TA-WEI: Good, thank you, Lin. I guess some readers might join the room later than others, so may I tell you that all the presenters here are from different countries. The previous two translators are actually in the States, they are in the early morning, they got up before there was sunshine, so it’s very challenging for them. Our next translator is Wen-chi. Wen-chi is in a normal time zone because he is in the UK. The ‘Facebook’ and the Centre of Arts poem collection – Wen-chi, can you talk about the chapbook first?

WEN-CHI: The story is called Lianshu (Facebook) in Chinese and it was not translated into ‘Facebook’ but rather ‘Social’. The story won a literary prize in Taiwan and Jeremy asked us to translate this work. And this is quite interesting because the story is about indigenous people’s lives, and in particular women’s lives. And I think it’s quite interesting because usually, as an expert studying Taiwanese literature, we just see indigenous life from outsiders. For example, there are so many books, so many monographs in the English world as well that are all about this life but it’s kind of an outsider’s perspective. But in this short story I think it’s quite interesting because the writer is a woman and she’s talking about how life really is in the tribe. At the beginning, you see directly that the heroine commits suicide, falling from the window, the third floor, I think, and it was really a shock in a way, and then somehow you have to read on and try to understand what’s happening. It’s very interesting because the writer, Lamulu Pakawyan, tries to intertwine indigenous struggle and gender issues together and the heroine encounters so many problems in the tribe and also you see how she wants to go away from the tribe because she just feels like she wants to develop her career in a city, for example, but she just feels like she could not live up to this family or the tribe, so she has to return to the tribe. But nobody understands her because she says she’s just doing her project, a local project in the tribe. So it’s kind of a struggle, if she wants to leave or not, and also all the families don’t understand her, not just because of her lesbian relationship but also her lesbian sexuality and also because what she’s doing is very different from the local people. People don’t understand this kind of project, this kind of cooperation with a government to develop the local culture. So you see the struggles as well. I think it’s quite interesting for people like me, I’m not an indigenous person, but you have a chance to get a glimpse of the inside, what’s really happening and the struggle of the people. I think it’s really cool. So I highly recommend you read this work.

TA-WEI: I have a question for Wen-chi but we will start with Jenna first. I want you to talk about your relationship. How do you co-work with your assigned author? For instance, I know Lau Tsi-u is a very active feminist writer in Taiwan and I am a close friend of Sabrina Huang, who is an admired essayist and also a great story writer. But I believe both of you can tell us more about the two writers and my question for Wen-chi might be more complicated because, Wen-chi, you co-work not only with a writer not from your own culture but you also co-work with another translator. So, can you talk about your very different collaboration after the previous two translators? But again, let’s start with Jenna. Jenna, how did you co-work with your assigned writer? Did you she leave you alone?

JENNA: Yeah, she pretty much trusted me with the translation. There were some little parts where I consulted her. Like, what exactly are you trying to say here? Did I understand it right? It was mostly these kinds of questions. There’s one thing in particular that she asked me: if it was possible – and I told her, yes, totally – to spell her name in the Taiwanese Hokkien Pinyin. She likes to highlight the importance of another dialect from Taiwan and therefore she asked if it was possible to spell her name in Taiwanese and the pinyin that we’re seeing on the cover right now is what she provided me with. She told me she’d like to go by this name instead of an English name. So that was pretty intentional and throughout the story it’s mostly me working with Jeremy Tiang and our relationship has been pretty friendly. We hung out in my town and we went out to explore different restaurants and I initially approached her about the short story collection Self-Served Goddesses. There are several stories contained in that collection that I’ve been working on for book form, so I’ve just been in touch with her, except I got a little busy promoting my book here, but I am also spending some time working on her collection as my next potential book to be published. So our relationship has been very friendly and I see the process, getting to know authors or getting to know the situation with the rights, as something enjoyable. I can make friends and we all hang out together and I like the idea of forming a community with authors and their publishers.

TA-WEI: Thank you. Earlier I encouraged the translators to ask each other questions but I also need to encourage the readers with us, if you have any questions, please feel free to write in the chat box and we will try to answer you and I know that the interaction with the translators is always fun, so please don’t be shy. Lin King, I know that Sabrina Huang is not usually known for science fiction, so I guess you might be surprised when you read the story.

