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What Was It Like to Work on To Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu? Ask the Translators!

Image Placeholder of - 53Cixin Liu is the New York Times bestselling author of The Three-Body Problem, and we are so, so excited to see what he has in store for us with his latest work, To Hold Up the Sky. To celebrate this new release, we decided to interview some of the people who made it possible for us to read this book in English—the translators. From their greatest challenges to their favorite stories in the novel, check out what Carmen Yiling Yan, John Chu and Adam Lanphier had to say here!


What makes the stories in To Hold Up the Sky stand out to you as a translator?

Carmen Yiling Yan: What strikes me the most is the scope of imagination in these stories, the sense of astronomical scale. There’s truly a sense of wonder that I haven’t experienced in much other science fiction lately.

Adam Lanphier: I only translated The Village Teacher, so I’ll talk about that story. Among Liu Cixin’s Chinese readership, The Village Teacher tends to elicit superlatives, both positive (e.g. it’s his “most touching” story, “most humane,” “most real”) and negative (e.g. “softest,” “most sentimental,” “goofiest aliens”). I agree.

Trying to carry this story’s deft, earnest genre-play into English was a balancing act. For the story’s moral message to land, the village needs to be poignant, not lurid; the children need to be sympathetic, not schmaltzy; the teacher needs to be a hero, not a caricature. The aliens didn’t need much—goofy is goofy.

This is a special story to me, as it is to many of Liu Cixin’s fans. I worked hard to do it justice. I hope I succeeded.

What are the biggest challenges in translating science fiction?

Carmen Yiling Yan: One tricky aspect is getting the technical terminology right, especially on a topic that I’m not familiar with. For Full Spectrum Barrage Jamming, I was looking up army manuals and physics articles.

Adam Lanphier: I’ll tell you what isn’t the biggest challenge: the science. I am frequently surprised by how straightforward it is to translate detailed, technical passages, even speculative ones. The language of science is precise and objective, almost by definition; it’s simple to research (compared to history, say) and its terminology tends to strike a similar tone across languages. I imagine most languages have more ways to say “I love you” than “cold fusion.”

John Chu: One of the trickiest things about translating any story is that you’re really translating between cultures. As a translator, you are trying to have the same effect on the reader in the target language that the original author had on the reader in the source language. Two obvious areas that make things difficult are humor and profanity. As a translator, you have to find something that your reader will find just as funny or just as profane. Invariably, it’s not a ‘literal’ translation of what the original author wrote. What we find funny or profane is extremely culture-based.

In that light, I don’t know that the challenges in translating science fiction are all that different from translating a non-speculative story. There may be more elements to balance against each other. Science fiction has its share of technical language and made-up words, for example. Ultimately, it’s still about making the target language reader feel that same “sense of wonder”, for example, that the source language reader feels.

What are some marks of a story that’s been translated well?

Adam Lanphier: A well translated Chinese story, if it’s a story worth translating, will maintain a clear sense of space, direction, and location. In my experience, this is the ‘omelet test’ for translators of Chinese into English, as spatial language in Chinese, though precise, is unintuitive for English speakers and tricky to maintain convincingly in translation. What’s more, it often assume a reader’s familiarity with features of traditional Chinese architecture (e.g. a character might tell another to “go inside” when they’re already indoors, an abstract reference to the series of increasingly private courtyards that were once prevalent in Chinese buildings; one might render this as “go down the hall”) and society (e.g. an “outsider” may mean a stranger, a non-relation, a foreigner, or a layperson, depending on context. “Gentile” sometimes comes eerily close).

If I can’t whether we’re indoors or outdoors, or where a character’s other arm is, or where the magazine on the chair went, that’s a red flag.

Unless a Chinese story touches on biology or butchery, a good English translation will use the word “heart” no more than once every other page.

These are details. Like all translators, I’m a craftsperson, and like most, I’m a freelancer. I shouldn’t presume to offer a more thorough answer to your excellent, difficult question, whose meat I’ll leave Nabokov and Borges to fight over.

