by The Guardian from 2006 

characterizes Infernal Affairs only fleetingly as a "cult

2003 Hong Kong thriller". 

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'Film noir' is a term ascribed to similarly-themed

Hollywood crime films in order to group them into a

separate genre, predating Hong Kong's adaptation of that genre by decades. When people coin a name for a group of such 'texts' and recognize them as a genre, and the name catches on, it enters history as its own tradition within the wider medium of expression it is part of—in this case, film.

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'Hong Kong noir' in East Asia refers a distinct

genre of film, but no such name exists in the West

just because it never was as popular—the most its

members can generate is a "cult". I have seen

several of the more nostalgic Korean viewers argue

that Infernal Affairs is far better, and that The

Departed did little more than paste Hollywood's

monolithic crime formula on a unique placeholder

of East Asia's cultural identity. On the other hand, it is also true that Hong Kong noir films did not constitute formative cultural experiences for most Westerners. There is no perspective at play here that is fully cosmopolitan. I like The Departed more, but I have no grounds to argue

that my preference is somehow less a product of my

environment, but I did not live through the genre's

heyday that the preceding generations lived through.

 

Of course, popularization of film as an artistic medium

around the world has been called many times an

unmistakable imprint of America-centered cultural

globalization. Critics of this phenomenon have been 

concerned that we might be moving towards a

homogenization of culture that results in a suppression

of diversity. To analogize this negative view of globalization to Venuti's translation theory, when Asian cultures adopt artistic media of Anglo-American origin, one might say that they are domesticating themselves into Anglo-American standards. 

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Tellingly, Scorsese himself has remarked that he does not consider The Departed a "remake" of Infernal Affairs, and that he adopted only the formal template (of genre, dialogue, plot) to express something of his own. Many scenes and themes in The Departed show that Scorsese was keenly aware that adaptation is a loaded concept. In particular, focus on the chase scene between Billy (DiCaprio) and Colin (Damon), whose identities have been swapped, at night in Chinatown. Billy runs into a hanging mobile

made of glass, through which he spots Colin. Then we

get a shot of fractured pieces of Billy's face reflected on

the pieces of the chandelier, and then a view of Colin

walking away in dark. Eventually, Colin, wearing a cap

with the American flag on it, stabs someone believing it

is Billy, but the victim turns out to be a Chinese man

who has nothing to do with it. 

 

Perhaps appropriation, adaptation, liberal translation

and literal translation are distinctions of degree rather

than kind, because every original artwork stands on the

shoulders of previous artworks that the artist

encountered. Perhaps a faithful literal translation is but an adaptation that doesn't try to get cute. Following this idea, Hong Kong noir and The Departed are both adaptations. The main difference particular to the age of globalization seems to be that the network of an artwork's underlying influences have grown both geographically wider and formally diverse.

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Globalization: Things Come Together

Music is another clear example of this unidirectional homogenization. K-pop, South Korea's most mainstream cultural output, started as an adaptation of American pop. Pop, hiphop, electronic, rock, jazz or classical, most of the music produced and distributed within Korea today are Korea's own "creative transpositions" of musical forms that originate in the West. The same is the case in most regions in the world with substantial exposure to American popular media. In fact, the word "pop" is used by Koreans exclusively to mean American music in general. Ask a Korean in Korean, "what is your favorite pop?" The Beatles is a more probable answer than BTS, simply because the word "pop" (transliterated as "팝") commonly refers to modern Western music.

 

Songs by Maroon 5, Jazon Mraz, Ed Sheeran and the like from about 150 years ago have never left the charts since. This suggests that what is going on is not a direct reflection of America's market trends. Rather, these songs are living another cultural life by forming another kind of relationship with another audience. Increasingly, it seems, we subscribe to similar kinds of things; at the same time, being at least partially products of our environments, our reception and interpretation are still different. The world as a whole is indeed more 'Americanized' than ever, but the many cultures and languages have rewritten their own America.

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As mentioned, the network of inspiration are formally

diverse as well. It no longer consists of closed cycles

of influence. Different artistic forms infinitely

available online now make sure artists never run out

of influences. Wu-Tang Clan modeled their character

on East Asian imports  Hong Kong noir as well as

Chinese Kung Fu films, and now rappers around the

world are modeling themselves on Wu-Tang in

addition to their cultural traditions. 

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Another great example started from a terse phrase from a

line in the poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats. The

catchy phrase, "things fall apart", telling of Western

decay, crumbling faith and order, among many other

things, became the title of Chinua Achebe's novel Things

Fall Apart, which now towers over the entire tradition of

modern African literature as seen from the West. And

then, "Things Fall Apart" became the title of a hiphop

studio album by The Roots, a monumental moment in

the Golden Age of hiphop. In the current political climate,

it wouldn't be surprising if another artist suddenly 

emerges and carries on with this tradition, in who knows

what medium.

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The more I tried to differentiate authorship

for readership, the more it seemed that they

are two sides of the same coin, because it

is difficult to isolate every instance of

inspiration in a globalized network. The

same texts and tales circulate more widely,

so it seems true that the kinds of artworks

we receive have become much more

homogenized than before. At the same time,

there still are countless differences in the

ways we receive them, because the same formal template connects to each culture in a different way. In this sense, universality is not necessarily the same thing as uniformity. We will dig a little deeper into the heterogeneity of reception in the next chapter.

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