With the exception of books originally written in German or in English, I have to rely on translation in order to access world literature. As someone who grew up with and in one language but who now lives with and in another, I know that translation involves more than merely replacing words. Even languages such as German and English that, in the larger scheme of things, are fairly similar often express ideas very differently. In addition, social contexts and expectations differ significantly.
The farther apart two languages are, the higher the stakes of translation can be. As a reader, you will in effect have no direct access to an author’s work any longer. Instead, you will be exposed to an interpretation of it. With translation, the interpretative aspects typically are not discussed widely because the assumption is that a translator will be truthful to the original text.
But what does truthfulness mean when two languages and the contexts they operate in are very different? Without going into the details of what translation might mean — do you stay true to the language at hand or to what you perceive as the author’s intent, and do you take the target language and social context(s) in mind? — I personally do not approach translated books as exact versions of their originals. To get access to the originals, I need to be able to read the language they were originally written in.
All of the above might sound fairly abstract for someone who is not particularly interested in languages (as I am) or in translation (ditto). But if you’re interested in getting some form of access to societies, cultures, or mindsets that exist in other cultures and/or societies, you at least need to keep the aspect of translation in mind.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue is not necessarily a book about translation, or rather it is not a book that only focuses on translation; but translation, either in the form of translating from one language to another or of translating one cultural background into another, forms its very core. The book is easily one of the most ambitious and daring novels I have read in a long time.
The premise of the book is as simple as an onion: peel back one part to get exposed to another. Set in 1938, when Taiwan was a Japanese colony, Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist, travels to Taiwan for work. Chizuko does not speak Mandarin, so she has to rely on translators to speak with most people on the island. She quickly becomes infatuated with one of her translators, a young woman named Wáng Chiēn-hò (Ō Chizuru in Japanese, which Chizuko uses), and attempts to become friends with her.
Traveling across Taiwan for months, the duo visit a number of places — against her will (or so she says and thinks) the Japanese writer becomes a representative of the colonial regime — and sample the food (of which there exists a richly bewildering variety). Chizuko writes a number of articles about her travels and eventually compiles her experiences into a novel.
That novel was then supposed to have been published in Japan, only to be quickly forgotten after World War 2. Eventually, it was rediscovered, translated into Mandarin and republished a number of times, with additional notes and explanations about its background. That’s Taiwan Travelogue — at least in its Mandarin original: it pretends to be the latest edition of the republication of a novel written by a Japanese author, but everything about this is completely fictional.
The English translation, done by Lin King, adds another layer of complexity, given that Mandarin and Japanese share a writing system from which English is excluded. In the English edition, the translator had to make a decision: would she take the Japanese or Mandarin reading (pronunciation) of names? In the original text, the reading would occur in the reader’s mind (obviously for a reader able to read the original text).
King added footnotes with explanations to her translation — and those footnotes (based on real concerns) now sit next to the many fictional footnotes produced by Shuāng-zǐ for the original novel (remember, the novel presents the translation of an obscure text originally written in Japanese alongside the kinds of footnotes and comments that tend to come with such projects).
You might imagine from the description above that Taiwan Travelogue might be a tedious read. It absolutely is not. In fact, it’s incredibly charming and engaging; Shuāng-zǐ deftly proves that ideas that open up many layers of complexity need not result at all in an overly complex outcome that is difficult to access.
I don’t know whether the publisher’s description is able to convey how the book ends. Knowing what I know now (having finished reading the book), I don’t know how anyone could produce PR copy of the book without giving away its ending. I certainly do not intend to give away how the book ends; all I will say is that I didn’t expect it to be this heartbreaking.
There is ample talk about food in the book. If, like me, you love East Asian food, you might want to read the book only on a full stomach (I made the mistake of not doing so) — especially not if you do not have easy access to high-quality food from Taiwan (alas, I do not). Things can be a bit too mouth watering.
That said, though, for me the extent of the descriptions of food at times went a bit overboard — there are only so many times that you can read about endless details of how yet another dish is being made. Photolandians, take note: nobody wants to know every little detail, however irrelevant it might be, about your process (different area, exact same problem).
Of late, there have been ample amounts of gnashing at the teeth because of the possible impacts of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) on writing. I think Taiwan Travelogue demonstrates that we needn’t worry. AI will never be able to match the sheer inventiveness and skill necessary to write a book like this. It’s just not going to happen.
And for every famous writer deciding to now work with AI (sadly, Olga Tokarczuk decided to do so), there will be someone like Yáng Shuāng-zǐ who demonstrates that real literature needs to be written by real people — without the use of what someone called a stochastic parrot. In effect, Taiwan Travelogue works so well because it centers of many of the kinks that the use of AI is intended to remove.
Highly recommended.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ: Taiwan Travelogue; translated by Lin King; 300 pages; Graywolf Press; 2024
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