John Chu: I honestly don’t think you can tell whether a story has been translated well without doing an A/B comparison with the original text. For reasons not worth explaining, I’ve actually done this with _The Three Body Problem_ and _Death’s End_. (I’ve read _The Dark Forest_ in Chinese but not in English.) So I feel confident in saying that Ken Liu did a superb job with them. Lots of people think they want ‘literal’ translations and they really don’t. _The Three Body Problem_, particularly, is steeped in Chinese history and your typical American reader is not going to have as thorough a grounding in Chinese history as your typical Chinese reader. Ken does an excellent job making sure that someone who doesn’t have a Chinese history background reading in English has at least a similar understanding as a Chinese reader reading the original. There are any number of things in those books that don’t really translate directly, for example, puns. Ken always comes up with substitutes that fit seamlessly.

The things he did that make those translations work so well aren’t noticeable unless you compare back to the original. When you read the translation, what you’re reading is the combined effort of both the original author and the translator. And, honestly, when it comes to things like word choice and phrasing, it can be hard to figure out who did what. (Obviously, original author is solely responsible for stuff like plot.)

That said, the translator is always trying to give you the experience that someone reading in the original language gets. Whether the translator has done that is up to the reader.

What’s the top reason why English-speakers should read more translated fiction?

Carmen Yiling Yan: First and foremost, because there’s so much good stuff out there! Some of the best epic fantasies and historicals I’ve read have been in Chinese. And there’s entire trends and genres with no direct equivalence–I have a soft spot for escape room novels. People who don’t read translations are missing out.

John Chu: I think the wider the net you cast, the more likely you are to find interesting, excellent work. There’s amazing work being published every day and not all of it was originally written in English.

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Two Contributors to Iraq + 100 Reflect on Science Fiction in Arabic Literature

Image Place holder  of - 16From contributor Anoud, author of “Kahramana”

I didn’t think too much about Sci-Fi’s absence from Arabic literature or the fact that I was quite ignorant in Arabic Sci-Fi until I was approached to contribute to Iraq + 100. I’d read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth as a child, as well as superhero comics translated into Arabic, but as an adult, I can only recall reading Orwell’s 1984 and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in that genre. You must have noticed by now that, with the exception of Saadawi, none of these titles are Arabic.

The debate in Arab media about the lack of Sci-Fi in Arab literature attributes it to the Arab world hitting a slump when it comes to scientific advances and inventions in the 20th century, in comparison to other parts of the world. Stories of violence and ongoing conflict stomp science when it comes to news headlines. Some Arab writers blame it on religious taboos where—in some countries—imagination offends the clergy as a defiance of nature, a challenge to god. I remember when I was 8, my school teacher in Baghdad told us that the NASA “Challenger” space shuttle exploded because NASA were challenging god. My parents snickered when I told them but you get the idea.

Since getting involved with Iraq + 100, I have been making more of an effort to explore this genre in contemporary Arabic fiction. My reading list includes Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, published in 2008, and Noura Al Noman’s Ajwan, which won the 2013 Etisalat Award for Young Adult Fiction.

When asked to contribute to the anthology I struggled. It was just too much headspace and I didn’t know where to start. Normally I look at things I’ve lived or seen and dissect them. I can paint a vivid picture of sights, smells, and sounds of a market place in Baghdad, but ask me to imagine it with time travel, aliens, a post apocalypse and I’d not be able to get past that first four lines. I felt strange when I read some of the other writers’ contributions like “Kuszib,” “Nujefa” or “Baghdad Syndrome”. It was a good kind of strange. I’d never imagined Iraq that way and it was as if the other writers just opened up a new portal into Iraq for me, and it was kind of exciting. I find my story “Kahramana” as more futuristic than full on Sci-Fi, if that makes sense.

I’m optimistic that with a little more nourishment more Iraqi writers will turn to Sci-Fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Both as a way to take a break from our miserable realities, and as a way to safely mock and critique the status quo and those in power without seeming too obvious. I’m glad Iraq + 100 started this and I’m both eager and terrified of how the Iraqi readers will respond to the anthology. Will we excite? Offend? Both? Time will tell.

Placeholder of  -55From contributor Ibrahim Al-Marashi, author of “Najufa”

Contributing to Hassan Blasim’s project Iraq + 100 appealed to me, given I’m Iraqi-(American), a historian of sci-fi, and a consumer of sci-fi as well.

As a historian, I was intrigued by Hassan’s lament in the introduction that there is not a strong science fiction and fantasy literary tradition in the modern Middle East. This dearth of genre fiction is surprising given the history of the region. One Thousand and One Nights, the quintessential fantasy collection, was first compiled and published in the Middle East. I also found elements of proto-speculative fiction in the works of the Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi from Murcia (today’s Spain). In his Futuhat al-Makiyya, written around 1238, he describes his travels to “vast cities (outside earth), possessing technologies far superior than ours.”

