I recently had the pleasure of translating a literary non-fiction work by Malaysian writer Angel Lee about her adoptive hometown Kluang.
Translators often need to create a mini-world in their heads (known in the trade as a schema), so as to properly visualise what the author is talking about.
This is particularly important when working out of Chinese, which manages to be super-concrete and specific when it comes to actual objects, foodstuffs and minute cultural details, while also highly context-dependent when it comes to things anglophone readers take for granted, like tense.
I was excited to get this assignment, because literary non-fiction is my favourite thing of all. But I have never lived in Malaysia. I’ve been on holiday to Kota Kinabalu, and I’ve been to KL on a work trip.
But my lived experience of traditional Chinese culture is highly specific to Hong Kong and Taiwan. I’d never even heard of Kluang, although its mountain gets a cursory mention on an online database of hikeable/climbable peaks in Malaysia.
It became pretty clear that I was going to have to get more closely acquainted with Kluang, so I took a bit of a Google Maps hike around the town, and up the main trail to the summit of Gunang Lambak, in search of a narrative voice that would suit the town, its people and Angel Lee’s voice in Chinese.
I checked out the town centre, the trail-side notices, the structure on the summit, saw play and recreation areas filled with people of all ages, and started to form an imagined Kluang I could work with in my mind.
I started to imagine the people as fairly straight-talking, practical folk who like to stay healthy and enjoy the basic pleasures, people who love to stand around on a mountain chatting while also getting exercise. A bit like the group of aunties and uncles who once rescued me and my dad from a hillside about the Palace Museum in Taipei and whisked us down to a local temple for chicken soup, before giving us a lift back into town. When I went back to Lee’s piece, I felt as if I could hear their voices, and hers, more clearly.
I also searched out some visual references for traditional Chinese tenon-and-mortise furniture, which I hadn’t ever thought much about before reading Lee’s touching and fascinating portrait of life a lived more slowly, yet savoured fully, with her partner K. I wanted to be able to imagine it all fully and as accurately as possible.
The site that commissioned the translation is called This is Southeast Asia, and boasts some beautifully written pieces from authors working in a number of local languages and writing about places that are meaningful to them in great detail. Anyone wishing to support Southeast Asian literary non-fiction, and its availability in English can make a donation HERE.
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Review of a short story recently translated by me for the latest edition of Chinese Arts & Letters.
Luisetta Mudie 