No language can have a single source. It is always a massively collective endeavor that does not stop at borders or walls. All languages overlap or spill into one another, just like people.—Aleksandar Hemon
As canons are reconsidered, public monuments are toppled, and the legacies of institutions’ namesakes are reevaluated, language is in the spotlight, leading to rapid shifts in usage. Speakers of North-American English are now more widely using both the singular they, which has existed since the 1300s, and the nonbinary they, which Merriam-Webster added in 2019. The former Friends of Dard Hunter is now the North American Hand Papermakers. When this magazine receives correspondence mentioning the misnomer “rice paper,” the editorial policy is to find a more accurate term while also using it as an opportunity to start a conversation. Many of us in the field are paying more attention to the words we use when we talk about paper, examining how these terms come into circulation, and making deliberate changes to the language in order to prevent erasure, remove bias, and lift up all global papermaking traditions.
I grew up monolingual in an area currently known as the Mohawk Valley, neighboring the Oneida Indian Nation. Born into a family of scientists—descended from Welsh, German, French Huguenot, Irish, and perhaps ancestors from other cultures forgotten by family lore—I used to get great satisfaction out of labeling things. Classification granted me the illusion that I could understand and control things. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I noticed language shifting around me: Indian was replaced by Native American, then indigenous peoples of the Americas, and has since moved toward Indigenous, now capitalized, and with no need to invoke the legacies of Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus and centuries of colonization and all its attendant misunderstandings.
Comparative Terminology
English
papyrus
paper
(hand) papermaker
Italian
papiro
carta
cartaio/cartaia; persona che fa la carta
German
Papyrus
Papier
Papierschöpfer/Papiershöpferin;
Papierschöpfer*in
French
papyrus
papier
papetier/papetière
Spanish
papiro
papel
papelera✧
Catalan
papiro
paper
paperera✧
Japanese
パピルス (papirusu)
紙 (kami/shi)
紙漉き職人 (kamisukishokunin, lit.
“paper-making craftsperson”)
Korean
(papiruseu)
謙檜 (jon-i/jongi), (hanji)
濰檣 (jang-in/jangin, lit. “master” or
“master artisan”), (hanji jangin)
Russian
Папирус (papirus)
домашинная бумага (domashinnaya bumaga, lit. “homemade paper,” refers to paper before industrial production)
производитель бумаги/бумажный фабрикант (proizvoditel' bumagi/bumazhniy fabrikant, both variations of “paper manufacturer”)
Vietnamese
cói giấy
giấy
thợ làm giấy
Subsequently—as I studied, began to partially inhabit other cultures and communities, and ultimately became a translator—language shifted within me. Of course language shifts, as long as it’s alive, it shifts. How we handle the shifts says a lot about who we are, what we value, and how we coexist with one another.
To examine the current terminology we use when we talk about paper, I decided to begin by looking at how paper is talked about across cultures. As I surveyed colleagues, curious findings flooded in, some of which are distilled in the table above. I asked them to share the word(s)/character(s)/transliteration(s), and any relevant etymology of the words papyrus, paper, and papermaker in their specific field and language. This in itself was revelatory. In Italian, the difference between papyrus and paper—papiro and carta—is built into the language itself. Derived from calques (from ancient Greek via Latin), the former comes from πάπυρος (“papyros”) and the latter shares the same root as chart and card in English (χάρτης, “khártēs”).
English does not carry the same distinction. German terms are visibly influenced by French, but pronounced differently. Alongside Spanish I include Catalan because some sources I spoke to suggest the English paper is a loan word, since the Spanish l shifts to an r in Catalan. While it is not clear when the word evolved, it likely predated paper’s arrival in England since the Arabs brought papermaking to the town of Xàtiva (شاطبة, Shāṭiba) and its surroundings in the 1300s. In Japanese, 紙 can be pronounced either “kami” or “shi”—the latter being a Chinese reading, since Japan had its own spoken language but no writing system until it adopted Chinese characters, thus elements of the two languages often combine (a point we’ll return to later). In Korean, 謙檜 is a general term for paper, whereas is a newer term that means “Korean paper,” hence the general word for papermaker can be modified to specify what type. The Russian term бумага (bumaga) is believed to be from Middle Persian pmbk’ (lit. “cotton”), likely via a Mediterranean term for cotton wool (such as Italian bambagia, since paper made from cotton was first imported to Russia from the Mediterranean), although, beyond paper, the term also connotes (cotton) cloth; terms for paper and papermaker can vary according to the type of sheet formation.
