by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (China, Columbia University Press)

I’m not sure how to define historical fiction. How true does regular fiction need to be to become historical fiction? Is historical fiction something more than entertainment? If so, is it less entertainment than entirely fictional fiction? (Has anyone ever stayed within realism and written entirely fictional fiction, not bringing in some small history, some personal history? I doubt it.) Is this novel—which is maybe not even all that fictional—historical fiction? I’m not sure it really even matters, I’m just having trouble imagining a way to pin this book down long enough to write about it. It’s a book built on the past but that needs the future too, the time ahead.

On October 27, 1930, at a sports meet on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, the Atayal tribe rose up against the Japanese colonial regime, slaying one hundred and thirty-four people in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese response brought the tribe to the brink of genocide

That part is true, if that kind of thing matters to you. The impetus of Remains of Life is something like an investigation into this event, The Musha Incident. In the afterword, author Wu He writes:

This novel is about three things:

First, the legitimacy and justification behind Mona Rudao launching “The Musha Incident.” In addition to the second Musha Incident.

Second, the Quest of Girl, Who was my next-door neighbor during my time staying on the reservation.

Third, the Remains of Life that I visited and observed while on the reservation.

All this happens concurrently, in a single unbroken, stream-of-consciousness paragraph, with fewer full stops than there are days in the week. In the text, translated by Michael Berry, a conversation with one of the villagers (the “Remains of Life”) can spark a winding, philosophical assessment of the facts of the Musha Incident—

History records the facts, but contemporary history never investigates the facts, it instead investigates the “legitimacy of historical incidents”

—which can eventually abruptly be broken by the appearance of Girl, Wu He’s neighbor and guide who introduces him to even more of the Remains of Life, characters allegorically named, and sometimes renamed, for how Wu He sees and thinks of them: Girl; Boss; Pimp-Bastard; Old Man; Playboy; Skinny Monkey; any of whom might want to talk about any imaginable thing, even their thoughts on the honesty of the novel being written by Wu He.

I need to be loyal to the true face of my writing.

Clause by clause, the novel grows. Conversation, rumination, and observation are modes used to braid Wu He’s three threads, all inspiring and clarifying each other. The past refracts and informs the present, and the way we carry ourselves through the present dictates how we can think about the past. The novel builds. It cycles, it morphs, it reacts. And it grows. The block of text just keeps growing, like life. The relentless prose brings to mind Thomas Bernhard, or even Pierre Guyotat in some regards, but the effect of the prose is to me most like W.G. Sebald. There’s a shared bravery in their not explaining that which can not fully explained, and a peace in looking at it anyway. The text of Remains of Life is not showy circumlocution, or the kind of modernist mishmash you probably think of when you hear “single unbroken paragraph” or “stream-of-consciousness.” It’s a careful, thoughtful accrual of exactly what all an honest man can take in while carrying on. It’s a difficult book to read, though not because it’s hard to pay attention to, or hard to follow—t’s actually delightful, line by line—but because the structure of the book forces the reader into the same position as the narrator: because there are no breaks or refrains, you have to take what you read and carry it with you, forward, into the future and into meaning.

I don’t give much thought to the past destroying the present or the present destroying the future, that’s how I will spend my Remains of Life—in bed with my mind devoid of all thoughts and contemplation

To circle back to my initial questions, Wu He’s Remains of Life is historical fiction, though it doesn’t function remotely like any I’ve read before. It certainly deals with history. It’s a way to start thinking about it, at least. But the reason it should win the Best Translated Book Award isn’t that it’s great historical fiction, it’s that it’s decisively present fiction in a way that no other book I’ve read is. The overlapping layers of consciousness and threads of story serve to collectively mirror back a life; a man, heartbroken, does not so much investigate as he does accrue. He has freewheeling conversations with everyone he encounters because he wants to know more, and they have conversations with him because he listens. He gathers. He adds to himself without reducing the people around him. Their existences are also true. The past becomes both more and less clear. He meditates. He’s trying to understand a number of things, but he doesn’t know if that’s possible, or even predict how he might go about accomplishing understanding. He meditates. He’s content to just try. He carries forward into his own ever-changing Remains of Life. So he goes on, his eyes, his ears, and his heart all wide open, available for whatever happens in the next conversation, or on the next line.

There’s something gratifying to digging in and unpeeling all the logical fallacies and pretzel-twist arguments that people make about sports on the regular. And because sports is both objective and communal in the sense of having actual games that have actual winners and losers, and open to subjective scrutiny about strategies untried, player motivation, and grit, hot takes will never go away. Which is fun! I love me a good hot-takedown.

