Lost in Translation?

My journey into international literature recently passed the two-month mark, and I’ve been taking stock of many lessons in a short time span.  I began with a simple premise: not enough women authors are translated into English, and those who are deserve more attention.  Though I organize the site by language and country categories and tags for readers, I approach authors as individuals rather than national representatives.  But there’s an issue I haven’t addressed: What happens when it doesn’t work?  What if a translation is an acclaimed international bestseller, but still feels like a misfire?  I encountered this dilemma last week with Jen Calleja’s translation of Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands.

At first glance, The Pine Islands seemed promising.  Widely celebrated as German author Marion Poschmann’s first work to appear in English translation, it ascended to the short list of the Man Booker International Prize last spring.  When I began reading, its whimsical elements proved an appealing, mildly humorous draw.  Gilbert Sylvester, an academic who specializes in the “representation of beards in film,” dreams that his wife is cheating on him.  While many people might simply go about their day after this experience, he picks a fight with her, abruptly leaves home, and flies to Japan.  The novel coupled a satirical approach to western academia with a common fantasy: What if I don’t go to work or home today, but just keep going until I end up somewhere else?

The narrative’s problems start when Sylvester lands in Japan.  On a train platform, he inadvertently prevents a Japanese student, Yosa Tamagotchi, from commiting suicide.  Initially, authorial distance is an effective tactic, gently mocking Sylvester’s bizarre motives.  But it backfires when applied to a Japanese character, turning him into a stereotype.  Even his surname sounds like the popular 1990s toy. He’s a “petrochemistry” student who worries that “his marks [are] good, but may not be good enough” and feels a paralyzing fear of exams.  As his parents only child, he is deeply concerned about disappointing them.  Along with Sylvester, he follows the pilgrimage of haiku poet Bashō across Japan, making his transformation into cardboard Japanese sidekick complete.

Sylvester’s racism is one of his many unpleasant traits, and it illuminates the lack of character development in this strange friendship.  When Tamagotchi disagrees with him about their travel destination, he thinks to himself, “Who did this Japanese youth think he was?”  After abruptly losing track of Tamagotchi, he marvels that he cannot locate him, despite having realized that the Japanese don’t all look alike.  In stark contrast to the nuanced portrayals of the narrator and Sensei in Strange Weather in Tokyo, these gaps felt at once negligent and ignorant.

So how can we react to this novel’s surface depiction of Japanese culture?  The Asian Review of Books attributes its oversights to Poschmann’s lack of knowledge, as she wrote the novel after a three-month stay in Kyoto.  I’m inclined to agree, but also recognize the value of authors who are willing to move beyond what they know.  After all, translation always involves risk. The translator takes on a text, the publisher distributes it (sometimes at considerable financial risk), and the reader chooses a book from a different language and culture.  But the sensitivity of cultural exchange requires extra effort with both experience and research.

While The Pine Islands fell far short of the mark for me, I still think it’s worthwhile to read it, especially for dialogue about its setting and characterization. Would you be willing to read this translation?

Marion Poschmann, The Pine Islands, trans. Jen Calleja
(Serpent’s Tail, 2019)

Photo Credit: shohji, Matsushima Bay, via Pixabay.

Translating Defiance

Sweden occupies an odd space in the American imagination.  As we struggle to make ends meet, Sweden seems no less than a Scandinavian utopia: government-funded healthcare, lengthy parental leave.  Yet the Nordic Noir genre depicts the seamy underbelly of this illusion.  Think, for instance, of the psychopathic villains in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels or Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series.

Marlaine Delargy’s translation of The Other Woman, Therese Bohman’s second novel, is a far cry from any of these stereotypes.  On one level, it takes on an old story. The narrator, a young woman who works in a hospital cafeteria, starts an affair with a married doctor.  But she recognizes the pitfalls and power dynamics of this relationship, even as she toils in a dead-end job. Portraying neither an idyllic nor a nightmarish landscape, The Other Woman embues a working-class mentality with sensitivity, refreshing what could otherwise be a stale plotline.