I have long been fascinated by modern works of science fiction and fantasy as the genre developed in English. H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was a commentary on the British role of the extermination of the local population of Tasmania, while the Godzilla franchise and the post-apocalyptic genre of Japanese manga, such as Akira, are imaginative spaces to deal with real trauma: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

My contribution to this anthology is “Najufa,” a story based on my first trip to my family’s ancestral city of Najaf as an adult with my father and mother in 2010, the site of the shrine of Imam Ali. My use of droids in my story was inspired by the fact that cell phones are not allowed within the confines of any shrine, since terrorists use cell phones to detonate explosives remotely. Visitors and pilgrims have to check their cell phones outside the shrine, like a coat check. Within the Najaf shrine I remembered how the younger pilgrims became fidgety, anxious to see if they had any missed calls or texts. I felt a disconnect between the spirituality of the place and something as mundane as worrying about a missed call. This phenomenon is no different from life anywhere else in the world. We are living in a techno-addicted world. But in Iraq, whether it is a terrorist or a pilgrim, the phone had become an extension of ourselves, and it was in Najaf that I realized we are essentially cyborgs, human-techno hybrids, where the phone might as well be an extension of ourselves.

My story was also inspired by the writer Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (made into the film Blade Runner), and the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, whose oeuvre provided the inspiration for the Matrix franchise. I found those works bring up philosophical issues of how one determines reality in an age of digital and virtual reality. My story sought to bring our current techno-phobias, and combine them with Iraq’s real problems that began after the 2003 invasion by U.S. forces.

Collectively, the authors of Iraq + 100 project their ideas into Iraq’s future, which highlights Iraq’s reality in the present. That is what attracts me to speculative fiction. While as a genre it is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. Sci-fi reveals our anxieties of the convergence between science, automated realities, and what it means to be human. Science fiction is a reflection of our socio-political facts.

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The Happily Invisible Co-Author

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tor-invisible-planetsWritten by Ken Liu

Invisible Planets is the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction. Inevitably, the question arises of just how “faithful” the translations are. The simple answer is: “very” and also “not at all.”

I often compare translation to the performing arts, but that’s not quite right. We (rightfully) celebrate a concert pianist’s brilliance in interpreting the dead notes in a score, and we argue over which actress’s version of Viola gives the most interesting twist to Twelfth Night, but we are hesitant to say much about the translator’s contribution to our enjoyment of a book, even though comparing any two versions of the Bible ought to convince the most skeptical reader of how much difference translation makes.

Some of this is because the distinct contributions of the translator (like the contributions of a skillful editor), are often difficult to see. While listeners can often compare many different performances of the same musical composition, most modern works of fiction are translated into English only once. While anyone can read the text of a play and readily see the additions, both verbal and nonverbal, made by an actress, only those who can and have read the original novel or short story can fully appreciate the choices and changes made by the translator. Since translation appears opaque to most of us, we are hesitant to attribute much to the translator.

But I think there’s a deeper cause for the unease we feel toward translators: since we do not fundamentally believe what they do adds value to a work of art, we do not trust them.

A piece of music performed by an orchestra is no longer just markings on the page; rather, it’s a living, beating heart that makes its presence felt through time. A play that is performed by actors is no longer a textual artifact; rather, it’s a complex, multi-sensory experience. But after a translator is done with a text, we still have nothing more than a text.

The translator is thus seen as a necessary evil—merely a passive lens necessary to decode the hieroglyphics of people who are not so fortunate as to write and speak our language. The best that a translator can do is to be unnoticeable, and anything short of perfection would be deemed a “distortion.” Thus, the most value that a translator can add to a work is precisely zero (and many times, readers work from the assumption that translators subtract rather than add).

This sentiment is expressed by readers and writers in countless ways: from reviews that attribute anything the reader disliked to the translation, to omissions of the translator’s name when works in translation are nominated for awards. We do not, fundamentally, believe that translators add anything.

