In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?
Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.
The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.
BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?
MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal.
I’d been reading Prabda for years, before I became a translator, but I started reading Saneh Sangsuk only after I became a translator. When I studied comp lit in college, my languages were French and Latin, so I’m self-taught in Thai literature. I did a lot of catching up when I started as a translator. I began reading Saneh soon after I started translating. My Thai friends who are serious readers mentioned him, and so did booksellers. But it took me a really long time to get around to translating him. I’ve wanted to translate him for at least five years, I would say.
BH: I’ve read a bit of Sangsuk’s biography, and I was wondering if he looms very large in Thai literature. How do you see Sangsuk’s position within that world?
MP: Saneh is a very well-known writer, but I would say in Thailand, if you’re not a very serious reader, there are probably very few writers who are household names. Saneh’s probably not one of those, but among serious readers, people know him. That’s my sense. And certainly among writers that I’ve talked to, everyone thinks he’s a master storyteller. I feel that way about him too. He’s also so meticulous about his language.
BH: How did that meticulousness feature in your translation and translation process? Did you have a close collaboration with him, or was it more of a divided process?
MP: I’ll take the easy question first, which is collaborating. Venom, though it came out first, is actually the second book that I’ve done by him. The first was The Understory, which is coming out in the fall in the United Kingdom, also with Peirene, and then with Deep Vellum in the United States next spring. So, I feel like we’ve collaborated quite closely for a couple of years now. I talk to him on the phone quite a bit. We’ve spent so much time on the phone together. He’s very generous with his time. He’s very willing to explain words or his thinking behind something. He’s very open to answering questions.
And I think he’s very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text. Before we started working together, I read an interview with him in a Thai book of interviews. He was talking about some work of his—I’m afraid I can’t remember which one—and he said, “It should take you four hours and forty-five minutes to read it.” And I thought, That sounds awfully specific. But then when I was talking to him about Venom—I’m making up the numbers, but again he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read. And again, that same thought struck me. Why is he being so specific? Surely, the precision is kind of exaggerated? But as it turned out, he just has a very clear idea of how his texts should sound. I don’t know if he’s actually timed it, but when you talk to him, it almost feels like he has, because he has such a specific idea of the flow. It was only after I spent a lot of time talking with him that I realized that he was not kidding when he said those numbers. And so, working on his texts, I have to be hyper-aware of rhythm.
There’s also a fair amount of repetition, and in Thai you can tolerate that a little bit more than in English. So, I have to sound it out and see how to mimic the flow without repeating word-for-word, but also, Saneh often doesn’t repeat things exactly. Thai has a lot of words that don’t mean anything on their own—I think grammatically they’re called particles. He’ll sort of sneak those in. And especially in The Understory, I just had to circle these extra words in each of these quasi-repetitions to make sure to vary it a little bit, because he’s very aware of them. His diction is also amazing.
BH: You mentioned in your translator’s note that this book was very much an attempt to capture a moment in time that is now gone. I think you captured that very well with your translation, so I want to congratulate you for that.
MP: Thank you. You know, that translator’s note, I was sort of ambivalent about giving away the story’s time setting there. Saneh has a lot of works that are set in this village Praeknamdang, and they’re always set around this time, the late sixties or so. And in a lot of them, he names the year, so you know exactly when it’s set. But in Venom, he doesn’t. I obviously have the advantage of having read his other works, so I know his fictional universe, but since this is the first book we’re putting out together, I felt the need to convey the time because I didn’t want people to think that this was present-day Thailand and I wanted to help people get into that world he’s created.
This also plays into how he works himself into his fiction. He’s probably one of the kids that played with the boy, but at the same time, as a lot of people have noted, Venom has this fable-like quality to it, and I think that’s probably why he doesn’t name a year. Because he does give the year in other books, but he doesn’t here, it feels like there’s a pointed atemporality to it.
BH: I think there’s a lot of care and attention towards nature and animals throughout the book. Is this sort of construction, this care towards nature, typical of Sangsuk’s writing in general? Or is this more specific to Venom?
