_There are multiple reasons that Brendan O’Kane’s been on my list of people to interview someday for this blog. One is that Megan Shank, who co-edits the Asia Section with me, has been singing his praises for a year now, saying he’s one of the smartest translators of Chinese literature out there and that we need to find a way to get him into the LARB. Another is that, last October, he wrote one of the most buzzed about—and most provocative as well as most provocatively titled—commentaries on Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize win: “Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?” [. . .]

Two things, though, led me to move O’Kane from my “interview someday” list to my “interview now” one. First, when I asked Julia Lovell about translation trends in my recent interview with her, she noted the importance of the magazines Pathlight and Chutzpah!, and Brendan’s a contributing editor to the former (which is affiliated with the excellent Paper Republic translation website founded by Eric Abrahamsen and Cindy Carter) and a contributor to the latter. Second, I came across a lively interview that Alec Ash, who writes regularly for the China Blog, did with him for the Anthill as O’Kane was preparing to move back to the U.S. to start graduate school after a long stint in China._

How interesting is this interview? Just check out the first question and response:

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Let’s start with a topic close to your heart: English language translations of Chinese literature. A lot has been going on lately. Penguin has been putting out works from China’s Republican era. A few years ago, they published a new translation of Lu Xun’s complete works of fiction. This year, they’ve published two Lao She novels that, unlike most of his best-known works, are not set in his native Beijing. One of these, translated by William Dolby and introduced smartly by Julia Lovell, is set in London and titled Mr. Ma and Son. The other, which is a reissue of an old William Lyell translation but comes with an excellent new introduction by Ian Johnson, Cat Country, is set even further from Beijing—on Mars! Some commentators have also pointed to a notable increase lately in the number of contemporary Chinese authors being translated. What struck you as the most important shift during your time in China?

Brendan O’Kane: I’d love to say that there had been a major shift, but I’m not really sure that there has — at least, not on the publishing side of things. There are more works in translation coming out now than there were before, but that’s a pretty low bar: Only 11 translations from Chinese were published in book form in the U.S. last year. That was actually down from the heady days of 2011, when a whopping 12 books came out. Literature in translation is always a hard sell for publishers in the English-speaking world, and Chinese literature in English translation hasn’t yet found its Haruki Murakami, or Italo Calvino in terms of influence and cachet, let alone its Stieg Larsson in terms of sales.

Things have changed on the translation side, though: there are now quite a lot of native English speakers with good real-world Mandarin, probably more than at any point in the past, and this is a part of a much larger and more important shift. When I started studying Chinese in 1999, it was still kind of a weird language for an American to take up. The general public’s mental image of China was probably just about evenly split between Red Guards and Kung-Fu monks. It wasn’t a place that people thought, knew, or cared very much about, one way or the other. The US is still in the very early stages of awareness — to say nothing of knowledge and understanding — but as far as I’m concerned it’s only going to get better from here on out.

So anyway: things are still pretty dire on the Chinese-literature-in-English-translation front, but we’ve got a more diverse range of translators than ever before, and they are applying their talents to a wider range of Chinese authors. (Some of these authors are even girls!) There’s a hell of a lot more happening on the supply side these days than at any point in the past, and maybe even a little more than usual on the demand side as well — much of that coming from new magazines like Pathlight and Chutzpah which I know have come up on this blog before, and also Asymptote, a more generally translation-focused publication that’s also worth watching. Publishers continue to be the major obstacle, but something’s eventually going to have to give on that front, too.

And then this:

JW: Let’s turn to a different subject: the Nobel Prize. There are some who insist that Lu Xun should have been the first Chinese writer to win the award. Others have said that the honor should have gone to other authors who were active prior to 1949, such as Lao She. In the end, though, the first two to get it were Gao Xingjian, who was living in France as an exile by the time he won, and then, last year, Mo Yan, who is still based in his native country. You did a memorable post for the lively group blog Rectified.name about the early responses to the latter’s Nobel Prize win. Can you sum up for LARB readers who missed it what your main point was in that piece, which was discussed by many China specialists and also got caught the attention of Salon, which referred to it in its piece on the issue?

