Who won the Booker? On transcreation and Taiwan Travelogue
What is a translator’s job? Are there limits to a translator’s liberties with the original text?
Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed (1993, trans. Linda Asher), reading Alexandre Vialatte’s French translations of Kafka, penned the same complaint over and over: Vialatte overreaches into the author’s territory too aggressively. For example, in the scene where K. and Frieda make love in The Castle, Kafka uses the word Fremde (strange place) twice and its derivative Fremdheit (strangeness) once, a deliberate threefold repetition. Vialatte replaces the third Fremdheit with exil (exile), presumably because repeating étrangeté three times would be inelegant French. ‘But Kafka never mentions exile.’ Kundera writes, ‘Exile and strangeness are different notions.’ The French reads more beautifully indeed, but it is no longer Kafka.
In his 1898 preface to the Chinese translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu ranked the translator’s obligations to the original text: 信 (xin, fidelity), 達 (da, expressibility), 雅 (ya, elegance), in that order. Fidelity comes first, and elegance exists to serve fidelity, not to replace it. Granted, not every writer believes in this ordering. Borges, for instance, argued in a 1943 essay on Henley’s English translation of Beckford’s Vathek (1786) that ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’, treating translation as a legitimate creative act that can improve on its source. But Borges’ position is the minority one. Fidelity remains the mainstay of the translation business, and every literary prize that honours translation assumes it.
Such is the debate that hovered in my mind when, after reading and disliking Yang Shuang-zi’s 《臺灣漫遊錄》 in its original Chinese version, I turned to Lin King’s English translation and had to admire what she had done with (or maybe to) the original. The novel itself is interesting for its own sake, employing frame-narrative where a fictional Japanese author named Aoyama Chizuko, presented as a 1930s colonial-era writer, is said to have written a 1954 Japanese travelogue about Taiwan, which a further fictional Taiwanese translator in the recent years (Yang’s late twin sister) has now rendered into Mandarin. Yang, having many years of experience writing manga and yuri, has a niche style of prose that mixes cartoonish dialogues with simplistic environmental descriptions. I will in this essay focus on Lin King’s treatment of the original text, and avoid discussing the novel per se, which is covered separately by my short review here.
In King’s English version, Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf, 2024), the plot is intact, but almost everything else has been quietly reshaped: the preface on the colonial history of Japan in Taiwan and the development of ‘exotic Taiwan literature’ is trimmed to a shorter biographical introduction, the manga-inflected interior voice is replaced with the cadence of interwar historical literary fiction (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is the canonical example of the register I mean), and the sensory paragraphs are rewritten into something an anglophone reader would call ‘beautiful and elegant’. Similar to Vialatte’s treatment of Kafka, each intervention by Lin King is small and unintrusive unless read alongside the original Chinese text. However, the accumulation of such alterations produces a novel that may as well be put in another genre (the English translation is definitely not a ‘light novel’ anymore), with a different interior voice from the one Yang wrote, and a framing apparatus that no longer positions the book inside the specific colonial-literary conversation that Yang placed it in.
King’s translation won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024 and the International Booker Prize in 2026; each prize split its award payout between the author and the translator; each jury citation praised ‘Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King’. Setting the two texts side by side, however, they do not read as the same novel. When the improved book reads as Yang, is honoured as Yang, and is quoted in reviews as Yang, whose achievement, exactly, has been rewarded?
Let us begin by looking at the first thing that would jump out to a regular Chinese reader of Yang’s original text: the Japanese-style, light-novel dialogue. This is possibly one of the biggest problems with the original Chinese text, since the protagonist, Aoyama Chizuko, is an author whose very first novel supposedly went on to be adapted to film in the 1930s, suggesting at the very least that she writes in period-appropriate prose. However, Yang’s Aoyama indulges in modern manga-inspired, anachronistic vocalisation and sentence structures that would not have been used by an educated Japanese writer at the time.
