July 2019 - International Bookshelf: Women in Translation

Interview with Berlin Fang

I recently spoke with Berlin Fang, whose acclaimed literary translations in Chinese span the works of William Faulkner, Betty Smith, Annie Proulx, Peter Ackroyd, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann. National Book Award winner McCann describes him as “one of the finest translators I have ever worked with” and “a transnational figure, deeply involved in the cultures of China, the United States, and Ireland.” See our conversation below about the process and challenges of translation, the “cousin factor,” and Chinese women writers whose voices need to be heard.

I’d like to hear about how you began doing literary translation and your process. For instance, how do you choose texts to translate?

I started translation as a graduate student in English Language and Literature in Nanjing University, where my thesis advisor, Professor Haiping Liu, asked if I would participate in translating the cultural biography of Pearl S. Buck that University of Pennsylvania Professor Peter Conn had just written.

After graduation, Yilin Press, which specializes in translating literary works into Chinese, contacted me to do more translation. For them, I translated V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, as well as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Sound and the Fury.

I’m contacted to translate more texts than I have time to work on. I make choices based on their potential impact. I saw A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for instance, as having large impact in motivating the Chinese youth. It turned out to be just like that. I also make choices based on my time and availability when I was contacted and on the author’s original impact in English.

What are some challenges you’ve encountered while translating?

The greatest difficulty lies in understanding what the author is talking about in the source language. Something may be crystal clear to him/her in the process of writing, but it may not be so for me as a translator due to lack of exposure to the context or background. In this sense, translators experience difficulties that are similar to that of an average reader, except that readers can skip, while translators have to deal with the difficulties.

Translating into the Chinese language is easier compared to the comprehension, but there we encounter difficulties also: Not all words or phrases have ready equivalents in the Chinese language. For instance, the word “cousin” has eight counterparts in Chinese, depending on whether the cousin is male or female, younger or older, on mom’s side or dad’s side. I use what I call “the cousin factor” to judge authors. It is the writer’s failure if he/she cannot project the image of a person as being male or female, younger or older in the reader’s imagination. These details should be rather basic.

I try to be invisible in my translated text, choosing instead to let the text speak for itself.

Sometimes there are cultural allusions that may be immediately understood by authors’ original audiences, but not so for the average Chinese readers. We as translators walk a fine line: we want to make texts accessible to the readers by pausing to explain with footnotes or endnotes, but overdoing it would interrupt the flow of the text. In the past, many translators were also teachers of literature, so adding notes is a way to show off their knowledge. Therefore, it is a tradition among Chinese translators to use a copious number of footnotes, but I choose to be a minimalist, as I do not want to interrupt the reading process often. I try to be invisible in my translated text, choosing instead to let the text speak for itself. Not adding many notes may make comprehension more difficult, but I am not hovering over a reader all the time explaining what is going on. It’s a tradeoff.

Your translations include not only classic American novels like The Sound and the Fury and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but also contemporary fiction by Annie Proulx, Peter Ackroyd, and Colum McCann. Are you in contact with these authors when translating? Is there any collaboration involved?

For both classic works and contemporary ones, I seek help from my friends who are original speakers of English when I have difficulty understanding something. I have spent most of my career working in universities. Having very educated colleagues really helps. For contemporary authors such as Annie Proulx, Joseph O’Neill, and Colum McCann, I benefited a lot by asking them questions directly. In most cases they are very willing to help. Colum McCann was especially collaborative with translators, answering all of my questions with great patience.

In addition to your work for Chinese readers, you’ve also translated Chinese writers into English. Do you see differences in how Chinese and English readers approach literature in translation?

There are far more literature translated from English into Chinese, than the other way around. There is a shocking “trade deficit” in the “import and export” of literature.

There is a shocking “trade deficit” in the “import and export” of literature.

I do not have the statistics for it, but it seems to me for every Chinese book translated into English, there must be ten translated from English into Chinese (a very wild guess based on impressions only. I am sure there are reliable data somewhere). Over the years, this contributes to an imbalance of understanding that is also quite shocking. Chinese may know more far about the culture of English-speaking countries than English-speaking people know about the Chinese. If you survey an average Chinese college graduate student and ask him or her to mention American authors, and then you do the same for American college graduates about Chinese authors, the results could be very revealing.

Works translated from English are regular items for an educated Chinese, but far fewer Americans read any works from China. It is customary for the Chinese to read works of translation, but I find few Americans, even college professors, read anything translated from China.