BO’K: A lot of people I generally admire and agree with (like Salman Rushdie and the China scholar Perry Link) or sympathize with (like Chinese writers in exile Liao Yiwu and Ma Jian) responded to the news of his win by accusing Mo Yan of being a state writer and an apologist for the Chinese government. Ai Weiwei did his usual thing of cursing a lot on Twitter; Meng Huang, a Chinese artist now based in Germany, struck a blow for freedom of speech by streaking outside the Nobel banquet hall in Stockholm. (Mo Yan didn’t really do himself any favors in his public remarks in Stockholm either, especially when he compared censorship in China to airport security protocols, in the sense of being an unavoidable inconvenience.) A lot of the commentary boiled down to “Mo Yan is a bad writer because Liu Xiaobo shouldn’t be in jail.”

I found the whole thing depressing and dispiriting, because this should not be an either/or proposition: Mo Yan didn’t send Liu Xiaobo to jail, and there is absolutely nothing he could say or do, up to and including getting the words “FREE LIU XIAOBO” tattooed on his bald pate, that would do one bit of good for Liu Xiaobo or anyone else in China. (This is especially clear given the Chinese government’s continued persecution of Liu’s brother in law Liu Hui, and the ongoing extrajudicial house arrest of Liu’s wife Liu Xia: the authorities are impervious to moral argument, and they have no shame.) Mo is a deputy chairman of the China Writers’ Association, which is to say that he has slightly less power, in actual terms, than your average deputy chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts in the US. Meanwhile, as much as we might wish otherwise, moral/political courage and literary merit are not the same thing — if writing bad poetry were a criminal offense, Liu Xiaobo would never see daylight again. So I wrote that post on Rectified.name in hopes of getting people to disentangle the two. Once you do that, and once you actually read Mo Yan’s books, I think you find that he’s a much sharper writer than he’s been given credit for. His books don’t make any kind of overt criticisms of the system — perhaps because he’s overly cautious; perhaps because he’s just not much interested in lifting his gaze from the village level — but they are all, in one way or another, about the human suffering created, perpetuated, and intensified by that system.

As for the question of who should or shouldn’t have gotten the Nobel: every now and then you’ll hear that Lao She had been in line for the Nobel before he was driven to suicide by Red Guards, or that Shen Congwen, another leading figure of that generation, was one phone call away from winning the Nobel at the time of his death. I’m not sure that these are any more truthful than the stories about how everyone in China might now be speaking Cantonese (or Shanghainese, or Sichuanese), but for a single vote. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Chinese author more important or influential than Lu Xun, to be sure, but I’d probably be on Team Lao She. Though if we’re allowed to pick any Chinese writer who was active in the Republican era (1912-1949), I’d rather see the award go posthumously to Qian Zhongshu, the author of Fortress Besieged — a genuinely world-class novel that unfortunately suffers badly in its current English translation.

Seriously—go

One of my favorite moments of BookExpo America was hanging out with Stephen Sparks, who is one of the coolest and smartest booksellers out there, and a great Best Translated Book Award judge.

So here, thanks to the are the two of them together.

Stephen Sparks: You just about stumbled into translating Chinese. Can you tell us a little bit about your history with the language and how coming to it accidentally has shaped your work, if at all?