I often wish that the book world had a few more of these hot take coots. Sure, there are media people offering up crap takes on Twitter all day, every day, but these rarely ascend to the level of verbosity and manic, laser-focused attack that you find on something like Hot Take. Imagine if there was a going off about the NY Times Bestseller list, or the new Grove catalog. How fun would that be? And how fun would it be to break apart that person’s blistering attacks? Oh so very.

I should make it clear that I’m really thinking about fiction here. And not just a scathing bad review—that’s fine, that’s something that might divide opinions, but rarely do these have the sort of unhinged quality of a really juicy hot take. The literary world is far too reasonable (which is shocking, when you pause to think about it) to provide a meaningful platform to someone claiming that Stephen King’s latest shouldn’t be sold in Barnes & Noble because he doesn’t stand for the national anthem at Red Sox games. Or whatever. Something impassioned and nonsensical. But worthy of an 8-minute read on Medium. Something capturing the fire of the old Tanizaki vs. Akutagawa debates, but without that degree of learnedness.

Actually, the perfect example is Franzen’s incredibly awful take on What a bunch of hot garbage! And what a great job Ben Marcus did of More of that, please!

by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated from the Japanese by Phyllis I. Lyons (Columbia University Press)

For a few days, I played with the idea of trying to write a blistering hot take about Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Black and White, but I honestly don’t have the right mix of delusion and talent to make that really work.

But, if I was going to write some half-cocked take, I would probably come out swinging:

In the history of publishing, how many times has the �ٰ����Բ������ٴǰ�’s afterword—yes, the �ٰ����Բ������ٴǰ�’s—been a far superior reading experience to the work of some ordained “master” of literature? Once. One time only. With In Black and White by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

Here’s the thing: As respected as Tanizaki might be for his other works, The Makioka Sisters, Some Prefer Nettles, Naomi, etc., this book has been overlooked for the past eighty years for a number of reasons. It was written on deadline for a newspaper, has a plot so thin you can read the jacket copy and skip the rest, and contains some of the most stilted dialogue this side of an episode of Riverdale.

What’s black and white and read all over? Not this book!

Which is totally unfair! In Black and White is a fine book. It’s fine. Sure, the plot is more interesting in summary than in execution, but still.

Actually, let’s start there. I should probably offer a spoiler warning, but to be honest, if you read the description on you’ve already seen it all.

In Black and White is the story of the “diabolist” writer Mizuno, who, along with spending time at brothels and drinking too much, is commissioned to write a story for The People magazine. After turning it in late—like any good writer’s writer worth his writerly nature—he realizes that he slipped up and included the actual name of the man who he used as a model for one of his characters on a few occasions. No big deal, right? Well, in this case that’s not so great, since Mizuno has written a story about how a man, much like Mizuno himself, pulls off the perfect murder and kills Cojima/Codama on a moonless night at the end of November. Given that Cojima’s real life situation—where he lives, his profession, his habits, etc.—is so similar to the character who’s murdered, Mizuno is paranoid that not only will Cojima recognize himself in the story, but that someone will acutally murder the real Cojima in the way described in the story, bringing Mizuno under suspicion.

Two interesting things about the rest of the novel: 1) As you would suspect, Cojima is murdered in the exact way depicted in the story and Mizuno, who, thanks to his time cavorting with a prostitute whose name and address he doesn’t know, has no verifiable alibi, and 2) Mizuno (probably) writes a sequel to this story in which someone reads the original story and decides to take revenge on the author by committing the murder as written in order to frame the original writer.

You know what I call a plot like this? Lazy. Self-indulgent. Self-indulgent and lazy. A novel that posits a world in which a fiction writer’s work is so important that a magazine lets its copyeditor rent a room in the writer’s same boarding house so that he can ensure the writer actually finishes his oh, so important pages? FANTASYLAND! Bring on the satyrs, dragons, and Tom Brady Concussion Sauce, because we’ve just left the real world behind!

I have no idea what the writing life was like in Japan in the 1920s, but given that Tanizaki played a big role in it (he’s considered to be one of the best Japanese writers of the past century), I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s talking about.

