#41 Guest Episode: Jennifer Feeley, Part 3 (English)

This episode features the conclusion of our conversation with Jennifer Feeley. Where in previous episodes we discussed specific Hong Kong literature that Jennifer has translated, here she shares some advice for anyone interested in getting into literary translation. We are also thrilled to announce that since taping this episode, the American Literary Translators’ Association has announced two emerging translator mentorships for Hong Kong literature, including one with Jennifer. We have included a link to the details in the show notes and encourage listeners to apply.

今集節目係我哋同 Jennifer Feeley 對話嘅尾聲。喺上兩集我哋討論過 Jennifer 翻譯過嘅香港文學作品，今集佢為有興趣進入文學翻譯嘅朋友分享一啲建議。我哋亦好高興宣布，自從錄咗呢集之後，美國文學翻譯家協會就宣布咗兩個香港文學新興翻譯導師計劃，Jennifer 就係其中一位導師。我哋喺節目簡介入面加入咗詳情連結，並鼓勵各位聽眾申請。



Books mentioned in this episode:


Translation resources:



Transcript:

Cameron

One thing that would be really interesting for a lot of people–because we might have some future or budding literary translators out there–can you talk about how you got into literary translation and also how someone else might end up in literary translation?


Jennifer

Sure. I mean, I can first talk about my own path and then, you know, for other people, because I think there are multiple routes and there's not one way or wrong way. So for me, my background is through creative writing, so as an undergraduate, I went to Oberlin College, I double majored in creative writing and East Asian studies, and at Oberlin, literary translation was a core part of the creative writing program, so my very first creative writing class was called the poet as translator. So we read works by poets who were also literary translators, so we read a book of poetry that they had translated and then we read a book of poetry they had written that showed the inflections of the work they had translated or of the culture.


So, from the time I was 17 I was thinking about creative writing and translation being very very closely intertwined. As I was learning Mandarin as an undergraduate, it just kind of made sense to me to, you know, to start translating and so I began translating poetry by mainland women poets. There was a Shanghai poet named Lu Yimin whose work I had been really interested in as an undergraduate, and so when I was taking these literary translation workshops as an undergrad I was focusing on her work. Then I did the traditional academic route of getting a PhD, so I kind of put the translation aside because you don't have a lot of time when you're a PhD student, as you know, and then I got a tenure-track job at the University of Iowa and I was excited because they have an MFA literary translation program as well as the distinguished writers workshop plus international writing program. Unfortunately, my job was not rewarded by doing translations. Being a research institution, I was focused on academic work, so eventually I decided I wanted to leave that because I wanted to do more creative work. 


I really missed that. I love teaching so much, but I missed being able to focus on original creative writing or translation, which to me was also a form of creative writing. I felt like through my own teaching, as you brought up earlier Cameron, there are classes you would like to have or you would like to teach but you don't have the works in English translation, and, at least in North America, when we are teaching courses–and I'll put this in quotes–in Chinese literature or culture, it's usually in English unless it's at the graduate level. I'm not sure, maybe at UBC, Raymond, you might have more courses where you're able to teach literature courses in Mandarin or Cantonese. But just because of the level of proficiency required to read literature written in Chinese is a bit higher than some other languages, we usually teach in English; I felt like I could better serve the field by translating. I can write an article about Xi Xi that maybe five people will read, or I can translate her book and maybe 500 people will read it–I don't know, I'm just making up numbers. 


