Translated literary works are fast becoming international best-sellers
Drinks, cheers and applause – it’s the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world’s biggest book fair. And in its 70-year history, the event has never hosted a themed event dedicated to a Chinese author, until a few weeks ago.
Mai Jia, the pen name of Jiang Benhu, China’s version of Dan Brown, brought his spy thriller The Message to the event, where rights were sold or agreed upon for more than 15 countries within hours.
Previously, his Decoded sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 33 languages – a hard-won success for Chinese authors, as Western publishers rarely put translated novels before their own best-sellers, according to Gray Tan, Mai’s literary agent.
|
Global readers’ passion for original Chinese storytelling reflects the world’s interest in fast-growing China and its culture. Photos by Peng Dawei / China News Service |
Matching a well-written, smartly translated story with a top publisher is the key to success in foreign markets. In short, “it’s all about picking up the right book and taking it to the right people”, Tan says.
Readers from around the world have been captivated by John le Carre’s Cold War mysteries and Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. Mai’s novels are unique for adding a Chinese touch to the genre.
His Decoded is a legend about an orphaned math genius devoted to cryptography and deciphering, while The Message features a locked-room spy game set in China in the 1940s.
Wang Dewei, a Harvard professor of Chinese literature, says the story intrigues readers with a riddle to solve.
Mai attributes his popularity among foreign readers mainly to his books’ translation. “A good translation could give a novel a “second life,” he says.
Both his books were translated by Olivia Milburn, an Oxford graduate in ancient Chinese. English readers were impressed by the classic beauty and elegant taste of the language in Decoded.
“This strange, twisting tale is told in fizzy, vivid and often beautiful prose,” reads a review in The Economist, saying it is a book that “everyone should read” and calling Milburn’s translation “a treasure”.
With Mai’s brand appeal and Milburn’s strength in language, foreign publishers expect The Message to become another global hit.
Mai is not the only Chinese author who has benefited from good translation. Liu Cixin’s sci-fi epic, The Three-Body Problem translated into English by Ken Liu, garnered the Hugo Award, known as the sci-fi Nobel Prize.
Readers gave it four-and-a-half stars on Amazon’s book review page, saying Ken Liu’s translation “made incredibly smooth reading as if it were the original work.”
Ken Liu, a Chinese-American sci-fi writer himself, said a translator would deliver the author’s thoughts and emotions accurately “only if he could hear the author’s voices in his mind.”
The translation itself won’t necessarily make a best-seller. A touching story that resonates with global readers is a must, literary critics say.
The London Book Review called The Three-Body Problem trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written”. It created a brand-new world, picturing a universe far beyond the three-dimensional world, and predicted catastrophic consequences from human attempts to contact an alien civilization, the review said.
At the 2018 Frankfurt event, the German version of Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest, the second volume in the series, became the talk of the town.
Chen Feng, the copyright broker behind Liu Cixin’s books, was delighted to see that almost every event Liu attended was overbooked. Watching the long line at the author’s book-signing event, an attendee asked: “Is he a Nobel Prize winner?”
The path to global fame is not easy. Mai and Liu Cixin wrote good stories. Translators broke the language barriers. It is the literary agents who broker the deals with foreign publishers. They are the “invisible hands” pushing Chinese authors into the global market, observers and analysts say.
Tan, Mai’s literary agent, says that to sell Chinese stories abroad, agents are competing for the precious time and attention of foreign book editors. “To allure them, convince them, you’ve got to be good and play by their rules,” he says.
Drawing a clever parallel between Chinese and Western books will help publishers catch the essence quickly and situate it properly in their own cultural context, Tan says.
Mai’s The Message, for instance, was compared to Agatha Christine’s Murder on the Orient Express. The Zoo on the Grasslands, a novel by Chinese writer Ma Boyong, seen as the Chinese version of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, appealed to several publishers at the book fair.
Meanwhile, it is crucial to know the people behind the books. The publishing world is a circle of publishers, book detectives and literary agents. “Make contacts and friends, build trust and a brand, so that once you sell the books, they are in safe hands,” Tan says.
Tan’s idea is echoed by Chen, Liu Cixin’s copyright agent. He understands the efforts top publishing houses like Tor devoted to promoting Liu’s books: polished editing, reports in national papers, reviews in The Wall Street Journal, publicity events, access to major bookstores and placement in online shops.
By 2017, with more than 300,000 English copies sold, Liu’s trilogy had become a New York Times bestseller, according to the publisher. Former US president Barack Obama and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are among its fans.
Global readers’ passion for original Chinese storytelling reflects the world’s interest in a fast-growing Asian country and its culture. “You can catch the heartbeat of a nation by reading its novels,” Mai once said. Once foreigners are willing to sit down and listen, then it’s the perfect time to tell our stories, Chen says.
Still, to translate passion into sales requires talent and perseverance. More professional translators and literary agents are needed in China, and a copyright broker mechanism needs to be nurtured in the country, Tan says.
In the end, to ensure the long-term success of Chinese stories in the global market, the real task is not selling books, but to “bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West,” Tan says, and to “win the hearts and minds” of readers.
Xinhua
|
From left: Handicrafts from Wuhan at the Confucius Institute booth; Liu Cixin (middle) in dialogue with German Sinologists; Chinese selections are more diverse at the 70th Frankfurt Book Fair. |
(China Daily European Weekly 11/23/2018 page20)