One of the most ludicrous aspects of this minor work is the number of times Mizuno refers to himself—or is referred to—as a “diabolist writer” or someone practicing “diabolism.” These terms are repeated fourteen times within five pages! It’s just like when you repeat a word over and over until it becomes syllables and noise and the meaning dissolves. What does “diabolism” even mean? Is Mizuno worshipping the devil? No, there’s no evidence of that. Sure, he drinks too much and wants to get with prostitutes, but that’s dissolute or or debauched, but diabolic? And again, Tanizaki creates a world in which people gossip openly about this writer’s diabolism. Even the cops! When they bring him into the station, they have a long philosophical conversation with Mizuno about his “diabolism” and the aesthetic principles behind his writing. Sound like any cops you know? Me neither. Here come the satyrs again . . .

OK. I don’t really have a response to that one. The “diabolist” thing got to me a bit as well. It’s funny, in our local translation workshop, every translator tries to avoid repetition like the plague. That’s not always the right approach though, and sometimes using the same word or phrase over and over can accrue meaning (or become incredibly funny), especially if used correctly. So maybe Tanizaki’s endless repetition of “diabolism” isn’t the worst . . . I mean, it’s not as distracting as the stiff dialogue or the strange misogynist stuff.

It would take a whole post to break down all of the odd stuff about women in this book, but here’s one bit of dialogue between Mizuno and the woman he hires to be his mistress for a month (on Tuesdays and Fridays) when they’re having lunch and finalizing their “arrangement”:

“Everyone says that, that my arms are great—”

“T���� are great! It’s a pleasure just to swing them like this. I’d like to make them into a toy and swing them forever.”

“If you want, make me into a toy.”

Yeah, that’s a bit weird. In a few different ways.

But let me reiterate—my reaction to the actual novel was mostly just a shrug. It was fine. I had no problem at all putting this book down, and a lot of the dialogue—and the ideas expressed within—made me groan, but this wasn’t awful. It just seemed a bit meh, a bit flat, a bit of a toss off . . . until I read the afterword.

Once you slog your way through 200+ pages of this tripe, this, I’ll say it again, self-indulgent book, that even includes a scene in which Mizuno invents a sex tale that he shares with his copyeditor, who he then catches masturbating to his memory of this tale, which, if you follow me here, is just a metaphor for how much jacking off Tanizaki is doing in this book, writing about his own writing and its power, if you get through that, you reach the end of the rainbow and find Phyllis Lyons’s afterword that injects a much needed historical context and sense of balance into this off-kilter text.

This part of the book is brilliant! The reading she offers—involving Tanizaki’s arguments with Akutagawa about “pure art,” “plottedness,” and “stories with no story”—imbues this book with a sense of purpose that it’s otherwise lacking. Even if her reading in which she postulates that the “Shadow Man” and Cojima are both stand-ins for Akutagawa, that Akutagawa traps Tanizaki by killing himself, shows a level of invention and attention to actual plot that that hack Tanizaki, yeah, I said it, hack, could’ve learned from.

Here’s some advice for you, Columbia University Press: Cut the first two hundred and eighteen pages of this book and publish just the afterword. Boom. That’s what I call maximizing profits. Economics 101, Mr. University Man.

Obviously, that’s too far, but I do wish that there was a way to get at least some of this afterword before the book to help guide one’s reading. No disrespect to Tanizaki, but the novel is a bit thin without the historical and personal context. And given that the plot is maybe the least compelling part of this reading experience, it would be useful to have some other tools in your mind before diving in. Reading Lyons’s afterword was the first time I really sat up and engaged with this book.

That said, if you’re a completist and a fan of Tanizaki’s other works, you’ll likely enjoy this quite a bit. And it’s a great example for translators of what you can add to a classic work to help it reach as wide and audience as possible. I know this isn’t going to make any best-seller lists, but if someone were to use Lyons’s afterword as the basis for an article about literary feuds, hot takes, contextual reading, and whatnot, it might really connect with those literary readers out there.

Considering how many translations are coming out from university presses these days, and how infrequently these titles receive any attention, I feel like it’s really important to highlight these six books and presses. (I was going to include Michigan State here as well—they’re doing great stuff—but since I had The Knight and His Shadow on a different list I thought I’d focus on some other notable university presses.) To be completely honest, I don’t think I read a single review of any of these titles, which might be due to the media’s dismissal of books from university presses as “too academic,” or possibly because the presses aren’t doing as much outreach to trade outlets as they could. Regardless, it’s a shame these books weren’t more talked about. Hopefully this post can at least connect these books with a handful of new readers . . .

by Li Ang, translated from the Chinese by Sylvia Li-Chun Lin with Howard Goldblatt (Columbia University Press)

Columbia is one of the best sources for interesting works from East Asia, such as Atlas by Kai-Cheung Dung or Horses, Horses, In the End the Light Remains Pure by Hideo Furukawa (one of the 2016 books I’m really looking forward to). In fact, since 2008, they’ve brought out twenty-four works of fiction and poetry from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, and India. That’s a much better record for diversity than any commercial press . . .

