Negotiating Culture Space and Identity: The Translation and Analysis of Tongzhi and Ku-er Fiction

[last accessed 16/06/10]

Appendix
Interview with Fran Martin 3/09/2009
1. Angelwings is published in 2003 and organized in chronological order, but is there a specific timeline that the stories are translated? Were they also translated chronologically?
The first one I translated was Chen Xue’s story – I did that initially in 1996 I think, and a slightly earlier draft was published in positions in 1999 along with my essay about the story. What I did with the others was basically translate them one after the other in the chronological order in which they appear in the book. They were all done in 1999-2000: the year after I submitted my PhD thesis. Of course, my knowledge of the literature and its social/ cultural/ historical background had come largely out of my PhD research in the mid to late 1990s.
2. What inspire the selections of stories and authors in the anthology? Apart from being a snapshot of 90s tongzhi/ku-er culture in Taiwan, were the stories/authors also ones in which you share an affinity with?
Some of the stories and authors I knew well from my own research on 1990s tongzhi / ku’er culture. Chi Tawei, Chen Xue, and Hong Ling I knew personally to some degree as well as knowing their various writings quite well. Actually I am in the same generation as these three – we are about the same age and know many of the same people in Taiwan. I also had previously read and written about some works by Qiu Miaojin, Chu T’ien-wen and Chu T’ien-hsin in the course of my research. The additional four writers were all suggested to me by Chi Ta-wei (Hsu, the two Lins, and Wu). That is, they were suggested to me by my consultation of Chi’s written works (Queer Carnival and Queer Archipelago), plus I discussed the translation project a lot with Tawei and he made specific suggestions about which stories and authors to include. In Taipei in 1997-98, Ta-wei and I used to get together regularly to discuss his MA dissertation, which he was writing at the time, and we became friends. I always really liked his writing (both literary and theoretical). So I was pleased that he was keen to offer suggestions about the translation project.

Of all the writers included in the collection, I guess I felt the most intellectual affinity with Chi’s writing, and also a certain closeness with Hong Ling’s and Chen Xue’s work (given that I knew them a little and we are in the same generation, et cetera – there is perhaps a certain historical-cultural familiarity in certain aspects of the way they each write). I very much admire elements of Chu T’ien-wen’s and Chu T’ien-hsin’s writing (later I translated another of Chu T’ien-hsin’s homoerotic stories, “Waves scour the sands” – in Renditions). And I was and am a little in awe of Qiu Miaojin’s writing - -it’s very powerful, and powerfully strange (strange as in peculiar and strange as in alien). I find it extremely moving. Of the four male writers that were more or less new to me for this project, one that took me somewhat by surprise was Lin Yuyi. Translating “The boy in the pink orchid tree,” I enjoyed the story a great deal, even though it is rather a “classical” piece, with an older feel to it – very far removed from Chi’s, Chu’s or Qiu’s more experimental work, for example – but I found the story very stirring and evocative. So that was a resonance I felt across the distance that separates me from the author (I have never met him; he is of a different generation and writes in an older style, et cetera).

On principles for inclusion, please see also my response to question 3, below.
3. How would you consider your academic background, as well as your role as a queer/nutongzhi activist influence (if at all) the ways or methods in which you translate?

In translating, I actively want to make English readers feel something of the texture and specific metaphors of the Chinese. I have actually had arguments with line-editors over their suggestions for word changes that I sometimes felt would over-westernize the language. I don’t believe in seamless or static-free translation – this might indeed be connected with my academic background in post-structuralist thought (Derrida; Bhabha; Spivak on translation – plus postcolonial theory more broadly on the irreducible plurality of cultures.) I have never formally studied translation at all, so perhaps in the view of trained translators this approach might seem amateurish. Certainly one has to make compromises for readability, and I do strive for somewhat natural-sounding English. One also wants to avoid over-exoticising the tone of a phrase that sounds mundane in the Chinese but spectacularly alien when translated literally to English. It’s always a compromise, but I suppose I err more on the side of keeping the grain of the original as far as possible. I think that Anglophone readers should be made to cope with a little strangeness.

In terms of a sense of queer activism: implicit in the project was my desire to present something of the specificity of same-sex cultures in Taiwan without reducing it to a globally familiar LGBTQ. That relates to the point above. And I wanted to include works that were collectively experienced as significant to local queer readerships. This was what I consulted Tawei about – it was a key principle of inclusion, over and above any reified notion of literary “quality” or “positive representations.”
4. This is only a personal reading, but what I particularly enjoy about Angelwings is that it is neither a queer nor tongzhi text, but is instead both, particularly in the sense that I don’t feel the Chinese/Taiwanese aspects of the source texts are diminished. This very much differs from the popular notion in Translation Studies that the translation of literature from a minor/minority culture to a Global, English speaking audience is inevitably ‘Westernised’. Would you consider your translation (to borrow the word you mentioned) to be part of the syncretic tongzhi/queer culture?
I am very pleased to hear you felt some of the Chinese/ Taiwanese grain remained. I really hope that the book could be seen as part of that syncretic tongzhi culture! At the time I thought I was doing the project so that Anglophone readers could read the stories that academics and students like myself wanted to analyze in our scholarly writings in English. It didn’t strike me at the time that the book would have much significance within Taiwan itself (since there, people read the originals, of course). But in retrospect maybe the act of anthologizing the stories and naming the field did have some sort of significance – anyway people working in the field in Taiwan became aware of the book, so in that sense I hope it did become part of the field that it is about.