There isn’t enough space in this essay for me to delve into all the ways in which translators do, in fact, transform works of art. Suffice it to say that a “faithful” translation, the ideal of many readers, is simply impossible. Cultures are distinct from each other, as are the ways they have chosen to partition and shape experience linguistically. Every translation is thus an act of cultural negotiation, a performance for (at least) two audiences balanced on the edge of betrayal and subversion. The translated text is a new work of art derived from the original, but with its own internal life, logic, and separate aesthetics. Betrayal is not only inevitable; it is desirable.

I think it’s most useful to think of the translator as a co-author. And like any collaboration, a translation is full of internal tensions and contradictions: between the intent of the author and the intent of the translator, between the expectations of the original audience and the expectations of the target audience, between the literary tradition that the original is in dialogue with and the literary tradition that the translation is thrust into, between the desire to assert that the text is universal (in spite of language) and the need to defend the unique cultural milieu in which it was written (despite translation).

The tension between the translator and the author is rarely acknowledged, though all writers whose works have been translated have felt it to some degree. Many authors view being translated with anxiety, as though their work is being taken away from them, and their chief concern is the desire to retain control. But like any act of collaborative adaptation and performance, control by the original author is neither possible nor even desirable. A good director or musician will not feel bound by the desires of the playwright or composer — for the performance is a distinct medium with its own needs and rules, and the same is true of translation into a new linguistic medium.

For writers and readers alike, I posit that it’s best to think of the translator as an invisible co-author. Like the titular objects in Invisible Planets, the translator’s presence cannot be seen but can be felt. They open up new vistas and sling new trajectories.

And indeed, I suspect most translators rather enjoy the unique role of being an invisible co-author. The lack of focus on their art paradoxically also gives them more space to experiment and push boundaries, to betray and negotiate in the tunnels of the word-mines in darkness. Translation may be the one performance art that thrives in the anonymity of its performers.

As you read the stories in Invisible Planets, I invite you to think about the imperfection of any attempt at communication, trans-linguistic or otherwise. We are each our own translators, forever adapting and shaping our internal representations of the external world, betraying endlessly.

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On The Cusanus Game

The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke

Written by Ross Benjamin, Translator

In The Cusanus Game, German author Wolfgang Jeschke tells a story at once exciting and philosophically far-reaching. In the mid-twenty-first century, a nuclear disaster near the French-German border has devastated a broad swath of Europe. In Rome – a city increasingly beset by the disastrous consequences of climate change and overrun by neo-fascist gangs preying on foreign refugees who have fled from the intolerable environmental conditions to the south – Domenica Ligrina has just completed her studies in botany. She and other scientists are recruited by the Vatican to take part in a secret time travel project: to journey to fifteenth-century Germany and collect plants and seeds with which the ravaged nature of the present can be revived. In Cologne of 1451, however, Domenica is accused of witchcraft and condemned to burn at the stake. She places her hope in Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus, to whom she writes letters from prison.

Domenica has long been fascinated with the remarkably prescient ideas of this theologian-philosopher, who was a confidant of the Pope. As Jeschke shows, Cusanus’s cosmological thinking anticipates the theories of the multiverse in contemporary theoretical physics that are central to the plot and structure of The Cusanus Game. The game of the title was invented by Cusanus (and discussed in his work De Ludo Globi) to teach its players important principles of life and the world: The object is to throw a ball with a slight dent in it onto a board with concentric circles such that it spirals toward and comes to rest in the center; however, the dent ensures that the ball will never reach the center. A character in the novel explains the point of the game as training its players “to sustain defeats lightheartedly and good-humoredly” and yet to keep striving closer to the goal of perfection despite the obstacles that the fundamental unpredictability of events will always put in our path.

Domenica’s journey turns out not only to embody these themes, but also to mimic the “erratic path” of the ball in Cusanus’s game. As she lives out different possible timelines in alternate universes and repeatedly faces the dark abysses of human violence, destruction, and suffering, she seeks to set our world on a more sustainable course. She learns that every choice creates another parallel universe, but that not all universes can survive: like a living organism, the multiverse is constantly evolving, and Domenica eventually encounters extraordinary beings that play a role in its self-correcting process of development.

The Cusanus Game is a powerful novel of ideas seamlessly woven into a time travel adventure story. Its elaborately labyrinthine plot mirrors the spiraling game board as previously narrated events repeatedly follow new trajectories, while at the same time the protagonist’s experiences lead her to ever greater understanding and sense of purpose. The interplay between these different levels – personal and cosmological stakes, scientific and theological perspectives, environmental and metaphysical missions – makes the novel a profound and thrilling read.

