Tâigael
« previous post | next post »
What with all the talk about Taiwanese and Gaelic swirling around Language Log recently, I was serendipitously surprised to find this in my inbox last week:
Hot off the press!
From the Introduction, by the editors, Hannah Stevens & Will Buckingham:
There’s a Gaelic proverb that says a good story is worth telling twice: cha mhisde sgeul math aithris dà uair. The stories in this collection are very good, and so they are told four times: once in Gaelic, once in English, once in Mandarin, and once (or twice, but we’ll get to that) in Tâi-gí, or Taiwanese.
Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic is a book for anybody who loves to slip across the boundaries and borderlines between languages, to see how, in the process, the landscapes of human thinking and feeling shift and change. We are both writers ourselves. Although originally from England, we have chosen to put down our roots in both Scotland and Taiwan. And, double-immigrants that we are, we have found ourselves fascinated by the diversity of languages in both countries, and the possibilities this diversity opens up for thinking and feeling differently: the Gaelic place-names unfamiliar on our tongues, the music of the Scots spoken by our neighbours in Dundee, the boisterous exclamations in Taiwanese we hear drifting up from the street in Tainan… And the more time we have spent reading about the history of language diversity in both places, the more we have realised that, for all their differences, Taiwan and Scotland have undergone startlingly similar histories of colonialism, language suppression, and revival. In Taiwan, Tâi-gí was actively suppressed—along with many of Taiwan’s other languages, including indigenous Austronesian languages and Hakka—fiirst in favour of Japanese, and then in favour of Mandarin. Meanwhile in Scotland, both Scots and Gaelic were suppressed in favour of English. But if Tâi-gí and Gaelic share similar histories of suppression, they also have parallel experiences of revival. Both in Scotland and in Taiwan, the last few decades have seen a growth of new projects and initiatives to support languages that are under threat. And this is to the benefiit of us all. Language diversity, we believe, is good for everyone. It expands the possibilities for how we think, speak, imagine and even dream. It brings a greater richness to our shared human culture.
…We worked collaboratively with our writers, and with translator Shengchi Hsu, to translate the stories from Taiwanese to Mandarin and English, and from there to Gaelic, and—in the reverse direction—from Gaelic to English, and from there to Mandarin and Taiwanese. None of us spoke all these languages well, which meant that in the editorial process, we had to cross back and forth between languages and cultures, in the process reimagining both Scotland and Taiwan.
…
Along the way, we have become increasingly convinced that translation is fundamental to what it is to be human. It is nothing less than the process of weaving and reweaving a shared world, across all our differences. In moving from your world to mine, from our world to the world of another, we discover many things. But, more than this, we strengthen the threads that join us.
…Questions about language are there as well, sometimes in the foreground, and sometimes in the background. How does language connect us to a community or to a past? What makes speech prophetic? Does naming things conjure them into being, invite them into our world?
…
The texts in Gaelic are presented according to standard orthography. For texts in Taiwanese, we have taken into account the complex history of written Taiwanese. We have chosen to present the Taiwanese texts in two forms: in written characters (漢字, or hàn-jī), and in romanised form. There are still active debates around the best way to represent Taiwanese when using characters or hàn-jī, and different writers make different choices. Meanwhile, when writing in romanisation, there are two different systems in current use. We have chosen to present these texts in POJ or peh-ōe-jī, as this is the system with the longest literary heritage. Regardless of the system used, the Taiwanese language is also subject to a variety of regional pronunciations and spellings. In all cases, we have gone with the preferences of our writers and translators, even where these may differ from the spellings found in dictionaries. We have also commissioned audio versions of the stories, read by the authors and translators. These are available on the accompanying website by scanning the QR code below. [VHM: omitted here]
We have talked about slipping across borders. And it seems to us that, if languages are countries, they are countries with open borders. They are places where people come and go, where they settle down for a long or short time, where people come to live, and of ten to thrive. And if there is a pleasure to finding oneself in a place that is familiar, there is a pleasure to unfamiliarity as well. So we hope that this book encourages readers to move across these borders, to taste different ways of being and living, speaking and thinking, to see the world differently, and to fiind new ways of telling their own stories. Because a good story, as we have said, is worth telling (at least) twice.