King’s translation, possibly due to this reason, converts the light-novel dialogue piece by piece into period-appropriate speech. For example, on her first afternoon in Taichū in May 1938, Aoyama meets her to-be interpreter Ō Chizuru at a fruit stall, and Chizuru teaches her to crack a watermelon seed with her front teeth. Aoyama’s reaction, in Yang’s Chinese (chapter I), is 「太厲害了！這是什麼有趣的食物啊！」. Plainly rendered, this would be ‘Amazing! What kind of interesting food is this!’ The doubled exclamation, the 「什麼⋯⋯啊！」 (‘What … is this!’) sparkle-eyed cadence, the excitable 「厲害」 (strong, great, skilful) delivered without qualification are reminiscent of any light-novel heroine, here in this scene encountering the exotic. King’s English of the same line is ‘Amazing!’ I exclaimed. ‘What a marvel!’ (chapter I), inserting a dialogue tag between two clean exclamations and arguably toning down the original’s ‘manga-ness’: 「厲害」 has become ‘marvel’, a word carrying a historical-literary weight the Chinese categorically does not have; the sparkle-eyed 「什麼⋯⋯啊！」 pattern is gone. What was, in Yang’s Chinese, the voice of a light-novel heroine has become, in King’s English, the mouth of an Edwardian literary novelist.
Unfortunately, Yang’s text provides King too many opportunities for such ‘gentrification’: Aoyama speaks in this voice throughout the novel. Her paragraphs are filled with 「哎呀哎呀」 (‘aiya-aiya’), 「不可小覷不可小覷」 (‘not-to-be-underestimated, not-to-be-underestimated’; repetitions in the style of manga speech-bubble dialogue), 「唔嗯嗚咕」 (‘hmm-hnnngh’; a manga-vocalisation of a defeated groan), 「哎咿呀哎咿呀」 (a variant of ‘aiya-aiya’). Yang wrote her Aoyama in the cadence of the yuri light novels that she and her twin sister spent a decade writing before 《臺灣漫遊錄》, and the manga-inflected interior speech is the first thing that any Chinese reader would pick up about the dialogue, which contradicts, for its own sake, the character that she is a novelist of the first rank in 1938 Japan. King replaces every one of these markers with a period-appropriate English equivalent, vastly improving the original text’s texture and moving it beyond the light-novel genre. Sure, it is probably impossible to render 「唔嗯嗚咕」 directly in English without producing something that reads as a children’s-book sound-effect; but that is the point. With a light novel as the base, King has chosen a ‘workable’ English equivalent and moved on, and the English reader now has in their hands period literature that grants a completely different reading experience than that granted to the Chinese reader.
These manga-vocalisations recur across every one of the twelve chapters, from Aoyama’s first afternoon in Taichū to her final farewell on the Taishō Bridge, and not one survives as manga-vocalisation in the English. 「哎呀哎呀」 (‘aiya-aiya’) becomes ‘Oh dear’ or ‘Ah’, or is cut entirely; 「唔嗯嗚咕」 (‘hmmm-hnngh’) becomes ‘I could only grumble some meaningless noises’ or ‘I mumbled’, completely changing the nature of such text; 「哎咿呀哎咿呀」 (the aforementioned variant of ‘aiya-aiya’) becomes ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear’, which it certainly is not.
Some of these substitutions can be seen as, should we be charitable, what the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti calls domestication (The Translator’s Invisibility, 1995): recognising a source-language marker that will not survive literal transposition, and replacing it with a target-language equivalent. Jay Rubin’s famed rendering of Murakami Haruki’s stock 「やれやれ」 fits this description well. In the opening of 『ノルウェイの森』 (1987), Watanabe’s plane lands at Hamburg and he thinks 「やれやれ、またドイツか」; Rubin’s Norwegian Wood (2000) gives us ‘So — Germany again’. The Japanese sigh-word 「やれやれ」 has no direct English counterpart, so Rubin has substituted an English idiom with an em dash (‘So —’) that carries a similar tired familiarity.