Li Ang has received the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award from the French government, and is considered one of the “most sophisticated contemporary Chinese-language writers.” She has a few other titles available in English, but this is the first one to come out since 1995.

The novel features two storylines: one focusing on Zhu Zuyan, who was imprisoned in the early part of the twentieth-century during Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, the other taking place in contemporary Taiwan and featuring a real estate tycoon.

by Hisham Bustani, translated from the Arabic by Thoraya El-Rayyes (Syracuse University Press)

Just as Columbia has a focus on East Asian writers, Syracuse has one on Arabic literature. According to the Translation Database, they’ve brought out fifteen works of Arabic fiction and poetry since 2008, most of those in the last few years.

This book is interesting in part because it’s so of the moment and breaks out of the assumptions of what Arabic literature is like:

This award-winning collection of seventy-eight pieces of flash fiction presents an intense and powerful vision of today’s world seen through the eyes of an alienated and sardonic author. The Perception of Meaning reads like an alternative history to our world—a collage of small nightmares brought to life by a canon of unlikely historical figures, including Mark Zuckerberg, the lead singer of Megadeth, Stanley Kubrick, the Korean activist Lee Kyoung Hae, and the Mayan poet Humberto Akabal, among others. A dazzling exemplar of contemporary experimental Arabic literature, The Perception of Meaning deftly captures a historical moment in which Arab societies are increasingly questioning the status quo and rebelling against it.

“Simone”: by Eduardo Lalo, translated from the Spanish by David Frye (University of Chicago)

There are a bunch of reasons why I’m including this book here. For one, the cover looks like a trade press cover (reminds me of a Quercus books). I also like the bold, almost over-confident phrasing at the beginning of the jacket copy: “Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now.” And the fact that Lalo is one of only five Puerto Rican writers in the Translation Database. Plus, there’s the book itself:

A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writer’s frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teaches—forces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appear—scrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiper—Simone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker.

by Ibrahim Al-Koni, translated from the Arabic by William Hutchins (University of Texas)

I just really like this cover. Not to mention that this final volume of Al-Koni’s trilogy opens with, “a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community’s leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet.”

by Miljenko Jergovic, translated from the Croatian by Stephen M. Dickey with Janja Pavetic-Dickey (Yale University Press)

Yale—who has been kicking ass on the translation front for years, with Can Xue, Patrick Modiano, Romain Gary, Claudio Magris, and many more—sure isn’t afraid of doing huge books. Cyclops by Ranko Marinkovic is 576 dense pages. Blindly by the aforementioned Magris is only 400 pages, but of knotty, attention-requiring prose. The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus is a 647-page play. By contrast, The Walnut Mansion seems slight at only 429 pages, but you should see this typeface! These are massive, impressive Works. Most translation publishers shy away from books like this because the cost of the translation alone—not to mention the printing bill—more or less makes breaking even an impossibility. I suspect the donation that funds Yale’s “Margellos World Republic of Letters” series makes this moot, but still, they deserve some props for undertaking these massive books that most other presses would run away from. Maybe they’ll be the ones to do those 1,000-page novels by Tokarczuk and Clemens Setz . . .

by Vidar Sundstøl, translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally (University of Minnesota Press)

It’s so perfect that University of Minnesota Press published Sundstøl’s “Minnesota Trilogy,” which concludes with this volume. According to his bio, Sundstøl lives in Southern Norway, but I assume he has some sort of connection to Minnesota. Otherwise, why would he write a series of crime novels set there, featuring the Twin Cities, Duluth, and members of the Ojibwe tribe? I hope the University of Minnesota sells thousands of copies of all of these to the really nice people of Minnesota . . .

In her spare time from teaching, translating, dancing at during the Best ALTA Ever, and speaking on panels throughout the world, Esther managed to co-edit (with Susan Bernofsky, another giant in the world of literary translation) an anthology of writings on translation that professors everywhere should be using in their world literature classes. (See below for a special offer from CUP for this title.)

Featuring essays by Haruki Murakami, Alice Kaplan, Peter Cole, Eliot Weinberger, Forrest Gander, Clare Cavanagh, David Bellos, Jason Grunebaum, and José Manuel Prieto, among others, you can expect a bunch more posts and references to this in the future. But for now, I wanted to share that Esther wrote for last week’s PW Tip Sheet. It’s a nice lead in to today’s feature piece, which will post shortly, and which you’re going to love.

