Not Out of Hate. Ma Ma Lay

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      The idea of translating Monywei Mahu (Not Out of Hate) began with hearing Mrs. Anna Allott’s paper on the Burmese novel given at an Association for Asian Studies conference in Chicago in 1982. I was very excited as I listened to her discuss various Burmese authors and their works, none of which had been translated into English. I was amazed, also, that an English lady knew so much about Burmese literature while I knew next to nothing. Very impressed by her talk, I felt I wanted to try translating so that Burmese literature could be better known outside of Burma.

      I went up to her after the panel discussion was over and told her how much her talk had affected me and that I wanted to try translating one of the novels she had mentioned. We soon decided I should do Monywei Mahu. I was attracted to this particular work because it was written by a woman, and also because I was intrigued with the story of a Burmese woman who leaves her home and family to become a nun, in contrast to the Western version, in which the nun leaves the convent to live in the outside world; I thought there might be some interesting cultural and social implications. I later discovered, of course, that the nun was not the central character, and that in fact her role belonged more to the background of the story.

      When I was ready to begin, I could not find a copy of the novel, which at that time was next to impossible to get from Burma. So we arranged for Anna to xerox the first few chapters and mail them to me from England, and we would go on from there. Then I found a copy of the novel in Cornell University’s Echols Collection.

      Having never attempted such a project before, I just sat down in the kitchen, which had the best light, and day after day worked on the translation. I did not anticipate some of the difficulties I encountered. Sometimes I would take all day just to cover half a page. I could not help being overly conscientious, treating the material as if it were Holy Writ or Shakespeare and looking up the meaning of every single word. At day’s end I felt like a little hen who had pecked and pecked at a kernel of corn all day and was still unable to crack it. I used to call up a Burmese housewife who lived in Manhattan to discuss Burmese medicine just so I could get the feel of it, but she herself was now more interested in Western medicine and had lost touch with the Burmese side of things. I felt culturally isolated working in a foreign milieu.

      Another difficulty was that I did not have adequate dictionaries. The one I leaned on heavily was compiled by Adoniram Judson, the famous American Baptist missionary and scholar, who lived about the time of the British annexation of Burma. So the vocabulary was limited to words used in the nineteenth century, which presented a major problem. Just using Judson’s scholarly work excited me, however, and I feel a personal debt to him.

      One of the first problems was to make up my mind who I was translating for. I decided that the high school boys of Government High School in Rangoon, to whom I had taught English in my first teaching assignment, would be my audience. I thought that it would be a change if they read a Burmese novel they already knew, in an English version. (This was when I started treating the material like Shakespeare.) However, the novel did not seem to hold up at all to this sort of English. At this time I met a friend who was teaching comparative literature at an American college, and she encouraged me to translate the novel for her students, an approach that was better.

      I ran into another problem when I worried about the wrong interpretation of actions set in a different social situation, and became defensive of Burmese culture. I kept explaining the action in parentheses (which got to be tiresome reading), but later these were skillfully turned into footnotes by my able editor. I also had problems with Burmese honorific terms, which if translated would puzzle and confuse readers. For example, a Mr. Joe Brown is addressed in English as “Mr.” by people outside his family, “Joe” by his wife, and “Dad” by his children. His friends would also call him “Joe,” while he would refer to himself as “I.” In Burmese, however, Mr. Brown would refer to himself in the third person, as “Your Dad,” “Your Uncle,” or even “Joe.” The precise usage of these “I” forms would change depending on the age of the person speaking and whether a younger or older person was being addressed. My editor convinced me to stick for the most part to English personal pronouns to facilitate matters.

      I also made some problems for myself by not agreeing with what the author was doing to the characters. I wanted to make them over and change the plot, but had to restrain myself. I became unable to identify with the book and actually stopped working on it for over a year. These and many other similar difficulties delayed me further from completing my self-imposed task.

      But for the kind encouragement of friends and family I would not have come to completion. Thanks to my daughter Maureen, for her gadfly goading, and to my son Michael, for his help and encouragement in getting the first chapters typed. The friends I would like to thank are many, among them Anna Allott, for inspiring me in the first place and then being generous with her time and knowledge whenever I sought her counsel. I would also like to thank John Ferguson, the unflagging and hard-working secretary-treasurer of the Burma Studies Group, who encouraged this humble project from its infancy and got it on its way by taking the time to read many chapters. My gratitude to Euan Bagshawe, an Englishman who had to help me with the nun’s letter in chapter three, with its Pali and Buddhist exhortations. I felt that, although I blame the British colonial educational system for my knowing Jane Austen but not Ma Ma Lay, things have been evened up a bit in this small project with the help I received from my two British friends.

      Finally, I was fortunate to find my very able editor, William Frederick of Ohio University, who offered to get the translation published virtually sight unseen after he read a short story of Ma Ma Lay’s that I had translated. Bill finally managed to see the project through with his consummate editorial skills and warm encouragement, so that the elephant did not “get stuck at its tail.”

      To all my friends who were enthusiastic and patient all along and who finally, tactfully, did not ask how the translation was going—many thanks. You can ask. It’s all over now.

       New York

       May 1990

      INTRODUCTION

       Anna Allott

      Although the accounts of her life do not record when the young Burmese girl, Ma Tin Hlaing, first showed a talent for writing, they all without exception mention that the work she wrote when she was 37 years of age, already widowed and with three small children, won a government-sponsored literary prize, having been chosen as the best novel published in Burma in 1955. In spite of its heroine’s tragic end, the novel was also very popular with the reading public, going into at least five editions during the 1950s and 1960s.¹ This introduction will attempt to suggest some of the reasons for the success of Not Out of Hate (Monywei Mahu), a novel which seems to reflect aspects of her own life more directly than her other works of fiction.

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