Taiwan

Rose, Rose, I Love You, Wang Chen-ho
玫瑰玫瑰我愛你, 王禎和

En route back to Singapore after Christmas holidays home in Canada, I had a few days layover in Taipei. Naturally, I took the opportunity to read a Taiwanese author. — I'm usually quite organised with my holiday reading, and plan well in advance. But in the rush up to Christmas, I didn't get around to arranging anything for Taiwan and was left with a last-minute scramble on Amazon. Rose, Rose, I Love You came flying in just under the wire, arriving literally the morning of my flight to Taiwan.

I'm very glad that it did arrive in time, because Rose, Rose, I Love You has been one of my favourites in my reading the world project so far.  Wang Chen-ho is one of Taiwan's most famous writers. Rose, Rose, I Love You, considered Wang's masterpiece, is comic novel set in the coastal town of Hualien during the Vietnam War. The plot centres on the efforts of the town's leaders to come together to set up a brothel to entertain a group of American GIs coming to Taiwan for R&R. The raucous dialogue and outrageous story caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994.

Special credit is due to Howard Goldblatt, the book's translator. As a translator myself, I can recognise the mind-twisting challenges he must have faced trying to translate a book that Taiwanese readers would have easily managed, but in a linguistic hodgepodge that would be completely alien to English-language readers. The book is written partly in Mandarin and partly in Taiwanese dialect, sprinkled with Japanese and contains countless plays on words of the mispronunciation and misunderstanding of English words being taught to bar girls. Quite a challenge to find a way to convey these shifts and nuances when the target audience of the translation will read everything in a single language. I tip my hat to you, Mr Goldblatt, I surely could have never done as well.

I also got the idea for my holiday reading to ask for the place and date to be written on the title page in local script. A great memento of my experiences reading a book in situ.

Malaysia

The Gift of Rain 
Tan Twan Eng

A recent road trip up the coast to the historic Malaysian city of Malacca provided the opportunity to add this country to my list. There are a fair amount of Malay authors available in local bookshops, a few of whom, like Tash Aw, even have international renown. I had particularly wanted to find a book by an ethnic Malay author rather than an ethic Chinese author, for no particular reason other than to set a challenge for myself. All the titles I came across for Malaysia seemed to have ethnic Chinese authors for some reason. 

 In the end, I settled for a book (by an ethnic Chinese author) whose jacket description caught my attention. The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (陳團英) is set in Penang, an improbably Anglo-Malay-Chinese-Indian island entrepôt set in the Andaman Sea. The island and its unique hybrid, hodgepodge culture is the backdrop to the turbulent times of World War II. 

The half-Chinese, half-English protagonist gets caught in a tangle of war-time loyalties and deceits during the Japanese occupation of his beloved island home. There was an out-of-place digression into Chinese history lesson when protagonist’s estranged Chinese grandfather takes a flashback trip down memory lane. But mostly the book does a formidable job in making you question the shifting moral sands of complicated history with frequent what-would-you-do situations where every option is fraught.  

Given the setting, I’m not surprised that I feel I gained insight into World War II in Malaya rather than about the country itself. I’d still like to read a book by an ethnic Malay author at sometime to see if I’d that would offer up a point of view on my northern neighbour.

Canada, French

Le désert mauve
Nicole Brossard

As a Canadian, I was naturally curious to see what Ann Morgan chose to read for Canada. My country, naturally, has a few literary bigwigs of it own, along the lines of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. I don’t know why, but I just assumed she would pick one of them. It certainly never occurred to me that she’d stray from this well-trodden path, and much less that she might read a book by a French-Canadian author in translation. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Consequently, I was more than a bit surprised to see Le désert mauve by Nicole Brossard, and translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as Mauve Desert, under the Canada entry. Reading Ann Morgan’s post about the book made me doubly intrigued because, as a translator myself, the book deals with the act and meaning of translation.

Le désert mauve is a bit confusing to talk about, actually. It’s one book, but three books. It’s a book and its translation, but both are written in the same language. The first book is about fifteen-year-old Melanie coming of age in the Arizona desert. The second book is about Maude Laures, who finds the first book in a Quebec bookstore and becomes obsessed with it, spending two years analysing its characters, events, and emotions. The third book is Laures’ eventual translation of the first book. (An imagined English-to-French translation, as the book in its entirety is French in the original – and wholly English in Mauve Desert). 

