Posts featuring Chi Ta-wei

Compound Vision: In Conversation with Catherine Xinxin Yu on Translating Wu Ming-yi’s “Cloudland”

July 31, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

Blurring this boundary [between speech and thought] almost creates an overlap between the human self and the personhood of the landscape. . .

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. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

June 18, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Darren Huang and Suhasini Patni

Hear about some of the most recent literary news from Taiwan and India!

This week, find out from our editors-at-large what has been happening around the literary world. Taiwanese literature appears in French translation, introducing a diverse swathe of writers across Taiwan’s linguistic backgrounds to French readers. India continues to reel from the impact of the pandemic, as the literary community remembers the writers they’ve lost, and many organizations stepping up to advocate for pandemic relief work. Read on to learn more.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan 

In February, the French publishing company L’Asiatheque released Formosana: Stories of Democracy in Taiwan, a collection of nine short stories by contemporary Taiwanese writers. L’Asisatheque is focused on making available books in translation from Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America, and Africa to French readers. In 2015, the company launched a “Taiwan Fiction” series, led by editor Gwennaël Gaffric, who is also a Chinese translator and professor in China Studies at the University of Lyon. The series seeks to amplify Taiwanese literature with themes of environmentalism, cultural identity, Taiwanese dialects, gender, postcolonialism, and the impacts of globalization. The series has published a number of modern classics of Taiwanese literature in French including A City of Sadness by Chu Tien-wen and Wu Nien-jen, The Membranes by past contributor Chi Ta-wei (recently reviewed in our blog), and multiple works by Wu Ming-yi, including The Man With the Compound Eyes and his novella, The Magician on the Catwalk.

In Formosana, the writers grapple with turbulent periods in Taiwanese history, including that of Japanese colonialism, the White Terror, martial law, and democratization. The stories also contend with social issues, such as nativist movements, LGBT rights, and environmentalism. In a recent interview, Gaffric discussed his choice of centering the collection on the theme of Taiwanese democracy. He believes that though there is increasing coverage of Taiwan in the French press, most French people do not understand its historical and cultural intricacies. He states: “We attempt to allow people to understand the fate of Taiwan from the past to the future, through various types of literary works which provide different channels and voices.” For his next book, Gaffric plans to publish the works of indigenous writer, Syaman Rapongan, to introduce indigenous writing to French readers.

On May 29, Taiwanese literature was also highlighted in France when Chi Ta-wei was invited to join the ninth annual “Nuit de la literature,” organized by the Forum of Foreign Cultural Institutes in Paris (FICEP). A reading of Chi’s “Pearls,” one of the stories from his eponymous science-fiction collection, was conducted in both English and Chinese at the virtual event with the author and Gaffric. READ MORE…

Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

June 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

Winter 2012: A Giant Nipple on the Cover

September 5, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Six months in its making, a showcase of contemporary Taiwanese art and letters sans pareil

“When I’m having trouble writing something, I often close the document and compose the passage as email. I imagine I can feel the tug at the other end of the wire, and this creates in me a needed urgency. The letter always arrives at its destination.”

—David Shields, excerpted in our Winter 2012 issue

Dear indignant scholar concerned that Taiwanese literature is always overlooked in favor of Mainland Chinese authors (e.g. when Mo Yan took the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012),

This issue, spotlighting Taiwanese Fiction, is for you. Six months in its making, it is a showcase of contemporary Taiwanese art and letters sans pareil. In addition to fiction, there is nonfiction by Jing Xianghai that I rolled up my sleeves to translate five days before the issue launch. There is Antonio Chen’s roundup of Taiwanese novels in 2011 (for which I had to painstakingly format and upload image files for 26 book covers). There is even a fabulous piece of noise art accompanying poetry by Hsia Yü, the most acclaimed Taiwanese poet of her generation. Famously reclusive, Hsia Yü had only ever agreed to two interviews in a career that spanned thirty years, and we would go on to publish her third interview, conducted in Chinese and translated into English, in our Spring 2012 issue.

READ MORE…