For its thirty-third edition this year, the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TiBE) filled a hall of the Taipei World Trade Center from February 4 to 9. The exhibition’s theme—「閱讀異世界」 ‘Follow Your Fancy in Reading’—celebrated the「異」or the ‘other’ in global literature, drawing authors from as far as Italy (this year’s guest of honour) and Czechia, and as near as Japan and Hong Kong. Asymptote’s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction, Michelle Chan Schmidt, was one of the translators, editors, publishers, and readers who flocked to the fascinating six-day event to learn more about Taiwanese literature in translation.
Alongside the meticulous preparations of lóo-bah and bah-sò rice, yamagawa pot, or the Taiwanese iterations of yōshoku curry, translation is one of the crafts in Taiwan Travelogue that combine to give Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novel the complexity and richness of a twelve-course feast. When our Japanese narrator Aoyama Chizuko arrives in Taiwan—a then-Japanese colony—in 1938, Ông Tshian-hóh, also known as Ō Chizuru or Chi-chan, is the young local woman assigned to serve as her Taiwanese interpreter. It takes only a quarter of the meticulously structured novel for Chizuko, increasingly enraptured with Chi-chan, to realize her hidden dream: ‘Wait, I know what your ambition is! It’s to become a professional translator—of novels, isn’t it?’
On the opening day of the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Yáng and Taiwan Travelogue’s translator, Lin King, spoke at length in Mandarin about the layers of translation saturating this brilliant novel, beginning with its ‘translate-ception’ structure: Yáng’s narrative masquerades as an original piece of 1930s Japanese travel writing that her authorial persona purports to have translated into Taiwanese Chinese. To write the novel, Yáng and her sister delved into the immense archives concerning the Japanese colonization of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, which enabled them to filter Taiwan Travelogue through Chizuko’s Japanese eyes. It was a kind of pain, says Yáng, to not be able to write in a Taiwanese voice in the novel.
Originally published in 2020 in Taipei as《臺灣漫遊錄》, King translated Taiwan Travelogue into English in 2024, adding an additional meta-layer to the conceit of translation that already undergirds the narrative. The English edition is itself bookended by fictional (and real) editorial paratexts and marinated in a generous dose of translators’ footnotes, culminating in the beguiling effect of Yáng and King taking turns to whisper in the reader’s ear. And what of other languages—its 2023 Japanese translation by Yoko Miura, its forthcoming transformations into Dutch and Ukrainian, with more surely to come? How many more layers of meta-footnotes—perhaps now riffing off King’s as well—will arrive to enrich the text?
At TiBE, King mentioned that the translator’s authority over their work has expanded beyond her expectations. ‘The translator no longer has to be transparent. I’m not translating for the sake of translating—translating has walked me to where I didn’t anticipate it to go.’ Both Yáng and King also noted hopefully that Taiwanese literature in translation might bring the nation’s culture and history to those who might not know of it, especially in the wake of their historic U.S. National Book Award victory as the first Taiwanese awardees. To highlight a selection of the multitude already available in the Anglosphere, other English translations of Taiwanese literature available at the Taipei Book Exhibition included Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara in Mike Fu’s translation, Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise in Jenna Tang’s translation, Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes, and Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town, both translated by Darryl Sterk (a past contributor to Asymptote).
Lin King and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ converse on stage at TiBE, in front of a backdrop that reads in Complex Chinese: ‘Translation is the original work on a journey: From《臺灣漫遊錄》to Taiwan Travelogue’ (translation mine).
Another talk at TiBE introduced Jim Weldon’s new translation of Deserted Village by the major Taiwanese writer Lee Chiao, published by Taipei’s Bookman Books in 2024 and previously translated into English as a part of Professor David Der-wei Wang’s Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan initiative in 2000. The second novel in the Wintry Night《寒夜三部曲》trilogy (originally published from 1980 to 1981), Lee’s realist prose details the turbulence of Taiwan’s early twentieth century as experienced by three generations of Hakka farmers, entwining postcolonial critique and nativist 「鄉土 」writing. The remaining two novels will also appear in Weldon’s English translations with Bookman later this year.
