Why This Taiwanese Book is Masquerading as a Rediscovered Japanese Novel

Photo by Y K on Unsplash Electric Literature Urgently Needs Your Help For the 15,000 people who visit our site every day, reading Electric Literature costs nothing. And yet Electric Lit is not free. We need to raise $25,000 by December 31, 2024 to keep Electric Literature going into next year. If the continued existence of Electric Literature means something to you, please make a contribution today . Written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King , Taiwan Travelogue masquerades as a translation of a rediscovered text from a Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, who sails to Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938 and becomes infatuated with Taiwanese cuisine, culture, and her charming interpreter, Chizuru. As the novel unfolds, Aoyama is forced to reckon with the impact of the imperialist regime she represents, and how those power dynamics inevitably bleed into her cherished relationships with the people of the island. With footnotes from both Yang and King sprawled throughout its pages, the reader must interrogate if they can trust Aoyama-san as a reliable narrator and her perspective as a colonizer on colonized land, and more importantly, ask themselves what biases their own interpretation of the story. I sat down with King to discuss the very meta process of translating a novel about translation, the impact she hopes English readers will gain from a queer story set in Japanese occupied-Taiwan, and how it feels to have translated the first Taiwanese novel to be longlisted (and therefore shortlisted) for the National Book Award in translation. Hairol Ma: First off, congratulations on being a National Book Award finalist for translation. How does it feel to have translated the first Taiwanese novel to ever make the longlist? Lin King: It’s all very surreal. It feels like a confluence of timing and what the book is about, since the content itself is about translation, but it was definitely a surprise. We’re also the only translated book from East Asia to be nominated in the longlist this year. I personally don’t have any expectations going into the winner announcement, because having gotten this far is already a […]

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