There are also differences between English-speaking countries. Generally speaking, there is greater interest in Chinese literature in Europe, especially in France and Germany, while there is less interest in America.

The absence of women writers in English translation has been a popular topic lately. Do you think this problem applies to Chinese writers? If so, who are the authors we haven’t heard from, but should?

Indeed, I feel far fewer women writers from China were translated into English or even have anybody paying attention. I would recommend Chi Li (池莉), Fang Fang (方方), and Tie Nin (铁凝). Their works are worth translating if they have not been translated already.

Here are a few younger women writers originally from China who deserve more attention. I could get in touch with them if you want further information about any of them.

(Note: There is very little available in English on these authors, so please use Google Translate for the Chinese-language sources below.)

Chen Yonghe (陈永和) is a Chinese writer living in Japan, whose works Chronicles of 1979 and No. 3 Guanglu Street won quite a bit attention in recent years.
Zhang Huiwen (张惠雯) was educated in Singapore, but is probably living in the U.S. Here is a short bio in Chinese.
Li Fengqun (李凤群) is an award-winning novelist from Anhui Province (where Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth was set). Here is a bio in Chinese.
Er Xiang (二湘）is an emerging new writer whose Silent River will be adapted into a movie. She is based in California. Her stories mostly focus on lives of Chinese expats, as well as those who have returned to China after having lived in the U.S. Here is a list of her stories.
Liu Ying (柳营) is also worth watching as an emerging new author. She lives in New York right now. Here is more information about her.
Zeng Xiaowen (曾晓文) is a Chinese writer based in Canada whose recent novel Legend of the Chinese Chip is gaining a lot of attention.

Special thanks to Edwina Pendarvis of Marshall University (Huntington, West Virginia) for arranging this interview.

Photo Credit: I don’t usually know the photographers featured on this site, but I’m proud to include the work of my friend Isabella Zhou here. Her landscape photography has won many accolades, including a National Geographic 2019 Photography Contest Editor’s Favorite nomination. This photo is part of her Glimpse of China gallery, shot in Wuyuan County, Jiangxi province, China, 2018.

Translating War at Home

Holocaust fiction and memoirs seem to have an enduring appeal. Novels like Suite Francaise, Lilac Girls, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz are easy finds atop bestseller lists and in bookstores. Leah Janeczko’s translation of Rosella Postorino’s At the Wolf’s Table fits well within this genre. Postorino’s first work to be translated into English is a flawed but compelling take on an easily overlooked aspect of the war.

Similar to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Wolf’s Table is based on the life of a Nazi-era eyewitness, but from an unusual point of view; Margot Wölk is a food taster for Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair military compound. During a time of paranoia about assassination attempts by poison, Wölk was subject to SS security and control. Since all other food tasters died during the war, her role only came to light after she broke her silence at age 95. Clearly, this premise carries troubling ethical implications, which At the Wolf’s Table only partially explores. Within this odd atmosphere, the relationships between the female food tasters emerge as the strongest force, while a morally ambiguous love line falters, ultimately shortchanging the complexities of life in the Third Reich.

From the first page, Wolf’s Table throws the reader into a twisted fairy tale. The text refers to Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf at the door, but it’s also Goldilocks and the Three Bears recast as modernized horror. Starving women behold a welcoming feast: “The string beans were served with melted butter…The aroma of the roasted peppers tickled my nose.” The porridge may be just right, but the bears are never far away. In such a strange environment, Rosa Sauer (the protagonist and stand-in for Wölk) distinguishes herself from the pro-Nazi Fanatics, seeking out women equally ambivalent about this task. She finds a kindred spirit in fellow food taster Elfriede Kuhn, a gadfly at once contemptuous and tender.

Rosa and Elfriede’s friendship is powerful and convincing, forming a core that the novel might otherwise lack. Despite a problematic marriage, Rosa is horrified when her husband, Gregor, is declared missing in action. Elfriede picks up on her extreme distress, needling her about her “’bomb-shelter’ hairdo” and “stubbornhead” attitude. After this spat erupts into physical violence, we learn that it’s an aggressive catharsis. Elfriede asks if she feels better now, with Rosa reflecting: “She embraced me in a hug. She had never done that. I clung to her body for sharp edges. It wasn’t waiting for anyone, that body; it could offer refuge to mine.” The stormy connection helps the two women navigate the conflation of domesticity—food, cooking, female companionship—with an increasingly hostile war zone.