What happens to meaning and ways of understanding when we translate terminology developed in other cultures or other times? The challenges of translation are immense. For starters, can we truly understand what someone says to us, in our own language or another? Recently, the field of translation itself is emphasizing collective and collaborative work, asking what the responsibilities of each contributor to the process are (author, translator, and editor do not always agree on how much can or should be “explained”), and even questioning typographic norms. Refusing to set words from other languages in italics is one way of discarding a centuries-long practice of “othering” certain terms. Choosing to capitalize or not is another key detail. Examining gendered language and formulating gender-neutral constructions present rich possibilities in translation.
In thinking about the ways we translate papermaking terms into English, oftentimes we opt instead to transliterate and gloss terminology, stealthily weaving a clarification into the surrounding prose; but when we do translate them, wild things happen. One example from Spanish: because papelera can mean “papermaker” but also “wastepaper basket” and “(industrial) paper factory,” Chilean papermaker Carolina Larrea finds workarounds for that and other terms, including couching, which Spanish speakers translate as transferir (“to transfer”), because couching is too close to acostar (“to lay”), which is too easily interpreted as “getting laid”—just think of singing the refrain of Patti Labelle’s 1974 hit “Lady Marmelade” (voulez-vous coucher avec moi?) during a long day on the wet floor. Larrea also always has to explain that formation aid, auxiliar de formación, is not a person who helps make a sheet of paper, but a substance. Such “overly literal” translations are the more humorous side of misunderstanding. Like the game of telephone—also known, somewhat ironically, as Chinese whispers—transmission can create distortion. As conservator Minah Song pointed out when telling me about her work (including research into a Western paper made in Japan and marketed internationally under the name Shogun), language cannot be separated from culture.
I also asked my colleagues about any special terms they have seen misrepresented or otherwise disrespected in either the other language or English. To put it another way, I wondered whether occupation, colonization, or domination by another country or power had affected terminology in their area of expertise. Several papermakers mentioned Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 and its lasting effect on widespread biases and notions of refinement—an oft-displayed disdain for Korea and Korean things, especially among older generations of Japanese, is rolled up in that history. But one thing both Japanese and Korean share is their use of retronyms. As mentioned above, the original word for (handmade) paper in Japanese is kami, not washi; the latter term was coined in the late 1800s (wa=Japanese + shi=paper) to differentiate it from “Western (increasingly machine-made) paper” known as yōshi (yō=Western + shi=paper), which began entering Japan after the country was opened to international trade. Korean made a parallel shift from jongi to hanji. If not for colonization and domination by other powers, there would likely have been no need to coin the words washi and hanji. Aimee Lee makes another significant distinction: “Even when I say hanji, it could mean any range of papers, and technically what I make in the US could be said to not be hanji because it’s not made in Korea and I’m an American.”
I ended each mini-interview asking for any additional observations, and this is where our conversations grew more pointedly political, but also spiritual. One contingent of scholars has emphasized how the Japanese word for god or deity (which shares the same root as the word for life, and the quality of being alive) is a homonym of kami—same pronunciation, different written character—which was said to show the reverence for the material and its sacred origins. A case could be made that this is pure coincidence, or is even a remnant of various forms of intentional conflation between imperialism and divinity, which played a role in Japanese identity until essentially the end of WWII, and had parallels in the West. Although some Japanese are comfortable drawing connections between paper and a deity, I have never met a German who reads even a remote divine connection in the word Papierschöpfer, even though the word Schöpfer (lit. “creator”) can have religious overtones—in the relevant context, of course.
