Maya Rubinby Maya Rubin
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Strangers Press/Facebook
LITERARY TRANSLATION is having a moment, particularly in Taiwan. You might have seen the recent, glowing New York Times profile of Tilted Axis, a British publisher specializing in translated literature, or witnessed the frenzy over Lin King and Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子)’s National Book Award win for King’s brilliant translation of Taiwan Travelogue. Riding that wave is Ká-sióng (the Taiwanese Hokkien romanization of 假想), a collection of five newly translated Taiwanese short stories recently published by Strangers Press in partnership with the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, National Museum of Taiwan Literature, and Books from Taiwan. The stories in Ká-sióng, each of which has a different author and translator, are almost dizzyingly diverse, from body horror in an Indigenous Atayal village to sci-fi memory manipulation in a futuristic, flooded Taipei. The stories–which are presented in arbitrary sequence–offer a polyphonic, cacophonous vision of Taiwanese fiction and culture.
First is Not Your Child by Lâu Tsí-û, translated by Jenna Tang. A claustrophobically realistic tale of a government staffer’s reflection on a PR catastrophe about an abused child, the story is a meditation on the tension between Taiwan’s much-touted social progressivism and the virulent sexism faced by professional Taiwanese women, particularly those in government–“when men cried,” the narrator remarks bitterly of her workplace, “they were revealing their true feelings; when women cried, they were being hysterical.”
Not Your Child is a fitting choice for Tang as a translator, given her prior work on the late Lin Yi-han’s devastating Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise–many of the themes of Fang Si-Chi recur here, from the complicity of Taiwanese society in protecting abusers to the purity narratives surrounding victims of childhood sexual abuse. While an interesting document of contemporary sexism in Taiwan, the story seems in comparison to the inventiveness of others in the collection to be a bit drily realistic; the points made about Taiwanese society’s treatment of the victims of sexual abuse are also reminiscent of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise nearly to the point of repetition. That said, readers will still appreciate Not Your Child’s unsentimental treatment of Taiwan’s clamorous political scene.
Second is Cage by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Shengchi Hsu. Cage is an outlier in its authorship–Qiu is the only non-contemporary author translated for this collection (Cage, elsewhere referred to in English as Prisoner, was first published in 1988; this year marks the 30th anniversary of Qiu’s suicide in Paris in 1995). Unlike any of the other authors chosen for this collection, several of Qiu’s works have been previously translated to English (her translated works include novels Notes of a Crocodile, translated by Bonnie Huie, and Last Words from Montmartre, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich, as well as her short story Platonic Hair, translated by Fran Martin).
Cage follows the relationship of Ping and Li Wen, who meet atop a building where both have decided to commit suicide. Told in Qiu’s characteristic first-person narration from the perspective of Li Wen, who is haunted by a mysterious, drunken man (or possibly ghost) living in his apartment, Cage follows the fraught affair between Ping and Li Wen, which culminates in Li Wen’s eventual rejection of Ping due to his inability to withstand the pain of love. As her first short story, Cage is, for fans of Qiu, intriguing as a way to track the development of many of her recurring themes–suicide, gender confusion, doomed love–which are articulated to greater effect in her other work, particularly in Notes of a Crocodile, to which Cage is a clear predecessor. As a standalone story, despite displaying Qiu’s signature formal inventiveness, Cage feels somewhat repressed in comparison to the emotional depth of her other works.
Third is Mountain Rat by Lulyang Nomin, translated by Yu Teng-Wei. One of the high points of the collection, Nomin’s story is a sinister allegory in the vein of Kafka’s Metamorphosis which deftly weaves in commentary on the precarity of migrant and Indigenous loggers in rural Taiwan. While on a logging expedition with an undocumented migrant laborer from an unnamed country, the narrator is bitten by a mountain rat and forced to quarantine in a bamboo hut on the edge of his village, where he is gradually overtaken by the spirit of a mountain rat named Busus. An attempted exorcism from a local priest only angers the rat-spirit in its quest to possess the narrator. His metamorphosis eventually complete, the narrator joins other anthropomorphic mountain rats and flees the village for Taman Mountain, from which Busus desires to claim his rightful place as king of the village.
