'Taiwan Travelogue' Winners Yang Tsang-zu and Ling King on Multilingual Storytelling, Footnotes, and Food as Plot

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Excerpts from the interview:
Q to Yang: How did you do this marvellous, amazing transference of skill from the video world onto the page?
A: Ever since I was little, I started my creative thinking from imageries and video. So when I started to work on my fiction, it's a similar approach to how a movie director would dissect it into different frames. And that's why I would say my novel reads in a very graphical way.

Q: Ling, how was it for you to translate this multi-layered novel?
A: It was so much fun. It was a challenge to be able to work with so many languages. Literature translated into English tends to be packaged as if it's meant to be a smooth reading experience. You're not asked to keep track of a lot of notes or you're not supposed to be looking things up online as you go. But because the work itself was already so layered, so multilingual, there was no excuse for simplifying it. As a translator, it was such a joy to be able to celebrate all these different languages within one book.

Q to Yang: This novel has intertwined many cultures. There's Japanese, Chinese, Taiwan. Apart from the cultural mix, what was the linguistic balancing act that you had to achieve while writing the text?
A: Firstly, the current Taiwanese Mandarin is different from the language people were using 100 years ago. So in my mind I set it up as I’m translating from Japanese into Taiwanese Mandarin, using a certain translational accent. The readers could feel a difference in the formats and the languages. And that's the reason why I chose a certain framework an a certain language ratio.

Q to Ling: How do you translate all these variations in, I assume, dialects, but definitely languages, into English, which has its own restrictions? It's a destination language with which is finite.
A: Every language is finite. And I'm sure people in India can feel this resonate. There was a national imposition of certain national languages. And for us, since 1949, this was Mandarin. Everything else was reduced to a dialect, something that you speak at home, something that children, younger generations are discouraged from speaking, that was not taught in schools. For me growing up, I really only spoke Taiwanese Mandarin. And so bringing it all into English, the other language that I speak fluently wasn't so much of a compromise, because the language that we've been speaking since we were little is already one step removed from this part of history.

Q to Ling: When you were translating, how did you work with the footnotes?A: Again, I feel this would have a lot of resonance in India that because we had one colonial govt come after another, and each one trying to erase what had come before, it being a different regime. And so we in the era following Japanese rule were not allowed to talk about the previous period. And as we move back into democracy and there is more interest in finding out our own history. And there is this sense of constant rediscovery, self-discovery. And so the reason why Tsang-zu chose this framework for her original storytelling was because she wanted to include all this context, but not make the narrative itself seem really dry and educational and just pedantic. And she thought one way to do it is to pretend to be a translator of a historical text. And so I can add all this contextual information that I want to tell everyone in modern Taiwan, but while still telling a good story. And for the English edition, I just jumped on that bandwagon, just added to it in order to provide more helpful notes, hopefully for the reader to be able to learn about the context without having to constantly turn away from the book to your phone or computer to look things up.

Q to Yang: How did you work out the story plot when it is so deeply immersed in food?A: So food is an essence for the story, and it also carries a certain level of symbolism to it. I'll say there are two levels to how I designed food to drive my plot. It is a symbolism of the relationship between my protagonist, and it helps push and develop my plot. In terms of the selection of dishes, there are a few things I took into consideration, such as the different communities we have from Taiwan and also local cuisines, local culture. I want to take all of that into account.