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I Bet People Will Join Us

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 that my concept of “translation style (翻译腔)” is specific to translation from other languages into Chinese. Superficially, the term describes a translation that retains so many characteristics of the source language that it sounds unnatural. The style can manifest in overly long sentences, awkwardly inverted clauses, and literally translated expressions, such as “poor as a church mouse,” that have no direct equivalents in Chinese. 

“Translation style” is not a euphemism for “bad translation.” On the contrary, in the early twentieth century, its characteristic “flaws” were embraced, to varying degrees, by a group of influential English-to-Chinese translators and intellectuals who had spent time abroad and wanted to introduce European thought to China. For centuries, the dominant written language in China was classical Chinese, or wenyan (文言), which had taken shape during the end of the Warring States period (476-221 B.C.E.). But the writer and critic Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936) believed its rigid syntax and limited vocabulary made it woefully inadequate for conveying new ideas to the masses, who used vernacular Chinese, or baihua (白话), almost exclusively in daily life. Lu and his peers saw an urgent need to revitalize written Chinese by embracing baihua and elevating it into a respected medium for public discourse. 

A translator of Russian literature and Western literary theory, Lu advocated a radical strategy that preserved as much of the original text’s flavor and syntax as possible. He wrote to a friend that he’d prefer the phrasing “behind the mountains the sun has set down (山背后太阳落下去了),” to “the sun set behind the mountains (日落山阴),” if the focus of the original sentence was on the mountains, not the sun. In his Chinese writing, too, Lu often “defamiliarized” his prose with common European techniques, including repetition, verbification, and anastrophe. He wrote sentences like, “Outside, it was as quiet as it could be, so quiet that you could hear the sound of the quietness (屋外一切静极，静到要听出静的声音来),” and “the elastic plump gentleman has plumped into the space I’d vacated with the right side of his body (那弹性的胖绅士早在我的空处胖开了他的右半身了).” The effect accumulated into an unforgettable voice. Across a formidable array of essays, stories, translations, and reviews in baihua, Lu and his peers vastly extended the capacity of the traditionally overlooked language, proving its potential for intellectual debates and literary expressions, and thus helping develop modern written Chinese.

The call to replace wenyan with baihua as China’s dominant written language was met with doubt. Among Lu and his cohort’s most vocal opponents was the older scholar and translator Lin Shu 林纾 (1852-1924). Although he spoke neither English nor French, Lin translated over two hundred works of fiction from both languages in collaboration with interpreters. To call his translations unfaithful would be an understatement. “To truthfully convey the author’s intention,” Lin argued, “the translator should be allowed to rephrase and trim sentences. If he sticks too closely to the original, the translation may end up being obscure and inaccessible.” Lin glossed the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Dickens in the mode of classic Chinese novels — thus Arthur Conan Doyle’s Uncle Bernac became The Legend of the Bearded Assassin (髯刺客传), and Oliver Twist became The Story of a Thief (贼史). Having never lived abroad, Lin relied on his imagination (and illustrations in the original works) to flesh out scenes. He never hesitated to condense descriptions, leaving out geographical and biographical information that he considered unfamiliar or irrelevant.

Although Lu’s work had a greater impact on the Chinese language, I’ve noticed that Anglophone translators of East Asian literature tend to follow a path closer to Lin’s. Scenes were cut from Edward Seidensticker’s translation of Yasunari Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer from Japanese. The passive, dreamlike heroine of the Korean novel The Vegetarian re-emerged in its English version as more “active and rational,” according to Korean critic Cho Jae-ryong. Ken Liu, English translator of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, had to insist that his publisher include footnotes in fiction translations — a practice generally discouraged in American publishing but standard in China. Most of the time, when I pick up an English translation, it reads as if it were originally written in English, except for a sprinkling of words like “sensei,” “shifu,” and “jiaozi.” Maybe that’s what English publishers want. The translator is an inconvenient partner in the business of writing — it’s best that she remains as invisible as possible, even as she is often granted remarkable freedom to “recreate” the original text. Until recently, translators had to fight to get their names on the front covers of books they’d labored over for months, even years. 

In 1931, Lu wrote that a translated work ought to be “chewed with some effort, not swallowed in a few gulps like cooked rice soaked in tea soup.” I’m not necessarily an advocate of his brand of extremely literal translation, but I believe that readers are more receptive to — and even interested in — that which appears strange, foreign, or difficult than we might assume.

On Douban, a Chinese Goodreads-style platform for discussing movies, books, music, and more, there is a 38,000-strong group called “Translation Style.” Its members entertain themselves by emulating various styles, from that of Bible translations to that of viral short videos. If there is any mockery, it is directed at both the translators, for rendering foreign phrases too literally, and the readers, for embracing the infelicities so passionately that they’ve become fluent in the not-quite-fluency. In the voice of a slightly old-fashioned Chinese translation of an Agatha Christie novel, the group’s bio reads: “Oh my dear God, our neighbor Aunt Susan suggested we set up this group where we could talk like this — because why not? I bet people will join us, I swear to Saint Mary!”