Mountain Rat contains subtle, fascinating discussions of Taiwanese indigeneity, putting the experiences of Indigenous Taiwanese people in parallel to much-villified undocumented migrant laborers, as well as contending with the impact of Christianity upon Indigenous culture (the priest, while clearly in possession of some power, is ultimately unable to suppress Busus). By the end of the story, when the narrator has become “possessed by [Busus’s] powerful, filthy, sinful, endless desires,” the narrator’s identity is swept away as if “in a torrent of time,” replaced by Busus’s annihilating consciousness–itself a meditation on the erasure of Indigenous culture in Taiwan.
Fourth is Cloud Labour by Sabrina Huang, translated by Lin King (of Taiwan Travelogue fame), another high point of the collection. Cloud Labor employs the common sci-fi trope of memory erasure–the technology is reminiscent of that in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–in a plutocratic, climate-ravaged, dystopian Taipei. Taipei 101 (“a jade-coloured iron bar jabbed into the island’s eye”), that avatar of Taiwanese capitalism, has fallen into disrepair and been inhabited by the homeless lower classes; the sea has overtaken Taipei Basin and turned it into a group of islands navigable by ferry.
Sky, a “Proxy,” has the inherited gift of being able to remove, absorb, and metabolize the memories and emotions of those willing to pay (he specializes in resentment, anger, and hatred). The story follows the death of Sky’s mother Peacock, a fellow Proxy from whom Sky inherited his gift, and his encounter with the alluring Stone, a Pleasure Vendor and illegal purveyor of happy memories to weary Proxies like Sky. Cloud Labour is in many ways about the danger of the loss of historical memory: the Proxies practice decontextualized Buddhist rituals against a backdrop of austere futurism; negative emotions to do with past pain or hardship are considered best excised; grief and heartbreak and betrayal—the residue of painful memories–-are erased to smooth the friction of human existence. This future is one in which we lose some of our humanity in our quest for emotional stability, the lineage of memory broken by the consuming desire for optimization and progress. Huang’s story, alternately devastating, foreboding, and profound, paints a disturbing future in which the worst impulses of the modern era are extended to their dystopian, logical conclusions: socioeconomic inequality, the pathologization of emotion, climate change, and the transactional nature of relationships.
Fifth and finally is Social by Lamulu Pakawyan, translated by Colin Bramwell (remarkably, the only non-Taiwanese translator of the lot) and Wen-chi Li. Social, like Mountain Rat, deals with indigeneity, though in a very different manner. The story follows the final days and death–likely by suicide–of a friend of the narrator’s to whom the story is addressed in the second person. It is told in large part through the narrator’s reading of the friend’s old Facebook posts, hence the story’s title. The friend had struggled to reconcile her Indigenous identity with her elite education and her insecurity about her distance from her culture–her lack of fluency in Indigenous language, her failed attempts to grow millet.
The friend’s tensions with her family over religion (her family, who are Christians, forbid her from engaging in Indigenous religious rituals) and her sexuality (her family pressures her to marry a man, though she is in a relationship with a woman) lead to an explosive argument, resulting in her fall (or perhaps jump) from her bedroom window. Through social media comments and personal narrative, Pakawyan weaves a complex portrait of a woman struggling to reconcile her Indigenous identity with her reluctant, and at times relieving, assimilation into the culture of the colonizer, asking incisive questions about the politics of preserving Indigenous culture and the toxicity of online relationships in the present day.
There is a recurring theme of multiple or permeable identity that recurs in many of the stories. In Cage, the mysterious man living in Li Wen’s apartment seems to be a mirror or foil to Li Wen; a beer bottle thrown first at the man and then back at Li Wen bounces off the man but passes through Li Wen, as if Li Wen’s corporeality has been transferred to someone else. In Mountain Rat, the spirit Busus wars with the narrator’s own consciousness for control of his body; in Cloud Labour, Proxies go inside their wealthy clients’ minds and reorganize their emotions; in Social, the narrator’s friend’s Facebook page becomes a kind of projection or echo of herself after her death (there is also the fact that the friend struggles to reconcile multiple seemingly contradictory identities).
