In the beginning, there was nothing but emptiness. Emptiness that came from within, reflected without, and turned back inward, carrying with it an infinite chill.
Unfortunately, the queen had spoken in Sanskrit, a language at which the king was a complete dunce. He thought she wanted sweets. “Have all the sweets in the palace brought to the pool side!” he ordered his retinue. The queen who had spoken in Sanskrit felt embarrassed for him.
As someone who thinks of myself primarily as a writer, I first became interested in translation three years ago when I started working on a novel inspired by the tropes of wuxia (martial arts fantasy) fiction in English.
We're delighted to welcome John Yu Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu to the blog, to tell us more about their translation of Ji Yun, and their work on Chinese anomaly tales, or zhiguai. You can read their translation of Ji Yun's Guests from the Sky in the September 2019 issue of Samovar, alongside the original Chinese. They are both writers and translators, and teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They are one of two finalists for the The International Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts from Antioch University/Lunch Ticket Magazine.
Umberto Eco once pessimistically said that “translation is the art of failure”. In contrast, I say that this precious craft is the art of success because without literary translation, we are all separate dots in an ocean of failures.
Short stories tend to have much shorter lifespans than novels do. As such, a translation is a form of reincarnation. The end result is the same story, but also a completely different one at the same time. The first level of changes is due to the different language operating under another structure, a different set of ties binding the abstract with the specific. But there's also the second level, a more intimate level where the story surreptitiously obtains new properties after it’s been processed through the mind of the translator.
I got into translation for the same reason many people get into blogging, writing reviews, and other fannish activities: I loved certain stories and felt the strong desire to share them with my friends. Except many of my genre-reading friends do not speak Russian. And while I'm not a reviewer and am a lazy blogger at best, in this case I had, ahem, a particular set of skills…
Ma io penso che gli scrittori di fantascienza non siano profeti, sono solo narratori, ecco perché ci sono sia cose buone che cattive che provengono dalla grande attenzione che riceviamo.
For the latest of our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome H. Pueyo, writer and translator of 'Saligia', in our March 2019 issue. We asked her to tell us more about the story, and her experiences of writing and translating.
Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction?
Writing is an old passion of mine; it never occurred to me to do anything else in my life since I was a very small child, so it’s hard to separate myself from it. That being said, I’m very new to speculative fiction!…