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African But Not Too African

In October 2023, Bloomsbury began to republish titles from the vaunted African Writers Series, an imprint that published 359 books between 1962 and 2003. Put out by the London-based publishing house Heinemann, most of the early AWS entries were originally written in English, but soon translations from other languages into English appeared. The AWS sought to establish a center for African writers, ensuring they were read in countries other than their own. For African readers, the AWS soon became the dominant way of identifying and consuming the broader category of so-called “African literature.” As the Ugandan journalist David Kaiza once put it, “To a grateful continent, the series gifted a plot to plant a cultural flag; appendages no more, here is the collection of our own worldview: here our Shakespeare; here our Hard Times.”’

When Heinemann stopped publishing the series, most of the books went out of print and became almost impossible to find. Those that survived were generally by writers whose fame had taken hold outside the series’s bedrock audience — authors like Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Buchi Emecheta, who all hewed closely to the AWS model. AWS novels tended to follow a similar script: a protagonist, usually male, often educated in the Western system, struggles to locate himself within both his African tradition and a European Christian tradition, a struggle that ultimately leads to his downfall. The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah disdained this model as a box constructed by a British publisher within which books by African writers had to fit. For him, the AWS “did its best to stunt the growth of African talent.” And so it happened that the most gifted writers of the post-independence 1960s set — including Armah, Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel in 1986, and the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who did not write about an African identity forged in relation to colonialism — found themselves on the fringes of the AWS canon.

Most Anglophone writers from African countries accrue cultural capital through association with literary outfits in the imperial core: an American or British publisher, agent, or prize. Abdulrazak Gurnah, the most recent African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, had all three — book deals with Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury, a big agent in London, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1994. For a spell, he was even editorial advisor at the AWS. And yet, for him, the system didn’t quite work. Gurnah had been publishing for decades, but remained relatively unknown. Even for keen readers of his books, the 2021 Nobel win was a pleasant surprise; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the poster boy of AWS, was the expected choice among African writers. But neither he nor Achebe — whose Things Fall Apart inaugurated the AWS, and who was the series’s first editor — ever won it.

As some of the original AWS titles return to print and the Bloomsbury imprint seeks out new African writers “to add their voices to the project,” I have no idea what comes next. Will the series resume its former central position for African writers, or will a newer publishing outfit become dominant? There are now a number of African, English-language publishers — such as Cassava Republic and Masobe Books — that publish African novelists, but they all have to reckon with the fact that global capitalism pushes Anglophone writers from the Global South toward publishers in the U.S. and the U.K. that can offer bigger advances, better funded production, and more established distribution networks. There is little incentive for a writer as famous as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for instance, to publish with an African publisher. Books like hers are published first in the West, and then East African or West African rights are sold to local publishers. Even the AWS reissues, under the auspices of a British publisher, might be overlooked in a market flush with titles distributed by the Big Five American houses.

The protagonist of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel The Most Secret Memory of Men (2021) is a Senegalese writer called Diégane Latyr Faye, who is obsessed with a fictionalized version of Ouologuem (whose acclaim as the first African writer to win a prestigious French literary award was marred by later accusations of plagiarism). Throughout the novel, Diégane and his colleagues, fellow African writers living in Paris, have lengthy arguments of the sort that plagued early AWS cohorts, questioning what it means that their literary careers exist entirely in a foreign country. “We bemoaned the fact that some of our elders had fallen into the slave hold that was complacent exoticism,” Diégane says. “Those same forerunners, enjoined to be African but not too African, in obeying these two equally absurd imperatives, forgot to be writers.”

The Most Secret Memory of Men is, in my view, the finest book to be written by an African author in years. Part of its point is that this is a useless designation, that modern African writers shouldn’t be seen as just that and nothing more. And Sarr attempted to buck the trend with more than just self-critique — he co-published his novel with both a Senegalese and French publisher. Still, when his novel won the Prix Goncourt, Sarr was lauded as the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to win the prize, victim of the very thing Diégane protested, just like his hero Ouologuem, whose Bound to Violence (1968) was marketed by its publishers as the “first truly African novel.”

In what is either a cruel irony or an elegant exhibition of the state of affairs, when Other Press published The Most Secret Memory of Men in the U.S. last year, it also reissued Bound to Violence. The accusations of plagiarism that led to the latter’s fade into the background were, in 2023, reframed, per the New York Times, as “an artistic technique” or “assemblage” à la Picasso. For Ouologuem’s part, after being promptly dropped by his Western publishers, he refused to defend himself or try to salvage his global literary reputation. Apparently, until he died in Mali in relative obscurity, he wouldn’t even speak French.