LIN: I don’t know if I can say this but I think of her as most known for her essays, which are so incisive, and commenting on the condition of living as a woman in Taiwan, and so it did surprise me to get this story and then to see that the main character that we start off with is male and living very far off in the future and for any readers who are familiar with Taiwan, especially Taipei, it’s really fun to piece together the remnants and the dregs of what she writes about in the story and map them onto the current existing Taipei. And it does feel like we are living in this – we’re talking on November 7th 2024 – near-apocalyptic age where a lot of this feels far away but also that it’s not unimaginable. And so I feel like this was a really interesting extension of her essays that comment so much on contemporary life, that this is how she extends those thoughts into the future, almost. I don’t want to speak for her but at least that’s how I as a reader was reading this, that this is this great thinker of our contemporary times projecting what these future paths might lead us to, should we let them, and that was terrifying. But also, strangely, because of the storytelling and because of the characters and their interactions, you could really luxuriate in the disastrous state that she describes, as well, which is kind of scary because you then can see how people would be attracted to these ideas or certain offerings in this case of like, ‘Oh, we’ll just take away your negative emotions’ and you can see that how then spirals into this future where we have all these new problems. I’m kind of rambling, as you said it’s very early, but I feel like knowing her as this great essayist on social issues, on how we perceive the world made reading her futuristic story even more despairing but also fascinating and probing.

TA-WEI: Thank you. Earlier, Jenna and Lin talked about Lau Tsi-u and Sabrina Huang and if, dear readers, you read Chinese, you are certainly encouraged to check out the Chinese language books by these two highly talented female writers. Now, let’s move on to Wen-chi’s collaborators. Wen-chi, you might need to explain more because we are less familiar with your assigned writer and we are not very familiar with your work in co-translation, either. So, can you share your experiences

WEN-CHI: Okay. Referring to the writer, I actually really have no idea. I just got an assignment I had to translate. So, actually, I have no idea about the writer, Lamulu Pakawyan. But it’s quite interesting. I just felt like, Oh, it’s really cool, and she has already won so many literary prizes, but I don’t remember if she already has a collection or something. It’s quite interesting to see how those indigenous people have been seen. In Taiwanese literary circles, it’s just being seen through this kind of literary prize, usually. I once worked with Shu-ming Tung, maybe you know her, she’s a professor and an expert on indigenous poetry, and I invited her to write a chapter on indigenous poetry. It’s quite cool because it’s like the short story ‘Social’. It’s kind of like the perspective of the insider, what’s really happening, the struggle of people, and at same time she demonstrates so much in this kind of indigenous poetry and those poems usually got known through the literary prize. So this is how indigenous people are being seen in Taiwanese readers’ circles, through literary prizes, not through collected works, collections of poems or a monograph or something. So this is how indigenous people are seen in Taiwan. And about my co-translation with Colin Bramwell. We met each other in 2014 or 2013 when I was in Edinburgh for my MA and then I just advertised, ‘Hey, I want to find someone who could help me translate some works from Taiwan.’ I posted this advertisement on Facebook through a literary society at the university. There were two people who approached me, one was Colin, another was a girl who’s from Singapore, but I wanted someone who’s already in the English context and also has no idea of Chinese Mandarin or the Chinese language. I feel it’s more interesting, so for this reason I chose Colin rather than the girl from Singapore because I felt we kind of overlap because that girl, she’s from Singapore and so she must understand Chinese as well, so I just chose Colin and then we started to cooperate with each other on certain works. Usually, I translate poetry, poems from certain works. I translate a first draft and then Colin will receive this first draft and just revise or make it better or polish it into a better version. And then, after Colin, there’s a second version and a third version and usually the third version will be more radical, totally different from the original because I just give him the first draft and the draft is usually quite bad because it’s just literal translation, and also the grammar was so bad and English readers might not understand it. So, I think that’s quite cool, the collaboration. Colin has to know everything based on my draft rather than to understand the original. But he knows English quite well because he has a Masters in English literature and a PhD in translation. So he just uses his knowledge of English literature and has to improve or polish a piece of work to make it better and I think it works well in certain ways because we got a prize and also our work has already been compiled in certain anthologies. So this is our way of cooperation. And this is not a single case. For example, for Ya Mu’s work in German translation there were two translators. And I just received an academic book on co-translation. So actually, there are many people doing this kind of co-translation because two people, say from different backgrounds or maybe with a different education, can cooperate with each other and try to figure out the best way to present the work, the best version of the work. I think it works well and sometimes I encourage people, if you want to translate a work and you don’t feel secure, maybe you could find local people to cooperate with you.

