How Yan Lianke Became China's Most Controversial Satirist

I'm intrigued by that phrase you just mentioned. Never heard it before... "Night in which all cows are black"?

Translated books live and die with the ability of the translator. A bad translator can make a bad book boring, a good translator can turn a mediocre book into a page-turner.

Whether the translator did well or not can only be seen by trying to actually read the book.

I read the first few pages of "Serve the people!" on Amazon and found it to be quite well-written, with appropriate explanations for cultural context where necessary. Then I read the same part in a pirated Chinese version [1] and found it to be even better.

The most difficult part of a translation is to preserve not only the content but also the form. Yan Lianke makes some stylistic choices like reusing sentence structures with only a few words swapped out, that would sound incredibly forced if you tried it in English, but flows naturally in Chinese. In these cases, the translator can only leave it at an approximation.

Some metaphors are also difficult to convey. In the original, Yan Lianke compares history to a measuring rope, whereas in the translation it turns into a yardstick. Maybe there's some intentional subtlety that gets lost (the rope is flexible, the yardstick is rigid).

Then there are simple translation errors that slipped through quality control, e.g. 一颗发光的五星 (one shining five-pointed star) is translated as five gleaming stars.

But if you're not explicitly trying to compare between versions, you're probably not even going to notice that there's anything off. Rather than wondering whether the translation is inferior to the original, try finding out whether you can enjoy it nonetheless.

Disclaimer: I'm a native speaker of neither English nor Chinese, so I might not be the best person to judge what quality literature in either language looks like.

[1] https://www.bannedbook.org/resources/file/600

I made a serious effort last year to read more translated works. Read a couple of Turkish novels, a Chinese one, and a couple others. Really enjoyed it, highly recommend reading translated stuff. Certainly your experience of the piece will not be 100% what the native writer intended, but it will be close, and that is okay. Even translated, there will be ideas and phrasings and ways of thought that you simply will not find in most native English writers works. Shakespeare read today will not have the same effect that Shakespeare perhaps intended it to have, 4-500 years ago, and that is okay. We read it all the same for what it can give us.

I'm a translator from the Chinese. Yan Lianke has had a couple of different translators, and his writing reads completely differently in different cases. I would recommend trying Cindy Carter's Dream of Ding Village -- I think she did an excellent job, and that's also one of his best books.

Grove Press publishes a novella collection of his called The Years, Months, Days. Those are also excellent examples of his work, and while I'm less enthusiastic about the translator, I know the story Marrow is pretty good, because I edited it :) Seriously, that's just a damn good story in general. Those novellas are I think more accessible to a general readership, because they're very specific, and very vivid. Even if you're unfamiliar with the place and time, the story will more than carry you along.

I think his other published novels, like Four Books and Explosion Chronicles, are not as good. They also require a little more background knowledge.

No idea about Lianke, but I’ve been learning French, and reading translations of novels from English has given a bit of perspective I missed when limited to the ones into English.

Harry Potter comes through just great: nuances tend to be preserved as far as I can tell at my level, wordplay becomes wordplay, the Sorting Hat song is still singable and even rhymes.

OTOH one translation of Alice In Wonderland was super-bad, ranging from very literal to misunderstanding the source. You’d come away thinking it was pointless nonsense. It’d be very hard to translate well, of course, and impossible to make anything exactly equivalent, but this particular attempt was just a waste of time. So cases like this exist.

Asimov’s Foundation and Empire also suffered, which surprised me some since I’d picked it as a source that’s not too literary, easy to translate faithfully. Looking up reviews of it in French, none ever remarked on the quality of the translation (or lack thereof). They seemed to just assume Asimov was like that. Still, the story was not much mangled, it was mostly just the prose style.

I’m more cynical now about translations — the published stuff varies more in quality than I’d appreciated — but it can still be very good. Someone else will have to chime in about Chinese literary fiction.

I've read some Chinese novels translated into English (I'm a Chinese speaker) but more Russian ones like Crime and Punishment and War and Peace.

My two cents is that there are some subtleties that are cultural but for the most part its understandable from the reader's perspective as to what the author was getting to. Although google and wikipedia is your friend when it comes to cultural references.