Recently, I came across an interesting comment, that despite the fact that more POC writers are being published, the English publishing world will not actually become more diverse, as the editors and gatekeepers who select them for publication continue to be predominantly white.
Asian writers have perhaps heard similar feedback from their editors: “Your story is not Asian enough,” or: “Why don’t you write more about your family’s immigration stories?” Sometimes the endeavors of white editors to market POC writers may in fact reinforce stereotypes. The same could be said for translations: if the translators of foreign literature continue to be exclusively white, native English speakers, then English readers would likely continue to receive material that reinforces their expectations, rather than that which may broaden their perspectives.
The word translation is rooted in the Latin translātus (to carry over); it’s always about appropriation and transition, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about how we can strive for a more inclusive and dynamic future in publishing—trusting and bringing in more POC translators to deliver English translations may be one solution.
Jianan Qian, Na Zhong, and Liuyu Ivy Chen are all millennial Chinese female writers who have received higher education in both China and the US. They write bilingually and translate between their two languages, having already introduced several talented contemporary Chinese experimental writers and young female authors to the English world. Their work has been tremendous thus far, and one expects their futures to be even greater.
—Jiaoyang Li, July 2020
Jiaoyang Li (JL): All of you were writers before becoming translators. What is the relationship between writing and translation for you? Is translation a kind of creative writing?
Jianan Qian (JQ): For me, the purpose of literary translation is twofold. First, the work pushes me to do intensive reading. Usually I choose my own translation projects, so I can take the time to appreciate the author’s writing on a granular level. I also consider translation to be a writing practice—it might be a sort of creative writing, but for me, it is more like an opportunity to see how beauty comes into being differently in the two languages. I work with a wonderful co-translator, Alyssa Asquith, and I always learn a lot about linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural differences from our exchanges.
Na Zhong (NZ): A great translator should think like a writer, and to be a great writer you have to be a great reader. Translation provides the reliable gymnastic exercise for me to maintain, stretch, and become aware of my linguistic muscles. A rich text demands that I pay maximum attention to its diction, syntax, voice, and many other elements of writing. And a carefully chosen word can lead me into the depths of the story that would be impossible to reach if I were only engaging with it as a casual reader.
And yes, translating is a kind of creative writing, as imitation lies at the heart of all art forms. In the most literal sense, translating is rewriting the story in another language. It allows me, the translator, to adopt a voice and way of storytelling that I have never embodied before. The writer creates the characters imaginatively; the translator recreates the implied writer imaginatively.
Liuyu Ivy Chen (LC): For me, writing in my second language is an act of translation; living in a foreign country is a daily work of translation. Reading a new book, meeting strangers, falling in love, visiting an old place, or forgetting about the past are all translations to be enacted or retracted. This distance to cross and reduce is not so much between two languages, but between me and the world. There is so much I don’t understand, and translation is one way to cope with the unknown, to stay open-minded, and to bring seemingly unattainable beauty closer to touch. I read, write, and translate to touch the world. Translation is not only a kind of creative writing; it is a way of living.
JL: How do you choose your translation projects, and what are you most interested in translating?
JQ: In terms of Chinese to English translation, I work exclusively on Zhu Yue’s story collections, for many reasons. First, I am a huge fan of his stories. They are original, funny, and thought-provoking, and I hope to share my experience of reading them with more people. Secondly, for years, the presentation of contemporary Chinese literature in the English translation has been overly politicized; that is, the English book market tends to encourage readers to find in contemporary Chinese literature an antithesis of American democracy. I think that portrait of Chinese literature is extremely narrow, and Zhu Yue’s stories may help introduce the English-speaking audience to diverse contemporary Chinese voices.
NZ: In most cases, I pick works instead of writers to work with, simply because even a great writer can have his or her bad moments, and I need to be profoundly moved to be willing to revisit a work for the fiftieth time, and still have the passion to make it right and true.
The moments when such decisions, or contracts, are made can be quite emotional. In 2017, a publisher asked me if I would like to translate “this debut novel by an Irish writer called Sally Rooney.” I clicked open the PDF copy of Conversations with Friends and made up my mind before I finished the first page. To be precise, I was sold when Frances describes Bobby’s “little spoon-like ear.” The specificity of the detail, the deliciousness of the feeling!