In case you are feeling overwhelmed by this whirlwind of words, let us take a poetic pause. I often turn to two poems by Seldon Yuan, reproduced above and on the next page, when I am full of ideas but at a loss linguistically. The poem “How I was made” might limber up the mind as we examine our terminology, to help us think about the naming process, which frequently begins with an examination of technique or genesis: naming things can give us a fleeting feeling that we’ve understood something, until we realize we haven’t. The poem “I draw a line” points toward notions of classification: the most common ways we “name” paper are according to technique and material, and sometimes origin or appearance—a few examples: handmade cotton rag; deckle-box paper; overbeaten abaca; Echizen washi; bark paper.
HOW I WAS MADE
I must name
to find I do not know
how I was made
— Seldon Yuan
I DRAW A LINE
I draw a line to
divide this space in
two in order
to know where I am
not
to render
this space unfamiliar to
imagine that I may not be
alone so that there is room
for a dialogue
for movement
— Seldon Yuan
So how did a term like “rice paper” come to stand in for all East Asian handmade paper? Did some Silk Road merchant come up with that as a marketing term? The misnomer does not describe the material accurately, and it disparagingly alludes to origin—think of all the derogatory epithets involving rice. Calling East Asian paper “rice paper” is akin to saying Fabriano makes “pasta paper” solely because it comes from Italy, or that handmade paper from Israel is “matzoh paper.” Since the nineteenth century the term “rice paper” has been so deeply entrenched that it is nearly impossible to stop. At least three recent, bestselling memoirists have invoked the term: Michelle Obama, Michelle Zauner, and Anthony Veasna So. Here, the publisher Naveen Kishore has a helpful provocation: “Challenge the language you have so carefully cultivated. Revisit the meaning of words you have since childhood imbibed as universal truths.”
Ken Grabowski’s article “The Rice Paper Caper” helps complicate the matter, as does a consideration of other absurdly named items such as cosmetic “rice paper” and of course culinary “rice paper.” The Vietnamese term bánh tráng (lit. “spread-out dough stuff” or “spread-out batter”) reveals that what is often marketed as “rice paper” for making various Vietnamese recipes has only the most tenuous tie to what hand papermakers create. Interestingly, the verbs associated with papermaking in both Vietnamese and Japanese refer to making something from wet, pulpy material by spreading it thin. Beyond shared traits like translucency and thinness, the connections between rice and paper evaporate.
Speaking of spreading things thin, how do we define paper? By the way it is manufactured? How it is used? What it looks like? Or some combination? Lisa Miles sheds useful light on terms like bark paper. “I have struggled with paper terminology since I began my MFA papermaking studies at the University of Iowa Center for the Book in 2014. As a book artist, I am fascinated by the extant Maya bark paper codices, and researched how to make the substrate myself. After comparing the technique of Meso-american bark papermaking to other global papermaking techniques, I immediately began pushing back against definitions of bark paper as ‘primitive paper,’ ‘pre-paper,’ ‘false paper,’ ‘not paper,’ and ‘pseudo-paper.’ It became clear to me how Eurocentric these ideas were, and that they had been handed down by scholars and practitioners without question....When I have explained the definition of ‘true’ paper to beaten-bark papermakers in Mexico and Indonesia, they have been perplexed as to how the Western world could classify what they make as anything but paper. ‘If it is not paper, then what is it?’”
As a publishing consultant, my default mode is to question every word, because every word is a decision—and every decision has consequences. Robert Frost famously claimed that poetry is what is lost in translation; David Bellos says community is. Through attention to our words and the practice of papermaking, we can regain both—just differently.
Some suggestions for papermaking communities: Continue interrogating the terminology we use, especially when it involves colonialist and imperialist positions. Challenge the false geographic binary by decentering Western notions of paper and papermaking history and resetting certain definitions. After all, there are many ways to translate that binary—Western/Eastern, Occidental/Oriental, European/Asian—none are necessarily relevant to our globalized twenty-first century, and all fail to account for the many infrequently learned and translated languages that lie outside the sampling I gave above. Finally, remember this: when our necessary revisions cannot be accomplished in or through translation, we always have the tool of conversation. As Diderot remarked on organization and classification, “[T]he possible systems of human knowledge are as numerous as those [individual, human] points of view.”