A romantic subplot disrupts this appealing solidarity, revealing unfortunate weaknesses in pacing and character development. With her husband missing and possibly dead, Rosa begins a torrid affair with one of her enforcers at Wolf’s Lair, Lieutenant Ziegler. She runs into him at a local noblewoman’s party. He initiates their rendezvous by standing outside her window in the middle of the night. While intriguing, Ziegler’s character and motivations feel incompletely sketched, rendering him a virtual specter alongside the larger-than-life Elfriede. When a food poisoning mishap causes Rosa and several of the women to become ill, Ziegler is an icy and unsympathetic figure. When Rosa observes that his “indifference” to her terror is “humiliating,” he slips into a familiar Holocaust role: the terrifying professional who follows orders and prioritizes duty over ethics. Yet his rage when she tries to end their liaison—he threatens to “break [her] window” if she refuses to meet him again—doesn’t quite fit with the backstage role she seems to occupy in his life. Gaps in the love line are compounded by the novel’s rushed plot in its final pages, which blaze through the end of the war, Rosa’s fractured reunion with her husband, and major time jumps.

Despite its shortcomings, At the Wolf’s Table is a promising addition to the Holocaust fiction bookshelf, if only for the touching and unusual friendship it chronicles.

Rosella Postorino, At the Wolf’s Table, trans. Leah Janeczko (Flatiron Books, 2019)

Photo credit: Engin_Akyurt via Pixabay.

Translating Political Terror

Buenos Aires is a city of ghosts. For many, this sentence conjures the enduring cultural scar of the Dirty War: thousands of forced disappearances during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. For me, it calls to mind a rainy winter morning when I wandered the Recoleta Cemetery, trench coat collar turned up against the chill. The neat rows of sarcophagi mimicked the posh streets just outside the gates, evoking a strange commune between the living and the dead. The eerie stories of Things We Lost in the Fire push this idea to a horrifying conclusion: Buenos Aires is a city of monsters whose tentacles reach well beyond the city limits.

This sinister collection has a masterful translator at the helm: Megan McDowell, acclaimed for her work with Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, and Diego Zúñiga. She notes how Enriquez creates a world where “haunted houses and deformed children exist on the same plane as extreme poverty, drugs, and criminal pollution.” I’ll focus on a few of these interwoven themes, drawing relationships between the supernatural and corruption, between violence and the feminine.

Among the stories, “Under the Black Water” enmeshes social consciousness and horror, opening with a DA exasperated at the sight of a corrupt policeman: “The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt.” The effectiveness of McDowell’s translation is on full display here; every word feels crucial. In a slum where “the reasons for killing poor kids [are] many and despicable,” a pair of cops have beaten two teenagers and thrown them into the Riachuelo, the polluted river surrounding Buenos Aires.

The consequences of this tragedy extend beyond police brutality and environmental devastation. As a priest warns our lawyer protagonist, one of the boys has returned after waking up “the thing sleeping under the water,” a sinister creature inspiring cult-like worship in local residents. Intermingling the grotesque and political critique runs the risk of privileging one element over the other. With such intense sociological and ecological issues, who needs Cthulhu or the creature from the black lagoon (and vice versa)? But with a horrified priest and a death cult at hand, the river monster feels like a fitting final act in a world gone mad. There is also a religious subtext, an underlying tension between Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian cults with uncertain rituals, that would be intriguing to trace in Enriquez’s other works.

Things We Lost in the Fire also offers an intriguing perspective on women and violence. In Enriquez’s tangled world, female characters are victimizers, victims, enablers, and horrified witnesses of brutality. Depicting a marriage on the skids and an ill-fated trip to the Paraguay/Argentina border, “Spiderweb” illuminates a fine line between boredom, contempt, and the sinister. The narrator regrets her hasty marriage to elitist and verbally abusive Juan Martín, a reaction her family shares. As he becomes a petulant presence on their day trip to Paraguay, her cousin, Natalia, reminds her that “death is the only problem without a solution.” Though far from a pleasant character, Juan Martín is also the only one willing to point out atrocities of the Paraguayan dictatorship. When he expresses outrage at the sight of soldiers sexually harassing a waitress, the protagonist has a visceral reaction: “…he was going to play the hero, and then they would arrest all three of us. They would rape Natalia and me in the dictator’s dungeons, day and night…And all because he needed to be a hero and prove who knows what.”