Another memorable project is my English translation of three short essays by Deng Anqing, a Chinese fiction and nonfiction writer who chronicles his lockdown life in Hubei province when COVID-19 struck China in January. I was part of a one hundred-strong translator community that volunteered to translate the diaries of Wuhan residents into English, French, Japanese, and other languages. It is one of the few moments in my life as a translator when I had a palpable sense of the role translation plays in our reality—rendering a piece of life, feeling, and consciousness intelligible in another language, demystifying the exotic, fearful Other.
LC: I share the sentiment of France-based poet and translator Li Jinjia, who said during a recent interview: “I do not get to choose a translation project—it is a necessity, a command, a debt. Like when you read a book and it compels you to get up and pace around in the room; you want to walk out but hesitate. A desire flares up in your chest: to build a dangerous, intimate bond with this work, to extend its life while canceling it out in another language, and to melt into a broader unknown with it. . . I felt this way when I translated Yu Jian’s Ling Dang’an. I remember I was in the National Library of France when I finished reading that poem, and I saw the reading room engulfed in blazing flames. I had to escape. I started translating.” (Quote translated from Chinese.) I could not have said it any better.
On a summer afternoon in 2018, I sat in the New York Public Library at Bryant Park, reading Zhu Yiye’s novella A Girl Who Eats Sparrows. When I finished reading the story, I saw not only the high-vaulted reading room, but the entirety of New York City burning. I stood and fled. I was on a mission: to get hold of this author and ask for permission to translate her work. I left a message on Zhu Yiye’s Douban account and she responded, thankfully. We’ve since become close collaborators and friends.
Besides literary translation, I’ve also done a lot of translation for art museums and nonprofit organizations around the world. These projects are also born out of necessity—necessity of beauty, truth, politics, and globalization. I love the work because it helps me engage with the rest of the world and expand my vision and vocabulary. I try to approach these non-literary projects with a literary eye, and literary translation with a worldly mind.
JL: When you translate from Chinese to English, what difficulties have you encountered and how have you overcome them?
JQ: In my translation workshop experience at the University of Iowa, I started out by doing a new translation of Yu Hua’s story “No Name of My Own.” I read the previous translation closely and took issues with some of the translator’s word choices, so I translated the text to what I thought would be closer to the original. But later in my workshop, my so-called faithful rendition turned out to be an awkward read for the English-speaking readers. Then and there, I came to realize that because different languages function differently, sometimes I have to move away in order to get closer. That was a great lesson, not only in terms of literary translation, but also of writing in a second language. After that, I became more interested in how to restore beauty in English.
LC: Translating from Chinese to English takes a leap of faith, like emigrating to a new country. You see ordinary symbols with fresh eyes but are forever uncertain of whether to trust your instinct. Finding a voice is about resisting that feeling of minority, because every person should be an equal majority. You want to learn a language not only to fit in, but to create something new in it, like any native speaker would do. You want to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar, then break the familiarity again. My poetry mentor Sharon Olds often mentioned “the strength of writing in one’s second language”—I was humbled to realize that she was pushing the boundaries of her native language, and I learned that quick assimilation might bereave me of the beauty of discovery.
To feel comfortable writing in English and translating from Chinese to English is to feel comfortable with my entire being, which has been removed from its native environment since I was seventeen. The language I speak at home in Zhejiang province may as well be Italian when compared to Mandarin, and English feels like my third language. I have been told that I could not speak perfect Mandarin as a southerner, that to become an English writer is a pipe dream, that a translator can only translate into her native language, that a woman my age should do X, Y, but not Z. The trick is to not believe any of it; once you believe the limits others set, you conspire to confirm and internalize that limit and trap yourself.
JL: You translate from Chinese to English, and from English to Chinese. What does this difference mean to you?
JQ: In my native language, I know how to connect with my readers at the level of prose—that said, I focus more on reading and interpretation. I do a lot of research to make sure that I get the correct connotations and implications across. In English, as I have little difficulty understanding the multiple levels of meanings in the original, I put more effort into the writing. For example, Zhu Yue’s stories radiate a sarcastic humor, derived from his pseudo-academic prose style and coined terms, and I ask my co-translator Alyssa to give extra care to those aspects. Honestly, without her help, I would not be able to ascertain if my rendition does justice to the original. In translating into English, much like writing in English, I am still a deaf person playing music. I have to borrow a good pair of ears. Alyssa is wonderful because she not only lends me hers, but also opens my ears to the music.