King’s substitutions may look, at first glance, like the same practice. But they are not. Rubin’s ‘So —’ preserves the sigh-function of 「やれやれ」 even as the specific sigh-word disappears; the tired-familiarity is still doing rhetorical work in the English sentence. King’s ‘What a marvel!’ does not preserve the shōjo-cadence function of 「什麼⋯⋯啊!」; it replaces that function with a historical-literary novelist’s exclamation, which is doing an entirely different kind of rhetorical work. Rendering the light-novel vocalisation 「唔嗯嗚咕」 as ‘I mumbled’ is not finding an English equivalent for a manga groan-sound; it is doing away with the groan-sound and reporting, in plain narrative, that a groan happened. Rendering 「哎咿呀哎咿呀」 as ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear’ is not finding an English counterpart for a manga speech-bubble object; it is replacing that object with an entirely different novelistic character-tag, converting an anachronistic exclamation with period-appropriate speech. In neither case has the source-marker been transposed; the marker has been abandoned, and something else has been put in its place. And what has been abandoned is not a stylistic tic but a genre-defining marker: Yang’s manga-cadence signals a light novel with colonial-critical ambitions, and once every last manga-vocalisation has been converted into historical-literary narration, the book that reaches the anglophone reader is a historical literary novel with colonial-critical ambitions. King has silently changed the genre of the novel, and this does not seem to have been acknowledged by the book’s readers.
Beyond the cadence-level substitutions, King’s editorial hand also does some sweeping editorial work, cutting specific passages Yang wrote, editing certain lines to say something the Chinese does not say, and adding English text with no Chinese counterpart. Each of these changes what the text actually expresses. The single most concentrated case sits inside chapter II. By this point in the book, Yang has built a specific ‘reading-key’ for how Aoyama perceives Chizuri. Hiyoshi’s prologue tells the reader:
《臺灣漫遊錄》中，青山老師時不時見到王女士宛如戴上能面的距離感⋯⋯
This is roughly ‘In Taiwan Travelogue, Aoyama repeatedly perceives Chizuru with the distance of one wearing a Noh mask…’ The Noh mask (能面, noh-men) is a carved wooden mask from a major form of Japanese dance-drama from the 14th-century called noh (能). Variants of the mask are worn by the actors and designed so that a small tilt of the head shifts the apparent expression: the outward composure holds while the inner state moves underneath, a ‘persona’ of sorts that is built for performing, not experiencing, emotions. This is a term that is, in the Chinese text, applied by Aoyama throughout the book, re-used to the point of annoyance but most likely intentionally. That is also why Hiyoshi in the prologue is already telling the reader in advance to notice it.
Then in chapter II, this motif arrives for the first time in Aoyama’s own writing:
——那個時候，小千凝望著我片刻後，微笑起來說「我明白了」。
「能面」。或者說，「小面」。
能劇裡可愛而美麗的年輕女人的面具。
小千的笑容，就像是小面那樣。
真是不明白這個人啊！
Aoyama first names the Noh mask, then narrows to the specific type 「小面」 (ko-omote), the variant of Noh mask worn by young and beautiful women. She then applies it to Chizuru’s smile, exclaiming (again, in manga speech-bubble style): 「真是不明白這個人啊！」 (‘I really don’t understand this person!’). Here, the cultural reference to Noh, and especially to the specific variant ko-omote, is consistent with Aoyama’s education and reminds the reader of her heritage.
Here is King’s treatment of this passage:
When I'd expressed the desire to be friends, she had neither consented nor refused. She had simply looked at me for a while, then smiled, then said, 'I see.'
That smile was like a Noh mask.
Inscrutable.
The culturally important ko-omote specification is gone. Aoyama’s confused exclamation is also gone, replaced by a period-appropriate, much more educated-sounding ‘Inscrutable’. Aoyama’s confused interior voice is hence replaced by an external critic pronouncing on the character: yes, Chizuru is ‘inscrutable’: not that Aoyama ‘doesn’t really understand her’, but that Chizuru herself is ‘inscrutable’. The prologue told the reader to notice Aoyama’s confusion; and King has deemed the confusion as burden: so let’s just go straight to the conclusion.