TA-WEI: Thank you. We learn a lot from your experience. And because all of us are busy and focused on our obligations, I’ll give you some updates now. There are more than thirty people watching us and we got a question. I don’t know if you can read the question but may I read the question from Paul to you? It’s kind of provocative but you are free to take the time to answer. Do the translators think that Taiwanese writers with their freedom of expression, compared to the censorship in China itself, are now writing or could write about the genocide in China or about the Muslims and the Uyghurs in China? What do you think? I know it’s not an easy question, it’s not easy to answer, and maybe you might want to prioritise other topics. But take your time and maybe we can start with other questions first. Our focus is primarily on the chapbooks but after that, if we have some energy left, we can move on to others. But does anybody want to take the question or do you want to talk more about the chapbooks and the writers or your relationship with the BCLT, which generously gives a platform for Taiwanese writers and translators? And Jeremy Tiang, I think that many of you are familiar with Jeremy, Jeremy is a very kind mentor to many of us.

WEN-CHI: I’ll take the question quickly, actually, from Paul about the censorship and whether Taiwanese writers write about that. Definitely, there must be some Taiwanese writers writing about what’s happening in China and there’s almost no censorship. We appreciate the freedom of speech in Taiwan. What is really interesting is that you see certain writers, when they are forbidden in China they just publish their work in Taiwan. For example, the famous one is Gao Xingjian. Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain was published in Taiwan and other works are just published directly in Taiwan. And there’s a professor called Zhan Min-xu who proposed an idea inspired by Pascale Casanova, the ‘World Republic of Letters’, maybe you know this idea. The World Republic of Letters suggests that Paris is the centre of world literature because all works must be published in Paris first. In Sinophone states or Sinophone communities, like Zhan, I would say that Taiwan or Taipei is the World Republic of Chinese Letters. So all the works must first be published and sent to the world through Taiwan. So I would say, yes, in Taiwan there’s no censorship and so because in China everything is censored, Taiwan can take advantage of that and there are so many writers published already in Taiwan and then through Taiwan to the world, for example Gao XingJian. So yeah, that’s my perspective.

TA-WEI: Thank you. I think that since we finally touched upon the relationship between politics and literature, maybe it is fair for Lin and Jenna to vent too because you are in the United States. I really feel for you because you are stressed out. How about Lin first and then Jenna? When you are working with your translations you are also experiencing everything in the States. You want to share some thoughts?

LIN: Yeah. Going back to the question itself, can Taiwanese writers write about these things, like Wen-chi said? Yes, they can because there is freedom of expression. The government is not interfering, as far as I know, in what publishers choose to put out into the world. And in the US, as you just said, we are maybe on the verge of seeing some of that change on a state-by-state basis. So I think we might, I hope not, but I think we might reach this strange point where what’s being published in Taiwan and for those of us who are translating literature from Taiwan to have a higher degree of freedom of expression in the source material than can maybe be widely read in the destination of the English translation, and I say this because my translated book will come out in five days. Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shiang-Zi is a queer, historical novel and because it has been nominated for the National Book Award we are going to Miami Book Fair at the end of this month to promote it. However, I am a little scared because Florida famously has been banning a lot of books, especially queer books, and I’m kind of wondering, you know… we’re still within this current administration, so I think I’ll be okay but I think that is something that has been thrown into the air, whereas we have never questioned before whether you have free speech in the United States. So these are things that can change and I think Taiwan is for me a really optimistic example of how quickly we can evolve into democracy, even as we’re seeing some parts of the world quickly evolve out of democracy. So, yeah, just some thoughts.

TA-WEI: Thank you and please take good care and be resilient and good luck in Florida. Jenna is doing a book tour – actually, not only one. Jenna has done dozens of book events on a book about psychological trauma, so maybe you also find that the collective psychological trauma in the States might have something in common with the psychological trauma you are dealing with in your translation. But before you speak, may I interrupt because one reader shared with us that she finds that there is already a wave of Hong Kong diasporic writing in Taiwan. I think that is a nice response to Paul earlier. Readers and publishers and cultural agencies in Taiwan are certainly concerned about those who are suppressed in China, including those in Hong Kong and those among the Uyghurs. But because Hong Kong culture is much closer to Taiwan, it’s natural for Taiwanese editors, writers, translators and so on to prioritise those in Hong Kong. Jenna, are you ready to share your psychological adventures?

