WiT Month: Q&A with Bonnie Huie
To celebrate Women in Translation Month this year, we asked some of our favorite translators about decolonization and decentering Europe in translation. Next in the series, writer and translator Bonnie Huie.
In his essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness”, John Keene wrote: “As part of the panel at which I initially presented this talk, the organizer, Jen Hofer, invited all the panelists to bring an object representative of our translation work”. What object represents your translation work?
Every so often, I succumb to the delusion that I will make my mark by inventing a new vegetarian dish in a creative/fusion vein. My signature creation is natto jaga, a baked potato topped with stinky, slimy, fermented soybeans and finished with beurre blanc. The concept is inspired by wordplay on niku jaga (“meat and potatoes”), a stew that is a staple of Japanese home cooking. Since lockdown, I have been fermenting natto at home. All in all, it is a time-consuming endeavor undertaken to realize a linguistic conceit that only one or two people max will think is clever or funny, and while the final product is multilayered, it is also probably more of an acquired taste than it has to be. This is my gift to the world.
What is the role of the translator in decolonizing translation? In your regional/linguistic focus(es), are there certain stereotypes or tropes you have to avoid?
In my region of focus, there is gatekeeping. In 1980, there was an infamous exchange over race and intellectual authority between two scholars of East Asian Studies. It still encapsulates my academic and professional experiences decades later. Camille Drummond at Pioneer Works once suggested to me the idea of a panel of translators of origin, and I was stunned that anyone else noticed or cared. Recently, I did an interview where I was asked about gender bias, and adhering to the word limit, I said that we should talk about race too. And so I did. When I received the print issue, I discovered that the question and answer had been excised, and my headshot took up a good 5 x 5 inches of the page. The interviewer never said a word to me about it. Didn’t share the proof, unbeknownst to the editor. And in the summer of George Floyd, after police stations had burned down and more protesters had taken to the streets than at perhaps any other point in US history, never answered my e-mail asking why. While my comments about my experiences of racism had been deleted, the lip-service question “what kind of diversity do we need more of” was left intact, so it looks like the institution has a big welcome mat for People Who Look Like You. But don’t you dare show anyone the snake bites you got once you were inside.
As an Asian American woman translator, I can’t even say the word race in a media interview without being surreptitiously edited to look the part of an uncomplaining model minority. That is why I asked for my words to be restored online. There is a preponderance of agreeable Asian immigrant narratives in our ecosystem because it bolsters White supremacy and reinforces anti-Blackness. Binaries of cultural identity are a tool used to police colonized subjects and threaten them with statelessness while the colonizers flaunt their own mobility. I have never experienced any confusion about where I belong, except when the literary world feels like a racist gutter. I don’t care if I never get work again. When someone tells you to be grateful for what you have been given, it is the master telling you to eat out of their hand like an animal.
In your regional/linguistic focus(es), what is the role of work by women or other underrepresented literary figures in destabilizing colonial narratives?
To me, the touchstone of postcolonial literature in my region of focus is a novella called The Cocktail Party by Tatsuhiro Ōshiro, an Okinawan author who won the Akutagawa Prize for it in 1967. It is an account of sexual assault—which has been normalized in some places by American imperialism—told through the eyes of a man who slowly realizes his powerlessness to help due to his social relations and their separate geopolitical interests. I was incredibly moved by this work when I first read it, and it made me think about how our preconceived notions of dramatic structure—particularly those derived from ancient Greece—can inhibit our ability to frame certain subject matter, including that which concerns the status of women. This became more apparent to me from a comparative standpoint when I saw the film Alles ist gut by a younger German director, Eva Trobisch. It’s about the aftermath of a sexual assault by an acquaintance, in which there is no recourse for the victim. It’s mundane, anticlimactic, and full of frustration—and it’s an impressive film. I think a general audience’s taste for this style of storytelling is key to changing who is heard and understood. Maybe I would translate the film’s title as Everything’s Fine because that’s what you tell yourself, and everyone else, when it happens.
How do your other interests or artistic practices influence your translation work?
A few years ago, I took part in the PEN Translation Slam, where two different translators translate the same poem and the results are revealed and compared side by side at a live event with the poet present. The other translator was the novelist Amanda Lee Koe, and onstage, in the middle of the event, she turned to me and said, “Can I ask you something? What’s your star sign?” And I remember I said, “Oh my god…I can’t believe we haven’t talked about this.” As it turned out, there was an uncanny opposition between us: she is Libra sun, Aquarius moon, whereas I am Aquarius sun, Libra moon. We had translated the poem “The Artichoke” by Un Sio San, who is a Gemini, and the moderator was the only non-air sign. Amanda’s translation was loose, more or less freestyle. Mine was borderline surgical, like I obviously don’t write without a dictionary and a thesaurus on hand. I think everyone sensed we were onto something, because everyone in the Catalan group after us immediately volunteered their own star sign.
Astrology can be useful for mapping emotional logic, whether it be your own or that of people who are very different from you. Authors sometimes use it to develop characters and to give them life. The protagonists of both books of Chinese genre fiction I’ve translated have been Scorpios, and in Notes of a Crocodile, it is evident that Lazi is a Gemini and Shui Ling is a Scorpio. Apparently Scorpio is the sign that everyone wants to be or to get with. But then, I’m an Aquarius—coming up with ideas is like skipping stones.
Bonnie Huie is a writer and literary translator of Chinese and Japanese literature. Her translation of Notes of a Crocodile (NYRB Classics), a coming-of-age novel by Taiwanese lesbian countercultural icon Qiu Miaojin, won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize. She is the past recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her rendition of Motojirō Kajii’s poem “Under the Cherry Blossoms” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her translations of political fiction by Okinawan novelist Tatsuhiro Ōshiro and Takiji Kobayashi, a leading figure of the proletarian literature movement, can be found in the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in New York.
