The translation took around seven years. Our interest in KCKP goes back further. When we were writing Thailand: Economy and Politics in 1993–94, we wanted a prologue that gave a bottom-up view of sakdina society, to balance the epilogue about Phumphuang. Pasuk came up with the idea of using KCKP.
Prologue of Thailand:Economy and Politics. 1995
Subsequently, I read the enthusiasm for KCKP by William Gedney, Yoneo Ishii, Sulak, and so on.
The idea of translating KCKP grew out of our translation of Nidhi’s Pen and Sail in 2002–3. Nidhi’s book has over a hundred quotes from Thai literary works. We thought we would not be able to handle these so we asked several Thai literature experts, both Thai and farang, for help. For reasons of time or inclination, every one of them declined. There was no other option than to do them ourselves. To my surprise, they were not as difficult as I had expected (though I know now that we did not translate some of them very well).
Several of the most interesting quotes in Pen and Sail are from KCKP. At the launch event for Pen and Sail, we arranged for an artiste to recite a famous passage from KCKP. We made an English translation for the audience and found it worked quite well. Around that time I suggested to Pasuk we should do the full translation and she agreed. We planned it as “retirement project.” But then we got impatient.
We had translated several books and articles from Thai to English, but all history or social science. The only literary piece was a single short story. We had only vague ideas how to approach the task. For around a year before we translated a word, we made some preparations. We looked around for academic work on KCKP and found there were only a couple of articles in English and a handful of theses in Thai.
We looked for other translations from classic Thai literature as a guide, and found only Bickner’s work on Lilit Phra Lo which is a very different kind of work.
More usefully, I began reading or re-reading translations of old literary works from other languages, concentrating on narrative tales and works from oral tradition. This was great fun. Those which I liked best and which most influenced how we approached the translation were Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, done almost half a century ago. I also read the Siegfried tales, Icelandic sagas, Decameron, and others. Only later did I read Seamus Heaney’s wonderful translation of Beowulf—while wrapped in a blanket sitting on the deck of a ferry traveling down the coast of Norway in the half-light of a summer night.
Tyler's Genji
A little later, while in Japan, we were advised to read the Heike tales and the Tale of Genji. By luck, Penguin Classics had just published a new translation of Genji by Royall Tyler. Both of us had tried reading Genji before, but neither had reached the end. Yet reading Tyler’s translation seemed almost effortless. We spent some time discussing why. The prose is slightly stylized in a way which conveys the courtliness of the original, but at the same time it reads as totally modern, with no oldy-worldy stuff. Very clean and crisp. The illustrations of dress, architecture, ritual, household articles, and so on, all done in a imitation of Japanese woodblock printing style, added greatly to the enjoyment of reading the text. The size of the bulk is bulky but not unmanageable. The footnoting helps. We have shamelessly stolen many ideas from Tyler.
Khun Wichitmatra's commentary
Someone told us about Suphon Bunnag’s massive, loving, commentary on KCKP, published as her cremation volume in 1975, and we photocopied the whole thing. By chance, in 2002 Amarin decided to reprint the erudite commentary by Khun Wichitmatra and Plueng Na Nakhon, and I chanced on a copy in Chula bookstore. It had been out of print since the first publication in 1961, and has since completely disappeared again. In 2000 Dokya had also reprinted Kukrit Pramoj’s commentary on KCKP, originally serialized in Sayam Rath in 1988.
Over 2003–4, these preparations went alongside other projects. We finished the Nidhi translation. We were writing the History of Thailand for CUP. On impulse, we decided to write a book on Thaksin, if only because nobody else had done it in English. We were still thinking of KCKP as a “retirement project.” Pasuk was offered a 6-month visiting fellowship at the Center of Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto, starting in September 2004. We decided we might make a gentle start on the translation in Kyoto, alongside other projects, so we traveled to Japan weighted down by dictionaries and commentaries.
Kamo River, Kyoto
We started on the actual translation on 1 October 2004, over a bento lunch on a bench beside the Kamo River. Pasuk had the good sense to write the date on the text.