This imagined passage from one language to another was particularly interesting to me. I found myself flipping back and forth between the two books to see how Laures had translated passages that we ambiguous. Had a certain lyrical passage become dulled? Did clarity come into any darker corners? – As a technical translator, I don’t have to philosophise about these issues much, but I do constantly wonder what gets lost and transformed along the way despite my every best intention otherwise. It was fascinating to be able to see the translation process and its results in this way.

Burma

Not Out of Hate, Ma Ma Lay
မုန်း၍မဟူ, မမလေး 

I was killing some time in a bookstore in Bangkok recently while waiting to meet up with some friends. By chance I wandered past a shelf and this art deco Veronica-Lempicka-esque cover caught my eye and I happened to pick it up. I nearly fell over when I read the back cover and discovered the book was by a Burmese author, and was the first book published in English translation from the former hermit kingdom of Burma. A country virtually shut off from the modern world for nearly fifty years, there was as little leaving Burma as there was going in, and the country remained a black hole on many world-readers' lists. 

Although one of the country's very few female authors, Ma Ma Lay is widely acknowledged to be one of Burma's greatest twentieth-century writers. Her stories are known for authentic portrayals of modern Burmese society. Not Out of Hate, originally published in Burmese in 1955, explores the impact of the West on Burmese culture and society, as told through the story of a young, small-town woman who marries a Westernised man. The well-written story was made more poignant when post-reading contemplation led me to see the book as an allegory for the country as a whole.

As a translator myself, I found it quite interesting that Not Out of Hate's translator, Margaret Aung-Thwin, made frequent recourse to the use of footnotes to explain contextual and cultural elements of the book. Footnotes are certainly one possible strategy for translators to use when they encounter a concept that's difficult to translate because it doesn't exist in the other language, or a situation the foreign readers wouldn't understand because they lack the same cultural references. The general view is, however, that they are a distraction that breaks the flow of reading the text, and, as such, are rarely used by most translators. It's interesting to see through the use of footnotes here, the details and nuances that must sometimes be left by the wayside when translating otherwise.

Laos

Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos, Outhine Bounyavong
ແພງແມ່: ອຸທິນ ບຸນຍາວົງ, ອຸທິນ ບຸນຍາວົງ

A trip to Laos was the opportunity to add this Southeast-Asian country to my list. An amazing and multifaceted country with virtually no fictional available in translation (my Lao is pretty rusty). A hunt through world-reader lists all suggested Mother's Beloved as their Laotian entry, and the bookshops I visited when I was there confirmed that this is the only book of fiction by a Laotian author available in English translation. As explained by the book's foreword, fiction simply hasn't been a longstanding part of Laotian culture, with most educated elites reading French classics in the past and traditional stories transmitted through oral storytelling traditions, drama, and song. 

I usually don't much enjoy reading lengthy forewords and always feel that I'd rather just dive into the book, despite the important and pertinent information a foreward usually contains. This was very much the case for Mother's Beloved, where the foreword was particularly revealing. It explained that after the communist revolution, writers became State employees who were charged with making the revolution's ideology accessible to the nation's people. Knowing that went a long way to explaining the short stories in the book as moralistic fables. It was interesting that a lot of the topics addressed still seemed very contemporary, such as the threat of war and environmental degradation. 

The simple stories tell of ordinary Laotian people and their customs, providing a window into the country's transformations and values following a period of upheaval. 

Australia

Jasper Jones
Craig Silvey

In checking geographically large Australia off the list, my world map now seems a lot more filled in, although there are +100 countries still to go.

This book came highly recommended by my better half, who cited it as a favourite. Many thanks for the suggestion, as I did indeed enjoy this book set in a small Australian town in the 1960s. The book's protagonist, Charlie, is a bookish, quiet type who is suddenly visited one night by the town's outcast, a rebellious mixed-race teenage troublemaker, begging Charlie for help.

Growing up in a small Canadian town, I found there was a lot I could relate to in the books themes – although frequent references to cricket naturally left me baffled. Craig Silvey, the author, was really quite masterful in creating the feeling of small town tension, where everyone is in everyone's business, minds are narrow, and the urge to escape weighs heavy.

Although the narratives of the books are very different, I found it interesting that my choice for neighbouring New Zealand, Once Were Warriors, also touches on many of the same themes of racism, an oppressive society, and the outsider's struggle.