Words that don’t seem to have an exact equivalent are often described as untranslatable. But are there really words that simply can’t be understood outside of the language that produced them? An article by Jason Wire on Matador Network offers the word mamihlapinatapei, from the Yagan language spoken in Tierra del Fuego, as an untranslatable term . . . and then proceeds to translate it in a way we can all understand: “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.” If ten people who read this article begin using it regularly in conversation—“Is this mamihlapinatapei we’re feeling right now?“—within five years it could be as common as schadenfreude. And what a shame it will be if that doesn’t happen. [. . .]

Translation is an art, not a science, and like all artists (and perhaps all scientists, as well) its practitioners are more likely to be hacks than geniuses. But there aren’t many words, or poems, or books that genuinely cannot be conveyed in another language, and might not even be enriched in the process. The great Japanese translator Motoyuki Shibata claims that Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (an English fiction that purports to be a translation from Japanese) is much improved by its translation into Japanese by Takayoshi Ogawa, who transformed it into something authentic by incorporating the actual traditional vocabulary used by geishas. (Even so, the novel never achieved bestselling status in Japan, where people just weren’t that interested in reading another geisha story.)

What really can’t be translated is the experience of sharing a language—not just a word or two here and there—within the culture of people who speak it. That’s why the Wampanoag are currently engaged in a heroic act of linguistic revitalization, translating their entire language from the written documents left by colonization to bring it back into spoken use in their daily lives. There’s no way anyone else can do that for them, just as no one but you can translate yourself—via study and practice—into the shared space of a new language.

As mentioned above, you can receive a 30% discount on this book via Columbia University Press by and using the discount code: INTALL. And you should. To appropriate a sports phrase, this book is an instant classic.

by Dung Kai-Cheung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall, and published by Columbia University Press

Having wanted to read this book for months, I took the opportunity to snag this for myself when we were lining people up to write for this series. And I’m damn glad that I did.

1. It’s not Jackie Chan. As Bonnie McDougall points out in her introduction, most depictions of Hong Kong that the typical American reader are familiar with are written by outsiders. John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. Paul Theroux’s Kowloon Tong. John Lanchester’s Fragrant Harbour. Basically all the books on Not so with Atlas! Dung Kai-Cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist, and as such, offers a different—and more genuine?—perspective on this really interesting part of the world. From Kai-Cheung’s introduction:

There are enough fictitious Hong Kongs circulating around the world. It doesn’t matter so much how real or false these fictions are but how they are made up. The Hong Kong of Tai-Pan and Suzie Wong, a mixture of economic adventures, political intrigues, sexual encounters, and romances; the Hong Kong of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li kung fu fighting their way through to the international scene; the Hong Kong of John Woo’s gangster heroes shooting doublehanded and Stephen Chow’s underdog antiheroes making nonsensical jokes. And yet, in spite of these eye-catching exposures, Hong Kong remains invisible. A large part of the reality of life here is unrepresented, unrevealed, and ignored. Hong Kong’s martial arts fiction, commercial movies, and pop songs are successful in East Asia and even farther abroad, but for all the talents, insights, and creativity of its writers, Hong Kong literature attracts minimal attention—not just internationally but even in mainland China. I am not claiming that literature represents a Hong Kong more real than the movies, but it has its unique role and methods and thus yields different meanings. It is not just a different way of world-representing but also a different way of world-building, that is, creating conditions for understanding, molding, preserving, and changing the world that we live in.

For this alone, Atlas deserves to win.

2. It’s like Calvino plus Borges . . . At first glance, Atlas sounds a lot like Calvino’s Invisible Cities with a touch of the Borges:

Set in the long-lost City of Victoria (a fictional world similar to Hong Kong), Atlas is written from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. Divided into four sections—“Theory,” “The City,” “Streets,” and “Signs”—the novel reimagines Victoria through maps and other historical documents and artifacts, mixing real-world scenarios with purely imaginary people and events while incorporating anecdotes and actual and fictional social commentary and critique.

