L'entretien en anglais

How would you introduce yourself to French readers who don’t know what you’ve written yet?

You know, I don’t actually like to give a marketing pitch. I would just say that I’m a writer of science-fiction and fantasy – at least a lot of my stories have been classified that way. I published around 130 short stories, some of which have been translated to French. I’m the author of two big fantasy novels, which I describe as silkpunk – meaning that they are sort of like steampunk, but based on the technology and aesthetics of East Asian antiquity. They’re not really fantasy China stories, in that the stories may be reimaginings of very old East Asian historical romance tales, but they’re done using a language and a set of tropes derived from Western epics, as well as Eastern narrators. Those two novels were called The Grace of Kings and The Wall of Storms. In French, my short stories are collected in one collection called The Paper Menagerie, which contains I cannot remember how many stories; 20, I think. And then, finally, I’m also the translator of a hard sci-fi series from China into English; it’s called The Three-Body Problem. The series contains three books, and I did the first book and the third book, The Three-Body Problem and Death’s End, which is coming out very soon. I think that’s about it!

Yesterday, we recorded a podcast on translation with Mélanie Fazi, a French author and also a translator. We talked about the fact that writing may be influenced by being a translator – or it could be the other way around. Do you think your writing may have been influenced by the books you translated? Do you think there’s a link between these two jobs?

It depends on what you mean by “influence”. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that you’re influenced by the very first piece of sweet candy you had as a child, the way modern novels sort of imagine everything is going to be about everything else, yes, sure; everything you do influences everything else. More strictly speaking, no, I don’t think so. I think translating and writing my own original fiction are quite distinct things, and I don’t really see much influence between them. I think it’d be horrible if, when I do translation, my own voice becomes the dominant one, to the detriment of the work. I certainly think it’s a betrayal of trust for me to allow my translation work to “influence” my writing in a way beyond what can’t be helped as a matter of living a life and being influenced by outside experiences. In terms of whether the two are connected, this is a complicated issue. Translators who are also writers and translators who are not writers will have very distinct views on this. I think translators who are not writers often view translation as a very distinct type of skill. They dislike the idea of a writer/translator coming in and claiming that somehow they can do the translation job while being formed by their writing skills. Being a writer and a translator, I have a different view of this myself. I view translation as a performance art of sorts, in that you are in fact working as an unacknowledged co-author of the work that you are translating. There’s always a tension between the translator and the original author that’s not often discussed. But it’s there, because the translator’s intent is not necessarily the same as the author’s intent. In any kind of work of collective authorship or collaboration, there’s always this tension between the two co-authors – in this case the translator and the author – that’s hard to tease apart. I think translators who are also writers often have this difficult relationship with the works they’re translating. On the one hand, it does require a lot of creativity; when you are translating, you are in fact putting a lot of new things into the work that weren’t there before. But at the same time, you also kind of have to keep in mind that you’re not exactly a traditional co-author, in the sense that most people understand it, and you sort of have to restrain yourself. I think that’s a difficult balance to keep for most writers/translators – at least for me it is. Everybody has to settle on what they consider to be ethical and what they consider to be the right thing to do, what is honest for the work and for the author, and for the profession of the translator. But as a writer/translator, I like to think that because I am also a writer, I understand the author’s own difficulties and challenges in trying to reach out and communicate with an audience in a way that’s perhaps special, and more intimate. In that way, I think I do bring something extra to my translations, that wouldn’t be there if I weren’t a writer myself. But whether that’s true or not, only the reader can judge.

As far as France is concerned, you can relax, because I think your translator is doing a great job. You’ve got the feeling that it flows, you can read it really easily. I read mostly in English, and sometimes, when I read in French, I can sense that there’s a discrepancy between the French and the English version. But when you read this one, the translation flows.