The narrator describes social realism as “depressing,” but a hefty dose of it defuses any illusions about Swedish life here.  Wearing an “ugly uniform,” the narrator clocks in at the cafeteria kitchen and drops “yesterday’s leftovers” into a large garbage bag.  On the bottom rung of the hospital’s “strict hierarchy,” she is a frequent target of derision.  Even as junior staff engage in petty power trips, many of her well-heeled acquaintances regard her with disgust: “…his whole bearing speaks of yachts and tennis lessons and studying abroad…I am uncomfortable in his company, because he seems uncomfortable in mine, he has the ability to make me feel judged.”  Her circumstances are more mysterious than they might appear, however.  She has attended university and is well-read, frequently alluding to Dostoevsky and other literary works.  But her working class roots trouble her, a conviction that she is “vulgar” despite “a couple of college courses.”  Her alternating feelings of shame and contempt for elitist concepts of progressivism are incisive, providing her with a unique perspective that I didn’t anticipate.

If her background is painted in shades of elusive gray, then her lover is far more straightforward—and less intriguing.  An affluent doctor with a corporate lawyer wife, he comes across as a garden-variety philanderer with dark fantasies: warning the narrator not to wear perfume or makeup in his car, insisting that she be his “little girl” and wear childish lingerie.  He pales in comparison to the women who surround him.  During this affair, she becomes fast friends with Alex, a free-spirited student who reassures her of a life beyond drudgery and insecurity.  But Alex has her own history with the doctor and an ulterior motive in maintaining this friendship.  Swept along by Alex’s revenge fantasy, the narrator could easily become a victim.  Yet she turns the fallout to her advantage, gaining a financial windfall, a new apartment in Stockholm, and a chance at a new life.  The novel ends on a note removed from existential gloom and doom, refusing to indulge in a cautionary tale about a fallen woman.

This edition of The Other Woman was released in 2015, and seems to have met the fate of many works by women in translation: middling reviews on Goodreads, a Kirkus Reviews blurb acknowledging its heavier themes, and relative obscurity.  An insightful protagonist and a fresh glimpse into Swedish literature make it worth a second look.

Therese Bohman, The Other Woman, trans Marlaine Delargy (Other Press, 2015)

Photo Credit: Pexels via Pixabay.

 

    

WITMonth Week Four

To close Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing what is arguably the most discussed world literature book of the year: Marilyn Booth’s translation of Omani writer Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.  The first Arabic-language winner of the Man Booker International Prize had a few surprises in store for me.

When starting this cryptic work, I quickly discovered that it’s best to do so with no expectations.  Because of its blurb about three sisters—Mayya, Asma, and Khawla—who marry for motives including “duty” and rebounding from a “heartbreak,” I anticipated an Omani comedy of manners.  Yet this text is a complex family saga spanning decades, its huge scope encompassing brief but telling character studies.  While Celestial Bodies’ keen social consciousness offers a unique perspective, its considerable time leaps and shifts between third- and first-person narration make a convoluted impression.

The novel begins when Mayya marries a wealthy man—Abdallah, the son of Merchant Sulayman—after a disappointing first love.  Mayya, however, is not the de facto heroine. As the only first-person speaker, Abdallah provides a reprieve from an otherwise cool and poetic omniscient third voice, drawing attention to issues ranging from domestic violence to autism to slavery (Oman outlawed slavery in 1970).  He spends much of the narrative haunted by his unrequited love for Mayya, wondering: “You keep up this aura of friendly care, but what are you really thinking and feeling…”  But he also reflects on Zarifa, his father’s slave and “long-time mistress” who served as his stand-in mother. After an argument, Abdallah’s father “abandoned her and married her off to the most aggressive and eccentric slave he had.”  In Oman, at least, the abuses of slavery are not so easily dismissed as distant historical fact.

The family’s dysfunctional dynamic appears to continue with Mayya and Abdallah’s three children: London, Salim, and Muhammad.  Abdallah proves a caring father when eldest daughter London escapes an abusive marriage, declaring, “You are a successful physician and you have your freedom and a good social life and he doesn’t deserve even a stray thought.”  His desperation with youngest son Muhammad, who is autistic and continually slams a single door in their house, feels immediate and real.  Though pushed to the background, Mayya’s sisters Asma and Khawla face their own familial challenges and unsuccessful marriages.  Khawla, who waited for her ne’er-do-well fiancé to return home from Canada, accepts defeat and asks for a divorce: “She was at peace, so her heart stopped forgiving…Every night, the portrait of the Canadian girl on the key ring got bigger, and went to sleep on Khawla’s pillow.”  Poignant snapshots of domestic disillusionment emerge as the novel’s strongest aspect.

