Posts featuring Yáng Shuang-zi

Taipei Travelogue: On the Taipei International Book Exhibition 2025

February 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

What historical and cultural pressures have shaped these literatures into their current forms and dynamics?

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. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2024

November 11, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Jonathon Atkinson, Rachel Stanyon, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

Balle CALCULATION vol1 rgb

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

May 28, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jacqueline Leung, Julia Sherwood, and Suhasini Patni

The latest news from Hong Kong, Slovakia, and India!

This week, our writers deliver the latest literary news from Hong Kong, Slovakia, and India. Read about the newest translations to come out of Hong Kong, including works by Duo Duo and Leung Lee-chi. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to shake the literary world: we hear of how the arts continue to be neglected in Slovakia’s recent recovery plan, and India losing some of her brightest writers amidst this crisis. Despite this, some hopeful signs that things might change. Read on to find out more! 

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Chinese poet Duo Duo’s Words as Grain, translated from the Chinese by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, is out this month. A recipient of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Words as Grain is a new collection spanning approximately five decades of the poet’s oeuvre since the 1970s, with a full representation of Duo Duo’s work since his return to China from exile in 2004 and a selection of earlier poems. Duo Duo is hailed as an exponent of the Chinese Misty Poets and has been described by essayist and critic Eliot Weinberger as “a political poet who makes no statements; a realist poet in an alternate universe.” One may revisit Duo Duo’s poem, “Promise,” published in Asymptote’s July 2018 issue and translated by Klein, for a taste.

May also sees the publication of Jennifer Feeley’s translation of Hong Kong writer Leung Lee-chi’s short story, “Empty Rooms,” up on Two Lines Journal. A 2020 winner of the Award for Young Artist in Literary Arts by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Leung is among a younger generation of Hong Kong writers starting to get exposure in the English language. “Empty Rooms” is a response to late novelist Liu Yichang’s short story “Turmoil” depicting the chaos of the 1967 riots through the perspectives of inanimate objects. In a similar vein, “Empty Rooms” portrays the interior of an apartment to piece together moments of memory and departure.

It is also exciting to see the announcement of results for the 7th Bai Meigui Translation Competition organized by The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. “The Season When Flowers Bloom,” Francesca Jordan’s winning translation of an excerpt from Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s novella, is selected by the judging panel consisting of Susan Wan Dolling, Mike Fu, and Darryl Sterk. Jordan will be offered a place in the upcoming “Bristol Translates” Literary Translation Summer School in July. Honorable mentions from the competition include entries by Stella Jiayue Zhu, Will Jones, and Lucy Craig-McQuaide. READ MORE…