Thailand II

Jasmine Nights
S.P. Somtow

With so many countries to read through, it seems almost insanity to be doubling back on a country, especially so early on in my literary travels. But part of travelling is seeing where the journey takes you. In this case, I was in Thailand for work and happened to be absent-mindedly flipping through my guidebook, as I am wont to do while eating my meals. I happened to come to the "Books" section of the guide, which mentions S.P. Somtow as "the J.D. Salinger of Siam". That certainly piqued my interest. Later, during a bit of free time one evening, I happened to wander into a bookstore and saw Jasmine Nights on display. I knew I was fated to read this book.

Interestingly, both Jasmine Nights and Four Reigns, my first entry for Thailand, are set in the same world of minor aristocrats and the Thai élite living in estates in Bangkok of the past. Four Reigns happens over a lifetime, ending in 1946, with Jasmine Nights picking up a bit later in 1963 and happening over just a few weeks. With televisions and the Vietnam War, modernity is a bit more present in this conflict of East meets West. The conflict, however, is not one of events, or people, but, interestingly, an internal one to the protagonist, who, despite being Thai, speaks only in English and insists his aunts and relatives call him Justin.

A funny coming of age story that was definitely worth my detour back to Thailand.

Albania

The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare
Ura me tri harqe

A summer holiday in enigmatic Albania some years ago prompted the purchase of this book by Ismail Kadare, the leading literary figure of the country. Living and writing through the extreme and autocratic dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, he evaded politics (and scrutiny) by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore.

Very much in this vein, The Three-Arched Bridge is set in 1377 and is based on a traditional Albanian legend. The story centres on a mysterious group of builders who arrive to construct a bridge over a raging river in the remote mountains of the country. This leads to conflict with local officials and with river boatmen who squabble incessantly with each other and with the builders about the bridge, oblivious to the crumbling Byzantine Empire around them and the march of the Ottomans into Europe.

The story can be read as a parable for the history of Albania, with three major ethnic groups, Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox, living side by side. It can also be read as a moral commentary of the petty differences and disagreements between these groups having exposed the country exposed to vagaries of historical forces marching on the country from without. An interesting insight into quite an unknown country.

Russian Federation

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Один день Ивана Денисовича, Александр Солженицын

A book I read rather a while ago that depressed the shit out of me. It follows titular character Ivan Denisovich as he lives the Kafkaesque nightmare of one average day in a Soviet gulag in Siberia. 

Most strangely to me was that, at the end of the book, Ivan feels his day has been productive, even "almost happy". He "went to sleep fully content. He'd had many strokes of luck that day." It's a real testament to how people can overcome misery. Perhaps the book is meant to be a triumph of the will, but mostly I came away from reading this with a dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach about how people can be so cruel and malicious towards other human beings. – Not a easy beach read, to be sure.

I get the feeling that a lot of older Russian literature tends to be in this same vein of one person suffering through intolerable circumstances; think of Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, etc. I'd be quite interested to read something more contemporary to see if the literary undertones have changed with the times as Russia has changed. I see that Ann Morgan also read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for her Russia selection, but she also lists many contemporary writers for me to check out in the future. 

South Africa

Embrace
Mark Behr

Behr is another writer like my Bangladesh entry, Monica Ali, who is a bit hard to pin to one country. Behr was born on a farm family in Tanzania back when it was still known as Tanganyika. After the nationalisation of white-owned farms in 1964, his family emigrated to South Africa. He did most of his schooling there then served in the Angolan War, and lives now in the United States. His books deal largely with South Africa – his first was even written in Afrikaans – and since I don't have any other South African writers in my wheelhouse, I'll count this Tanzania-born, USA-residing author as my South Africa entry, for now at least. 

I read this book quite some time ago and didn't really remember much about it, certainly not the title or the author or anything helpful like that. Initially I thought it might be by South Africa's literary star, J.M. Coetzee. I had to go through descriptions of all of his books before determining that, no, it wasn't him. I was a bit stumped and had to do quite a bit of Internet sleuthing with various combinations of the only things I remembered about the book: "South Africa", "boarding school", "LGBT theme", before eventually teasing the title out of the web.

The other thing that I do remember taking away from this book is how well white South Africans lived in the 1970s when the book was set: teachers driving Volvos, students listening to Bang & Olufsen stereos in  the school's music room, that kind of stuff. I guess that's what you get when a small group oppresses and exploits everyone else. I'm looking forward to reading a book set in the period since then to see how much has changed.