So that's kind of you know my route, my own path. I both have the creative writing background and I have the academic path, but I don't think that there is a specific path, and you can get an MFA in literary translation, you can go get a PhD in whatever language or culture field, but those are not accessible paths for a lot of people, and I think especially literary translation is still a very white field–publishing is at least, if we're talking about in English. It is changing and it's becoming more inclusive, but I think there really is still a lot, there are still a lot of obstacles, and there's still a lot of racism, frankly, that persists even in translations from Chinese or Asian languages. I think a lot of translators who are heritage speakers have faced a lot of obstacles. I guess what I would say is that no matter your access to resources, if it's interesting to somebody, you want to pursue this path, you should do it, because I don't think getting an MFA or a PhD is going to make you a good translator; I think it might introduce you to networks and you might take classes that help you hone your skills, but there are also other ways you can do it. The American Literary Translators Association has emerging mentorship programs, and there are also travel fellowships for, I think, emerging translators. There are people who are literary translators who are willing to work with emerging translators. I know I worked with ALTA one year; we were able to get a fellowship from the Hong Kong International Poetry Foundation, so I was the mentor for the Hong Kong poetry emerging translator mentee, May Huang, who went on to publish a terrific book–bilingual–of Derek Chung’s poetry, A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, that came up from Zephyr Press last year. But we only had that funding for one year because COVID came and other reasons.


But actually Wong Yi and I are really trying hard because she came to ALTA with me and she could see how important you know translation is, so we are trying to brainstorm ways that maybe we can get funding from somebody in Hong Kong to bring about another Hong Kong translation fellowship that maybe isn't genre specific. I know that ALTA had one this past year for Taiwan from–I forget the funding body–and I know there are a lot of grants this year from institutions for translating South Asian literature–like a lot. So it just depends every year where funding is coming from. I know I'm also always happy to work with emerging translators, and through the American Literary Translators Association, there is also a BIPOC caucus for literary translators who identify as BIPOC, and through that caucus, I know there are a lot of more selfless translators who are willing to help mentor emerging translators. But I think it's really important that people not be discouraged because they don't see someone of their background reflected in people who are doing the translations. 


If I can make this specific about Hong Kong literature, I am so excited that there are so many people with connections to Hong Kong who want to translate Hong Kong literature. Either they grew up in Hong Kong, they're from Hong Kong, or maybe their parents are from Hong Kong. They might be heritage speakers of Cantonese, and I think it's really important because especially Hong Kong is a place that is so multilingual–there are already so many people who have the ability to be translating Hong Kong literature who are in Hong Kong and I really want to center more Hong Kong translators. I think there used to be this idea that you have to be a native speaker of the language you're translating into, and I think that there is room for all kinds of translators, and that makes it more interesting to me to have people from different backgrounds. But to give some specific advice, I think whatever language you want to translate into, read a lot in that language–read a lot of like diverse works. If you find an author whose work you want to translate, it's one thing if you're just translating their work for fun or for a class, but if you want to publish those translations, you really need to find out who is the holder of the copyright–and it may not be the author–and then see if the translation rights into the language you're working with are available and get written permission before you decide to publish somewhere, whether it's a journal or a press. Some places will not make you provide that, but I've known of cases where people haven't gotten it and then they published somewhere and they didn't have permission and then the author finds out and is unhappy. Or sometimes what happens is the copyright holder is both the author and the publisher–they split it–and I have heard of a case where the author told one translator, “You can translate my novel,” and the publisher found a different translator, and then there were two translations. Both were authorized, but by different people. Messes can happen.


So before you embark on a really big project, you want to make sure you have the permission, and with social media I think it is easier to get in touch with living authors.

If it's an author whose work is in the public domain because they have been dead a long time and their family doesn't want the copyright, that's a different story. But that's a very practical thing that seems like it would be self-evident, but a lot of people forget this step, so I really really encourage you,  if you want to publish your translations, you have to find out who has the copyright and get written permission.


Cameron

And is it the sort of thing where maybe, especially for when you're just in the beginning, maybe people want to start small, whether it's short stories or poetry, before they leap into a novel, both in terms of rights and the size of a task? 