NZ: Personally, translating from my native language into my acquired one is a more intellectually challenging experience than the other way around. When practicing it, I am aware that I enjoy a smaller repository of vocabulary and expressions and am less nimble with the control of diction and syntax than I like. However, such a weakness has the effect of sharpening my senses and prompting me to hunt for any word or phrase that can be useful. More often than not, my search leads me to the works of English writers who are reinventing the language every second. For example, when translating a short story where an extramarital affair is thwarted by an unexpected typhoon and the ensuing rains, I turn to Irish writers, particularly Kevin Barry, for their dark-humor-infused, watery, floody expressions. Sometimes I can’t resist the temptation to steal a verb or two, but most of the time I am just blissfully inspired.
LC: Translating from Chinese to English is setting up the mast to sail into the open sea, re-enacting my journey from my native land to my adopted country, but—in hindsight—with all my gained knowledge and experiences. Translating from English to Chinese is oaring a boat on a placid river—I’m a nostalgic boatwoman slowly rolling home. Both routes should be equally familiar to navigate once I reach native or bilingual proficiency.
I have two fears: not knowing English to its fullest, and slowly losing the agility of using Chinese. To sharpen my sensibility to both languages, I try to read classical verses in English and Chinese every morning. I’m now reading Odyssey (translated by Stanley Lombardo) and The Gay Genius: The Life and Times of Su Dongpo (written in English by Lin Yutang, translated into Chinese by Song Biyun). The trouble is that the more I read, the more ignorant I feel. But as long as I actively engage in a literary conversation in the depth of each language, I feel prepared for the crossing.
JL: Have you read any translated Asian literature that you felt had been mistranslated or mis-edited by westerners because of the cultural or aesthetic differences？Or somehow lost in translation?
JQ: Not really. I have only read some beautiful translations that I really admire. For instance, once I did a line-by-line comparison between Ken Liu’s translation of “Folding Beijing” and the original Chinese text by Hao Jingfang. I marveled at every change Liu made, and I have learned a great deal from that process. Fortunately, I have never had any terrible reading experiences when it comes to literary translation, but I do notice many cultural and aesthetic differences between the so-called East and West. I wrote about this in my column in The Millions. Take “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” a short story by the Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In its first English translation, the translator edited out a lot of minor threads because—I suppose—he thought those parts irrelevant to the major plot. But East Asian narrative doesn’t function in the same way as Western narrative—oftentimes the seemingly irrelevant threads carry much more meaning than the major plot. That is the case of “The Dancing Girl of Izu.” Those trimmed paragraphs show how the protagonist grows from a misanthropic sort of boy to a more compassionate and loving man, all thanks to his love for the Izu dancer. Once those parts are cut out, the whole story becomes lame. That same rash editing style can be found in many other fiction works in translation. For example, I once noticed a huge paragraph was carved out of an early English translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” With due respect to the English publication, I do think English-speaking editors should recognize their ignorance and thus hold more respect for foreign literature.
NZ: So far I have yet to encounter any ill-intentioned misrepresentation of Asian literature, but I do have a few bones to pick with some accepted norms persisting in the English publishing world.
First, the lack of footnotes or endnotes in many translated works. While footnoting is widely accepted in Chinese literature, most English publishers are wary of footnotes for its academic overtones. Instead, they expect the translators to iron out all the odd details that are potentially foreign to the readers. Insert a piece of explainer here, localize one or two slangs there. What you have as a result is a tamed translation, its wildness trimmed to suit the certain tastes of the recipient market. It will lose the power to dazzle, enchant, and, more importantly, offend.
Second, too much liberty has been taken, by either the translators or editors, with the original work. It begins with the title. Junichiro Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love, a book about a ruinous relationship recounted by its hopelessly enamored narrator, is translated into English under the title Naomi. While I don’t dislike it, I do feel that the self-deprecating bitterness carried by the original title is lost in translation. Similarly, Yōko Ogawa’s lyrical dystopian tale, Secret Crystals, is renamed rather misleadingly as Memory Police, its political aspect exaggerated, probably for marketing purposes. To me, such surgery hurts more than helps the reception of the work, because it deprives the English readers of the first clue provided by the author, and risks setting up an expectation for something that isn’t intended to be presented under the spotlight.
LC: I haven’t noticed any disaster in translated Asian literature—perhaps because I haven’t read enough. I did enjoy reading Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing (translated by Eric Abrahamsen) and The Wild Great Wall (translated by Dong Li). Since I’m not a critic, I’m less pressured to compare the texts and form analytical opinions. I read and enjoy the work in whichever language is available to me.
In reverse, I did notice the differences between the Chinese and English translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I first read it in Chinese (translated by Fan Ye) and was awestruck. Then, I read it in English (translated by Gregory Rabassa) and was spellbound—I felt my body turned cold, my head taken off, and the entire world burned to the ground. It taught me a lesson about translation: It’s good to translate a foreign language into one’s native language, but it’s best to translate from one native language to another. An ambitious translator should strive to turn both languages into her native language.
JL: Compared to translators who are native English speakers, what can you, as native Chinese translators, contribute to the current Chinese–English translation scene?
JQ: I have a very different perspective from translators who are native English speakers. Having grown up reading Chinese fiction lavishly, I hope to introduce different contemporary Chinese voices and show the English-speaking audience that Chinese literature, like any national literature, is extremely rich. Besides, since I understand the aesthetics of Chinese literature well, I feel obligated to say no if my English-speaking editors suggest radical cuts to the original. I am not only talking about respect, but about challenging the Western audience with aesthetic and cultural differences. When I read Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude in college, for example, his original storytelling blew my mind. I remember shouting to myself, “Incredible! Stories can be told in this way, so wild!” That is how exotic fiction has inspired and nourished me with its originalities. That said, I don’t want to see the uniqueness and wildness of Chinese literature tamed and consequently lost in the English translation. As a translator from my native language, I won’t allow that to happen.
NZ: It is not unusual for the English literary scene to marvel at something an Asian writer wrote a dozen years ago but has only become available in English recently. (The much applauded novel, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, was first published in Japanese in 1994.) While a belated discovery is better than nothing, a timely introduction can sparkle many more cross-border communications and allows the book to speak to the readers when the message it carries is still fresh and hot. As native Chinese speakers and close watchers of Sinophone literature, we can spot literary talents one step ahead and challenge the canon of Chinese literature built and accepted by the English-speaking world.
LC: I hope my translation work will help preserve some of the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese language, and possibly enrich the English vocabulary to challenge the way English-speakers think. When we confront concepts and ideas that do not exist in our language, it is a great opportunity to open up and include them, rather than transmute them into what is already familiar to a group of people. For example, the Chinese notion of shanghuo does not exist in English, but it is one of the most frequently used words among the Chinese. Shang means “up”; huo means “fire.” When one says “this dish is too shanghuo” it means this dish is too hot in temperature or nature (e.g. hot chili pepper, fried chicken, lamb, ginger) that it could cause inflammatory symptoms like acne breakouts, sore throat, running nose, or irritability. “This dish” can be an event or a person, thus the heat of shanghuo reaches deeper into Chinese people’s psyche. This one word is a small window into which English speakers could see the richly layered Chinese culinary arts, dietary tradition, and psychological state. Add it to your vocabulary!
Jianan Qian writes in both English and Chinese. In her native Chinese, she has published four books and translated five books. In English, she is a staff writer at The Millions. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta Magazine, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.
Na Zhong hails from Chengdu and lives in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Hub, Asian American’s Writers’ Workshop, The Shanghai Literary Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She is the Chinese translator of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People.
Liuyu Ivy Chen is a poet, writer, and translator. Her English and Chinese prose, poems, and translation have appeared or are forthcoming from Hanging Loose Magazine, Columbia Journal, LIT Magazine, Washington Square Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books (China Channel), SupChina, and Youth (China), among others. She is the co-founder of TransWords.net. She received her MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from New York University.
Jiaoyang Li is a Chinese poet, translator and visual artist currently based in New York. Her literary work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books (China Channel), 3:AM, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation of Art and The Immigrants Artist Biennial.