A Sweet Calling
May. 15th, 2010 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prusikFirst thing first, Tony Pi's A Sweet Calling published in the May issue of Clarkesworld Magazine is an awesome story. The writing is at once taut and lyrical, the action is beautifully paced, the world building is deft, sure and subtle, everything the story sets up pays off and to top it off, there's a lovely little twist at the end. If not merely for the sheer enjoyment, everyone should read this story to learn How To Tell A Story. Again, Clarkesworld proves itself to be a venue for some of the best speculative fiction being published today.
Of course, when they first published it at the beginning of the month, I put it in Instapaper, then didn't get around to it. I just read it now because I heard the Clarkesworld podcast of the story, and if nothing else, I wanted to know which words were italicized and which weren't. Chinese words, rendered in flawless (if non tone marked) pinyin were, unless they were names, in which case, they weren't. Instead of tangren, I might have been tempted to write 糖人 instead. (Literally 'candyman' which was used in English earlier in the story.) Or at least tángrén. Interestingly, the one time someone says "dragon" in Chinese, lóng(龍), it is tone marked.
Rendering the Chinese words in pinyin allows him to use Capitalizations of Significance. i.e., the main character is no mere tangren, but rather a Tangren. That actually does convey extra information in this case. This makes me reconsider my 'no romanization' stance. (Well, except that I'm not fond of Capitalizations of Significance either. I get why they're useful and sometimes necessary though.)
As for the podcast, I should say at the outset that Kate Baker is perhaps one of the best podcasters I've heard. I look forward to Clarkesworld podcasts. She brings out the emotion and attitude behind the writer's words with breathtaking clarity and sincerity. I'd consider myself extremely fortunate if she ever read aloud any of my stories.
This doesn't mean that I don't have the same problem with her that I have with apparently everyone podcasting today who attempts to pronounce something in Chinese. Honestly, I'll forgive a lot. If the tones are wrong, I'll deal. If podcasters approximate sounds using their closest English equivalents, well, that's to be expected. And, in fact, if they do just that, they'll get within the ballpark, I'll think, "Close enough" and not bother blogging about it. After all, it's not like I've trained in the diction of every language that might conceivably show up in a podcast. (Honestly, who am I? Henry Higgins?)
[Ok, there is a 'Henry Higgins' exception. Stories where pronunciation is an issue really ought to be podcast with the appropriate accurate or inaccurate pronunciation.]
It would have been nice though if she had known that yuan is a single syllable, that ai is pronounced "eye", not "ay". The consonant j is infinitely closer to the American 'j' than the French one. While tangren is a two syllable word, the syllable breaks after the 'g', not after the 'n' (and the 'r' isn't rolled). There may have been others. This is just what comes to mind.
(Oh yeah, sh doesn't sound like the American 'sh.' The pinyin 'ch' doesn't either, for that matter.)
Are the mispronunciations horribly detrimental such that they ruin ruin ruin the podcast experience for me? No. (In fact, I figured out she meant 糖人 on first hearing.) They were a little wince-inducing, but they don't occur very often in the story so it's not like I was constantly wincing. And frankly, I suspect Kate was just imitating American newscasters. They get it wrong in mostly the same ways. She might have thought their pronunciations were authoritative.
[Of course it's not just Chinese. I hear newscasters mispronounce "Medvedev" all the time. There are supposed to be glides before the last two 'e's.]
Hearing it done wrong leaves me with the impression that the language is unimportant. The unintentional attitude is that these words are just collections of phonemes Tony Pi made up to serve his fictional world. Of course, Tony gets the Chinese absolutely right. (I might quibble that 'yuanzi dumplings' is analogous to saying 'ATM machine', but we do the latter all the time. In his place, I might also have done the same thing.) He could have written the story without recourse to Chinese words at all, but he chose to use them to establish a link to an actual place.
I'd rather hear the podcast and make my small criticisms than not have the story podcast at all, of course. That there are now genre story podcasts where I can criticize the pinyin pronunciation is an advance. Genre is becoming more diverse and this is one of the ways that diversity is showing itself.