And in his fanciful writing, Dung does bring both writers to mind, such as in this bit about a plaza enclosed by a square street:

The only way of finding one’s way in the square street seems to have been by determining the direction. The four sides of the square street were fixed according to the four points of the compass, north, south, east, and west, but because there was no door numbers along the street (for no one could say where the street began and where it ended), it was rather difficult to determine if one were proceeding along the east street, the west street, the north street, or the south street. To be sure, this was not a problem for the local inhabitants, because whatever side of the street they lived on made no difference to them. Another special characteristic of the square street was that there was a flight of steps at each corner. It was said that if you kept turning right as you walked, the steps would lead upward, but if you went in the opposit direction, to the left, the steps would lead down. But whether you went up or down, you would still return to your original place by way of the four flights of steps and the four corners. Experts in cartography maintain that such phenomena can occur only on the surface of maps, or in pictures with fanciful optical illusions.

3. . . . except that it’s not. This isn’t just a derivative attempt to write something Calvino-esque or Borgesian. (Or, Calgesian? Borvino?) A unique combination of cartography, fabulism, and philosophy, Atlas brings up a ton of interesting questions about how the world can be (or should be) represented and how we read these representations. It’s definitely in the vein of those other two authors (who are mentioned in the book, along with Barthes and Umberto Eco), but it’s also something quite different and all of its own. (The titles Dung’s other novels make these influences even more obvious: The Rose of the Name and Visible Cities.) At times, this is more cerebral and heady than Calvino’s work, which makes this even more interesting.

4. It’s written in Cantonese and Mandarin. Esther Allen talked to my class the other week about José Manuel Prieto’s Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia and emphasized how she tried to retain the mixture of languages present in the original by including Russian texts, Japanese script, bits in Spanish, etc. This wasn’t just an aesthetic decision, but a political one as well. In her own words:

For the reader of the original text, the book’s origin in the Spanish-speaking world is evident in its every word and requires no further emphasis. As its translator into English, my overwhelming primary allegiance was to the Spanish language. If readers of the English translation were allowed to forget that the book was first written in Spanish—not Russian or English—and was translated from Spanish—not Russian—the book risked being denatured, stripped of all the historic and cultural meaning that derives from the specific language in which it was first written.

The translation therefore explicitly sought to emphasize the Spanish-ness of this text about Russia, but in a way that did not undermine the original’s will to leave its Latin American origins in the deep background. Keeping certain words or phrases in the source language, always an option, here became an imperative, and the English retains as much Spanish as I felt was possible. No longer the language of the text itself, Spanish becomes a key element in its polyglossia.

This came to mind in reading McDougall’s introduction when she talks about Hong Kong’s linguistic multiplicity and the fact that is book is originally written in Mandarin with some Cantonese expressions. This mix occurs in other works of Hong Kong literature, but may also be why it’s not accepted as readily by mainland China. In my mind, this sort of situation—overlooked even within its own country because of the linguistic mix—is a valid reason for awarding this novel the Best Translated Book Award.

Huang is a celebrated modern Taiwanese writer who has been writing for over 30 years. This is his first collection to appear in English, curated and translated by John Balcom who has graciously also contributed an interview to this feature. Much of Huang’s writing is political in nature, and in this collection we have stories representative of each of the various stages of his writing career. Here the stories range from metafiction to allegory to the science-fiction dystopian writing of Zero, which takes up the majority of the collection.

You can read a sample and an interview with John Balcom

Lily Ye: Huang’s writing, at least within this collection, is certainly very political. Where do you think that Huang Fan stands within the literary scene of Taiwan, and what is his importance?

John Balcom: I would say that every piece is political. Huang has always been way out in front when it comes to commenting on society, politics, and culture in Taiwan. His subtle grasp of the local situation has always provided fodder for his critical mind. He often dealt with subjects no one else wrote about, but which were of great interest – he struck a chord in the popular imagination and shook up the literary scene. His writing, when it appeared, was often quite revolutionary, often in terms of content, but also sometimes in terms of style – witness “How to Measure the Width of a Ditch”. However, thirty years later, we tend to forget what an impact his writing had – it’s sort of like reading Gide today.

LY: How would you characterize him in contrast to other modern Chinese writers like Cao Naiqian, who you’ve also translated? Do you know how is he perceived within Mainland China?

JB: It is really difficult to compare his work to that of say, Cao Naiqian. In a sense, they are writing out of two entirely different milieus and traditions. A better comparison might be between Huang’s use of the Sci-fi genre and that of Chang Hsi-kuo, the author of The City Trilogy. His work is known in mainland China, but by readers and specialists who know or study Taiwan literature.

LY: What do you think familiarity with his works will bring to Western audiences, and what would you like them to come away with?

JB: I think reading his work is essential for an understanding of post-War Sinophone literature. I would like readers to go away with a sense of his versatility as a writer.

Finally, here’s Lily’s review of Zero.