Starting the translation
At this point I could not decode the original at all. The klon verse is structured very differently from Thai prose. The wording can be almost telegraphese. The reader has to supplement the syntax. To do so, each line has to be read with the right breakdown and rhythm. Also, much of the vocabulary was strange to me. Poetic Thai uses a huge array of words, many borrowed from Khmer, Mon, Malay, and Pali/Sanskrit in order to achieve the intricate rhyme and alliteration of klon verse. At the beginning, Pasuk translated almost word for word, and I wrote the result between the lines on a blow-up of the original text.
Word for word
After a couple of months, I could read the klon better and increasingly attempted the initial translation on my own, often making wonderful bloopers.
We found that working in spells of an hour or so was about right. We were in no hurry, yet the work gathered pace. Kyoto is one of the world’s great cities, and we could fill every day several times over with work at the Center, visits to temples and gardens, and walks in the surrounding hills. But the evenings were emptier. There was a great but small coterie of colleagues staying in the Shugakuin international hostel. After that there was (non-cable) Japanese TV. Cookery programs. Fishing shows. We were soon doing an hour or so most evenings.
Kyoto, 2004/5
In addition we did quite a bit of traveling within Japan, mostly by Shinkansen. Working on the translation was a good way to while away the journey. We finished chapter 13, roughly a third of the total, on the flight returning from Japan to Bangkok in April 2005.
Soon after starting, we sent a round-robin email telling academic colleagues that we had begun this project. The main object was to find out, before we went too far, whether anyone else had already translated KCKP or was working on it. We received some encouraging emails in return, but also some blank puzzlement. Why translate such a controversial piece? Why detour so far from our other work?
At the beginning, we left the crude word-for-word translation untouched. After six chapters, I thought I had a feel for the story and the style. Starting with chapter 6, I converted the word-for-word draft into English prose. I then read the English version, stanza by stanza while Pasuk read the Thai original, checking that I had not lost, added, or distorted anything in the original Thai.
At this point, several key decisions were made. We decided not to attempt any poetic form in English. It would be very onerous and probably beyond our capabilities. Given the structural differences between the two languages, it would almost certainly mean some loss or distortion of meaning. And nobody would read the result because nobody much reads verse any more. So it would mean a huge effort to produce a flawed representation of the original that nobody would read.
Instead we decided to translate into prose but to respect the origins of the work as something recited for entertainment—heard not read. From the start, I read the English versions aloud, and have read them many times over since, often reading the Thai original aloud in parallel.
Next we decided to use the two-line stanza as the basic unit of translation. In the original, the stanza is one unit of the rhyming pattern. Sometimes the sequence of words or ideas within a stanza is rather strange, probably because the composer was changing things around to achieve the rhyme and other rules. Think of Shakespeare for comparison. We imposed a rule that we could switch around words, phrases, and clauses within a stanza, but could not move anything across the boundary between stanzas.
We decided to write down the English in stanzas, mainly so that we would be able to locate positions in the text during revision. Initially we expected to convert this layout to continuous prose in the future. But we got to like the layout, and so did our early readers. They advised us to keep it, mainly because it served as a constant reminder that the original was not prose, but verse.
We also decided we had to translate everything. We could not skip over a word or clause because it was too difficult. There are several renderings of KCKP in readable modern Thai prose. We consulted these when we encountered difficult passages. Useless. They just skip past them. We could not. Also we could not ignore or tone down anything we simply did not like. Coming upon one passage of Phlai Kaeo drooling over Phim’s breasts, I said, “Can’t have that. It’s just Playboy.” “Absolutely right,” said Pasuk. “Keep it in.”
There were some things which we put aside for later—such as the storyteller’s introductions, and the punning with Khun Phaen’s name—and a few which defeated us (on which more later). But the rule was: everything.
Before we left Kyoto, my niece Natalie came to stay. She casually asked to read what we we’re doing. I gave her chapter one. Within a few days she had read everything we had completed and was talking animatedly about Phim and her problems. That was the first time I had some assurance that we might be getting it right.
