from A Contrarian’s Tales

Note-style writing, or bijiti, is a Chinese literary form that can be traced back to the Southern Dynasties more than 1500 years ago. Minimalist in both length and the information that they directly convey, note-style stories derive their structure from leishu, the encyclopaedic annals that give an insight into every aspect of life in early dynastic China. Where the two genres of writing differ is their degree of fictionality. Leishu state what, as far as we know, really occurred in a particular place, at a particular time, to a particular thing or person(s), while bijiti report entirely fictional events as if having happened. Yang Dian’s A Contrarian’s Tales is a twenty-first century adaptation of the literary tradition—the first collection of its kind to be published in China in over a hundred years—that uses a mix of classical, modern, and oral language to flip reportage on its head. By dressing up fiction as and with nonfiction, Yang Dian imbues the bizarre, disarming, otherworldly, and grotesque with just enough of a taste of reality that the reader can readily populate with their imagination whatever time, place, or situation that the stories describe.

One of the main overarching translation decisions for this book was how to emulate the mixed-use of linguistic styles, as in the blending of Literary (or Classical) Chinese—the language traditionally used in Leishu—modern, vernacular Chinese, and spoken Chinese. Naturally, the differences between these language styles do not correspond to the differences between, let’s say, Early Modern English and Modern English, so I changed my approach to consider what is the effect each language has on the story and emulate that instead. Literary Chinese expression is highly concise and compact, able to evoke vivid imagery or convey abundant information in four characters or even fewer, whereas Modern Chinese expression relies on a clearer, more formulaic grammar that results in longer, more-familiar prose. These are two distinct styles of expression that exist in English too: an equivalent difference might be that between a thesaurus entry on a particular plant and a descriptive passage of the countryside by a novelist. This is only one approach to this challenge and far from covers all the challenges faced in translating this book, but I hope it provides an insight into a style of writing that is utterly distinct from the western traditions.