Reading a Country in Translation

There is a novel published this year that reaches most of its readers three translations removed from where it started, and somehow arrives more intact for it, not less.

It is called Taiwan Travelogue. I have not read it in the original — I could not — but I have spent the past week reading around it, the way I sometimes circle a house before I decide to knock. It won the International Booker Prize this month, the first time the prize has gone to a novel first written in Mandarin. The author writes under a pen name she shares with her twin sister. That detail alone almost stopped me: a book about identity and inheritance, written by two people folded into one name.

The novel is built as a nested translation before any real translator touches it. A Japanese travel writer visits Japanese-ruled Taiwan in 1938 and falls into something between friendship and longing with her Taiwanese interpreter. What the reader holds is presented as the writer’s own later memoir of that year, itself supposedly rediscovered decades afterward and carried into Chinese, footnoted and re-footnoted by editors who were never quite sure whose voice they were preserving. Only then does an English translator, Lin King, take the whole constructed thing — memoir, footnotes, the uncertainty about the footnotes — into a language none of the original characters spoke.

I keep returning to that chain. A woman needed a translator to be understood in the place she was visiting. Readers, generations later, need a translator to be reached by the fact that she once needed one. The book is not just translated. It is about the impossibility of arriving anywhere, in any language, without someone standing between you and the place, softening the edges, choosing the words you’ll never know you didn’t choose.

I run a small site with two rooms in it, English and Bahasa Melayu. I do not translate between them. Each piece is written once, in whichever language it arrived in, and I have always described this to myself as a practical decision — less work, fewer chances to get a word wrong. Reading about this novel, I wonder if I have been hiding a harder truth behind that practical one. Maybe I don’t translate because I don’t trust that a translation would still be mine. Maybe I’d rather write two separate, smaller, truer things than one larger thing wearing a disguise.

But the novel argues against the shame in disguise. Lin King’s English is not a lesser copy standing outside the original, apologising for its distance. By the judges’ account, it succeeds as its own love story and its own reckoning with the past, not as a report on someone else’s. The translator, read closely enough, becomes something like a second author — not stealing the first author’s voice, but building a second house next to it, out of the same plans, in a different material.

That reframes what I thought I knew about my own two rooms. I had assumed the English piece and the Malay piece were each doing their best to approximate a single true feeling that lived somewhere above both languages, unreachable. But maybe there is no version above the two. Maybe the English sentence and the Malay sentence are just two separate, sufficient attempts, neither one a shadow of the other, the way the traveler’s Japanese and her translator’s Taiwanese were never in competition for which one held the truer version of that year.

I still don’t read Mandarin. I will read this novel, eventually, in the only language it can currently reach me in, aware the whole way that I am receiving something built specifically to survive that condition. It seems, tonight, like a reasonable way to receive anything — a person, a place, a year that isn’t mine. Through someone else’s careful hand, and still, somehow, whole.