This is reminiscent of what Vialatte did to The Castle. Kafka’s Fremdheit became Vialatte’s exil for the sake of French ‘elegance’; Yang’s ko-omote followed by Aoyama’s confused ‘I really don’t understand this person!’ becomes King’s ‘Inscrutable’ for the sake of English ‘elegance’. What is curious is that the Noh mask itself recurs faithfully across the rest of King’s English, meaning that the cut is specific to the introduction of the idea and the specification of ko-omote. The English reader is robbed (for better or for worse) of the theatrical gloss and the confusion that Aoyama’s own voice would have given to the image at its first appearance.
As another example of translator-initiated editorial changes, in Chapter VII we see Aoyama, half-drunk, tell Chizuru that she wants to protect her (by half-forcing Chizuru to wear the coloniser’s clothing, the kimono, which Chizuru initially rejects). In the original Chinese text, Aoyama’s frustration is mixed with confusion:
「對於堅強的小千來說，那肯定是不需要的——不過，如果說那是我想要保護小千的心意，也不行嗎？」
Roughly this would translate as ‘For a strong Chizuru there is surely no need (for the kimono) — but, would you not wear it, if I say it is my token of protection for Chizuru?’
In King’s English, this becomes:
'Of course it isn't necessary — because you are strong. But, can we not think of it as a token of my wish to protect you? As a friend?' (chapter VII)
‘As a friend?’ is King’s addition. The Chinese line simply ends at Aoyama’s wish to protect Chizuru, without pointing at the kind of relationship the wish belongs to. This is beyond Venuti’s domestication, since it resolves an ambiguity that Yang left open on purpose.
The most consequential single edit (yes, I will talk about the prologue below, but that involves multiple edits, cuts and massive condensation) is at the 2020 afterword. This afterword is penned by the translator of Aoyama’s work, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子, literally Yang the twins), which is the shared pen-name of two fictional/real sisters: Yáng Ruò-tsí (楊若慈, elder, alive both in the novel and in real life) and Yáng Ruò-hūi (楊若暉, younger, alive in the novel but has passed away in real life in 2015). The novel’s 2020 afterword is written in the voice of Ruò-hūi, the deceased younger twin in real life, addressing Ruò-tsí as her twin elder sister and co-translator. This is an extremely delicate moment, as the older, alive sister is dedicating the voice of the book to her deceased younger sister. The shared pen-name lets Ruò-hūi’s authorial voice continue after her death. The Chinese opens:
我與孿生姊姊在該年年底短暫旅行北九州⋯⋯
Roughly ‘My twin elder sister and I took a brief trip to Kitakyūshū at the end of that year.’ And closes:
特別需要感謝的是我的孿生姊姊·「双子」當中的若慈。本書譯稿雖然由我·「双子」當中的若暉執筆，實際上卻是我倆的共同作品。
‘Very special thanks to my twin elder sister, the Ruò-tsí half of 「双子」. Although the translation was penned by me, the Ruò-hūi half of 「双子」, in fact it is our shared work.’ Two instances of 孿生 (twin), matched at opening and closing.
King’s English of the two passages:
My late elder sister and I had taken a brief trip to Kitakyūshū in Japan.
Very special thanks go to my late older sister, the Ruò-tsí half of the name 'Shuāng-zĭ.' I, the Ruò-hūi half of 'Shuāng-zĭ,' may have held the pen that translated this book, but it is in fact a product of our shared work.
Both instances of twin (孿生) are dropped; both are replaced with the completely different ‘late’. This substitution is done twice, in exactly the same way, suggesting that this is not an accidental slip. In Yang’s Chinese, Ruò-hūi’s voice continues the collaboration on the page, and the reader is trusted to sit with the twin-collaboration frame and work the rest out. In King’s English, Ruò-tsí is a dead sister remembered by her surviving twin, and the afterword takes on a mourning quality. So at the very end of the translation, King’s editorial hand lets the real-world grief leak into the frame narrative that Yang spent an entire book building. We could read the change charitably, of course: perhaps King feared that the anglophone reader would find the original framing confusing when they later learned the real-life biography. But is the fiction not exactly the point? Why should the anglophone reader be given a real-world footnote the Chinese reader is not?