Jennifer

Oh, yeah, definitely, I wouldn't, I would never translate a novel or a full-length book before you–I mean you can do what you want, but I don't recommend doing it before you have authorization, or even before you have a contract because you're performing free labor. Translators deserve to be paid and I also think, a way to establish your portfolio is to start small, whether it's with stories or with poems. So some very practical ways, especially for people who don't have access to MFA programs where they have  their professors who are helping them navigate literary journals, would be often there are literary agencies who are commissioning samples, so like from Chinese, there is the Grayhawk agency in Taiwan that does Books from Taiwan, and they will commission samples of novels or maybe a short story and pay you for that work. Then it is published on their website, and then when people publishers are thinking of buying the rights–you know, to publish that book in English or a different language–they may read the sample. So even if you don't end up doing the book, you are putting things on your CV and you're getting that experience. it's also a way for beginning translators to get paid and also to try translating different types of texts. So I think that is one way you can do it


I think more and more, with so many things being available online, reading extensively in literary journals [is important]. Once you read these works, you might be interested in it. You might then find that the author has an Instagram–a lot of writers from Hong Kong have Instagrams, they're very active, not so much on Twitter, I don't see a lot of like Hong Kong writers on Twitter, but I see them on Instagram–and so you can message them just find out are the rights available and do they already have an established relationship with a translator. Is it something where maybe you should let those people be and then find a writer who doesn't have a relationship with a translator? But then there are some writers like Xi Xi, who is a very prolific writer. There's no way I can translate every book by Xi Xi, nor should I, right? I want other people to translate her, even into English, so when you have a very prolific author like that, that's a different case.


But I also think they can just reach out to translators, like you can find me on Twitter, my DMs are open. I'm always happy to work with translators starting out because I know I still appreciate when, especially when I was an undergrad or graduate student, the people who are kind to me and helpful, because people are not always nice to students, and what I really love is seeing the enthusiasm from people who want to get into this field and don't know how. 


I feel like our propaganda Is working because I have like two success stories that I want to share. So last fall when Wong Yi was at Iowa, we visited University of Chicago, and we met this wonderful undergraduate student who works with Paola Iovene, who's the modern Chinese literature faculty there, who was translating something for her senior thesis with Paola and then was thinking that after graduation, she might go back to Hong Kong and look for a job. But we visited her class and then we also had dinner at Paola's home, and we were talking among a group of people. We started talking more about translation, and I saw that this was something she was really interested in, I think between the conversations we were all having as a group about translation and then reading Wong Yi’s work in Chinese and English and seeing this is a writer who uses Cantonese and that her work is very centered on Cantonese and on Hong Kong culture. I was really excited [to hear] that she [the student] is now accepted into the MFA program at University of Iowa for literary translation and she's decided she's going to pursue that route. 


Then there was another student–she's a graduate student at the University of Arizona–who was a staff member for the ALTA conference in November, who came to our panel about translating from Cantonese, and then she just messaged me that she would like to start translating Hong Kong writers and asked for suggestions. That makes me really happy because she's a heritage speaker of Cantonese, and when I see people who have this personal connection to Hong Kong and they want to translate Hong Kong literature, this is the best possible outcome te could have because we're going to get more translations and I think that the more diverse group of translators you have you're gonna get more interesting texts because different people are interested in translating different texts and. What I might choose to translate is gonna be very different from someone else, so I think it's looking pretty good for translations of Hong Kong lit. But if anyone is listening to this and is interested in pursuing it, please do and reach out to me, there are so many good writers, there's so many good literary works published in Chinese in Hong Kong that have not been translated and should be so please do it and I will help you.


Cameron

For our last question, we always ask for a resource to help with learning Cantonese, but this episode we're turning the tables a little bit and asking people to maybe think of a piece of literature from Hong Kong, about Hong Kong, that listeners might want to read. Some of these are available both in Chinese and English, so if people want to try reading both, that can also be a great linguistic exercise. So how about Jennifer we’ll let you start off since you're the guest?