JENNA: Yeah. First of all, just to follow up on Lin’s comments about Miami. I was just there doing my book tour. Even though my novel in translation isn’t necessarily about fear – it’s about feminist work – there’s definitely some kind of censorship there, I would give you that, and I say it anyway because the organisation in the university that invited us has certain responsibilities to keep us safe. So that’s how I went about it. But, of course, it probably varies depending on who you’re working with and I would still be careful but there’s a part of me that’s just like, I don’t care, I just want to talk about it. I’ve been on a book tour, this is my nineteenth city right now and I’m really tired, but I guess something that I was thinking about while we were talking about Hong Kong diaspora literature in Taiwan, because of freedom expression in Taiwan, there are so many different thematic bookstores popping up, at least in Taipei City and many other cities. There’s actually a list of second-hand bookstores on Independent Taiwanese Bookstores that broadly introduces bookstores. For example, they collect books from Hong Kong or bookstores, like photography books and other kinds of books. There are also very specific LGBTQ+ bookstores or feminist bookstores that I think are really worth digging into. Something I really enjoyed doing while I was in Taipei was exploring all these thematic bookstores to see what I could find. Of course, as translators, when we look for the next works that we’re going to translate it’s easier to find something on a Taiwanese literary award list or something like that but I myself also like to explore something that hasn’t been discovered or hasn’t been talked about enough. So it’s just my little treasure hunt and things I liked to do when I was back in Taiwan.

TA-WEI: Thank you, Jenna, and thank you for your reminder. I believe many of you miss Taiwan and many of your friends want to visit Taiwan and we really have to remind everybody that Taiwan is not only known for delicious food but also for its independent bookstores throughout the country. And many independent bookstores are committed to diasporic people from Hong Kong. Some are designed for people from Hong Kong, some are committed to the dignity and the autonomy of Tibet and some are for other politically oppressed people everywhere in the world. So please feel free to visit Taiwan. We have some minutes left but I think that after sharing our encounters with darkness, is it possible for you to talk about your expected futures? How about your future plans? All three of you deserve vacations, but how about your future projects? Anything, any writer, any book you are going to translate and or any new book you are going to sell? Wen-chi, how about you? Tell us something about your next project.

WEN-CHI: Well, usually I just translate poems. Poetry is a little bit easier for me because even though it’s a short story, it’s very ‘lengthy’ in a way and you always take almost one week to translate full-time. So, for me, I feel like a piece of work, like a poem, is a little bit easier for me. I just need to spend one hour or two hours and then one poem is finished and then it’s quite easy. You just feel a kind of progress in a way, obviously you feel a progress, so I usually focus on poetry. I was thinking for the next one, maybe Lo Chih-cheng, a very famous Taiwanese poet, quite famous for his mysticism, or maybe another work, like Yeh Ching’s lesbian poetry. I’m still not quite sure, I need to ask for copyright first, ask Yeh Ching’s family if it’s okay to translate it because she committed suicide in 2005 or 2006. Her work is relatively melancholic and all about love and also a depressed kind of style. So it’s really cool as well for me to translate her work and this is my next project. In academic life, I’m looking for an assistant professorship because I’m just a post-doc.

TA-WEI: Lin, I know you definitely need a vacation, maybe you need a spa session, a massaging session, but what about any book after Yang Shiang-zi’s book?