MP: I think one thing that this work shares with his other works is—you put your finger on it—a sense of respect for nature. I think he’s quite an environmentalist though I don’t know whether he calls himself that or not. I do feel that there’s this great respect for nature and this fear at the same time, and I think a lot of his work conveys the sense of smallness or insignificance of human beings when we are surrounded by the great wilderness. I do think that the snake represents that in some ways in this book. It’s not a straight-up villain. And neither is Song Waad. Saneh resists easy condemnations. The character of Song Waad almost doesn’t seem that complicated—he’s the bad guy—but at the same time, who or what causes what happens to the boy? Is Song Waad directly responsible? It’s not so clear.
BH: Does Song Waad appear in his other novels, or is he specific to Venom?
MP: He’s specific to Venom. A lot of his works do share some characters, but usually a minor character from one will become a main character in another. The character of Luang Paw Tien, the monk, whom we meet in this book, is the protagonist of The Understory. We meet him there as an old man, but he tells his life story from when he was young. I love having these recurring characters because with all this background, their stories become all the more poignant.
BH: It would be very easy to read Song Waad as a villain, but it is also true that a very simplistic reading isn’t necessarily possible. I recently read an essay about contemporary criticism that described reviews of books as almost like Scooby Doo: they are all trying to tear away the mask, and behind the mask is always capitalism. I was trying not to do that kind of reading—
MP: It’s funny that you say that, because I think that’s what Saneh is trying to resist. You have this character, Song Waad, who we think is the villain, but at the same time, much of the book focuses on the boy’s struggle against the giant snake. And you think that it’s the little guy against the system, but really the problem can also be read as very individual. His fight against the snake is very much his, and he’s fighting something that’s not man-made. The story plays out against a background of social problems, but it’s asking, What is it that breaks an individual in the end? Saneh doesn’t say that it’s the system; he also doesn’t say it’s not. A lot of it comes down to luck as well.
BH: In my review, I was trying to be much more conscious not to read with the type of literary criticism that sees literature as just a symptom of a particular social system and doesn’t take into consideration the aesthetic work that the literature is doing.
MP: I really appreciate that. Because I think if you translate from a less frequently translated language and a culture that’s not as familiar to English-language readers, there’s this feeling of not wanting to be read as something anthropological. I feel that very acutely, so it makes me happy when critics take an aesthetic approach—reading the words rather than/in addition to the place.
BH: One thing I found very interesting is when you defined Sangsuk as a literary renegade within Thailand because of his move away from a form of what we might call social realism. I was wondering, how you feel about the idea that literature can bring about social change? Do you have any stake in that?
MP: The ‘literary renegade’ moniker, didn’t come from me. I’d heard him called that for a long time, and I wasn’t really sure where it came from. When I was writing the afterword, I finally asked him about it, and he said that it actually was not the left, the social realists who called him that, but rather the right, just because he refused to go along with this whole “Thailand is wonderful, Thailand is beautiful” image that they wanted to build.
But to get back to your question, I do think that literature can bring about social change. However, I don’t think that every writer has to write with that as their goal. If a writer just wants to write a story that has nothing to do with politics or social progress, I think they should feel free. But what readers will do with it is also up to them.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press. She is translating a novel and a story collection by Duanwad Pimwana, both forthcoming in 2019 from Two Lines Press and Feminist Press, respectively. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
A Pointed Atemporality: Mui Poopoksakul on Translating Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom
He's very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text . . . he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read.
In our May Book Club selection, a young boy struggles with a snake in the fictional village of Praeknamdang, in a tense battle between beauty and cruelty. In poetic language that is nostalgic for the world it describes without romanticizing it, Saneh Sangsuk creates a complex and captivating world. In this fable-like story there are no simple morals, in keeping with Sangsuk’s resistance to efforts to depict a sanitized view of Thailand and to the idea that the purpose of literature is to create a path to social change. In this interview with translator Mui Poopoksakul, we discuss the role of nature in the text, translating meticulous prose, and the politics of literary criticism.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Barbara Halla (BH): How did you get into translation, especially given your law background?
Mui Poopoksakul (MP): I actually studied comparative literature as an undergrad, and then in my early twenties, like a lot of people who study the humanities, I felt a little bit like, “Oh, I need to get a ‘real job.’” I went to law school, and I worked at a law firm for about five years, and I liked that job just fine, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
So, I started thinking, What should I be doing? What do I want to do with myself? I had always wanted to do something in the literary field but didn’t quite have the courage, and I realized that not a lot of Thai literature been translated. I thought, If I can just get one book out, that would be really amazing. So, I went back to grad school. I did an MA in Cultural Translation at the American University of Paris, and The Sad Part Was was my thesis from that program. Because I had done it as my thesis, I felt like I was translating it for something. I wasn’t just producing a sample that might go nowhere.