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From the Tor/Forge October 7th newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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Starred Review: The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke

Placeholder of  -52“Jeschke’s epic is a mind-expanding SF thriller that will grab readers and shake them up.”

Wolfgang Jeschke’s The Cusanus Game got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!

Here’s the full review, from the August 26th issue:

starred-review-gif In the year 2052, the world is collapsing after a nuclear disaster in Germany that lethally irradiated parts of Europe and accelerated the ongoing social breakdown. Domenica Ligrina is a young botanist living in Rome, now a violent, nearly abandoned borderland of cultural clashes. She is offered a mysterious job by the Papacy that could restore Europe’s obliterated flora, and soon she learns that the work involves retrieving seeds from the Middle Ages—specifically the age of her hero, the scientist cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus. This is only one piece of a vast convoluted puzzle spread across both her life and the multiverse that constantly drops paradoxical hints from past, future, present, and alternate todays. “What is reality?” the story asks, and the answer is predictably complex and far-reaching. Jeschke’s epic is a mind-expanding SF thriller that will grab readers and shake them up. (Oct.)

The Cusanus Game will be published on October 15th.

Starred Reviews: The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla

Starred Reviews: The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla

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“Gafla creates an interconnected puzzle of living and dead characters and their stories that will shock, amuse, and illuminate the nature of humans and their inevitable end.”

Publishers Weekly

“Simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, handled with sublime assurance, astonishingly inventive, funny and totally fascinating.”

Kirkus Reviews

The World of the End, by Ofir Touché Gafla, gets starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews!

Here’s the full Publishers Weekly review, from the April 15 issue:

Placeholder of  -91 Poignant and funny, Gafla’s Geffen Award–winning 2005 novel is part romance, part mystery, and part science fantasy. Ben Mendelssohn is a “righter” who specializes in composing perfect endings for books and movies. When his beloved Marian dies “under bizarre aeronautical circumstances,” Ben plans the perfect ending to their romance, killing himself in order to be with her in the afterlife. The Other World is a surprisingly well-ordered place, full of cities of the dead and strange technologies, and managed by the mysterious, almost-human “aliases.” Ben finds a slew of relatives—the Mendelssohns have an extraordinary death rate—but no Marian, so with the help of an eccentric detective of the hereafter he goes on a quest, Orpheus-like, to find her. Gafla creates an interconnected puzzle of living and dead characters and their stories that will shock, amuse, and illuminate the nature of humans and their inevitable end. Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary. (July)

And here’s the full Kirkus review, from the May 1 issue:

Poster Placeholder of - 22 The first appearance in English translation for Gafla’s first novel (2004), and it’s a weird and effective blend of adventure/fantasy, whodunit and romance.

Ben Mendelssohn styles himself an epilogist—he writes endings to stories for people who are unable to. After the death of his beloved wife, Marian, under “bizarre aeronautical circumstances,” inconsolable Ben struggles through another 18 months of existence before putting a bullet through his brain. With thousands of others who died in the same instant, he wakes in the Other World (“We wish you a happy and satisfying death”), an orderly, secular and surpassingly strange realm where sleep and climate can be personally programmed; clothing, money and profit are unknown; and the no-longer-dead are housed in vast cities ordered by the year of the person’s death. Charlatans, people who never lived on Earth, tend forests of family trees and other matters. But of his Marian, there is no sign. Baffled, Ben turns to Samuel Sutton, aka The Mad Hop, a wacky afterlife investigator, for help in locating her. But as Samuel soon, and Ben eventually, grasps, the search is ineluctably interwoven with characters and actions in the world of the living. Born of their mutual fascination with the works of Salman Rushdie, a certain Ormus conducts an electronic romance with Vina. Samuel persuades irascible artist Raphael to paint Marian’s portrait, even though he, Raphael, isn’t dead yet. Ann “Anntipathy,” a nurse who hates people and urges her patients to die, finds herself the recipient of oral sex from Adam, a pedophile and video games designer, whose brother, Shahar, a famous actor, is also a murderer. A talking photograph inserts itself into the plot.

Simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking, handled with sublime assurance, astonishingly inventive, funny and totally fascinating.

The World of the End will be published on June 25th.

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