Monday, 1 September 2008

'On the Road' in Cambodia

lowellsun.com
By Jennifer Myers

LOWELL -- Fifty years ago, the face of Lowell was Greek, French-Canadian, Irish, Polish.
The average Lowellian probably could not find Cambodia on a map.

Today, with an estimated 25,000 Cambodians living in the city, the second-largest Cambodian population in the United States, you are more likely to hear folks strolling down Chelmsford Street speaking Khmer than English.

The time has come for the Mill City's new sons to get to know its favorite son.

Jack Kerouac's 1957 seminal American road-trip novel On The Road, the book that defined the 1950s Beat generation, is being translated into Khmer, the latest of more than 25 languages into which the book has been translated.

Jason Rosette, a 40-year-old Ohio native and graduate of New York University's film school, has been teaching and working on media projects in Cambodia since 2003. He recently acquired the rights to translate the novel into the native tongue of Cambodia from publisher Sterling Lord.

A former bookseller on the streets of New York City, Rosette says he has always felt a connection to Kerouac's work.

He concedes that his favorite Kerouac novel is Vanity of Duluoz, but On The Road has more mainstream appeal.

"At its core, the novel's enthusiastic Beat heart bears parallels to the great number of soulful Beat characters who inhabit Cambodia today -- the old soldiers, the saffron-colored Holymen, the unaffected frog hunters," he wrote in an e-mail. "When Kerouac refers to the Beat streets of Denver, for instance, I'm reminded of the currently still-dilapidated buildings of Kompot."
Locally, the news has received a warm reception.

"I think it's awesome, the more connections the better," said Victoria Fahlberg, executive director of immigrant-advocacy agency ONE Lowell. "It is one thing to translate it linguistically, but it will be interesting to see how they translate it culturally."

"I think today even some American kids would need a cultural translation to fully understand On The Road. We are living in a very different culture, and they certainly are living in a different culture in Cambodia," she added.

Not to worry, Rosette says he has that covered.

In addition to the literal translation, Rosette expects to work simultaneously on an interpretive translation.

"A reference in On The Road to a migrant Mexican worker or the "Okies" may be likened to a migrant Vietnamese fisherman's family," he explained.

Rosette says comparing Kerouac's America to modern-day Cambodia is not as much of a stretch as it seems.

Like the United States of the post-war 1950s, post-war Cambodia is currently undergoing major infrastructure improvements, leading to a wider web of accessible roadways.

"More and more Cambodians are driving cars, new motorcycles, and are hitting the roads for sheer kicks," he wrote. "There's a sense of exhilaration in the air."

Paul Marion, executive director of community outreach at UMass Lowell who edited a compilation of Kerouac's early works, says translating On The Road into Khmer is a natural progression.

"Khmer is as common in 2008 Lowell as French was in 1920s Lowell when Kerouac was growing up," he said. "To have an edition of On The Road translated into Khmer and published in Cambodia seems fitting in light of Lowell's cultural diversity today."

He added that former Lowell resident Chath PierSath, an artist and activist who has since returned to his native Cambodia, often said he wanted to write about his country the way Kerouac wrote about Lowell and America.

Rosette calls undertaking the translation, "a pure literary challenge."

"We'd be going from a Roman alphabet, written with a Beat-era U.S. English sensibility, by an author whose first language was not even English (Kerouac spoke a French-Canadian dialect first and foremost) to a Pali-based writing system that has no verb or noun inflections, not much punctuation, and numerous fundamental cultural and historical differences," he wrote, adding that he is currently looking to build a team of advisers, sponsors, historians, musicologists, Khmer poets, patrons, translators, Beat scholars and others to work on the translation, as well as a documentary about the process.

Anyone interested in joining the team, can contact Rosette at camerado@camerado.com.

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