Whenever I receive some sort of award or some praise for an overseas edition of one of my works, I always say that at least 50% of the credit goes to the translator. Being a translator myself, I certainly acknowledge the translator as a co-author of the translated work. I think a lot of authors are not comfortable with saying that, because they feel like they have to maintain control. I don’t – I think a translation is a new work of art, and the translator is my collaborator. The result is at least 50% theirs. I do think it’s interesting that a lot of authors are very concerned about whether the translator is faithful to their work. I manage to not be concerned about that. Obviously there are things that I care about, but I don’t think it’s interesting, or reasonable, or even realistic to require the translation to be faithful. The fact is, there is no such thing as a faithful translation. It’s actually not possible. It can neither be achieved by translating word for word, nor by translating sense for sense. That’s simply not possible. Every language in every culture shapes experience in distinct ways. It’s not so much that there are untranslatable phrases or words; it’s rather that every distinct culture sees the world through a different lens. So there is no such thing as a faithful translation, because every translation necessarily has to negotiate that division between cultures and languages. It’s just like performance art: when Shakespeare is being performed for a modern audience, directors and actors of course will take certain changes as required to make the play work for this audience, differently than it would have been performed for an Elizabethan audience. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a translator transforming my words in a way that feels more natural or effective for the target language or culture. In that sense I don’t really care that much about faithfulness or changes. Of course I do care about certain messages in my stories, because all writers do in fact write with a distinct message in mind. But part of what I’ve learned as a writer is that you cannot count on perfect communication even with the audience that you write for first: every reader has to pack the text with his or her own expectations and interpretative frameworks before they can unpack it. So it’s never possible to communicate with a reader in the way that you want. A translation is just another level of mediation, but not a particularly different kind of mediation.

I wanted to talk about “The Man Who Ended History”. What you’re dealing with in the book is something I knew about, but I’m not so sure the fact that such a thing existed is so well-known in Europe. Was it a way for you to share what happened, or was it just a means to deal with History itself?

I’m not terribly interested in educating anyone. I don’t believe people can be educated if they don’t want to, so there’s no point in even trying. The story I wrote was not really an attempt to educate. I think if the readers read it as one, they’re mistaken. The story I wrote is an exploration on the idea of History and historiography, and the idea of evil, really. I’m deeply interested in History, and the ways that historical injustices persist, despite everyone’s professed desire to set these injustices straight. I think the reality is that we almost never act on our professed ideals. I think we’re very cynical and instrumentalist towards History. This is not something unique to autocratic governments, despite the propaganda put out by Western governments that it is so. Democracies are just as manipulative and destructive towards History as their autocratic counterparts. It’s a part of human nature, really; it’s nothing to do with the government system. It’s part of human nature to wish to perpetuate privileges and power imbalances in the preservation of your own superior position. This is a story about that. It’s a story about the ways in which historical injustices and inequalities persist, and that trying to offer up facts or truths as an argument against lies is often not very useful. We, as a species, are not really interested in facts – we’re far more interested in the stories. This is a novella that tries to deal with that paradox. It is filled with facts and truths, but it is told in the form of a fiction clothed in a non-fictional documentary. There are layers of rhetorical change going on here. That’s meant to highlight the fact that we say we’re interested in truths and facts, but we’re not. As a species, we’re not actually interested in that; we just want a good story. What causes most people to be disgusted and moved by the Holocaust isn’t the fact that it happened, but rather the story of Anne Frank. It’s these stories that move people, not actual facts. And that’s terribly sad to me, because there are many historical injustices in the world that do not have as eloquent a voice speaking for them as Anne Frank. So we end up with these situations where lies persist. The horrors committed by the Japanese Imperial army during World War 2 are simply forgotten and deliberately erased. This story is about all of that. It’s about the way we relate to the truth, how we formulate History, how we conduct historiography, and how we rationalize victimization – how we rationalize the violence we commit against those who are being silenced and erased from History. It’s all of that.

You first started writing short stories, then you decided to write a novel. Was it a natural continuation of your path as a writer? Why did you decide to go from short stories to a novel?

