Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi’s short story, “Cloudland”, makes use of grief’s overwhelming ranges to set out a narrative of exploration, dream-making, and the multiplicity of life. After the death of his wife, the bereaved Shutter begins a journey to write the ending of a tale that she had not be able to finish, and on his way, he finds the wondrous methods that landscape and animals have long used to express and communicate, offering a way of thinking and feeling that his technologically dense, hurried world does not allow. A gorgeous, lush story that introduces Wu’s sensitive ecowriting, “Cloudland” merges the richness of language with the richness of the natural world. In this interview, Alex Tan talks to the translator of “Cloudland”, Catherine Xinxin Yu, about the operation of images in her methodology, the trick of incorporating definitions into the prose, and making use of a textual reality.
Alex Tan (AT): Technologies of perception populate this excerpt from “Cloudland”: the night-vision cameras placed in the forest by Shutter, the Rift in the Cloud constituting a virtual catalogue of a life, the mediatised footage of the train bombing, and most fundamentally, the unfinished story of Shutter’s wife—which of course precipitates his grief and the quest for the elusive clouded leopard. There’s such an ambivalence to some of these forms of knowledge-making, as Wu also seems to be commenting on the ubiquity—and the risks—of digital surveillance. I wonder how you navigated the interplay between the visual and the textual, when you approached this work as a translator. Did it stylistically inflect your translation in any way?
Catherine Xinxin Yu (CXY): I remember interviewing Wu Ming-yi for my MA dissertation, which included a translation and commentary on “Cloudland”, focusing on eco-conscious ways to translate nature-oriented writing. I asked him why he decided to stop using Facebook and other social media from 2019 onwards, upon which he talked about his apprehension exactly of the ubiquity of digital surveillance that you mentioned.
Both in real life and in the collection that “Cloudland” is from (Kuyuzhidi 苦雨之地, which I tentatively translated as Where Rain Falls Amiss), digital traces are so fine-grained and invasive that they can piece together the most secret aspects of individuals. According to Wu, it is both frightening and cruel to be forced to see a loved one’s dark depths; I think that is a crucial part of the pain that pervades “Cloudland”: not only losing a spouse and a wild species, but also discovering how little one knew about them: seeing that “rift’’ and realising there is no way to remedy it.
Many of his works contain a multiplicity of perspectives, where vision functions as a means and a metaphor for perceiving, conceiving, and knowing. Reality (or its shadow) shapeshifts from the visual to the textual. As a photographer myself, I identify with this and I know how an entire narrative can be encapsulated in one gaze. Short of actually visiting and seeing the landscape where the story is set, I looked at a lot of images and videos while translating Cloudland, so it wasn’t just a text-to-text translation, but also image-to-text. Visualisation allowed me to embody the text and then perform it in English. I suppose the result is that, by describing the visual rather than simply transferring words from one language to the other, the translation ends up being more vivid and immediate. Or so I hope.
AT: Much of Wu’s tale blends the dream-like with the factual, sometimes almost to the point of phantasmagoria. It feels like Wu’s mode of narration partakes of this; dialogues between characters are not distinguished by punctuation, and thus seem as if they are emanating from the landscape. Sometimes, lines uttered by characters occupy entire paragraphs of their own. In your translation, you’ve marked speech out in italics, while leaving others unitalicised—which then comes across as something Shutter thinks rather than says. What was your thought process when making these typographical decisions?
CXY: Another thing Wu Ming-yi said during our interview was that ‘everything in the story is real’. This circles back to the concept of compound vision from his novel The Man with the Compound Eyes, a metaphor for the simultaneous existence of different realities. I adore this Inception-esque element in Wu’s work, with stories nested within stories within stories, each as real as the rest, and each having a repercussion on the others. Dreams, memories, technology, and streaks of magical realism bring them together. There’s also the idea that reality comes into being through storytelling, both through the characters’ dialogues and Wu’s narrative (see the dialogue on “becoming a true person”, for example).
What you said about dialogues emanating from the landscape is beautiful. Wu’s writing is simultaneously introspective and outward-looking. The lack of speech markers reflects this fluidity between thoughts kept within oneself, and thoughts birthed into the world through speech. Blurring this boundary almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. Adding quotation marks would definitely interrupt that flow, but leaving the dialogues completely unmarked in English feels a bit too disorientating; italicising feels less intrusive. In Chinese—not just in Wu Ming-yi’s writing—it is common and widely accepted to not mark speech, or mark it inconsistently even within a short passage, and somehow that is not confusing at all. But I felt that more structure and consistency might be needed in English, hence the italics.