Zero and Other Fictions is a collection that displays a unique range. Huang Fan has been writing for over 30 years and it shows (though he may have been secluded for nearly a decade during this time, studying Buddhism and not writing much fiction). The “other fictions” included in this collection include a satirical tale of an unknowing political pawn, a humorous allegorical story of enterprise told through infidelity, and a bizarre metafictional piece that includes small illustrations among its many elements. This collection is concise; it is tight, dense, and powerful. Huang Fan is a different writer at every turn, and at each of these turns, a true craftsman.

All of this—the preview, the interview, the review—can be found by where you can also read excerpts, etc., from the fourteen other titles we’ve featured so far.

The prose in “Lai Suo,” the unwitting pawn of a man, emphasizes the protagonist’s lack of agency—he is constantly subjected to experience:

He seemed to hear a number of other sounds. His two maple-leaf ears were completely exposed to the continuous noise on the street—buses, trucks, cabs, motorcycles, as well as the occasional siren of an ambulance as it rushed by. All of these sounds knocked on Lai Suo’s eardrums as if they wanted to penetrate even deeper, but were stopped in the middle by something—it was like an acoustic tile on which was inscribed: LAI SUO, TAIPEI, JUNE 1978, TRAVELER THROUGH TIME AND SPACE.

In the metafiction of “How To Measure a Ditch,” Huang turns directly to his audience:

Well, what eventually happened to those two young ladies? I’m sure a number of readers will be interested in learning if I became friends with one of them or we fell in love.

I won’t say yes and I won’t say no.

My answer is that the future developments with the two young ladies have nothing to do with this story. They returned to their real lives. Like you, as far as they were concerned, this matter was simply one of those occasional variables in life.

As you read this story, you also are “involved in” the story; it’s just that the way you enter the story is completely different from the way those two young ladies entered.

The final story in the collection is Zero, which as Balcom explains in was revolutionary for the political context in which it appeared. With this in mind, and having read his prose, which leaves no room for error, it seems that Huang is a writer whose words are wrought with an artist’s ideal in mind, that Huang’s literary work is motivated by a pure force that does not cater to even his own whims. Zero is one of Huang’s first attempts at science fiction, and while it does harken back to dystopian classics such as 1984 (with a small “Winston” cameo), it does not leave the reader a satisfying conclusion about where the truth really lies, which is infuriatingly simultaneously unsatisfying and satisfying.

These stories are no small introduction to Huang Fan.

A book vaguely reminiscent of the Western morality tales Aesop’s Fables, The Demon at Agi Bridge truly reflects the Japanese oral tradition. The stories themselves often end with a lesson—life lessons such as promoting kindness and friendship (as in the tale “How a Man Received a Bounty After a Period of Prayer at the Hase Temple” where a poor samurai, in possession of no goods or money, profits solely from the kindness he gives others along his travels) while dissuading such actions as envy and dishonesty.

The tales also have a wide range of themes, such as Karma, Buddhism (readers well-versed in Buddhist teachings will have the advantage of understanding the reasoning behind various religious undertakings), filial piety, music and dance, Shintoism, animals and insects, the female body, poetry, gambling, and the exploration of the supernatural—in relation to the existence of wild demons, living in the middle of forests or on the sides of mountains, as well as in the transformations of humans into animals after the performance of an unforgivable sin. The settings of each story are often intertwined with court culture, aristocratic society, and political unrest within the Japanese warrior class. Similarly themed and moral-bound, the stories reflect a society striving towards a religious and moral obligatory lifestyle, such as following the way of the Buddha.

While most of the tales end in a moral lesson of sorts, the narratives are often laced with snarky comments and an underlying dark humor. One tale mentions the effects of “mushrooms” and the story’s character’s uninhibited usage of them: “We came on some mushrooms . . . [and] after we’d eaten them, we found that . . . we just couldn’t help dancing.” Another describes a mad, elderly woman removing the hair from her young, dead mistresses in order to preserve the luscious locks and make a wig.

In the short story “How a Court Lady of Royal Birth Demonstrated the Foulness of her Bodily Form,” a beautiful court woman captivates the heart of a Buddhist monk. Falling in love with her, the monk wishes to meet her in private. However, though his advances delight her, she admits that the meeting is to speak about a grave matter. Touching on one of the anthology’s most prevalent thematic occurrences is the mention of feminism, or the antithesis, incorporated seamlessly into the idea of Buddha nature and religious practices. A woman’s body is considered to be tarnished—with her lack of purity, her shameless lascivious seductions of men, and her monthly menstruation. Despite a woman’s inability to control the perceptions of her body, it is made clear she is still considered to be inferior in comparison with a man. “This body of mine is a thing putrid and rotten beyond description. My head is overflowing with brain matter and other fluids; my skin is stuffed with flesh and bones. Blood flows from my body; pus oozes out . . .” The description is of the pure nature of the woman body, seen in Buddhist ideals as foul and uncomely.

