Posts featuring Wu Qing

All Literature Is Worth Investigating: An Interview with Translator Stefan Rusinov

All cultures are exciting, both for their achievements and failures, for their beauty and nastiness.

In 1999, almost 170 years after his birth, Bulgaria honored publisher Hristo G. Danov’s legacy by establishing national literary awards in his name. In 2021, Stefan Rusinov, a translator who isn’t afraid to ask the important questions about the essence of his trade, won Best Fiction Translator for multiple books he had worked on over the course of twenty-four months. In addition to these admirable recent endeavors in Chinese prose, he juggles his work at Sofia University and his tasks as a freelance interpreter. Our conversation highlights his current projects, the importance of honest answers, and the value of simply “hanging out” with writers.

Andriana Hamas (AH): I would like to begin by asking you about your Бележка под линия (Footnote) podcast, thanks to which you meet fellow translators and discuss “behind-the-scenes torments,” the decisions they eventually have to make, and their inevitable missteps or failures. What have you learned so far?

Stefan Rusinov (SR): I’ve learned a lot, which was really the selfish reason to start this project to begin with. Private conversations with other translators and several years of translating gradually made me realize how case-specific this activity is and that mastery comes rather from accumulating solved problems than from learning universal principles (not to underestimate translation theory). That’s why I wanted to create a space where we won’t so much muse over the nature of translation and other such abstract questions, but we would dig into the specifics, where translators would be put in the position of explaining their considerations and decisions to someone who doesn’t know their working language. Nine episodes on, I’m even more certain that discussing actual problems encountered by translators from all kinds of languages is an important way to understand this activity (and also a major way to pump up my own translation skills).

I’ve learned, or rather, I’ve confirmed, that uncertainty is part of the game, and it should be. I find it very hard to trust a confident translator. There are tons of problems we need to solve and tons of decisions we need to make and, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s idea of interpretation, the mere existence of these cases means that we are bound to create a gap between the original and the translation. So, in a way, we are bad translators by default.

I also learned that in French unfuckable means “incomprehensible.” READ MORE…

Honoring the Art of Translation: Paper Republic

Read Paper Republic is one of the most important things we can do . . . to deliver on our mission of getting more people reading Chinese literature

In the preface of the formidable Narrative Poem, Yang Lian wrote: “Long must be identical with deep, and we have to make it new for a depth never before expressed.” This maxim is Yang’s contemporary grasp of the enormously, incomparably complex world of contemporary Chinese letters, which threads tradition with novelty, comprehension with inquiry, intelligence with intuition, and is profuse with dislocations, disruptions, oppressions, and erasures. Diving into this amassment—either as reader or translator—is often an overwhelming endeavour, so it is both a relief and a source of joy that such a thing like Paper Republic exists, an online hub that serves as a platform for new Chinese writing, a resource for Chinese-English translators, an extensive database, and the base of a vibrant community eager to share dialogue and talents. In our second feature for National Translation Month, we’re proud to shed a spotlight on their impressive accomplishments with a text written cumulatively by their brilliant team.

“Paper Republic began very simply as a group blog, run by translators of Chinese literature into English,” writes founding member Eric Abrahamsen. It was 2007, four or five of us had found each other in Beijing, and we formed a sort of mutual support group/social club.”

Since then, Paper Republic has grown and changed almost beyond recognition; incorporated as a company, we’ve spent a decade making concerted efforts to interest western publishers in Chinese literature, producing book reports, and even dabbling in literary agency. A few years ago, however, we began to focus on readers and translators. We are now a registered charity/non-profit organization, made up of a team of volunteers based in America, UK, China, and Japan. In addition to providing information about Chinese literature to people in English-speaking countries, we promote new Chinese writing in translation, publish free-to-read short fiction and essays online, host an extensive database on Chinese writers and their English translators, mentor Chinese-to-English translators, and provide resources to schools teaching Chinese.

In order to introduce Chinese writers to the world, we started Read Paper Republic back in 2015—sourcing, translating, editing, and publishing one short story every single week for a year, completely free to read. It was a mammoth undertaking, and the fact that we managed to pull it off at all is testament to the generosity of the authors and translators involved. One of the things that is special about Read Paper Republic is that every story, no matter how experienced the translator, is edited by a member of the team, who also checks the text against the Chinese, assuring literary quality as well as accuracy. From the very first series, we had aspiring translators offering their work; our editing process is both beneficial to them, and also fits perfectly with one of our aims as a non-profit: to mentor new translators. READ MORE…