The whole field was all new to me, so I didn’t know how anything worked. I didn’t even know how many pages a translation sample should be. But then I ended up not having to worry about that because I did the book as my thesis.
BH: You mentioned even just one book, but did you have any authors in mind? Was Saneh Sangsuk one of those authors in your ideal roster?
MP: I wouldn’t say I had a roster, but I did have one author in mind and that was Prabda Yoon, and that really helped me get started, because I wasn’t getting into the field thinking, “I want to translate.” My thought was, “I want to translate this book.” I think that helped me a lot, having a more concrete goal.
I’d been reading Prabda for years, before I became a translator, but I started reading Saneh Sangsuk only after I became a translator. When I studied comp lit in college, my languages were French and Latin, so I’m self-taught in Thai literature. I did a lot of catching up when I started as a translator. I began reading Saneh soon after I started translating. My Thai friends who are serious readers mentioned him, and so did booksellers. But it took me a really long time to get around to translating him. I’ve wanted to translate him for at least five years, I would say.
BH: I’ve read a bit of Sangsuk’s biography, and I was wondering if he looms very large in Thai literature. How do you see Sangsuk’s position within that world?
MP: Saneh is a very well-known writer, but I would say in Thailand, if you’re not a very serious reader, there are probably very few writers who are household names. Saneh’s probably not one of those, but among serious readers, people know him. That’s my sense. And certainly among writers that I’ve talked to, everyone thinks he’s a master storyteller. I feel that way about him too. He’s also so meticulous about his language.
BH: How did that meticulousness feature in your translation and translation process? Did you have a close collaboration with him, or was it more of a divided process?
MP: I’ll take the easy question first, which is collaborating. Venom, though it came out first, is actually the second book that I’ve done by him. The first was The Understory, which is coming out in the fall in the United Kingdom, also with Peirene, and then with Deep Vellum in the United States next spring. So, I feel like we’ve collaborated quite closely for a couple of years now. I talk to him on the phone quite a bit. We’ve spent so much time on the phone together. He’s very generous with his time. He’s very willing to explain words or his thinking behind something. He’s very open to answering questions.
And I think he’s very aware of the rhythm and musicality of this text. Before we started working together, I read an interview with him in a Thai book of interviews. He was talking about some work of his—I’m afraid I can’t remember which one—and he said, “It should take you four hours and forty-five minutes to read it.” And I thought, That sounds awfully specific. But then when I was talking to him about Venom—I’m making up the numbers, but again he said it should take something like an hour and thirty-seven minutes to read. And again, that same thought struck me. Why is he being so specific? Surely, the precision is kind of exaggerated? But as it turned out, he just has a very clear idea of how his texts should sound. I don’t know if he’s actually timed it, but when you talk to him, it almost feels like he has, because he has such a specific idea of the flow. It was only after I spent a lot of time talking with him that I realized that he was not kidding when he said those numbers. And so, working on his texts, I have to be hyper-aware of rhythm.
There’s also a fair amount of repetition, and in Thai you can tolerate that a little bit more than in English. So, I have to sound it out and see how to mimic the flow without repeating word-for-word, but also, Saneh often doesn’t repeat things exactly. Thai has a lot of words that don’t mean anything on their own—I think grammatically they’re called particles. He’ll sort of sneak those in. And especially in The Understory, I just had to circle these extra words in each of these quasi-repetitions to make sure to vary it a little bit, because he’s very aware of them. His diction is also amazing.
BH: You mentioned in your translator’s note that this book was very much an attempt to capture a moment in time that is now gone. I think you captured that very well with your translation, so I want to congratulate you for that.
MP: Thank you. You know, that translator’s note, I was sort of ambivalent about giving away the story’s time setting there. Saneh has a lot of works that are set in this village Praeknamdang, and they’re always set around this time, the late sixties or so. And in a lot of them, he names the year, so you know exactly when it’s set. But in Venom, he doesn’t. I obviously have the advantage of having read his other works, so I know his fictional universe, but since this is the first book we’re putting out together, I felt the need to convey the time because I didn’t want people to think that this was present-day Thailand and I wanted to help people get into that world he’s created.