The largest edits, though, are in the prologue. Yang’s 《臺灣漫遊錄》 opens with a fictional preface titled 〈戛然而止的夢，異鄉的華麗島〉 (‘A Truncated Dream, a Foreign Splendorland’), attributed to a wansei (Japanese-born-in-Taiwan) scholar named Hiyoshi Sagako, addressed to a Mandarin readership in 2020 and presented as an introduction to a rediscovered 1954 Japanese novel. To understand how King’s edits affect the book as a whole, it is important to note that Yang wrote Hiyoshi’s preface as part of the fiction, that the fictional Hiyoshi Sagako is a character in Yang’s frame narrative. Upfront we have to know that King has indeed publicly acknowledged that she trimmed this preface for the English version, giving as her stated reason that English-language readers are ‘less accustomed to lengthy front matter’.
Now, let us back up and consider whether her claim is even true. Breon Mitchell’s 1998 Schocken retranslation of The Trial, which we will return to later in this essay, opens with a twenty-page translator’s preface arguing (funnily enough) at length against the Muirs’ 1930s domestication of Kafka. Murakami Haruki’s Underground (Vintage International, 2001, trans. Alfred Birnbaum & Philip Gabriel), a work of reportage on the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, opens with a six-page author’s preface before the first survivor interview. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translations of Dostoevsky, which have been the standard anglophone Dostoevsky since the 1990s, have substantial translator’s forewords signed by Pevear. Crime and Punishment (Vintage, 1993) opens with a foreword of roughly twenty pages, and Demons (Knopf, 1994) opens with one of roughly thirty pages; each is followed by a separate ‘Translators’ Note’. Anglophone readers of literary translations have been comfortable with substantial front matter, and King’s defence would surprise the readers of Kafka, Murakami, and Dostoevsky. Some may argue that Taiwan Travelogue is a more modern creation and should not be compared to Dostoevsky or Kafka, but it is worth reminding ourselves that Yang’s frame narrative places Taiwan Travelogue in exactly this rank: a 1954 Japanese novel by a famed writer, a 1990 Mandarin translation, and a 2020 retranslation each carrying its own paratextual apparatus. Yang does her part as an author to fabricate a detailed and historical-minded preface by a literary critic (Hiyoshi Sagako), a preface that King decided that the anglophone readers would not need since they were ‘not accustomed to’ such things.
A charitable reader might rework King’s claim into something narrower: perhaps she was not saying that English-language readers in general reject long front matter, but that the contemporary anglophone reader skips it, ignores it, or even loathes it. Even this narrower claim does not survive inspection, however. It is true that a cursory look shows contemporary English readers skipping prefaces on a first pass. On a Reddit thread in r/books with hundreds of replies, the top-voted one says that ‘as a rule of thumb, if the preface is not by the author, then skip it. Way too often, there are spoilers there’; others tend to propose skipping the preface for fiction because ‘too many prefaces, introductions, translator’s notes have spoilers in them’. But the intention behind skipping prefaces is usually to avoid spoilers, and the near-universal follow-up is that they come back to the preface after finishing the book. A reader who for instance skips Pevear’s thirty-page foreword to Demons still owns the book; they can turn back to it after the novel, or five years later, or hand it to a friend who does want it. A reader of Taiwan Travelogue is robbed of such luxury.
Even if we grant King the front-matter defence, what she calls trimming removes about a third of the preface’s Chinese text and eliminates almost every element that makes the original preface a colonial-literary argument. After paragraph fifteen, the Chinese preface turns to extended literary-critical work. Hiyoshi points out that in chapter IX of the novel, Aoyama mentions wanting to write a story called 〈龍脈記〉 (‘Record of the Dragon Vein’) and a book called 《臺灣縱貫鐵道》 (The Taiwan North-South Railway), and argues that any reader familiar with Taiwanese literary history would recognise these as titles by Nishikawa Mitsuru, the real-life leading Japanese colonial-literature writer in Taiwan in the 1940s. Hiyoshi then walks the reader through Shimada Kinji’s gaichi bungaku (外地文學, ‘foreign [here used perogatorily] literature’) theory, in which colonial literature is required to look like colonial literature, exotic and consistent with the imperial narrative. Hiyoshi also talks about the kuso realism (糞寫實主義) controversy in which Nishikawa’s Bungei Taiwan (《文藝臺灣》, literally Literary Taiwan) attacked the Taiwanese-realist writers of Taiwan Bungaku (《臺灣文學》, Taiwan Literature). Hiyoshi argues that Aoyama’s chapter-IX ‘homage’ to Nishikawa is Aoyama’s coded self-criticism, an acknowledgement that her own earlier serialised Taiwan dispatches, the Taiwan Travelogue essay series that gave the novel its title, were of Nishikawa’s kind. This scholarly scaffolding frames the novel within the colonial-literary tradition, explicitly as a conversation between the colonisers and the colonised.
