“I became, in a small way, a character throughout the book,” Taiwanese translator Lin King observed about her newest work, Taiwan Travelogue. Selected as a National Book Award finalist for translated literature, Taiwan Travelogue is the English translation of 臺灣漫遊錄 (Táiwān mànyóu lù) written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ. Set in the 1930s, the novel follows a popular Japanese writer named Chizuko who travels to Taiwan to promote her work and also learn more about this colony. Chizuru, a Taiwanese interpreter fluent in Japanese, Mandarin, and English (to name a few), joins Chizuko’s travels. Together, the two women journey around Taiwan in a dynamic story of language, food, history, queerness, and colonialism.
During our call, King noted with a quirk of a smile that the original Mandarin Chinese novel had fictional footnotes. Since the story is presented as a Mandarin translation of a Japanese work, Yáng pretended to be a translator. Now that Taiwan Travelogue is available in English, this metafictional work gets even more meta. The real translations add fascinating layers to the topics Taiwan Travelogue explores.
Timid spoke with Lin King about translating Taiwan Travelogue, being a National Book Award finalist, and what translating the novel as a Taiwanese person means to her.
Lin King: It's so thrilling! There haven't been that many Mandarin language books to get to the NBAs, and this year we were the only representation from the continent of Asia in the long list—and in the shortlist. So that's a huge honor and not what we expected, especially now when I feel like there is a boom in recognition of literature from Korea and Japan. To be singled out in this way—and it's the first time that a Taiwanese author has been nominated—it's overall this very exciting [time] and where both the author and I are really just thrilled and can't really believe what's going on.
LK: I actually started working on this because I've done a chapbook for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Margins, where I met Shuāng-zǐ. I was assigned that piece because I know Japanese and that piece has a lot of linguistic elements.
She actually wanted her debut novel, 花開時節 [The Season When Flowers Bloom], to be translated first, but she didn’t own the rights for that one. So she was like, “[Taiwan Travelogue] is my latest novel; do you want to read it and tell me what you think?” I [felt] like this would be formally, structurally interesting for a further translation from the premise. I took my sample and pitched it to a few publishers and we ultimately went with Graywolf.
LK: My first language was Mandarin—it's what I speak at home—and I was exposed to Taiwanese also very early on because of family. I was born in the US and raised in Taiwan, but because I had a US passport and my parents had lived and worked and studied here for many years, there was an expectation that you will also go and then work and study there in the future even though in my entire childhood was in Taiwan. So I started learning English when I was very young and did my secondary education and higher education entirely in English. I would say that it is my primary language, at least in an academic or literary capacity.
I started learning Japanese in college, largely because I had placed out of Mandarin…I started Japanese because of all the similarities and because I had grown up very close to Japanese culture being Taiwanese. Then through a confluence of different factors, the first job that I had outside of college, I had to translate and interpret a lot between the three languages. I was working for an artist who worked a lot in these three languages, [and] I just kept it up.
LK: This is kind of niche but the fact that the original novel had these translator's fictional footnotes. I could tag on and add my own, so I became, in a small way, a character throughout the book. [The fact] that both Shuāng-zǐ and I were characters in this book in a small way… that was really fun. And it's a really rare opportunity that could only happen because the story was written that way.
TM: How else did you prepare to translate Taiwan Travelogue into English?
LK: I wouldn’t say it was a preparation, but just having to do a lot of online research. Because I was in the US for most of it, it was kind of hard to confirm some things. The Japanese translation was super helpful because I definitely did catch several mistakes—or rather, “Oh, this is how a professional Japanese translator interpreted this pronunciation of this now obsolete thing that was in colonial Taiwan…” I had the benefit of having done all my research and then having access to her research because it was published first. So [I’m] very grateful to Yuko Miura for her work. And the Japanese translation also was the first-ever Taiwanese novel to win the Japanese translation prize, so I really think this is a translators’ book.
LK: I learned more details because Shuāng-zǐ had done so much research […] about the food and the architecture of these cities.
In my experience at least, most people in the US don't know that Taiwan was, rather recently, ruled by Japan for 50 years. I’d get people asking me why many people are so obsessed with Japan, and I’d be like “Well, probably because if they are older, they probably were ‘Japanese’ for a while…” It’s interesting to see the gap. If they could know that [and] be able to construct a little bit better why Taiwanese identity is such a fraught topic for Taiwanese people and why there is a sense of difference from other Sinophone cultures and nations, then I would be happy.
LK: Nowadays, you see a revival of the celebration of the Japanese period in Taiwan, and I think it ties into modern geopolitics in a really interesting way because Japan is one of Taiwan's closest allies now. A lot of my Japanese friends tell me there's been this boom in Taiwanese visibility and tourism in Japan over the past few years. I'm sure that's the product of both people naturally being interested but also the governments probably collaborating to facilitate some of that.
One interesting phenomena I’ve noticed in the past couple years is a lot more celebration of the old architecture that remains in Taiwan from the Japanese era. So you get chic cafes now that make use of the old Japanese architecture and older Japanese tourists coming to Taiwan to reminisce about their youth. It's an interesting thing and very fraught when you think about the power dynamics that [used] to exist, that currently exist. Maybe part of why the Japanese translation was so well-received there is also because of that. For a long time, Japan didn’t want to acknowledge the failed colonies, and now there's more of that talk going on there. And in Taiwan, it's become this almost political part of our identity. So I feel like this is a timely book, and hopefully people will be able to see the current relationships and see this as part of the history.
LK: I feel like it is this little known part of Taiwanese history, or maybe just [East] Asian history…Another element that we haven't really discussed is the queerness of [Taiwan Travelogue]. That is also like a big part of a Taiwanese identity and something that I, as a Taiwanese person, am super proud of—that we have been a pioneer in a more socially conservative part of the world.
There are many ways in which [the title] wouldn't have ended up as just Taiwan Travelogue, but that was something that I feel quite strongly about. Now that it's getting this amazing recognition—the fact of just being printed in The New Yorker, printed in The New York Times—this title means so much to me, and it just feels like such amazing visibility at a time when we need it.
Taiwan Travelogue was published on November 12, 2024.
Disclaimer: This interview was edited for length and clarity.