Despite its refreshing approach and setting, Celestial Bodies is far from flawless.  The sprawling family tree on the first page is a critical resource, and parts of the translation are confusing.  Abdallah describes Mayya as his ethereal “air hostess,” which sounds more like an outdated term for a flight attendant than an otherworldly being.  Huge time jumps made it difficult to follow the narrative. In one section, London is a newborn and her family is arguing about her unusual name.  In the next, she is an adult and a physician.  With such a large cast of characters, the experimental timeline is an added challenge that is difficult to overcome.

I enjoyed reading Celestial Bodies, but admit that its shortcomings left me wanting more.  From generational tension to the burden of history, it has been a memorable Women in Translation Month.  The latest works show how much progress the publishing industry has made, but there’s a long way to go.

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies, trans. Marilyn Booth (Sandstone Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: George Desipris via Pexels.

WITMonth Week Three

Though this book made the Man Booker International Prize short list, I had planned to review it later, considering my recent post about Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez.  But revisiting South America with Sophie Hughes’s translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder is more than worthwhile.

This unusual novel explores the legacy of Southern Cone dictatorships through its three protagonists: Felipe, Iquela, and Paloma.  Shared family history unites them, as their parents formed a resistance cell during the Chilean dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s.  Felipe and Iquela are childhood friends, but when Paloma arrives back in Santiago to bury her mother, it triggers a madcap chain of events in which all three set off for Argentina in a hearse to retrieve the body.  The Remainder’s two great strengths are its alternating narrators, allowing for effective shifts in tone, and its experimental form, which uses language and typography to examine loss, remembrance, and generational tension.

Normally I’m distrustful of multiple narrators, as they can be jarring.  Here, this fractured style fits the characters’ struggles.  Felipe, who narrates his sections as a single run-on sentence, opens the novel with macabre mathematics: “…how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting…by using this apocalyptic maths to finally, once and for all…subtract them.”  This calculus of absence fails to impose order upon a tangled web of remainders. Iquela’s mother, the sole survivor of the cell, is a recluse; Felipe’s grandmother frequently succumbs to despair; Paloma, who lives in Berlin, often seems bewildered by her parents’ home country.

While Felipe persists in this grim task, Iquela’s account orients us with a clear progression.  Paloma’s parents escaped to Germany during the dictatorship era, but her mother recently died of breast cancer.  She ships her body to Chile, but the plane is diverted to Argentina because of raining ash in Santiago.  Unwilling to wait, she convinces the others to travel there in a rented hearse.  If Felipe’s perspective falls well within the realm of South American gothic, then Iquela adds a humorous element that almost satirizes that genre.  She mocks Felipe as “Mr. Light and Breezy” and describes how he sings “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as they leave Santiago.  For all their closeness, their relationship has a terrible precedent. During a time of torture and forced disappearances, one narrator’s father informed on the other, creating an orphan.

In The Remainder, form is crucial.  Felipe’s chapters descend from 11 to 0, while Iquela’s are designated by open parentheses: “().”  That blank space complements these three, whose lives often seem a disjointed afterthought to their parents’ activism.  At one point, the parentheses are filled with a repeated sentiment from Iquela’s mother, whose memory is a “topography of her dead”: “(I do all of this for you I do all of this for you…).”  Unlike the famed photographs of the disappeared, survivors’ histories feel surprisingly mundane; many older figures in The Remainder have gone into exile, divorced, or died of natural causes.  Yet their children carry terrible knowledge, a realization that ‘a rat’ wasn’t a rodent, ‘a movement’ wasn’t an action, and ‘the front’ wasn’t the opposite of ‘the back.’”  Sophie Hughes navigates these linguistic challenges expertly, depicting Paloma’s distinctive Spanish and the cell’s militant language in a way that English-language readers can understand and appreciate.

Coming of age under unique social and political pressure is a powerful theme emerging in this Woman in Translation Month series.  As one of a generation of Chilean writers reckoning with a dark history, Zerán raises a compelling question: Do children who bear the weight of their parents’ past have a future?  Sophie Hughes’ thoughtful rendition of this dilemma merits every accolade it has earned.

Alia Trabucco Zerán, The Remainder, trans. Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press, 2019)

Photo Credit: Suddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations.  Read previous editions here and here.

WITMonth Week Two

Considering our recent discussion about the lack of Chinese women writers in English translation, I turned my attention to the only Chinese work on the 2019 Man Booker International Prize long list: Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation of Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium.  Can Xue is the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, an enigmatic novelist who worked as a tailor before embarking on her writing career; Wasmoen has translated many of Can Xue’s works.