And then, we realise that none of this historical context and background survive in the English version. Nishikawa is not mentioned; gaichi bungaku is not mentioned; the kuso realism controversy is not mentioned; the entire argument about Aoyama’s chapter-IX homage as coded self-critique is not mentioned. The English reader is given the biographical opening (Hiyoshi is a wansei, Aoyama was a real coloniser), and the entire scholarly argument is removed. I would like to again remind us here that the preface is not just any regular preface, but part of the novel, as a critical contextualising lens in Yang’s frame narrative.
King’s ‘trimming’, sadly, does not stop here. The Chinese preface uses Brokeback Mountain (2005) to frame Aoyama and Chizuru’s relationship as a queer tragedy of historical impossibility: Aoyama spent one year in Taiwan, her real attachment is not to Taiwan but to the year she spent with Chizuru, exactly like Jack in Brokeback clinging to the summer of 1963. This is cut in the English. The Chinese preface then extends the book’s power argument beyond colonialism into all structural relations, using a family-elder analogy:
好比家裡長輩熱情地誇耀自己有人脈，能幫忙安插職位，「這份工作好啊，穩定又有錢」，卻沒問過當事人的意向⋯⋯無論是否懷著「善意」，權力的可憎之處，就在於主體被無視或移除⋯⋯習於權力者無法意識到剝削。
‘A family elder boasts about their connections, arranges a job (“this job is great, stable and well-paid”) for you but not for once asks about your preferences… Whether or not the elder acts with “goodwill”, the terrible thing about power is that subjectivity is ignored or removed… Those accustomed to power cannot perceive exploitation.’ This is cut in the English. The Chinese preface closes with 「青山千鶴子與王千鶴，有並肩走著同一條路的日子嗎？」 (Aoyama Chizuko and Ō Chizuru: would they ever be able to walk the same path side by side?), a poignant question that places the reader directly within the colonial argument about power hierarchy. This is also cut in the English, which ends its preface on a generic reading instruction.
No published English-language review of Taiwan Travelogue that I could find mentions any of these cuts. Nor did any Chinese-language review I could find raise the specific Nishikawa or Brokeback deletions. King’s Booker interview, where she describes her approach as ‘maximalist’ and says she ‘broke countless translation rules’, does not discuss what she cut; her published translator’s note in the 2024 Graywolf edition does not either. The Reporter interview is the only place she mentions the trim, but she has no other justification other than that English readers are not ‘accustomed to long front matter’, a claim that we have discussed at length above.
King kept the wansei biography, the interpretive discussion of Chizuru as metaphor, and so on. She cut the literary-historical argument: Nishikawa, gaichi bungaku, kuso realism, the Brokeback frame, the power-extension, the closing question which remotely echoes the China Mainland-Taiwan relationship of this moment. I cannot guess the intention behind such edits, but I do hope that one day King would address them more openly.
We certainly should not view King’s translation of Taiwan Travelogue in a vacuum. Luk Van Haute, who translates Murakami Haruki from Japanese into Dutch, compared his Dutch Dans dans dans (2008) against Alfred Birnbaum’s English Dance Dance Dance (1994) and found the English roughly a hundred pages shorter than the Japanese original: references to Boy George, the Everly Brothers, a Beach Boys album, a scene of the protagonist reading Playboy on a balcony, and a piña colada served to a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl are all absent from the English. Van Haute has since told Dutch editors not to use English translations of Japanese literature as reference material, because they intervene too heavily in the source, cutting or adding. Jay Rubin, translating The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) for Knopf, cut roughly 25,000 words (approximately sixty-one pages, including three complete chapters) because Knopf told Murakami the novel ran too long and Rubin worried that otherwise a freelancer might ‘wreak havoc on the novel’. Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan’s longtime English translator, describes his own method as translating his understanding of the text, not what the author literally wrote; Chinese critics have characterised his approach as ‘连译带改’, translating-while-editing.