Weldon and editor Ian Maxwell both spoke compellingly about the complexities of translating not only from Chinese, but a Hakka-inflected mode of Chinese: how to preserve the particularities of written Hakkanese—especially as Lee was writing in a time before its standardization? How to convey the specificities of plant, place, and food names as we move from a morphosyllabic writing system, in which the morphemes contain meaning themselves, to an alphabetical one? And yet, to what extent does translation reserve the right to semantic opacity?
For instance, the Taiwanese city Miaoli—from where Lee hails—derives its name from transposing the indigenous Taokas word, Pali, into the Hakka 貓貍, which was then ‘refined’ to the purportedly more elegant homophone 苗栗 by the Chinese Qing government in 1889. It then gained the name of Byōritsu throughout the colonial period, following the characters’ Japanese pronunciation. In a further displacement of meaning, ‘Miaoli’—as a transliteration of 苗栗—contains none of its Chinese allusions to chestnuts and seedlings. Weldon is aware that Taiwanese toponyms inherently reflect the displacement of Indigenous culture by multiple strata of colonial forces, a knowledge fortified by discussions with Hakka cultural organizations throughout the translation process; in acknowledging this complex historical background, Weldon’s thoughtful translation lives up to one of Lee’s purported dictums, a reworking of Jean-Paul Sartre’s thought: ‘Resistance precedes existence.’
Bookman’s exhibition also showcased Crossing the Harbour: Ten Contemporary Hong Kong Poets and Passages: Thirteen Contemporary Taiwan Poets, two bilingual poetry anthologies edited and translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi, the duo behind acclaimed English and Chinese poetry journal Pangolin House (and previous contributors to Asymptote). One could also spot some recent, acclaimed titles: Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions, translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz; and Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s The Piano Tuner, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. The selection evinced Bookman’s excellent selection of Sinophone literature in both original language and translation—though there are now so many outstanding translations of Taiwanese literature that it is near-impossible to make note of them all.
In another highlight, Joshua Dyer, translator and editor-in-chief of the government-sponsored program Books from Taiwan (which promotes Taiwanese literature to foreign publishers by facilitating translation samples and funding opportunities), headed a panel in Mandarin featuring two translators: Karin Betz, the award-winning German translator of Mo Yan, Can Xue, and Xi Xi, amongst others; and Chenxin Jiang, a PEN/Heim-winning translator of Italian, German, and Chinese—as well as the current board president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). (A past member of and frequent contributor to Asymptote, Jiang’s most recent translation, for now I am sitting here growing transparent by the Hongkongese poet Yau Ching, was published with Zephyr Press in February and featured on the blog.)
While Jiang presented ALTA’s mission to the audience—to host its annual translation conference, provide resources for professional development, and advocate for translators—Betz described her work in translation, starting from readers’ reports and the struggles of pitching, and concluding with something akin to a translational method: to ‘hear the sound of a language and render it in a different culture through imagination.’ An audience member brilliantly asked about the differences in language between literature from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China—and if a foreign reader could detect these differences in translation. To this, Betz and Jiang answered that their job is to serve the text—and in that vein, what is literature from Taiwan, literature from Hong Kong, or literature from mainland China, in the first place? What historical and cultural pressures have shaped these literatures into their current forms and dynamics?