Love in the New Millennium poses a unique reading challenge in two ways. First, it focuses on a vast network of characters, among them Cuilan, her lover Wei Bo, former factory workers A Si and Long Sixiang, antiques dealer Mr. You, and Chinese medicine practitioner Dr. Liu.  Keeping track of these figures, their pasts, and ever-shifting relationships with one another requires some patience.  Second, this novel revels in tonal discord, playfully mismatching events and their consequences; topics like hard prison labor and sex work receive light, sometimes humorous, treatment here.

Reviews note how Love in the New Millennium’s characters embrace changing identities.  It’s true that their interactions with one another and even with the natural world are fluid; at one point, a woman seems to transform into a cicada.  The novel begins with Cuilan, a widow, in the midst of a heated affair with soap factory worker Wei Bo.  But those anticipating a simple love story should proceed with caution.  We have yet to meet A Si and Long Sixiang, other figures from his love life, not to mention his wife, Xiao Yuan, and her fixation with Dr. Liu.  As Xiao Yuan reminds Wei Bo, “People can change themselves into forms they could never imagine in dreams.”

What is the effect of this strange fantasia?  Oddly enough, reading Love in the Millennium reminded me of the “Wandering Rocks” section of Joyce’s Ulysses.  After several dense episodes focused on protagonists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, “Wandering Rocks” forces us to turn to marginal figures obscured by the narrative’s lens until then.  Can Xue’s approach is even more democratic; no single character is a privileged focal point.  Without a sole protagonist to orient ourselves, everyone in the text possesses equal significance.

Love in the New Millennium also experiments with rapid swings in tone and genre.  The city in which much of the novel takes place provides two career options for women: a mill or prostitution at the local hot springs.  But grim social realism isn’t in the cards; Long Sixiang frets that she is “too old” to join the sex workers at the hot springs, while A Si happily buys a new apartment with assistance from Wei Bo and her other lovers.  When Wei Bo finds himself serving a “three-month [prison] sentence” for no particular reason, his attitude is one of indifference rather than terror: “Hauling sand not only tempered his body; he was also sleeping much better.”  A fellow inmate describes hard labor as “addicting.”  Although these tonal shifts sound flippant, their impact is stronger, encouraging readers to question their assumptions about everything from gender roles to surveillance and detention.

It’s a bitter irony to discuss Love in the Millennium’s egalitarian style when Can Xue is one of the few Chinese women writers available in English. If anything, its widespread acclaim reveals how much we need more translations—and soon.

Can Xue, Love in the New Millennium, trans. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2018)

Photo Credit: 玉 潘, Meixi Lake, Changsha, Hunan, China, from Pixabay.

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m reviewing recent, acclaimed translations.  Read last week’s edition here.

 

WITMonth Week One

Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m taking a closer look at recent translations gaining attention and acclaim.  Jennifer Croft’s translation of Wioletta Greg’s Accommodations follows 2017’s Swallowing Mercury, Greg’s previous autobiographical novel.  (I’m late to Greg’s work, and am eager to read this novel’s predecessor.)  In 1994, Wiola leaves her rural Polish village to attend college in Częstochowa, a neighboring city.  Accommodations is a lingering meditation on the relationships between individual and community, especially how those connections can serve as a conduit for cultural trauma.

Early reviews of Accommodations observed how it dangles the possibility of one genre before the reader, then proceeds full speed in the opposite direction.  But its narration is more subtle than any bait-and-switch ploy.  The novel opens with Wiola recounting her bus ride to the college town on “Friday, September 30, 1994.”  After a disturbing encounter with a drunken man, she lugs her suitcase through the city’s outskirts, past “a lumber yard” and “faded graffiti v[ying] along the wall for attention: ‘Soviet = with you from birth.’”  By orienting us in such a specific time and place, Accommodations implies a clear path forward; we’re beginning a campus novel about a young woman coming of age in the post-Communist era.  There’s little indication yet of the diverse cast of characters about to burst on the scene.

So where and why does this work take a sharp left turn?  Once Wiola settles into a grungy hostel, her college life fades into the background, beyond a brief mention of falling asleep in class or a short conversation with a classmate. A wide range of other voices take over: hostel manager Waldek, two young Russian men, petty criminal Scurvy.  When her time at the hostel reaches an abrupt end, Wiola takes up residence at a convent, where she encounters a nun haunted by the Holocaust.  Far from a linear narrative about a young woman’s experiences, it begins to feel as if Wiola is a minor character rather than a protagonist.  She may be dragging a suitcase around Częstochowa, but the emotional baggage she bears is not her own.