Seen from this perspective, King’s Taiwan Travelogue sits in the same tradition of English translators drastically editing source text to serve an audience deemed, perhaps unfortunately, too uninitiated for the original, be it the fault of the translators or the publishers (like in Jay Rubin’s case). But even so, King’s work occupies the grey zone of uplifting and rewriting the source text. Birnbaum’s Dance Dance Dance is a hundred pages thinner but still recognisably Murakami; Rubin’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle lost three chapters but remains the same sprawling metaphysical thriller; Goldblatt’s Mo Yan is leaner, sometimes controversially so, but Red Sorghum in English is still hallucinatory Gaomi County folklore. King removes historical context that is central to the book’s argument (the gaichi bungaku scaffolding, the Brokeback Mountain frame, the power-extension analogy, the closing question) and pushes the book’s manga dialogue into historical literary style, producing not a trimmed version of the same novel but a novel of a different kind, albeit with a preserved plot.
Breon Mitchell’s 1998 Schocken retranslation of The Trial is useful here as a benchmark for what a translator can do in the service of fidelity. Kafka’s opening sentence (‘Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet’) ends on ‘verhaftet’ (‘arrested’) per German grammar, where ‘wurde’ pushes the past participle in to the final position. In other words: the German reader does not know that K. has been arrested until the final word, and anyone who reads German should be able to feel the impact of ‘verhaftet’ when it arrives finally. Willa and Edwin Muir’s 1937 English relocates the word to the middle of the sentence and ends instead on ‘one fine morning’; Mitchell restores the German order and closes on ‘arrested’: ‘Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.’ Mitchell’s English reads less smoothly than the Muirs’, which is exactly the point. In his long translator’s note preface, Mitchell explains that the strangeness Kafka’s German confronts the German reader with is preserved as strangeness for the English reader. King’s own translator’s note and public defences describe a foreignising (borrowing Venuti’s complementary term to domestication) practice at the surface level: she kept footnotes, insisted on multiple pronunciation systems, refused to smooth the interpreter’s Japanese name Ō Chizuru into an English equivalent, preserved accents and tones. All of this asks the English reader to familiarise themselves with the multilingual nature of colonial Taiwan. This makes it doubly frustrating when we recognise that at the level of syntax, register, and authorial argument, King’s translation moves in the opposite direction.
Antoine Berman, whose theory Venuti built on, describes in his essay ‘Translation and Trials of the Foreign’ the twelve deforming tendencies in translation. We shall here borrow three of these twelve terms in an attempt to formalise what King does to Yang’s 《臺灣漫遊錄》. Ennoblement (or popularisation) refers to elevating/polishing the source’s literary register (「太厲害了」 becoming ‘What a marvel’, 「唔嗯嗚咕」 becoming ‘I mumbled’, 「哎呀哎呀」 becoming ‘Oh dear’; the aforementioned transformation of manga-cadence into historical literary voice reminiscent of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day). Rationalisation is resolving the source’s ambiguities into explicit target-language syntax (Aoyama’s confused 「真是不明白這個人啊！」 becoming the diagnostic ‘Inscrutable’, Aoyama’s open-ended offer becoming the category-fixing ‘As a friend?’). And lastly, destruction of underlying networks of signification means breaking the source’s internal cross-references (Chapter II’s ko-omote dropped at its first appearance, the leakage of real-world bereavement into the afterward where ‘my sister’ becomes ‘my late sister’). The resulting text, under King’s treatment, is what Gilles Ménage would (sexistly) call ‘belles infidèles’: a translation that reads more beautifully (belles) than its source, at the cost of departing significantly from it (infidèles). King’s English version of Taiwan Travelogue is undoubtedly a much better book, more beautiful and elegant than Yang’s Chinese original, but we should ask, at the cost of invoking cliché, the question of ‘Is it worth it?’