LIN: I will admit here that I don’t read my contracts closely enough to know if I’m allowed to talk about any right now. So, not touching on specifics, but actually I want to just give a shout-out to the Taiwanese government, to the Ministry of Culture, who are sponsoring a large flux of works from Taiwan to be translated into English just for potential sale, so there’s not even the guarantee of sale to a US or UK-based publisher or any other language in the world, but they are really throwing resources behind translators, publishers and rights agents to just make these samples happen. So I do work with several Taiwanese-based organisations, including Da Kuai Wen Hua, on translating these samples, including for graphic novels, children’s books and also literary novels or so-called genre to just push out more and more Taiwanese content into the market to potentially be seen. As for myself, of course I have writers who I really want to translate, who I’ve been in discussion with, but kind of like what Wen-chi said, as a translator into English you do have to go through this rigmarole, well no, it’s a process, it’s a long process of trying to secure rights on all sides and you’re kind of acting as the intermediary to make sure that the English language publisher and the author and their original publishers and everyone involved is in agreement for this project to even begin. So, there’s a lot of that but I’d say my focus is on Taiwanese literature that maybe has an internationalist slant, either Taiwanese writers in diasporas or just stories that involve Taiwanese people’s interactions with other cultures and that’s the general lens. But actually, after translating this Huang Li-Chun story, I’m loving the speculative. I’ve done a lot of historical fiction and now I’m kind of like, the futurist stuff, you don’t need to consult a book, you can make up the system and that’s really exciting as a translator. So yeah, it’s really fun.

TA-WEI: Thank you. And Jenna, how about you? Are you flying back to Taiwan or are you going to be flying away to another continent? Can you reveal something about the future, as long as you don’t do anything bad to your contract!

JENNA: Well, I’m not going back to Taiwan. I’ll be in America after my tour and I’m working with a few different American authors right now. At the same time, I am thinking about taking a break from the Taiwanese literature scene because there’s a lot of bureaucratic things that I just don’t want to deal with anymore. However, there are some projects that I’m working on, some graphic novels I’m also working on. I think we’re pretty much in the same project, probably, with Lin. So there’s that, but I do feel like I need a break from Taiwanese literature after having translated a very heavy novel and having talked about it over twenty times and I just feel like there’s a lot of labelling in terms of promoting our own books. Like, once we start promoting a book, there’s a sense that I’m tagged with those labels. But we are all individual translators, we want to get to know a lot of different authors and translate different works that interest us, so I would like to free myself from their labels and start to get to know other authors and other new works that are coming up on the scene. I think this year is really for work I’ve translated before but for me I feel like it’s time to move on and I also really want to focus on my own creative writing process.

TA-WEI: Thank you for your honesty. I feel kind of bad because I am a teacher of Taiwanese literature, so Taiwanese literature becomes a kind of marriage to you. We have another question, I think this is the last question, and maybe we have several minutes to take care of it. Kevin Wong is curious about the title of the chapbooks. The series is called Ká-sióng and he thinks that this title foregrounds the language or even cultural identity of Taiwan and Taiwanese Hokkien. While Kevin is very perceptive, I have to say that the title was assigned by Jeremy Tiang from Singapore, not by any of us or any Chinese person but by Jeremy in Singapore. So while the term might have something to do with Taiwanese Hokkien identity, it is from a Singaporean. But may I ask the three of you what do you think about the title Ká-sióng?

LIN: I want to just say that Jeremy did come up with the title but he discussed it with all of us and saw all of our opinions and we did discuss other possibilities and, I think, in collaboration with Strangers Press, with our author or our editor and ultimately it was a democratic process. But going back to the idea of what does it mean to pointedly say this title is not going to be in Mandarin Chinese, it’s going to be in Hokkien? You can see, just from the three titles that we translated, that the authors’ names all look diverse. Like Jenna said, some authors are choosing to Romanise their names using their Taiwanese pronunciations, Wen-chi obviously translated an indigenous author who’s using their indigenous name, and Sabrina chooses to use her English name with her Mandarin name inside the cover. And so I feel like there is just that freedom because we are a place where there are so many overlapping languages, even cultures of romanisation, even our names among the four of us are drawing from a variety of Romanisation systems and I just feel that Taiwan, because it hasn’t gone through that enforced uniformity process, is just going to be diverse in our choices of language and I think the title of the chapbook series reflects that.

TA-WEI: Thank you. Finally, I’m thinking about a way to encourage readers to reach out to us, not directly but indirectly. So may I thank the various agencies again. I’m going to thank them because if readers are interested in any of us, the readers can find us through these agencies, including the British Centre for Literary Translation, UEA publishing project, Strangers Press – certainly try to buy books from Strangers – and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, Taipei Representative Office in the UK and the Taiwan Ministry of Culture. You can easily find us through them or you can perhaps even find grants for translators, various grants from the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, and many of us here and offline are supported by the very generous Ministry of Culture in Taiwan. So please check out the websites of these agencies and I wish you a good time and I hope all of you take good care and have fun. It’s already November, almost winter, take good care and thank you all.