This isn't to say that I wouldn't be thrilled to hear a story podcast where all the Chinese is pronounced correctly.
[Edited to fix an italics tag. Thanks, bmlg.]
Of course, when they first published it at the beginning of the month, I put it in Instapaper, then didn't get around to it. I just read it now because I heard the Clarkesworld podcast of the story, and if nothing else, I wanted to know which words were italicized and which weren't. Chinese words, rendered in flawless (if non tone marked) pinyin were, unless they were names, in which case, they weren't. Instead of tangren, I might have been tempted to write 糖人 instead. (Literally 'candyman' which was used in English earlier in the story.) Or at least tángrén. Interestingly, the one time someone says "dragon" in Chinese, lóng(龍), it is tone marked.
Rendering the Chinese words in pinyin allows him to use Capitalizations of Significance. i.e., the main character is no mere tangren, but rather a Tangren. That actually does convey extra information in this case. This makes me reconsider my 'no romanization' stance. (Well, except that I'm not fond of Capitalizations of Significance either. I get why they're useful and sometimes necessary though.)
As for the podcast, I should say at the outset that Kate Baker is perhaps one of the best podcasters I've heard. I look forward to Clarkesworld podcasts. She brings out the emotion and attitude behind the writer's words with breathtaking clarity and sincerity. I'd consider myself extremely fortunate if she ever read aloud any of my stories.
This doesn't mean that I don't have the same problem with her that I have with apparently everyone podcasting today who attempts to pronounce something in Chinese. Honestly, I'll forgive a lot. If the tones are wrong, I'll deal. If podcasters approximate sounds using their closest English equivalents, well, that's to be expected. And, in fact, if they do just that, they'll get within the ballpark, I'll think, "Close enough" and not bother blogging about it. After all, it's not like I've trained in the diction of every language that might conceivably show up in a podcast. (Honestly, who am I? Henry Higgins?)
[Ok, there is a 'Henry Higgins' exception. Stories where pronunciation is an issue really ought to be podcast with the appropriate accurate or inaccurate pronunciation.]
It would have been nice though if she had known that yuan is a single syllable, that ai is pronounced "eye", not "ay". The consonant j is infinitely closer to the American 'j' than the French one. While tangren is a two syllable word, the syllable breaks after the 'g', not after the 'n' (and the 'r' isn't rolled). There may have been others. This is just what comes to mind.
(Oh yeah, sh doesn't sound like the American 'sh.' The pinyin 'ch' doesn't either, for that matter.)
Are the mispronunciations horribly detrimental such that they ruin ruin ruin the podcast experience for me? No. (In fact, I figured out she meant 糖人 on first hearing.) They were a little wince-inducing, but they don't occur very often in the story so it's not like I was constantly wincing. And frankly, I suspect Kate was just imitating American newscasters. They get it wrong in mostly the same ways. She might have thought their pronunciations were authoritative.
[Of course it's not just Chinese. I hear newscasters mispronounce "Medvedev" all the time. There are supposed to be glides before the last two 'e's.]
Hearing it done wrong leaves me with the impression that the language is unimportant. The unintentional attitude is that these words are just collections of phonemes Tony Pi made up to serve his fictional world. Of course, Tony gets the Chinese absolutely right. (I might quibble that 'yuanzi dumplings' is analogous to saying 'ATM machine', but we do the latter all the time. In his place, I might also have done the same thing.) He could have written the story without recourse to Chinese words at all, but he chose to use them to establish a link to an actual place.
I'd rather hear the podcast and make my small criticisms than not have the story podcast at all, of course. That there are now genre story podcasts where I can criticize the pinyin pronunciation is an advance. Genre is becoming more diverse and this is one of the ways that diversity is showing itself.
This isn't to say that I wouldn't be thrilled to hear a story podcast where all the Chinese is pronounced correctly.
[Edited to fix an italics tag. Thanks, bmlg.]