As for leaving certain passages unmarked, it was my way of adding a bit of variation and another layer of interpretation. Repetition is not frowned upon in Chinese, and it seems like it is common in East Asian languages to gently ask a question by repeating exactly what the interlocutor has just said. But in English, this can get very annoying very quickly, so I consciously try to avoid it. And in this case, given that Pawz is both the self and the other in relation to Shutter, thinking and speaking are kind of the same, so putting that tiny doubt into the reader’s head—”hmm, did Shutter say it or not?”—felt a bit more dynamic to me.
AT: I love how much Wu is concerned with imagining—as you say in your translator’s note—non-anthropocentric relationships between human and non-human animals by turning to the Indigenous: for the Rukai people, beings turn into stories and so become “part of the mountain”. Such a posture appears to parallel Shutter’s wife orientation to storytelling, as “her emotions were synced to those of her characters”. To what extent do you think Wu’s own writing draws from such a poetics of incorporation, harmony and perhaps even empathy across species boundaries, whether in Cloudland or across his wider oeuvre?
CXY: Thank you for raising this very, very important point!
Wu is an environmental activist. He led anti-nuclear protests, fought for the conservation of mangrove forests, and is a trustee of a cetacean conservation foundation called Kuroshio, on top of being co-director of the Taiwan Ecological Stewardship Association (TESA). He definitely invests a lot of care and dedication when it comes to animals and nature, and that shows through in his writing, in nonfiction about butterflies and waterways, and in novels about the Great Pacific Rubbish Patch, natural scientists, and concrete factories.
I am not sure about “harmony”. I remember he once said in a talk that human beings can’t “make peace” with nature, and nature neither “retaliates” nor “forgives”. It just takes its own course, regardless of what humans want from it. His writing often raises questions around how we can process (eco)grief and how we should approach nature. Without preaching, his books educate, appeal to empathy, and encourage me to think and act differently. And he not only draws from indigenous cultures in Taiwan, but also a vast body of international scholarship on ecology and conservation. So there’s also science in his ecopoetics.
“Incorporation”, as in acknowledging the interconnections between the human, the nonhuman, and the physical environment, is indeed a recurrent theme. All six stories in Kuyuzhidi are about how intensive, long-term interactions with nature change the cognitive and psychological landscape of individuals. The sensory experience of the body in nature and being part of it, coupled with careful observations and personal reflections—these are not only crucial components of an environmentalist education, but also building blocks for good nature-oriented writing (loosely quoting Wu’s essays and talks here). Translators should probably try that too. I am very jealous of Darryl Sterk, who translated The Man with the Compound Eyes and edited it on location! He travelled along the east coast of Taiwan, went camping, rock climbing, caving, and visited “walking trees” while he worked on the text. For me, that would be the dream!
AT: Alongside what you say about the body in nature, I felt like “Cloudland” is also exquisitely attuned to different orders of time shifting almost tectonically, beyond human comprehension: “Here, every day is identical yet subtly different.” Did you have any considerations when it came to translating temporality, especially since tense is often more ambiguous in Chinese than it is in English?
CXY: Again, here’s the “compound eye” at work. I find that since eco-literature often contemplates subjectivity—as in what constitutes a subject—the concept of time becomes relative depending on the perspective. An hour is different for a water bear versus a human versus a millennia-old tree. And what is time for hybrid or decentralised creatures like lichen or fungi? Time can also be circular with variations in each loop; hence every day is identical yet different, and ancestors can return in different guises.
Dealing with tenses is always a bit of a snag when translating from Chinese (insert smile-tear emoji and lots of deep breaths), especially in a piece like “Cloudland” that shifts fluidly between past and present, memories and reality, and stories within stories. I used to use the past tense as the default, but I have come to realise that a ton of past perfect isn’t pretty. Nowadays what I tend to do is to find a time anchor—decide which episode constitutes the here and now, and let the rest of the narrative fall into place around that. In the case of “Cloudland”, Shutter’s journey into the mountains is the now, and things relating to his wife are the past. Pawz’s story follows a different timeline, but tenses were chosen in a similar way.