But even belles infidèles, in its historical usage, addressed only beautification of an existing text, not the excision of large sections of authorial argument. Once we combine these various terms from translation theorists, what we get is the notion that the translation industry now uses as an umbrella: transcreation. This is what King herself describes when she told the Booker Prizes that she took ‘a maximalist approach, broke countless translation rules, and ended up with an experimental, multilayered work’; her editor at Graywolf, Yuka Igarashi, ‘trusted [her] to run wild with a complex mix of languages, notations, and footnotes’. King is also candid, in the same interview, that she ‘made the mistake of being intimidated by my author’ and ‘was scared to ask Shuāng-zǐ too many questions for fear that she would find me unfit for the job’: is this a defence or merely a joke? The maximalist transcreation was done with editorial encouragement but without close dialogue with the author whose book was being transcreated. This, at the very least, should hopefully not be the standard practice in translation.
King does preserve much of what makes Taiwan Travelogue the novel it is. As we mentioned before, the plot is intact, the character work is intact, and the novel’s colonial thesis, the line the anglophone reception has quoted most, is faithfully transplanted into English. In chapter V, after a banquet dinner, Aoyama tells Chizuru that the Empire’s Southwards Expansion Movement and its National Mobilisation Movement are ‘brute acts of erasing the distinctions of individual cultures’. Aoyama goes on to lament the erasure of Ainu culture in Hokkaidō and Ryūkyūan culture in Okinawa, arguing that Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria will follow the same path; Chizuru’s devastating reply is ‘But Aoyama-san, Taiwan is already walking that same path’. I therefore do wonder whether, without the prologue’s historical scaffolding, anglophone readers still perceive in Taiwan Travelogue an inspired scholarly conversation about gaichi bungaku and colonial literature.
And this is a good place for us to look back to Yan Fu’s ordering of a translator’s obligations, and to Kundera. King’s Taiwan Travelogue has elevated 雅 (elegance) at the cost of 信 (fidelity); she has, in the specific sense Kundera meant, replaced Yang’s deliberate manga-repetitions in the yuri genre with elegant English literary equivalents. The International Booker Prize’s £50,000 split between author and translator is a formal acknowledgement of the translator’s creative contribution; the National Book Award does not split its purse but names the translator on the citation. Both prizes were designed, in part, to correct the historical invisibility of translators, and there is nothing dishonest in a translator being honoured for substantial work. Yet the reviews of Taiwan Travelogue in the anglophone press have praised Yang’s prose (vivid, sensory, and restrained: the former two arguably true, but ‘restrained’ Yang’s prose is certainly not), Yang’s frame (brilliantly layered and exceptionally sophisticated). Some even provide false justifications for such a blind bundling of the author and the translator: Antonia Finnane, reviewing the book for Inside Story, writes that ‘the strategies [Lin King] adopts are true to the tenor of Yang Shuang-zi’s writing’. Hopefully based on the evidence laid out here, we can see that Finnane’s evaluation is categorically wrong: Yang’s tenor is light novel, King’s tenor is interwar historical literary fiction. The praise for Yang’s prose is, substantially, praise for King’s.
So, who won the International Booker Prize this year? I can only say that it is probably the transcreated work that only King and Yang together could have produced. It is a work that no anglophone jury could reasonably have understood as such, though, because anglophone jury most likely does not read the source text. Goldblatt, who served as a judge for a PEN translation prize, says in an interview that ‘the only U.S. prize in which the translation is first checked for accuracy is the Translation of the Year Award from the American Literary Translators Association. That means that the other prizes are given for the book, not the translation, since the judges cannot know if in fact the translators have done their job well.’ The jury citations praise ‘Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King’. Given what the translation is, the citation might more accurately read ‘Yang Shuang-zi, transcreated by Lin King’. Well, given the frame narrative that Yang built about ‘who is really writing what’, she probably would not mind.