When I wrote a lot of short stories, I was really experimental in trying to learn techniques. I think short stories are particularly good for experimentation, because they’re short, so they don’t require a lot of investment in terms of time. You can do things in a short story that you cannot do in a long narrative like a novel. In a short story, you can try narrative techniques that would be tiresome in a long narrative. For example, you can try the second person. I think most people find a novel written entirely in the second person somewhat tiresome, because there’s a persistent psychic pressure to force you to identify and agree to having done certain things that you’re not willing to. Something like Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is very hard to read because it’s entirely written in an experimental kind of point of view. But in a short story, you can try stuff like that without a huge amount of risk. You can also try to perform little language games. For example, I have a story that’s entirely written as one sentence. I think it’s around a thousand words or somewhere. Again, writing a novel in that kind of style would be tiresome, but in a short story, it’s interesting. It’s like prose poetry, it’s an experiment. So I wrote a lot of short stories early on because I really like the form, the freedom it gives you to experiment and to try different things. But later on, I did want to try and do a novel, because I’ve always wanted to tell a story that’s deeper and bigger than a short story can contain. I’m interested in telling very grand stories, War and Peace-type of stories – grand, epic stories involving many characters, many plot lines. They’re not so much about the trials and tribulations of one person, but rather the rise and fall of empires and the evolution of an entire people, their culture, their politics and their technology. Those are the kind of stories I’m interested in telling. So at some point in my short-story career, I told my wife I did want to try and write a very grand, big novel. And my wife said: “You’ve always loved historical romances, and there really isn’t something like that in English, at least not in contemporary literature; a real epic, in the old sense, a historical romance, a very epic-scale kind of story that’s done deliberately to evoke legends and myth, and the way an entire people see themselves”. And I said: “You’re right, I don’t see too much of that being done”. So I wanted to try to write such a story – and that’s how The Grace of Kings came to be. I wanted to re-imagine a very foundational myth for the Chinese, using a set of tropes and techniques taken from Western epics that I love, like the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Song of Roland. I wanted to apply them and try to tell a new story that would be based foundationally on a set of Chinese mythical legends. To me, this sort of melding felt very much like the sort of thing I like to do.

Were you expecting such positive reactions to the novel? The way people reacted to it was really amazing.

I actually haven’t cared that much about the reviews. I’ve always not cared much about reviews! Mainly because this particular story, The Man Who Ended History, was one of my favorite stories, but it couldn’t be published anywhere. I submitted it for a long time and got rejections from everywhere. In the end it was published by a small press, run by an editor who is a friend now, Dario Ciriello. He was just wonderful. He runs a small press that published only novellas. He loved my story, and he published it. But he was the only one, really – before that, it was rejected left and right. If I believed those kinds of reactions, I wouldn’t have kept on writing. I’ve never really cared that much about reactions, either negative or positive, about my work. The only reader that I care about is myself. I write these stories because they’re the kind of stories I want to see, and they don’t exist. If readers like them, I’m very happy; if readers don’t like them, I really don’t care! Either way, I just don’t bother that much. In fact, my publicist sent me reviews when they came out, but I told her to stop doing it, because I really just don’t care. If she thinks they’re useful, she can post them; if she doesn’t like them, then I never have to see them. But either way, I don’t really need to see them.

There are reviews, but there’s also the emotional impact of your stories on people.

I like to hear actual, direct reader feedback. After I published my short stories and my novel, readers wrote to me and said: “I was really moved by this story; here’s what I went through and here’s my reading history, and this is why your work really impacted me”. I’m always grateful for that, because it’s great to actually touch someone, and for someone to take the trouble to write to you and to explain that they really enjoyed your work. It’s a great gift, and I’m very appreciative of that. It worked for the novel too. I lot of readers have written to me afterwards and said: “I’ve never read anything like this before. I haven’t found an epic fantasy that I enjoyed until I found yours, and it’s really cool. When is the next one coming?” I’m very pleased by that kind of thing. But sometimes, although I don’t look for these reviews, readers write some reviews to say they didn’t like it and deliberately send them to me. I’m fine with that. Readers’ reactions when they don’t like the work are just as valid as when they do. You can’t take anyone’s reading experience away from them. If they didn’t have a good time with my book, I always do feel a little sad, because obviously, I try to make people happy with my story, although I don’t set out deliberately to make them happy and write these stories for me first. So when readers don’t like them and feel like I haven’t given them a good story, I do feel sad about that. But there’s not much I can do about it. I definitely notice their feelings, but I’m gonna write what I’m gonna write.

I’ve got a question regarding the fact that you’re mixing Western narratives with Chinese myths: do you think people will see you as someone who’s building bridges between cultures?