Here's the table of contents:
Naomi Sím 9
翠蘭ê情批 (台語) 11
Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe (Tâi-gí) 15
翠蘭的情書 (華語) 20
Emerald Orchid Love Letter (English) 25
Litir-leannanachd Mhogairle Smàragach (Gàidhlig) 32
Elissa Hunter-Dorans 41
A’ Chathair Fhalamh (Gàidhlig) 43
The Empty Chair (English) 49
空椅 (華語) 54
空椅仔 (台語) 59
Khang Í-á (Tâi-gí) 64
Kiú-kiong 71
〈4：44：44〉(台語) 73
4:44:44 (Tâi-gí) 76
〈4：44：44〉(華語) 80
4:44:44 (English) 83
4:44:44 (Gàidhlig) 87
Lisa Macdonald 93
Saorsa (Gàidhlig) 95
Freedom (English) 99
解套 (華語) 102
自由 (台語) 105
Chū-iû (Tâi-gí) 108
In Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic, we have a rich assemblage of stories in an innovative format involving four languages. Reading through the book will open hitherto unexperienced nooks and crannies of the mind.
Selected readings
- "Trainspotting-like Voices in Chinese" (3/12/11)
- "Dialect or Topolect?" (7/1/10) — Brian Holton's translation of Shuǐhǔ zhuàn 水滸傳 (Water Margin; All Men Are Brothers) into Scots
- "Bilingualism as a bonus for the brain" (6/3025)
Philip Taylor said,
July 5, 2025 @ 4:03 am
Wow. I ordered a copy without hesitation.
Peter Grubtal said,
July 5, 2025 @ 6:49 am
There may be an interesting concept underlying this book, but it doesn't seem without its share of half-baked politics.
Far from sharing
“ startlingly similar histories of colonialism”
Scotland's experience of colonialism is in colonizing England under James (VI/I) and being a co-colonizer of much of the world with England.
wgj said,
July 5, 2025 @ 7:56 am
@Peter Grubtal: Taiwan was a co-colonizer of much of Asia with Japan. Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's first democratically elected president, was in his youth not even conscripted, but volunteered for service in the Imperial Japanese Army in 1944 (see Wikipedia for more detail).
This piece of history made it rather awkward during the recent worldwide celebration of the 80th anniversary of end of WWII, when Taiwan tried to portray itself as the (current and potentially future) victim of military aggression (by China), despite the fact that historically, the roles were reversed.
Victims have often been aggressors to others, that's true for individuals, and for nations as well. In this, there's more similarity between Taiwan and Scotland than you think.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 5, 2025 @ 11:03 am
Wow excellent; purchased. And to emphasize, all the audio versions are freely available on the website.
Re above comments, haha — OK I guess it is the fault of "progressives" that 'colonization' no longer means pretty much anything at all… for slightly better yucks though, one should at least claim that the Gaels colonized the Picts and the Taiwanese colonized the indigenous Formosans.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 5, 2025 @ 11:27 am
Approx 200,000 Taiwanese (whether Han Chinese or aboriginal) served in the Japanese military from 1937-45, compared to a total population of maybe 5.5 million when you back out the ethnic-Japanese living there at the time. They were almost entirely confined to low-prestige non-combatant roles in the earlier years although as the war developed unfavorably for Japan policy then got unsurprisingly looser.* Really not a particularly close parallel to the often disproportionate-to-population major role of Scottish regiments in the expansion and maintenance of the British Empire. Future Pres. Lee's military duties in the Japanese Army largely involved manning anti-aircraft batteries either in Taiwan itself or Honshu, which would not have endeared him to the crews of the U.S. bombers he was trying to shoot down but was not really the expansion/conquest-oriented part of the operation. (Although one of his brothers was killed in the Philippines while in Japanese service; there's some suggestion that when they did start using some Taiwanese troops in combat roles it was in Southeast Asia rather than mainland China because the Taiwanese troops were not trusted in situations where the troops on the other side would be ethnically-Chinese.)
*There is an interesting side story about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takasago_Volunteers, recruited from the non-Chinese aboriginal population, who were put in units of their own and (rightly or wrongly) believed by the Japanese high command to for cultural reasons be unusually well-suited for jungle and tropical-island warfare. But the absolute numbers of men in those units were not very high.
Scott P. said,
July 6, 2025 @ 11:15 am
Scotland's experience of colonialism is in colonizing England under James (VI/I) and being a co-colonizer of much of the world with England.
The story of the Stuart Dynasty doesn't exactly end there…