In the narrative, “How Ki no Tosuke of Mino Province Met Female Spirits and Died,” a man’s wife, envious of a box a female spirit presented to him, opened it, only to find “several human eyes that had been gorged out and a number of penises with a little of the hair attached.” Though morbidity rather than sarcastic humor is often the most prevalent aspect within these tales, the “humor, word play, and comic twists” of each story present the reader with an enjoyable tale, a quick read, and an unforgettable experience.

This compilation of short stories comes highly recommended for both those interested in Japanese culture as well as those who desire to experience a new society of people and their history.

This book is part of Columbia’s which is just one of several Asian-related book series published by CUP. In many ways, CUP is to Asian literature as AUP is to Arabic lit . . . As Lily mentioned in this week’s Read This Next post, we’re going to be featuring one of the book from their in a few weeks.

Anyway, onto the review of The Demon at Agi Bridge:

“That must be the demon!” And what a demon it is! Oozing pustules covering bodies, blood excreting from tiny pores, sharpened horns decorating bony skulls . . . The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales is an expounding collection brimming with translated historical and cultural Japanese anecdotes, focusing specifically on traditionally oral Japanese narratives, known as setsuwa. The combined efforts of translator and editor Burton Watson and Hauro Shirane, respectively, elicit tales for the ignorant reader as well as for those more knowledgeable about the Japanese culture.

A book vaguely reminiscent of the Western morality tales Aesop’s Fables, The Demon at Agi Bridge truly reflects the Japanese oral tradition. The stories themselves often end with a lesson—life lessons such as promoting kindness and friendship (as in the tale “How a Man Received a Bounty After a Period of Prayer at the Hase Temple” where a poor samurai, in possession of no goods or money, profits solely from the kindness he gives others along his travels) while dissuading such actions as envy and dishonesty.

Click here to read the full review.

On the bus this morning, I read a bit about the Cheney Report (named after its author Orion Howard Cheney) that seemed very appropriate for this blog. The so-called Cheney Report was commissioned by the National Association of Book Publishers (NABP) after the stock market crash of 1929 to get a better handle on what was going on in the book industry at the time. I’ll let Striphas take it away:

After fifteen months of exhaustive research on Cheney’s part—and a comparable degree of nervous anticipation on the part of the NABP—the 150,000 word Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930-1931 (Cheney Report) was published in early January 1932. The eminent sociologist Robert Lynd assayed it in the Saturday Review of Literature, concluding that “it blows the lid off the book industry.” Indeed, the report was incisive and unrelenting in its criticisms of every aspect of the book industry and beyond. Cheney blasted publishers and booksellers for relying on intuition to guide important business, editorial, and purchasing decision rather than operating on a scientifically sound, statistically driven “fact basis.” He disparaged editors and publishers for their lack of creativity in developing the talents of first-time authors and scolded them for “murdering” potentially successful titles by releasing them into a field already so overcrowded that they simply “cannibalized” one another. Cheney was troubled by the lack of uniformity in the size and materials of printed books, which, he believed, drove up manufacturing costs unnecessarily. He chided advertisers adn book critics for generating insufficient interest in books and consequently for failing to help readers make informed decisions about what to buy. He condemned librarians for overstocking popular fiction and (like the booksellers) for making practically no effort at systematically studying the interests and reading habits of their clientele. Cheney even lambasted “uninspiring teachers” for their “unsound teaching methods,” which, he believed, resulted in their failure to stimulate adequate interest in reading among students ranging from preschool to college.

His big beef was with distribution methods, and the long-term impact of this study (creation of ISBNs and bar codes) is pretty impressive. Although I’m the first to object to business school people implementing their “economic science” on anything artistic (or even publishing), I do love this typical publisher response to the study:

Despite Cheney’s claim to have produced the report “in a spirit of objective sympathy,” his pedantry, harsh criticism, and acerbic tone seem to have gotten the better of him. The document generated what’s best described as a mixed yet largely defensive response from book industry insiders.

The situation is more complicated these days than it was in 1932 (pre-Internet, pre-superstore, pre-decline in newspaper book coverage), it’s curious how many of these problems still plague the industry today . . .