I hope not, actually! I think this may be easier to understand for Americans than for non-Americans. I always tell people that it’s weird when I hear my stories described as somehow Asian, because they’re not: they’re actually very American stories. My novels are also very American. Fundamentally, if you look at The Grace of Kings, for example, it’s a story about the formation of a new people, a new political entity. It’s about the foundational myth of a new empire. These are no longer very Chinese ideas. This is very much an American idea, the idea that you can just go out there and construct a myth for the people and then live by it. America is one of the few nations – a very young nation – that believes this is possible. Much of the Western states have much older ideas of a nation. Obviously, the very idea of a nation was a constructed thing, it’s not natural. But most nation-states like France, Germany, or even China, which is of course a different situation, have very old myths that they latch on to. The definition of a people in these situations is more mature. America is not like that. The American nation was, from its founding, an artificial thing. We started from the beginning by saying: “We’re constructing a new people. We’re not claiming to descend from ancient heroes who have lived in the land of America since forever. This is a land we don’t know. We come here, we’re taking the land from others who were here before us, we are settlers, and we are now claiming to start a new nation from scratch with a bunch of ideals”. That is very much what happens in Dara, my world. The myth of America is actually about taking immigrants from around the world and putting them together and creating a new people with their traditions, and making their traditions part of this new whole. A lot of my short stories did the same thing: they talk about East Asian history, about inequality, about the role played by the United States. But they’re also really American stories. They’re meditations on what it means to be American. The center of gravity of all these stories is the United States. So I don’t think of myself as a bridge, because I don’t think there is a clean definition of what is Chinese and what is American. I myself am an American writer. I actually don’t like it when people describe me as Chinese-American, that’s not an identity that I subscribe to. I describe myself as an American writer who happens to be of Chinese descent. My stories are very American, and even the Chinese mythologies, cultural practices and histories that I put into my stories are very American. They’re part of the American culture as a whole.

That’s why I wanted to ask you this question: that’s something that’s put forward a lot, and I wasn’t sure it was something you wanted.

Yeah, I don’t think of myself as bridging two cultures at all. I know some people view me that way, but that’s not how I see it. I’m culturally Chinese and culturally American, but my identity has always been very much American. My Chinese friends are perfectly understanding of that. I love to introduce their work to Anglophone readers in my work as a translator, but they understand that I’m doing so from an American perspective.

How do you deal with the fact that you suddenly won many prizes and became one of the most celebrated fantasy writers? How do you deal with the expectations? You said you do not pay attention to reviews, but can you feel that people are waiting for what will come next?

You know, that’s an interesting question. I’m of two minds about these awards. They’re really nice, obviously, because they’re a recognition from your fellow writers, from critics, or from readers, depending on what kind of award it is, that you did your job. They’re sort of like a pat on the back, and of course it’s really nice to be acknowledged by your peers and your readers in that way. But honestly, I really do try to forget about these things as quickly as they happen, because they don’t seem to me to be helpful in the long term. If you remember in your head all the time that you’ve won some award, it gives these awards more importance than they should deserve. All they really are is people telling you that you did your job on that story. That’s it, really. If you’re getting an employee-of-the-month certificate, what do you do with it? It’s nice, it means you did a good job and people recognize you – but you tend to forget it right away, because if you keep that in mind, it’s silly, it’s not that big a deal. I do the same thing, I don’t really remember these awards. They happen, I’m happy to be congratulated, and then I just put it out of my mind. I don’t let it influence me anyway. Like I said, I write for myself; I try to write stories that I think are good to me, and I couldn’t care less if they get awards or not. If they do get awards, awesome; if they don’t awards, I don’t care. So I don’t really feel that much pressure. I always tell people: “Writers should keep in mind that their best story is the one they haven’t written yet – it’s their next story.” So why focus so much on what awards your old stories have won? It’s sort of similar to what I said before: I had stories that ended up winning awards that were almost unpublishable. The Paper Menagerie was written for a specific anthology that actually rejected it. It wasn’t good enough to make it into the anthology! So why should I care that much about it? Sometimes awards are given to stories you really like, and sometimes they’re not, but either way, it doesn’t really matter. I try not to care too much about winning awards, and it doesn’t seem to affect me that much. On the other hand, I will say that having won the awards has been interesting, in that my agent was able to use them in negotiations about an option with a film studio, or when we’re trying to do a deal with some publisher. I can’t deny these awards have been helpful. So in that way, again, I’m grateful. But to me, it feels more like luck. It’s not like I earn anything, or like it makes me worth more or less. It’s just very lucky that I got them. I’m grateful I got them, but they don’t affect how I write very much.