Jennifer

Me start? Okay, so I'm going to cheat because I was thinking about this question, and I think it's impossible to pick one book and I don't want to put pressure on that one author. I'm going to recommend an anthology, it's called Making Space and it's edited by Nicolette Wong, and I'm recommending this book because it contains poetry, it contains fiction, it also contains nonfiction essays… Some of the works were originally written in English because Hong Kong has a very vibrant Anglophone literary culture, but some were written in Chinese, and for the works that were written in Chinese, you have both the translation and you have the Chinese original. The publisher is Cart Noodles Press, which is a small press in Hong Kong; I also wanted to foreground a small press. They're affiliated with the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, but I believe in North America you can also order this book through Columbia University Press. I wanted to highlight this because the editor is from Hong Kong and the press is based in Hong Kong and it's a little press, and I think that so many people are drawn to books by either major American University presses or some of the larger more prestigious presses in the US. But I think this is an indie but still very prestigious press from Hong Kong, and I wanted to give them some attention. And they published this book with support from the Kubrick Poetry Society, which is affiliated with the Kubrick bookstore in Hong Kong, and it has a range of works, a range of genres, a range of authors. Some of these authors are not Chinese but they live in Hong Kong, so I think it shows you the diversity of Hong Kong.


I'll recommend a couple other books, but I'll let you guys go first because you may be recommending ones. I would say.


Raymond

Okay, I'm not that resourceful in this area, but I do want to make a quick mention of two, 

I would say, considered modern classics written in Cantonese. The first one is called 《小男人週記》or Yuppie Fantasia, and it actually started not as written work but as radio drama and it came out in the, in the early 80s, and then it became so popular it was turned into a novel series. The literal translation is like “little man diary.” Basically, the content is [about] a group of white collar [workers and] office politics, and then from a very male perspective in those days. Now in hindsight it’s somewhat dated but also ironic and there's a lot of sarcasm in it, and why I mention it is because my mentor, Professor Stephen Matthews at Hong Kong U, he, he kept mentioning this [as] being his study materials. He picked up a lot of Cantonese from that work, and then also it just very recently was turned into a musical theater show just last year. Too bad I missed it, but I know the director of that show. I wanted him to bring it back again. So that's one I think is worth mentioning.


Then the other one is called 《穿Kenzo的女人》，”The Woman in Kenzo.” I think it's a good counterpart to this. This also came out in the 70s from the magazine 《號外》. It was also a novel series. Yeah, that's almost like the exact opposite from a more female perspective of what's going on in the Hong Kong society in the 70s and 80s and also interestingly it was also made into a musical theater show a few years ago. I think it was pre-pandemic and I watched that show in Hong Kong, so I didn't even finish reading all these works, but actually I watched the show, so that kind of made me interested.



Jennifer

How we need people to translate. 



Raymond

Exactly that's why I brought it up. I think it would be great if they can be translated and then I think a lot of people will be interested. So yeah, these are my quick mentions of the two. I hope it's relevant, but yeah.



Jennifer

Yeah!



Cameron

Well, I know there's a couple passages of 《小男人周記》 that are in Don Snow's research, because he uses it a lot, but I don't think anyone has fully translated it. 



Raymond

No, I don't think so 



Cameron

Raymond, did you see it when you came to the U-Mich library? I made them buy it. We have the 1980s edition paperback. 



Raymond

Oh, that's so cool!



Cameron

Okay, well, that's one thing before I share recommendations. I know we do have some academics who listen to this. I want to always remind people, especially because we're bringing up some small presses today, request these small presses to your libraries, ask them to buy them, that's a great way to support a lot of these small presses and also helps make these books accessible to students. It's great because then students sometimes ask for book recommendations, and you can say not only is this a great book, but we have it in the library, and that's always the hard especially when you're talking about you know, how do we acquire Chinese-language books in the US, sometimes because of shipping you can wait a long time. It can be very expensive, but if it's there and it's already, students can read it for free, I think that's really really great. 