AT: Could you tell us about one moment in Wu’s story that was especially intractable or resistant to translation, perhaps because of the specific features of the Chinese language? What creative ways did you devise of navigating it?
CXY: There were enough challenges to fill a whole dissertation! One example is the titles, which play on form, have multiple layers of meanings, and are featured in the resolution of the story.
Shutter changes the title of the story from 雲上二千米 to 雲在兩千米, and the only major difference is the second character, 上 and 在. These are simultaneously prepositions and verbs. So the first title can be translated literally as “2000m Above the Clouds” or “The Clouds Ascend 2000m”. The second title can be translated as “Clouds at 2000m” or “Clouds Exist at 2000m”.
I asked Wu Ming-yi what he meant by them—by changing from one to the other. He answered that sometimes authors shift things around and make minor changes without a clear purpose, so Shutter’s decision reflects that. The other consideration is that the titles recall classical Chinese poetry in five-character form. It’s succinct, literary, and vague enough to allow for multiple interpretations. And the difference between the two titles should be minute. So these were the guidelines I received.
In an earlier version, I translated them as “Ascend Above Clouds, Two Thousand Metres Up” (emphasising movement, which mirrors the wife’s ascent to a higher realm and Shutter’s journey up the mountains) and “Here Lie Clouds, Two Thousand Metres Up” (hinting at arrival and closure, and alluding to the epitaph “gere lies…”). But I eventually realised my reasoning was rather obscure, and the titles were too long and hence not catchy enough, so I adopted a freer approach and came up with “Clouded Heights” and “Cloudland” instead. I also like that two words combine into one. The rift disappears. I hope some readers will pick up on this coming-together-ness?
AT: You write, also in your translator’s note, that stealth glosses—or the insertion of a definition into the text—were occasionally necessary for the piece to stand alone. One example I can think of is your gloss of “yunhai” as “seas of clouds”. Could you say a little about why you decided to add a gloss here and to preserve the original phrase, instead of simply translating it?
In general, what are your thoughts on stealth glosses in translation, and when do you think they are necessary or important?
CXY: Some stealth glosses are intended to help out the reader, while others simply assume ignorance. While the former can make a translation a lot more approachable, the latter should be avoided at all costs—and a lot of factors go into gauging what gets glossed. Is it an interesting detail? Is it central to the plot? Can the reader easily make out the meaning from the context? Is it easy to Google? Is a supplementary glossary provided? As a reader, I prefer glossaries to in-text glosses, especially for book-length works. They can go into more depth and feel less condescending, because the reader gets to choose whether further explanation is needed. That said, I haven’t firmly made up my mind yet, and decisions are always made on a case-by-case basis.
As for retaining “yunhai”, it’s because it occurs so many times in “Cloudland”—enough for the reader to internalise the meaning and sound of the word. I inwardly vocalise all texts I read, so the sound of yunhai was always in the back of my mind when I was translating. “Sea of clouds” doesn’t have the same ring; it’s longer, clunkier, both orthographically and phonetically. It grates if used too many times. I wanted to preserve the sound of the Chinese word and the neatness of one concept represented by one word.
AT: There’s a moment in “Cloudland” when Shutter rereads his wife’s writing and muses, “Words are tools that lend themselves so easily to falsity, deception and insincerity.” I want to ask you whether this resonates with you. What posture do you adopt, whether as a translator, writer or reader, towards language?
CXY: Yes, to a certain extent. I think the implicit alternatives in this scene are words versus first-hand observation, but the latter isn’t necessarily free from biases and distortions either.
The link between representation and reality is elusive; words, of course, are a form of representation. The ways we refer to photography actually illustrates this perfectly. In some languages we say “take” a photo, as if you just casually lift a slice out of some objective reality. In others we say “make” a photo (“fare una foto” in Italian), emphasising the creative element. You see, photography doesn’t fully represent reality, and the words we use for it don’t fully elucidate its nature. Likewise, I think the relationship between words and truth, between texts and translations, lies somewhere in that nebulous spectrum, depending on how reality is defined and how representations are manipulated. And this is of course a simplification, since we know through communication theory that the medium and the participation of the receiver also change the meaning of the message. So I think what matters is not whether words convey the truth, but how they are used and how they interact with our existing conceptions.