I have a question about you as a reader. What do you like to read? Do you write what you’d like to read, or do you go for something completely different?

This is a really good question, and it’s not easy to answer. I like to write tales that have not been written yet. I write short stories and novels that haven’t been written yet, that I think ought to exist. And because they don’t really exist, I can’t say that I look for things that I want to write in that way. I try to read a variety of things that seem interesting to me. I read a lot of non-fiction, a lot of history, science, biographies, books about geography, sociology, physics, astronomy, and genetics, all the new stuff that’s coming out. I also like to read fiction that I think does certain things really well. Emma Donoghue’s Room is one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently. I think she’s incredible in the way that she can create a character who’s five years old, and to make the psychological heroism of a character like this so real and so intimate. I like to read romances, actually – I think romances are incredibly well crafted. They have to follow very strict genre limitations: they have to end with a marriage, they have to follow a number of rules along the way, like how the characters are supposed to meet and fall in love. And yet every good romance writer does so many creative things within this formula! It’s really amazing, it’s like reading sonnets. They have to follow very specific rules, and yet there are millions of sonnets, and all of them are very different. Romances work the same. I like to read thrillers, mystery stories – and of course I do read some sci-fi and fantasy, because it’s absolutely vital that you keep up with your genre. So I like to read a variety of things, mainly to make sure I keep myself open to the potential of fiction and to what other people have done and are doing. It’s an amazing age we live in, where writers are doing so many exciting experimental things and making it work. We just have so much great stuff to read.

The first story I read from you was The Paper Menagerie, and it was a shock! I think that’s why people love your writing so much, especially on our website – because it’s so powerful. When I read the story, I’d just lost someone, so it was such a catharsis for me. I gave it to my mother to read, and it was also very helpful to her. Almost everyone from the website read it at the same time, and we had this heartfelt reaction to it. So we were really incredibly happy when it was published in French. The Man Who Ended History is out too, thanks to Le Bélial, because in France we’re not really into short stories as much as the English-speaking people are.

It’s so funny that you say that, because from my perspective, Anglophones readers do not care about short stories at all! I always tell people that short stories these days are basically read by other writers. That’s who you write to when you write short stories and publish them in magazines and anthologies; essentially you’re writing for an audience of other writers who wish to be published in there too. That’s true in the genre or outside of it. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. When people ask me if that’s a problem, I say it’s not, not really. It’s like poetry: when you’re writing poetry, you’re almost always writing for other poets these days, because the people who read poetry are essentially other poets. But so what? The fact that it has a small audience of specialized readers who are also writers doesn’t make it invalid. It’s not a commercial activity, but so what? People participate in this literary exercise because it’s fun, it’s interesting and it makes them happy. It tells them something deep about human nature and about the life they want to live. If they enjoy that, what’s wrong with it? That’s how I feel about short stories. Not a lot of people read them in English-speaking countries either, but I’m so happy to write them!

To me a short story is like a universe in itself, it’s self-contained, and I really like this type of writing. And to be able to have novellas like this published is also really nice.

Thank you for letting me know that. Having that sort of reader feedback directly is very powerful for me. When you’re a writer, it’s very lonely. Sometimes it’s just you and the keyboard, and you’re like: “Who else has read this story besides my wife and my editor?” Who knows what happens to it! So it’s really cool to hear this. Shortly after I wrote this story, my grand-mother died. She raised me, so it was a very sad thing, because my love for her is the love of a child for a mother. I was very sad for a long time. I think a lot of my stories about parents and children come from that kind of place, that feeling of loss. As I say in the story, there’s a Chinese phrase for the sorrow a child feels when he or she wishes to be kind to a parent when the parent is dead and it’s too late.

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