A publicly awkward encounter with the Great American Novelist taught this translator a career lesson.
When Jonathan Franzen came to Portland, Oregon, in 2013 for a speech, I showed up with my Traditional Chinese translation of The Corrections to meet him, ready for a photo-op, not for the grilling. After a few pleasantries, he hit me with, “Why didn’t you ever ask me any questions about the novel?” I stumbled for an explanation but eventually pivoted to a safer ground— birdwatching. The man loves his birds.
It’s not that I have never queried an author. As someone whose first language isn’t English—or even my second—I’ve learned to lean on native English speakers when I come across a linguistic enigma I can’t decipher. The author is my final resort when a consensus fails to materialize. Only when my lengthy list of questions are winnowed down to just a handful do I hit the author button. When Franzen called me out that day, I could have launched into a saga as long as The Corrections. It could have gone something like this…
In Pulitzer Prize winner Less, a rom-com by Andrew Sean Greer, the protagonist Arthur recalled how nice his former beau Howard was. The only shortcoming was Howard was too specific in bed: “Pinch that… touch there… no, higher; no HIGHER!” Six years after they broke up, Arthur ran into Howard but forgot his name. He asked Howard’s new partner to take a photo of the two of them. Here is when Howard revealed his demanding streak outside the boudoir: “Hold the camera higher…no, HIGHER!” Ding, Arthur’s memory clicked: Howard. This translator instinctively thought the “h” and “er” sounds in both “Howard” and “higher” were not a coincidence, so I toyed with the idea of switching Howard’s name to Scott, since Scott can be 史高特 in Chinese, the middle character being “high.” But the jury was evenly split after I consulted four native speakers. It was time for Greer to cast the deciding vote. The sound similarity wasn’t intentional, he replied to my email, adding, “but if you think it’s funny in Chinese, change it!”
Being faithful to a fault, I decided to stick with Howard. My translator insecurity has a strict “no funny business” policy. I should avoid attempting my own linguistic comedy high jinks, however higher humor Scott may achieve. But while drafting this piece, I dug up Greer’s old email. Turns out, in response to my other questions, he did urge me: “When in doubt, make it funny. Humor rarely translates well, so if something just won’t budge—make it funny.” I was told twice by Greer to go for laughs. Translator insecurity is such a humor killer.
Change it or not, sometimes it’s just not up to the translator. In Tess Gerritsen’s mystery The Silent Girl, the Chinese-American author prefaces with a Monkey King quote from the 16th-century Chinese classic Journey to the West. Any Chinese translator will tell you how much they abhor reverting ancient philosophical sayings back into Chinese, because more often than not, neither Confucius nor Mencius nor Sun Tzu ever said those.
Little did I know, the Monkey King quote was a third-generation xerox. On a quest for accuracy, I downloaded the full 100-chapter original, and joined the Ming Dynasty monk on his epic trek, from the Mountain of Flames to the Kingdom of Women, all the way to the Indian border, while cross-referencing it with the Arthur Waley translation Monkey. It was like venturing into the fabled Water Curtain Cave, blindfolded. I needed the author to lend a torch.
Some readers may question my approach. The new original is the original now. Why can’t a translator simply convey the literal meaning and skip the archaic classical wording? After all, it’s fiction quoting fiction, and translators are traitors. I had thought about this, but in The Silent Girl, Gerritsen did reference The Story of Chen O, which is the title of Chapter 9 in Journey to the West, the translation of which corresponds with the Chinese classic line by line. This tells me Gerritsen is not one of those who stuff modern English words in Confucius’ mouth.
Before The Silent Girl, I’d translated another of Gerritsen’s books, The Keepsake, and received satisfactory answers through my publisher in Taipei. This time she did not disappoint, either. She told me the quote was adapted from Chapter 18 in Arthur Waley’s translation to “make it shorter and more powerful in English.” In the original classic, the passage is buried in Chapter 22, among the Quicksand River and a heap of poems. I followed the 16th-century style to make the new original read authentically old, essentially betraying both, just a smidge.
I had been a traitor early in my literary translation career. Everything is open to my own interpretation, I would tell myself when I stumbled upon English expressions that left me scratching my head. Deep down, however, my insecurities were like a moat keeping me from reaching my authors. What if they thought my questions were stupid? What if my questions revealed how little English I understood? Worst of all, what if they told their agent to press my Taiwanese publisher to drop this worthless, clueless dumb dude?
I realized, after having a few translations under my belt, I could no longer betray responsibly. There were glaring typos I needed to address, like “site” instead of “sight” for a gun. Or the gibberish characters in the advance reader copy my editor passed on to me. Or the inconsistencies in the PDF version. Chinese kinship terms are defined by maternal/paternal and birth order. I refuse to make them up in nonfiction.
When I translated Barbara R. Moss’s inspiring memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter, the author’s warm personality came through the pages and brushed aside my insecurities, and I contacted her to tell her how much this California-based translator enjoyed reading and translating her personal journey. We started our email exchange. I relayed this to my Taiwanese editor, who asked me to conduct a phone interview with her and write a translator’s note at the end of the translation. It dawned on me that authors were not all high and mighty. They were eager to expand their readership beyond borders. From that point on, I set a personal rule: finish my translation at least a week ahead of the deadline to allow for consultation with authors.
