In this monthly column, writer Sohini Basak sets out to interview contemporary writers from Asia to understand the nuances of cultural practices, power hierarchies, literary lineages, gender norms, all the while asking the question: Is there an Asian way of thinking? The hope for the column is to not only celebrate, but also sharpen our understanding of the countries geographically closest to us, and heighten our collective curiosities about the shared colonial histories, mythologies, sentimentalities and anxieties. Here’s an excerpt from her interview with writer Jeremy Tiang:
For the final part of the Reading Asia series, we speak to Jeremy Tiang. A novelist, short fiction writer, playwright and literary translator, Tiang’s works have received the Singapore Literature Prize, been nominated for the International Booker Prize, and they are known as a champion for literary translators across the globe. I am always amazed at the geopolitical and historical range that one translator’s work can offer to a reader and Tiang’s gift to us is wide-ranging: via his translations, we can go from Taiwan (Faraway: a novel by Lo Yi-Chin or Islands of Silence by Su Wei-chen) to 1950s Malaya (Unrest by Yeng Pway Ngon), from Hong Kong (The Borrowed by Chan Ho-kei) to post-Cultural Revolution Beijing (The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu, Nth Building by Zou Jingzhi), meet Singaporean diaspora (Death by Perfume by You Jin), and even slip into the territories that exist between cities and dreams (Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao or The City of Sand by Tianxia Bachang).
I usually keep this question for the last in all my interviews, but since you wear so many hats, I wanted to begin this one with it: What are you working on these days?
I’m spending part of this summer at Civitella Ranieri, a writing residency in Umbertide, Italy. The plan is to spend this time working on my novel, though I’m sure some translation will creep in around the edges – it’s hard for me to just do one thing. I’m currently under contract to translate three books that I can’t talk about because they haven’t been announced yet, and am also pitching a couple of books to publishers, while reading my way through a pile of novels, some of which I will no doubt fall in love with and try to translate.
What came first for you as a writer: scripts for the theatre, novels, or short stories? Do you work on all three genres simultaneously? And how do you switch between English and Chinese?
I was writing short stories and (short) plays as a child, so I guess you could say those came first? Then at a certain point I found something I wanted to explore at more length, and wrote a novel about it. I also trained as an actor, which pulled me further into playwriting. As for languages — I have spent most of my adult life in the U.K. and U.S., so English is my main working language, but I switch to Chinese when there’s something I want to say that requires the Chinese language.
You’ve translated over thirty full-length books of fiction (novels, novellas, short stories) from the Chinese. How do you go about the researching into not just the historical or cultural references of the work, but also perhaps language, dialect, older forms of language? Is it ever overwhelming?
There’s not really a one-size-fits-all approach, in that each book requires a different form of research. Sometimes it’s spending time on Google Earth to map out a city I’ve never been able to visit (Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao — though the author later informed me he’d messed around with the geography of his hometown), sometimes it’s watching a bunch of cat videos (Invisible Kitties by Yu Yoyo), and sometimes it turns out that earlier research on the Malayan Communist Party (for my novel State of Emergency) was exactly what I needed to know to translate a future book (Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan, a former insurgent with the Malayan Communist Party). It’s never overwhelming, I enjoy it all. It feels like I’m an actor carrying out research for the different roles I inhabit.
You’ve also translated some non-fiction like the lyrical memoir Durians Are Not the Only Fruit by Wong Yoon Wah or Shen Fuyu’s historical portrait of the Chinese rural worker in The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village. How do you select non-fiction to translate?
The Chinese publishing world doesn’t draw a strict line between fiction and non-fiction, and neither do I.
And for readers in South Asian readers new to Chinese literary non-fiction, is there a book that you could recommend that could be an engaging starting point?
I would be intimidated to choose a single book as a starting point for such a vast corpus. I’d say rather that whatever you’re interested in, go searching for it and I’m sure you’ll find it exists.
You’ve engaged with literary translation business in the Anglophone publishing world for decades, and from various vantage points. Most recently, you judged the International Booker Prize. You’ve also edited an anthology of essays on translations. Would you say there is a slow but steady shift in terms of interest (or, dare I say, resources) in the ‘west’ for contemporary literature from the Asian global south?
I don’t really know. Honestly, I don’t pay a lot of attention to what the ‘west’ is interested in, I just write and translate what interests me.