Given the multiplicity of identities contained in the five stories–female and male, Indigenous and settler, animal and human, past, present and future, and all of the gradations in between. Each story approaches and questions the boundaries of the self from a different angle; the self, throughout, is in constant flux. The stories collectively evoke the palimpsest of Taiwanese identity, written over with Indigenous, Hoklo, Hakka, European colonial, Japanese colonial, American neocolonial, and ROC influence. Some of this diversity is reflected in the authors chosen for the collection: two authors are Indigenous, at least one is queer, and one uses Taiwanese Hokkien romanization for their name.
It is also no accident that so many of the stories deal directly or indirectly with memory. In Not Your Child, the child-abuse scandal at work revives the narrator’s memories of her own history of abuse; meeting years later, Li Wen recalls the first night he met Ping in Cage; the narrator of Mountain Rat’s memories are erased when he is subsumed by Busus; memories are also erased, literally, in Cloud Labor; the challenges of preserving Indigenous memory is a central tension in Social. These characters’ memories determine and define them, and the loss of memory entails personal and cultural loss.
This is most explicitly articulated in Cloud Labor. On coming into contact with the Pleasure Vendor Stone, who, unlike most of Sky’s clients, has not undergone consistent memory erasure since the age of 14, Sky is struck by the “dazzling display of everyday life” in her face, such a contrast to the “sterility” of those, like himself, who choose to excise their pain. Everyday humanity is only achieved, Huang implies, when one is forced to bear the complexity of one’s history. Considering Taiwan’s long history of colonial erasure, including the ongoing struggle to bring to light and contend with the atrocities of the White Terror, these stories seem a collective statement of the importance of Taiwanese historical memory in cultural formation.
Strangers Press markets the Ká-sióng collection, bizarrely, as a “perfect pick-me-up for the literary curious,” an odd way to describe a collection in which suicide, child sexual abuse, and the oppression of Indigenous people are major themes. But it is true that the stories pique readers’ literary curiosity–they are tastes of the riches that Taiwan’s thriving contemporary literary scene has to offer. The authors’ biographies on the inside flaps of each chapbook contain basic biographical information alongside a list of the author’s many literary accolades for work untranslated to English, hinting to the anglophone reader at their further writing frustratingly frozen behind a language barrier. Of the authors included in the collection, four out of five have had no other work translated; a collection of Sabrina Huang’s short fiction, entitled Welcome to the Dollhouse, has been translated to English by Jeremy Tiang but has yet to find a publisher, remaining inaccessible. Ká-sióng reveals a glimpse to anglophone readers of all we cannot have.
Getting translated literature published has always been a challenge. To use a recent example, Lin King has spoken of her extreme difficulty in finding a publisher for Taiwan Travelogue, the merits of which should by now be obvious. Publishers like Tilted Axis and Strangers’ Press are trying to fill the gap, but the work is slow; Tilted Axis only publishes six to nine books a year, and translated literature in general only accounts for less than 5% of all published books. Taiwanese literature is no exception–the website Books from Taiwan, which helps translated Taiwanese literature find overseas publishers, has a long list of yet-unpublished work. Translated works are still clearly seen by publishers as risky choices, despite their potential to give readers access to literary modes and traditions that are otherwise inaccessible, something for which I imagine many readers hunger.
Translation, what Jacques Derrida called a “beautiful and terrifying responsibility,” remains crucial. Strangers Press states on their website reveres “translation as a form of cultural exchange – that cultures might learn things about each other, in multiple ways, through the process.” For those outside of Taiwan, this collection can begin to communicate the cultural depth and richness of Taiwan in a way that is otherwise unavailable–a rebuke to the flattened understanding of Taiwan in the West, focused on TSMC and the so-called “cross strait relationship.” The metanarrative of Ká-sióng, and Strangers Press’ whole project, is of the importance of translated literature as a means to approach, however asymptotically, a more complete cross-cultural understanding: wanting more is the point. For the anglophone reader, Ká-sióng is a window into the diversity of Taiwanese literature, an argument for the singularity of Taiwanese culture, and a plea for the publication of more literature in translation.