Thanks to Paul Denhoed and Allison Markin Powell, Carolina Larrea, Aimee Lee and Minah Song, Mary Ann Newman, Radha Pandey, Andrea Nguyen, and Irina Ruvinsky, Thomas Kitson, Michael Eskin, Daniel Mellis, and Igor Kiselev for the ongoing conversations about paper in Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Catalan, Hindi, Vietnamese, and Russian, respectively—as well as Lisa Miles for her thoughts on English terminology. Special thanks to Sidney Berger for the humor and clarity of his scholarship; I urge readers to look up his entire “rice paper” entry in The Dictionary of the Book. To again quote Naveen Kishore, “Translation rights that which is wrong. It describes the injustices hidden in the dailyness.” All of us who talk about paper—especially those of us who produce it—have our work cut out for us.
___________
NOTES
NOTES
1. Aleksandar Hemon, “Pathologically Bilingual,” in Specimen (September 15, 2016), http://www.specimen.press/articles/pathologically-bilingual/.
2. NB: Greek also has a second word for it, βύβλος (“byblos”), which refers more specifically to the bast fibers of Cyperus papyrus, and gave rise to English terms like bibliography, etc.
3. Paul Denhoed, e-mail message to the author, November 25, 2021.
4. Aimee Lee, e-mail message to the author, November 21, 2021.
5. Ibid.
6. Sukey Hughes, Washi: The World Of Japanese Paper (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1978), 48. “In Japan, much has been made among those who love paper of the fact that the word for god...has the same pronunciation as the word for paper....Linguistically there is probably no relation whatsoever between these homonyms; their written characters as far as is known have completely different etymologies. But for the Japanese there is often a kind of connection between these words. Ever since papermaking has been practiced in Japan, plain white paper has been a symbol of purity and godliness....Some feel that white paper represents the very essence of Shinto. To a lesser extent white paper is also symbolically used in Buddhism, as well as in superstition and magic.”
7. “How I was made” and “I draw a line” were published in the chapbook How I was made (New York: Seldon Yuan, 2015). Reprinted with kind permission from Seldon Yuan.
8. Thanks to Nicole Donnelly, Winnie Radolan, Bobbie Lipman, and Donna Koretsky for their input on absurdist culinary corollaries.
9. Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown, 2018); Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (New York: Knopf, 2021); and Anthony Veasna So’s “Duplex,” in The New Yorker (July 12 & 19, 2021).
10. Naveen Kishore in his keynote address at the Jaipur BookMark during the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2018: https://scroll.in/article/866975/translation-rights-that-which-is-wrong-it-describes-the-injustices-hidden-in-the-dailyness (video available at https://youtu.be/dEtC3AB2vUQ?t=1502).
11. Ken Grabowski, “Rice Paper Caper,” Hand Papermaking vol. 9 no. 1 (Summer 1994): 18–22.
12. And then there is so-called pith paper, a world of its own. See Irene Wei’s article from the Summer 2021 issue; she puts quotation marks around “paper” when referring to this material, because its production process is akin to that of a veneer.
13. Lisa Miles, e-mail message to the author, November 7, 2021. Miles noted numerous publications, including a 1998 article in Hand Papermaking Newsletter, that define bark paper as “not true paper.”
14. David Bellos, Is that a fish in your ear?: translation and the meaning of everything (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 338.
15. Paul Michel, “Organizing Knowledge,” in The Dynamic Library, ed. by Marina Schutz and tr. by Alta L. Price (Chicago: Soberscove, 2015), 36. I translated this book from the version produced following a symposium held in German, and its treatment of classification systems in libraries as well as art make the entire volume worth reading.
16. While the current edition of The Dictionary of the Book contains about 150 entries about paper, Berger reports that the forthcoming second edition will include over 200 entries about paper.
17. Naveen Kishore, keynote address (see n. 10).
