Na Zhong
I Bet People Will Join Us
Na Zhong
Years ago, as an intern at an English-language publication that champions translated literature, I asked the editor how he dealt with the thorny issue of “translation style.” He looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that?” It was my turn to be tongue-tied. “It’s a quality… permeating a work of translation… that immediately tells you it is a translated text.” He didn’t get it. I let the topic drop. I later realized...
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Angelo Hernandez Sias, Carey Baraka, Marta Figlerowicz, Michael Barron, Na Zhong, Siddhartha Deb, Yasmin Zaher, Zain Khalid
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