This also plays into how he works himself into his fiction. He’s probably one of the kids that played with the boy, but at the same time, as a lot of people have noted, Venom has this fable-like quality to it, and I think that’s probably why he doesn’t name a year. Because he does give the year in other books, but he doesn’t here, it feels like there’s a pointed atemporality to it.
BH: I think there’s a lot of care and attention towards nature and animals throughout the book. Is this sort of construction, this care towards nature, typical of Sangsuk’s writing in general? Or is this more specific to Venom?
MP: I think one thing that this work shares with his other works is—you put your finger on it—a sense of respect for nature. I think he’s quite an environmentalist though I don’t know whether he calls himself that or not. I do feel that there’s this great respect for nature and this fear at the same time, and I think a lot of his work conveys the sense of smallness or insignificance of human beings when we are surrounded by the great wilderness. I do think that the snake represents that in some ways in this book. It’s not a straight-up villain. And neither is Song Waad. Saneh resists easy condemnations. The character of Song Waad almost doesn’t seem that complicated—he’s the bad guy—but at the same time, who or what causes what happens to the boy? Is Song Waad directly responsible? It’s not so clear.
BH: Does Song Waad appear in his other novels, or is he specific to Venom?
MP: He’s specific to Venom. A lot of his works do share some characters, but usually a minor character from one will become a main character in another. The character of Luang Paw Tien, the monk, whom we meet in this book, is the protagonist of The Understory. We meet him there as an old man, but he tells his life story from when he was young. I love having these recurring characters because with all this background, their stories become all the more poignant.
BH: It would be very easy to read Song Waad as a villain, but it is also true that a very simplistic reading isn’t necessarily possible. I recently read an essay about contemporary criticism that described reviews of books as almost like Scooby Doo: they are all trying to tear away the mask, and behind the mask is always capitalism. I was trying not to do that kind of reading—
MP: It’s funny that you say that, because I think that’s what Saneh is trying to resist. You have this character, Song Waad, who we think is the villain, but at the same time, much of the book focuses on the boy’s struggle against the giant snake. And you think that it’s the little guy against the system, but really the problem can also be read as very individual. His fight against the snake is very much his, and he’s fighting something that’s not man-made. The story plays out against a background of social problems, but it’s asking, What is it that breaks an individual in the end? Saneh doesn’t say that it’s the system; he also doesn’t say it’s not. A lot of it comes down to luck as well.
BH: In my review, I was trying to be much more conscious not to read with the type of literary criticism that sees literature as just a symptom of a particular social system and doesn’t take into consideration the aesthetic work that the literature is doing.
MP: I really appreciate that. Because I think if you translate from a less frequently translated language and a culture that’s not as familiar to English-language readers, there’s this feeling of not wanting to be read as something anthropological. I feel that very acutely, so it makes me happy when critics take an aesthetic approach—reading the words rather than/in addition to the place.
BH: One thing I found very interesting is when you defined Sangsuk as a literary renegade within Thailand because of his move away from a form of what we might call social realism. I was wondering, how you feel about the idea that literature can bring about social change? Do you have any stake in that?
MP: The ‘literary renegade’ moniker, didn’t come from me. I’d heard him called that for a long time, and I wasn’t really sure where it came from. When I was writing the afterword, I finally asked him about it, and he said that it actually was not the left, the social realists who called him that, but rather the right, just because he refused to go along with this whole “Thailand is wonderful, Thailand is beautiful” image that they wanted to build.
But to get back to your question, I do think that literature can bring about social change. However, I don’t think that every writer has to write with that as their goal. If a writer just wants to write a story that has nothing to do with politics or social progress, I think they should feel free. But what readers will do with it is also up to them.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer turned translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both from Tilted Axis Press. She is translating a novel and a story collection by Duanwad Pimwana, both forthcoming in 2019 from Two Lines Press and Feminist Press, respectively. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributor:- Barbara Halla
; Languages: - English
, - Thai
; Place: - Thailand
; Writers: - Mui Poopoksakul
, - Prabda Yoon
, - Saneh Sangsuk
; Tags: - Deep Vellum
, - environmentalism
, - literary criticism
, - nature
, - nature in storytelling
, - pacing
, - pacing in translation
, - Peirene
, - respect for nature
, - rhythm
, - rhythm in translation
, - social commentary
, - storytelling
, - Thai literature