Another point relating to the impossibility, in my mind, of perfect or seamless translation arises from the fact that the type of colloquial English that sounds most natural to me is Australian English – so I actually have to “re-translate” that to get something approximating the “global standard” of west-coast US English, especially for dialogue. I have fought with editors over this, too. So maybe there is something almost in-built about keeping a grain of strangeness in the language – because for me, American colloquial English is quite strange (despite being excessively familiar), and I am aware that what sounds most “natural” to my ear will sound odd to American or even British readers.

5. Is there anything that you find particularly challenging, whether in terms of language or themes, during the translations of these stories? (I am thinking especially of stories such as Bodhisattva Incarnate, which has a complex intertextuality that I find challenging both as the Chinese and English reader).
I still can’t quite believe that I dared to attempt translating Chu T’ien-wen (others like Qiu are also quite challenging). I keep discovering details in the language – a particular phrase’s multiple associations or local shades of meaning -- that I didn’t “get” when I was doing the translation. The repeated, dismayed realization of all that one has failed to convey in one’s translations may prove to be a lifelong haunting.

1 For literature in Chinese see Chu-wei Chang 2008; For literature in English see Martin 2003a, Martin 2003b, Liou-liang ya 2005

2 Source from: “Definition of Metis” Metis Community Service [last accessed 19/10/09]

< http://www.metis.ca/index.php/metis-people/The%20definition%20of%20Metis%20Peoples>

3 Source from: Radicalesbians (1970) Woman Identified Woman [last accessed 23/05/2010]

4 The number 228 refers to the date that the event taking place, 28^th of Febuary, 1947. The New York Times (1947) reported that witnesses of the event estimated the prosecution of 10,000 protestors. While the Taipei Times (2004) mentions the numbers veers between 10,000 to 20,000.

Source from: Durdi, Tillman (1947) “Formosa killings are out at 10,000”. The New York Times 29/03/47 [Last accessed: 12/08/09] < http://www.taiwandc.org/hst-1947.htm>

Lee, Shoa Feng (2004) “The 228 Incident”. In The Taipei Times 28/02/04 [last accessed: 12/08/09] < http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2004/02/28/2003100472>

5 Originally a Hokkien dialect from Minnan, China. The language is the most widely used local dialect in Taiwan, hence the distinction as ‘Taiwanese’.

Both novels have been described by as representatives of either tongzhi or ku-er fiction.

. This paper will primarily be focusing on the Taiwanese aspect of the study.

6 Abridged to l/g/q

7 Debates on the globalizing influence of American g/l/q culture can be further referred to Altman’s essays ‘Global Queering’ (1996a) and “Ruputure or Continuaty” The Internationalization of Gay Identities (1996b). Associating the homogeneous effect of American capitalism with the imposition of a Western g/l/q model on local cultures, Altman takes a critical perspective of a domineering, universalising ‘global’ queer identity. Altman’s perspective was subsequently challenged by various Queer Studies scholars, including Berry and Martin (2003).

8 The myth originates from Yo Ming Lu [Ghost Tales], an anthology of supernatural tales from the Southern Song dynasty era. In the story, two travellers Li Chen and Ruan Ping encounters two beautiful women (described as fairies in the tale) in a mountain and decides to marry them. After half a year, the travellers leave the mountain to return home, only to discover they had been gone for seven centuries.

9 Both Harvey (2003) and Li’s (2006) study look at the translation

10 Della Porta and Diani include both Ferre, Gamson and Rucht’s (2002) comparative study on abortion discourse between the U.S and Germany and Steinberg’s (1999) dialogic analysis on the rhetorical forms of Nineteenth century English cotton spinners as examples.
Ferree, Myra, William Gamson,Juergan Gerhards and Dieter Rucht (2000) Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press
Steinberg, Marc (1999): The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth Century English Cotton Spinner. In American Journal of Sociology, 105, 736-80

‘Metatext’ can be interpreted as a form of paratext, categorised by Genette (1997) as ‘epitexts’.

11

12 It should be noted that both Harvey (2003b) and Frow (2006) in their discussion on the notion of binding and literary frame respectively, addressed the influence of Genette’s (1997) paratext in shaping their studies.

13 The term ‘Bodhisattva’ has the literal meaning of ‘one whose essence is Bodhi’, meaning a person who is in the final stage of enlightenment before the transformation into Buddha. A Bodhisattva chooses to delay the transformation but instead remains in the Earth, working for the salvation of all sentient beings.

Source from: Britannica Encyclopaedia of World Religions (2006) p.134-5

14 A method in which Martin employs through out the rest of Angelwings, in which she specifies in the footnotes for Bodhisattva Incarnate: “Words in English in the original texts are reproduced in italics in this and the other stories” (2003: 49).

15 The same sense of ‘酷’ that is also used in 酷兒/ku-er (literally translated as ‘cool child’)

16 Searching For the Lost Wings of An Angel specifically, is also translated by Partricia Sieber as In Search Of The Lost Wings of The Angels in the anthology Red is Not the Only Colour (2001).

17 The book 烈女傳 by the Confucian Philosopher Liou Xian originates from the Western Han era (206 BC – AD 9). The book is composed of a series of vignettes serving as a guide for ‘correct’ womanly conduct. Stories include the virtuous wife, mother and daughter through out history, as well as a chapter on ‘bad’, ‘improper’ women.

18 In the poem, the narrator compares his lover’s beauty to that of a rotting carcass. The general implication being that physical beauty inevitably declines.

19 Translated by Fran Martin as Bodhisattava Incarnate in Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction

from Taiwan.

20 A colour graph developed by Albert H Munsell, in distinction of colour is based on three categories: hue, value and chroma.

21 A government controlled department monopolising the sales of household essentials, including salt, petrol, matches, tobacco and cigarettes, established in 1910 during the Japanese occupation. By the 1960s the products sold are limited to alcohol and tobacco only. The department become privatised and sold as a company in 1990s Taiwan.