There are indeed haughty authors who ignore translators. I once contacted two authors simultaneously— one who penned a business book about corporate organizations, and the other who wrote Brokeback Mountain. Guess which one responded to me first? Annie Proulx’s reply landed in my inbox within an hour, addressing my questions—many questions—in details. Years later, when she spoke to an audience of more than a thousand in Portland, she complimented that “Eddie Song asks some of the most intelligent and difficult questions that any translator has…You’re always grateful when a translator asks questions, because quite a few of them do not. And you just don’t know.” Her chuckle elicited a roaring laugh.
As for the other author, my email to him vaporized into the ether, and he’s still a first-time author two decades later.
Based on my experiences with authors, those who shut me out tend to be the rising star type. I was once commissioned to translate a buzzy thriller, whose debut author was profiled again and again where I resided at the time. She had an active blog, complete with her email address, so I dropped her a quick note to inform her that I’d be translating her work. What I received was a reprimand from my editor: No more direct contact with this author; all future correspondence must go through the editor and her agent. To this day, I still have no idea what went down.
Not all newbies are as aloof as a cat on a high shelf, though. Seré Prince Halverson was over the moon to learn her debut novel The Underside of Joy had sold its rights to 12 languages. “There are no words…at least not in English,” she described her joy in one blog post. “I will have to ask the Chinese translator.” That would be me.
In A Captain’s Duty, which was adapted into an award-winning Tom Hanks movie, the captain and the nominal author Richard Phillips spent some time delineating all the family relations for me. My back-and-forth with journalist and first-time novelist Amy Waldman spanned an entire month, in which we compared the differences among the advance reader copy, the paperback, and the audiobook versions of The Submission.
There have also been big-time authors who came to my rescue. While translating The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, I came up with some questions along with a chronological error. The nonfiction work had been selling for years, she said, and I was the first one to catch it. When I met her at a book signing in Los Angeles, she gifted me the autographed poster board promoting the book.
Jeffery Deaver, master of suspense, not only answered my questions book after book but also took me to lunch during his Portland tour. Jennifer Egan, fresh off the acclaim of A Visit from the Goon Squad, had been very helpful with my translation of Manhattan Beach. My Taiwanese editor, Patrick Jia, is a superfan. He had been itching with his own questions too, and he asked me to forward them to her, who signed her reply as Jenny. In my ensuing correspondence with her, I came to address her as such, time after time prompting a blush on my thin old skin.
My skin turned scarlet in my dealing with Philip Roth. In 2004, as I was finishing my first draft of his American Pastoral, a fax with a list of my questions reached his agent’s desk. Roth responded with a typewritten and signed reply. A Philip Roth autograph! This fanboy screamed. But that wasn’t the reason my face turned hot.
A few days later, my editor dropped a bombshell. She’d just received a detailed evaluation of my translation— the literary giant had hired a Chinese translator to back-translate my work. Was he doubting my ability to translate his work, or did he find all translators sketchy? What I can say is this, I poured my heart into the translation—and got chicken pox at the ripe old age of 34— and I’m grateful he gave his fax of approval while he was still around.
While clearly in the minority, I’m not the only Taiwanese translator who queries authors. Marcel Proust’s Taiwanese translator Tai-yi Chen also translated illustrator-author François Place’s fantasy works, most of which are full of obscure references. “I was constantly on edge, fearing I’d miss some hidden meanings,” Chen confessed to me. “Thankfully, he’s a kind soul and happy to elaborate via email.” After Chen’s translation of Éric Faye’s fiction Nagasaki was published, the French novelist found out she was working on his other works and asked, “Don’t you really have anything to ask me about?”
Then there’s Ching-chun Shih, whose relationships with authors extend beyond the page. She considers Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers as her friend and teacher, sharing their in-person interactions through Facebook posts. When her translation of Bewilderment snagged an OpenBook Prize, a major publishing award in Taiwan, Powers lauded her as “the most conscientious of the many dozens of translators I have ever worked with over the decades. She has taken the view from one planet and transported it to another.” Meanwhile, novelist Anthony Marra of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena has become buddies with Shih over the years, visiting each other frequently in the Bay Area. She was even invited to his wedding.
Jonathan Franzen will not invite me to his wedding. As I was translating it, The Corrections had been widely read and discussed for 11 years at that point, so clarifications were just a Google search away. Plus, with Franzen busy promoting his latest book Freedom, he might not care to retrace his literary footsteps long buried in the sands of time. Most of all, the brick of a book was pressing me as hard as the deadline, obliterating that precious one week I usually reserved for some author moment. Add that to the interminable wait for messages to shuffle through my editor, the copyrights agent, Franzen’s agent and back again, it’s clear why I skipped this step.
When Franzen gave me that quizzical look at the event, I was hit with a realization— Franzen himself is a German-to-English literary translator. During all those months toiling through the Americana landscape and the Lithuanian scam in the family saga, I hadn’t even introduced myself to a fellow translator I’d been working on. The Traditional Chinese copy of The Corrections in my hand suddenly felt like a dead weight. He saw right through me. The shame I felt was worse than being called stupid by an author. From that moment on, I vowed to query authors as long as they’re alive, unless they are the next “it” authors who put up a “no direct contact” sign.