When it comes to translation, if the original is the textual reality, then the translation is a representation susceptible to distortions. I translate with the sincerest intentions, and I would love to make my process and biases as transparent as anyone cares to know. But I also trust that the reader understands that a translation is not a reproduction, and so creative changes, or the “mismatches” (錯位) that Wu Ming-yi himself appreciates, are not falsities.
AT: Moving beyond Wu’s story, I’m curious about your translational repertoire and disposition. Is there a reason you are specifically interested in literature from Hong Kong and Taiwan as opposed to, say, other Sinophone regions of the world? How do you go about choosing works that you want to translate?
CXY: I’m interested in Hong Kong literature because of my Cantonese background. Cantonese is entirely different from Mandarin, and can bring so much diversity to Sinophone literature in translation.
As for Taiwan, part of it is because of the richness of Taiwanese literature, which is disproportionate to the meagre attention it receives abroad—kind of a blessing for an emerging translator, I suppose! I am interested in literature about ecology, indigenous cultures, and gender/queerness, and these subgenres are particularly strong in Taiwan. Taiwanese manga is fascinating too. The other reason is that I think it is crucial to be able to visit the country one is translating without having to worry about safety and censorship.
I like Anton Hur’s philosophy in choosing books. I am the first reader of my translation. I’d like to work on what appeals to me.
AT: For readers who can’t read Chinese, which Sinophone writers (whose work exists in English translation) would you recommend? Who are some writers who deserve to be translated, but haven’t?
CXY: Wu Ming-yi, of course! He has two novels in English, translated by Darryl Sterk. If you read French too, check out his books in French translation by Gwennaël Gaffric, because there are titles not yet available in English, namely Le Magicien sur la passerelle and Les Lignes de navigation du sommeil.
I am awful when it comes to reading Sinophone literature in translation despite being a translator myself, so I am recommending the following authors based on the source text, not the translations: Pai Hsien-yung, Chi Ta-wei, Eileen Chang, Ah Cheng. Keep an eye out for an upcoming translation of Taming Sheep (馴羊記) by Hsu Chen-fu. For nonfiction, I like Sanmao’s travel writing and Winter Pasture by Li Juan, and I believe there’s an upcoming translation of The Odyssey of Taiwan’s Montane Plants by Chih Chieh Yu for those interested in botany. For mangas, look out for marvel-worthy superheroine adventure Yan (閻鐵花) by Changsheng, and feminist historical ghost story Guardienne (守娘) by Nownow. If you’re interested in translation processes, Raised by Wolves by Amang and Steve Bradbury is fascinating too.
There are too many authors that should be translated! I’ll limit myself to just a handful here? Natalie Chang Yi-hsum, a super witty queer feminist author who talks about unsilencing female sexuality. Chiou Charng-ting, new-wave nativist novelist who blends magical realism with body horror, and conducts extensive field work to research cultural elements in her stories. Syaman Rapongan, indigenous Tao author who writes about his people and the ocean. Apyang Imiq, indigenous Truku author who writes about reconciling his queer identity with traditional values. Salizan Takisvilainan, indigenous poet and essayist who delves into the history of Bunun porters and forest rangers.
AT: Thank you for these wonderful recommendations! If you’re at liberty to share, what’s next for you?
CXY: Talks are in progress to include my full translation of “Cloudland” in an upcoming anthology of Taiwanese environmental writing.
I am also pitching two books: Perhaps in the Smoke by Mukyu, a short story cycle about the Hong Kong diaspora in Taiwan following the 2019 pro-democracy protests; and Guide Us, Chicken Booty! by He Wun-jin, stories that explore the intersection between contemporary queer identities and traditional Taiwanese folk culture.
And if we’re talking about dreaming big, I’d love to translate Wu Ming-yi’s next novel, Sea Breeze Karaoke, coming out this summer, or his short story collection The Magician on the Skywalk, or a nature-oriented essay collection, like So Much Water, So Close to Home.
Catherine Xinxin Yu is an early-career translator based in Italy, working with Chinese, Cantonese, English, and Italian. She is fascinated by literature from Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially writings that explore gender, ecology, indigeneity, diaspora and multilingualism. Her works appear on Asymptote Journal, where she currently works as Assistant Director of Outreach. More info on www.cxxyu.eu
Alex Tan is Senior Assistant Editor at Asymptote.
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