The message seems clear; there is no room for egoistic idealism, and desensitization is the only way to survive. Yet her other observations signal complicity rather than determined indifference, as when she fantasizes about “hand[ing] him over to [the] soldiers and let[ting] them do as they pleased with him.” By the time we reach a mysterious conclusion, the story’s scattershot insect imagery—droning cicadas, dying ladyflys, glowing fireflys—seems a portal into a primal landscape where no one is exempt from violence. In drawing connections between cruelty and the dark impulses of a woman’s mind, Enriquez makes a unique contribution to horror literature, while also reflecting on the viciousness of a grim period in South America’s history.

I’ve so often heard short stories described as “middle brow,” consigned neither to high literature nor mass market appeal. It’s a fate Things We Lost in the Fire doesn’t deserve. As haunted as the streets of Buenos Aires, these stories need to be read.

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire, trans. Megan McDowell (Hogarth Press, 2017)

Photo Credit: Anthony, “Black Spider,” via Pexels.com.

Translating Loneliness and Connection

Allison Markin Powell’s elegant translation of Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo, one of my all-time favorites, explores the cautious fault lines of a May-December romance. Tsukiko, an office worker in Tokyo, runs into her high school Japanese teacher at a bar, referring to him by the honorific “Sensei” because she cannot remember his name. But as their acquaintance deepens, it becomes clear that this unlikely pair has a quirky and enduring charm. He scolds her for not paying attention in class; she teasingly insists he can’t be trusted as a fan of a rival baseball team.

So why is this masterful translation worth a spot on your reading list? Strange Weather creates a lasting impression through a love story that avoids sentimental clichés and its compelling portrayal of Tokyo, a city that feels at turns warm, familiar, and alarmingly vast.

Few novels with a romantic plotline emphasize the balance between solitude and intimacy, but the relationship between Tsukiko and her Sensei has tacit boundaries from the outset. Though they go on a series of excursions together, from market days to a cherry blossom festival, many of their early meetings occur by happenstance: “We never made plans, but always happened to meet by chance. Weeks went by when our paths didn’t cross, and there were stretches when we’d see each other every night.”

It’s a credit to both translator and author that this bizarre relationship—a student and teacher with a thirty year age difference awkwardly circling in and out of each other’s orbits—never feels dull or contrived. Instead, it compels us to pay closer attention, to focus on the moments of disconnection that jar their closeness. Unsettled by Sensei’s fixation on the wife who died after deserting him, Tsukiko reflects, “This was just what my life was like, after all. Here I was, trudging alone on an unfamiliar road, separated from Sensei—whom I thought I knew but I didn’t know at all.” By the novel’s conclusion, she seems to have made her peace with their unconventional romance, accepting that “Sensei had already gone away somewhere, before I ever came to know him well.” Yet he has left an indelible mark on her everyday life, from her tofu recipes to a renewed interest in Japanese poetry.

Though some of its key action takes place outside the city, this novel’s depiction of Tokyo parallels that of its oddball couple: an intriguing mixture of hospitality and inscrutable coldness. The world’s largest city is a place where it’s easy to run into an old high school teacher and attend a hectic yet welcoming market day: “The grocery stalls thinned and gave way to stalls selling larger items…An LP was playing on an old record player…The music had an old-fashioned, simple charm.” Yet it can also be place of near total isolation, a place where a thirtysomething woman can eat, drink, wander, and work alone for weeks at a time. This stark contrast becomes clear one February night when Tsukiko leaves her apartment to escape her own seclusion. When she unexpectedly runs into Sensei, the night regains some of its magic; she feels a “faint promise of spring in the night air” as the “moon glimmer[s] in gold.” These languorous phrases not only illuminate an enigmatic Tokyo, but also the power of Markin Powell’s translation. With the absolute minimum of fluff, sentences shift from desolation to promise, bringing this cityscape alive.

Though Kawakami’s humorous Nakano Thrift Shop draws much attention from readers and reviewers alike, Strange Weather’s combination of longing and independence has a power all its own. The magic of its contradictions—friendly neighborhood and concrete jungle, comfortable love and incalculable loss—lingers on.

Hiromi Kawakami, Strange Weather in Tokyo, trans. Allison Markin Powell (Counterpoint Press, 2013)

Photo credit: Janko Ferlic, “Turned-on Street Light,” via Pexels.