Howard Goldblatt: Truth be told, I’ve stumbled into nearly every aspect of my relationship with China and the Chinese language. Had I been sent to sea directly from Naval OCS during the early phase of the Vietnam War, like my classmates, instead of Taiwan, none of the rest of my life would have turned out remotely as it did. Had I been accepted into any graduate program in Chinese other than the only one that grudgingly let me in the door, I’d not have chosen a thesis topic that led to my discovery of a writer, Xiao Hong, practically no one had heard of at the time, who is now one of the giants of the period, and who put me on the map, as it were. And since none of her work was available in English, I ventured into the field of translation and haven’t stopped since. My critical biography of her (in Chinese) and rendering of her masterwork, Tales of Hulan River, are still in print, 40 years later. Then, “affirmative action” got me a job at that same university in a department that, untill that time, was comprised solely of native speakers of Chinese. Finally, Nieh Hualing, who, with her husband, poet Paul Engle, ran the Iowa Writers Workshop, stumbled upon my translation and recommended me to translate a novel for a large commercial press. I’ve had lots of help along the way and more than a little luck; my indebtedness to those factors manifests itself in my passion (some might call it obsession) for translating literary texts — mainly fiction — from Chinese. I simply cannot think of a single thing I’d rather be doing professionally. [. . .]

SS: You’ve said, without arrogance, that anyone who reads Mo Yan in English is reading Howard Goldblatt. How do you define what a translator does? And how does your understanding of translation relate to your characterization of translators as being eternally apologetic?

HG: I still find it baffling that a reviewer of a translation can credit or fault the author of a book for good/bad writing. It’s probably wrong to do that with the translator as well, though they are her words, since unless the reviewer knows the original language, he cannot be sure where the merit/fault lies. On behalf of literary translators everywhere, let me declare that we have nothing to apologize for, save screwing up a translation and, maybe, the occasional bad choice of what to translate. And yet, some outlets continue to omit translators’ names in published reviews, leading a reader to assume that the work was written in English, and it has taken years to get publishers to prominently display the fact that what the reader has in her hands is a facsimile of the original work. Whenever I begin to question my role in the literary process, I pull out my copy of Robert Wechsler’s book, Performing without a Stage, for encouragement. He reminds us not only of the perils we face (“There is no such thing as a good translator.” I.B. Singer) but, importantly, the signal service we provide (“Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization.” Borges). One question I’m often asked is for whom I translate — the author or the reader. While the choice is more nuanced than that, my answer never varies. The author wrote for his readers, and that is for whom I translate.

There are some prizes given to translated fiction — the American PEN Center award, the Best Translated Book Award, the Man Asian Prize (also available to works written in English), the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and more. But 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; I served as a judge for one of the PEN contests, in which a great many languages were included, while we judges were competent in three or four. I loved the book we chose, but to this day can state only that the translation read well. [. . .]

SS: How has translation changed for you as your understanding of Chinese culture and literary practices deepened?

HG: The obvious assumption would be that the process has become smoother, more comfortable, more internalized, while in fact my progression has had a somewhat unsteadying effect; maybe it’s a case of “the more I know, the more I realize I don’t know.” Or maybe my self-imposed standards have gotten more demanding. I don’t seek perfection; I just try to ensure that my renderings are, in the end, better than anyone else’s could be. And when I fail, I grieve (that’s a bit dramatic, I know). In a recent review of a novel by Mo Yan, which the reviewer absolutely hated (she too is a novelist, a breed that as often as not seems to hate other people’s novels), she loved the English title, which was not a literal translation of the Chinese, but a homonym of part of it, but then raked me over the coals for 1) exoticizing the text (she wanted me to use “Mum” and “Dad” for “Dieh” and “Niang” — to each her own, I say), and 2) for the descriptive “sick turtle.” Why, she asked, didn’t I simply say “stupid prick”? And she was right; what was I thinking? A bad stumble, in my mind. I don’t mind so much when I make a mistake; we all do that, authors included. What I hate is fouling a work by translating words and missing their impact or intent or tone. That would not have bothered me 20 years ago, at least not as much as it does now. In some respects, experience has been a boon, in that I’ve learned how to negotiate treacherous semantic waters with the confidence to simply bow to realities and move on when I encounter untranslatable items.

Read the whole interview and then be sure and buy a copy of