This approach risks alienating the reader.  In one sense, a young woman taking a backseat in her own story hardly feels innovative.  But like a graduate student who had visited her village, Wiola often seems a participant observer in her own culture, bearing witness to unforgotten atrocities of the Second World War and the Soviet period.  From Scurvy, we learn that Waldek, who waxes sentimental about his long lost love, endured a savage beating from paramilitaries who scared “even the biggest thugs” in a communist prison.  In another scene, she sees a homeless man who once went to prison for attempting to steal butter.  The Mother Superior of the convent recalls how her father and brother were massacred during the Nazi occupation.  None of these memories can be erased by a hectic new era of prosperity, “a time of privatization, acquisitions, cable TV, securities, the issuing of bonds.”  The novel ends with a primal scream, a fitting tribute to this collision between a woman and her community: “…I scream—tentative at first…then louder and louder, until finally it’s so loud the whole building can hear me, and all three Avenues and Jasna Góra combined.”  Jasna Góra, a local monastery and site of pilgrimage, feels analogous to Wiola’s own journey through suffering and young adulthood.

Accommodations provides a thought-provoking take on the transmission and emotional toll of cultural memory, and is worthy of a top spot on your reading list.

Wioletta Greg, Accommodations, trans. Jennifer Croft (Transit Books, 2019)

Photo Credit: twarezak via Pixabay.

Translating Poverty and Vibrancy in Rio

I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and it’s difficult to imagine iconic Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector here.  Irrepressible and charismatic, Lispector and her depictions of Rio seem as out of place in the D.C. suburbs as a bird of paradise stifled in a temperate climate. Yet she spent much of the 1950s in Chevy Chase, Maryland as the (mostly unhappy) wife of a Brazilian diplomat.  Her D.C. years were just one chapter of a restless life; the daughter of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants to Brazil, she also resided in Italy, England, and Switzerland.

Though she’s widely considered Brazil’s greatest modern writer, reading Lispector is no simple task.  Her stream-of-consciousness style is reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.  Her translator and biographer, Benjamin Moser, insists she isn’t any easier in the original: “Paradoxically, the better one’s Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector…her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader.”  An unusual narrator and heroine in Moser’s translation of her short final novel, The Hour of the Star, provide a taste of Lispector’s quirky style.

The Hour of the Star’s narrative style is leisurely.  For a story about a typist in Rio, its starting point feels off-base: “All the world began with a yes.  One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”  The reader seems to be in for a tedious ride, but not so.  This odd statement introduces the novel’s manic narrator: writer Rodrigo S.M.  His story about a poor girl is supposedly best told by a “male writer,” because a woman would make it “weepy” and “maudlin.”  His narration feels neither macho nor removed, though.  He admits that he’s “put[ting] off the poverty of the story” because he’s “scared,” but this character demands to be heard: “She’s accusing me and the way to defend myself is to write about her.”  As he assures us that “a plangent violin played by a thin man right on the street corner” accompanies this narrative, his detours take on a humorous, whimsical quality.  This Russian doll nesting—Clarice Lispector channeling a male writer channeling a Brazilian woman—turns readers into detectives, peeling back layers of language to find meaning.

When she finally appears, protagonist Macabéa defies explanation. Her life may be dogged by unrelenting poverty, but she isn’t a tragic figure.  She lives in Rio on “rough Acre Street amongst the prostitutes who served sailors, coal and cement warehouses.”  However, circumstances don’t define her.  Rodrigo reflects that “she had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it…when she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.”  Her first boyfriend proves an ominous man who has committed murder “since killing made him a Man with a capital M,” and Macabéa’s story seems recognizable again; a poor girl with a rural background encounters danger in the city.  But even when she meets a sudden fate, she is not a little girl lost, but “finally free of herself.”  She never conforms to any expectations of genre fiction, even when it clouds her identity.

Why read this cryptic work?  Beyond the refreshing prospect of a young woman who eludes stereotypes, The Hour of the Star forces us to confront our limits as readers.  We may want to know more, but the chaotic narrative prevents a full picture of Macabéa’s life and motives.  Rodrigo struggles to understand her, and Lispector had thirteen alternate titles for this novel.  Though it creates more questions than answers, this winding tale welcomes us to face uncertainty with humor and exuberance.

Photo Credit: David Mark, “Rio De Janeiro Brazil City,” on Pixabay.

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.