Beyond the Taipei World Trade Center, parallel but separate literary activities took place in an open, wood-paneled Japanese-era complex near the heart of the city, where one could find themselves in a tatami-lined room closed off by shōji, stocked with a glass pot full of golden tea. This is the Taiwan Literature Base, currently hosting the Chinese-to-Dutch translator Annelous Stiggelbout as its February writer-in-residence. Scheduled to give three talks during her stay, the topics up for discussion involve the art and craft of translation, the presence of Taiwanese literature in the Netherlands, and her experience translating Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara into Dutch. While the entry of Taiwanese literature into the Netherlands only commenced in 1978 and remains limited (apparently, only forty-six novels have ever been translated!), full-time translators like Stiggelbout, Silvia Marijnissen, and Mark Leenhouts are working hard to shift the landscape.
As a literary worker from Hong Kong still learning the craft of translation, I often wonder: what can I do to shift my own landscape? How might Hongkongese literature reach the level of global recognition that the Taiwanese is deservedly experiencing today? While Hongkongers similarly read and write in Complex Chinese and often speak Mandarin fluently (in addition to our native Cantonese), the linguistic similarities that seem to hint at a facile analogy between the two nations yield to the distinctiveness and complexity of their historical experiences and cultural identities, as pointedly yet elegantly demonstrated by Yáng and King in Taiwan Travelogue.
Even so, Taiwan’s atmosphere of democratic freedom and its harmonic notes of resistance (I’m thinking of Yáng’s acceptance speech), alongside its linguistic and geographical proximity to Hong Kong, have long resonated with Hongkongese writers, booksellers, and publishers—a solidarity that has only increased in pitch since the implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong in 2020. One sees this affinity in Hongkongese writer Gigi Leung Lee-chi, whose full-length fiction work Everyday Movement is set against Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, and was published in Taipei in 2022 after she relocated there. There is also the important advocacy of Tang Siu-Wa—a poet, essayist, and co-founder of the literary journal Fleurs des lettres and the House of Hong Kong Literature—who founded 2046 Press in Taipei to publish Hong Kong voices that would suffer censorship in their homeland. It is urgent work to me to bring these voices into English, an additional layer that is much harder to censor; and while I cannot speak to my fellow translators’ motives, I feel grateful to be far from alone in this endeavor, supported and guided by an admirable, groundbreaking team of translators and editors devoted to championing Hong Kong literature in translation (this conversation with the trailblazing translator Jennifer Feeley, published on the blog, is a good place to start).
On the last day of TiBE, a Sunday, it rains as it often does in Taipei, an unbeatable drizzle that appears as a mesh rather than discrete raindrops. Under an umbrella by the entrance to the MRT, recalling Yáng and King’s sparkling exchange from the start of the week, a pun comes slowly to me, riffing off the book exhibition’s 2025 theme to ‘follow your fancy in reading’:「閱讀異世界」, which can be more literally translated as ‘read (the) other world(s)’. In Mandarin, the terms for ‘translator’「譯者」and ‘outsider’「異者」—which Yáng used to describe Chizuko—are pronounced identically as yì zhě, glossing translator into outsider, outsider into translator. Like Chizuko, I am an outsider in Taiwan, despite all that it shares with Hong Kong: the written language, the ethnic Han and Hakka heritage, the fraught geopolitical relationship with the same neocolonial power. However, like Chi-chan, Chizuko’s Taiwanese interpreter and a deft analyst of the dynamics of colonial power, one of my ambitions is to ‘become a professional translator’, which entails observing, listening, internalizing, rewriting.
So what if the translator is a bit of a 異者? Or the outsider is a bit of a 譯者? What is a translator but a subverter of places and spaces, turning always from the inside of a language to the outside?
I should add that, upon translation from Mandarin to Cantonese, the pun dies.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) is Asymptote‘s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction and a 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop, where she curated the Winter 2024 special issue on ‘Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.’ Born in Hong Kong, she has contributed reviews, interviews, and creative writing to Asymptote, The Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, La Piccioletta Barca, Public Books, and others. As the Poetry from Hong Kong mentee of the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, she is translating Hongkongese writer Tang Siu-Wa’s《眾音的反面》The Opposite of Sounds from Complex Chinese into English.
Image source: the Taipei International Book Exhibition.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: