In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.
Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?
Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).
I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.
I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.”
AH: Why did you choose to work in Chinese? What place does Chinese literature occupy in the Bulgarian literary landscape?
SR: I’ve been asked this question a lot and where else than Asymptote to give a truly honest answer: no reason at all. I think all cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness. Also, all literature is worth investigating, as it presents bits and pieces of the human condition. What I care about is not so much Chinese literature per se, but rather story exchange, culture crossing, perspective shifting, inner dialogue; literature can be very effective in accomplishing all of this.
Chinese literature certainly wasn’t a major presence in the local scene when I began translating, but attention seems to have grown, and I’m very happy to notice that my translations make it into general discussions and personal year’s-best lists, that they are being appreciated as works of literature, regardless of their place of origin, like what happened with Yu Hua’s To Live and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. That is how I imagine the perfect dialogue.
AH: One of your first translations was One Day by Wu Qing. He is an avant-garde writer known for his DIY style and his use of modern technology for the popularization and even creation of his texts. What approach did you adopt while working on his book? Did author-translator communication play a role?
SR: I’m not sure I was skillful enough back then to choose from a range of approaches. The process was mostly intuitive and driven by the genuine adoration and sense of camaraderie I was finding while reading Wu Qing’s stories (not to say that adoration is a guarantee for a good translation). His narrator is a wandering loser, so the whole process (which lasted several years, as I was translating for my personal pleasure only) was an exercise in finding my own inner wandering loser and digging up the relevant language style that had been latent in me the whole time. To be honest, that wasn’t so hard. Mostly, it was satisfying and addictive.
I didn’t think back then that translators were allowed to bother writers, so I only asked Wu Qing a couple of questions (by comparison, when I learned that it’s common practice, I asked Mo Yan roughly a hundred and fifty questions about the novel Sandalwood Death). But I did spend some time with him, including in his hometown, which is one of the settings for his stories. Hanging out with the writer is a complicated matter and it could turn out to be harmful to the process, but in this case, it gave me a deeper understanding of Wu Qing’s aesthetics. Also, it turned out that a crossroad in his hometown, referred to in several of his stories, which I was picturing as this gigantic space I was used to seeing in big cities like Beijing or Shanghai, was, in fact, the tiniest of crossroads, where you can barely squeeze in a car. Those details can be important for grasping the reality of the scenes and the atmosphere of the story. It also makes me think about how often our imagination fails us and how we are constantly mistranslating in our minds.
AH: How has your relationship with the profession changed since then?
SR: Translation used to be one of many hobbies, but it slowly evolved into a profession and now it occupies most of my time, though it still doesn’t pay all the bills. Many things have changed: I’ve expanded my range of ways to tell a story; I’ve grown a lot more conscious of the variety of decisions I can make for a certain word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph; I’m now better able to imagine the scenes as described in the text; I’m more capable of keeping a full picture of the story in my mind, which means remembering multiple details and being on a constant lookout for inconsistencies and illogicalities; I communicate a lot more than I thought I would when I was getting into translation (at first, I thought it was a solitary ordeal, but it turned out to be quite the teamwork, involving the writer, editors, Chinese and Bulgarian friends, and all kinds of specialists I find everywhere online and in real life).
What hasn’t changed is that I’m as willing as ever to learn and improve and still very reluctant to compromise—I wouldn’t translate a book I don’t believe in, and I definitely wouldn’t speed through a translation just to make more money. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
At the same time, I pay attention to the general scene and try to think of how to make a positive impact, so readers will get better translations and so translators will get more satisfying rewards. That’s a hard one.
AH: What are you currently working on?
SR: I’m about to finish the first draft of Death’s End, the third volume of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (it will be called “Immortal Death” in Bulgarian, which is the original Chinese title). It’s interesting how once I’ve tackled all the science and military terms in the first two volumes, the third one is turning out to be a little easier, at least in that department. I also have two other finished first drafts waiting to be revised: Yu Hua’s essay collection China in Ten Words and one of my favorite pieces of contemporary Chinese literature, A Cheng’s three novellas, The King of Chess (published in English as The King of Trees).
Stefan Rusinov is a Bulgarian translator of Chinese and English literature. His translations include Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue, Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book, and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Currently, he is an adjunct lecturer of Chinese studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and host of the podcast Footnote. He is also the editor and translator of the nonfiction series China Inside Out, published on the website Toest. He likes hiking.
Andriana Hamas is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Bulgaria.
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