So two things that I want to quickly recommend, one is a poetry book. It's called Pei Pei the Monkey King, by Wawa, and I was really lucky, I got to go to a reading. It was a bilingual reading with both Wawa and then the translator, Henry Wei Leung, and it was really interesting because again, you know, you're reading and you think, Oh, this is very literary, or it's Standard Written Chinese, what have you,” but hearing it read in Cantonese is really interesting because that's really part of the process. But the publication is bilingual, it's a side-by-side translation, and I believe it's still available on Amazon.



Jennifer

I love that book. That's a really good recommendation. Those poems are great.



Cameron

There's also another one where Henry Wei Leung does a good little essay at the beginning about language politics, so that's the other thing I really tell people–you should read more translated Hong Kong works because translators’ notes are an underappreciated genre.



Jennifer

Yeah.



Cameron

I love reading them because you get to learn a little bit about the translator's point of view, but they'll also give you an interesting way thinking about these issues. But for instance, the way he talks about the language politics versus how you talk about them in Tongueless, it's inflected by the work that you're translating.



Jennifer

Right.


Cameron

So I think it's a great great work, and then also I think Dung Kai-cheung at this point is probably one of the literary heavyweights of Hong Kong, I know he's talked about a lot. He's very prolific, but Bonnie S. McDougall has been involved in translating a few of his works. I know Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City came out with Columbia University Press in 2011 or so [2012], but then there's an even shorter one that I think is a little bit more approachable for people who are just getting into his work. It was published in English as Cantonese Love Stories through Penguin Specials. It's all short stories that are about Hongkongers’ relationships with brands. They're very short. It's almost like flash fiction and it's excerpted from a longer novel called The Catalog–It's an English title even though it's written using Chinese. But what I like about that for students, especially, is because it's really short fiction, it's a great way to start getting a feel for, for Hong Kong literature in short doses, And also he does use a little bit of colloquial Cantonese in those stories. So if you want to start getting a sense, especially for people maybe coming from Mandarin and want to start maybe getting a literary relationship with Cantonese, I really think The Catalog is a great entry point. 



Jennifer

It is, and since you brought up his work in translation, he's doing a really interesting project right now. When I had lunch with him last summer, he was talking about how Bonnie has kind of retired from translation, and his friend Yau Wai-ping translated one of his novels as I think The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera, but he's saying Yau  Wai-ping is busy being an academic, and then with Bonnie McDougal retiring, what he has done is turning to ChatGPT and he is translating his novel, Hong Kong Type, and you can subscribe to his SubStack, and then you will get that, so what he's doing is he's putting the chapters into ChatGPT, and then he edits it himself, because he doesn't you know, he said translators need to be paid and everything takes time, and instead of waiting for all of that, he is just taking this on himself. So yeah, you can subscribe to his SubStack and you can get these installments in your email of what he's doing. He also has a Chinese-language sub stack. He has a few projects going on but he's really into NFTs and these new technologies, and I said to him, “Oh my gosh,I think there are a lot of people who would love to translate your work, but they knew that you were working with Bonnie so they didn't want to disturb your, your relationship.” So if you're a literary translator, his work is available to translate, you know, just you know you need to get permission from him. But he is somebody who's really underserved in translation because his work is amazing. I think it's also really difficult. I don't know how you would translate it, but I would like more of it in English. So I hope someone will do it. 



Cameron

Yeah, there's almost like a sci-fi edge to his writing that's really come out over the past two decades. 



Jennifer

Yeah, he's so interesting. I love his work.



Cameron

I know he's someone who I've seen more academic research also coming up about him, which I think is really cool because I remember hearing him talk once in Hong Kong and being very taken with his presence and his way of expressing.



Jennifer

He's really smart. Yes, so yeah anything by him is definitely worth reading. I'll mention a couple other books that I thought might be mentioned so thus I was waiting. I think definitely for novels, Owlish by Dorothy Tse is a must-read, translated by Natascha Bruce, and I know it's being translated into a lot of other languages too including French and then a couple other European languages, but it's a brilliant translation. It's also brilliant and original; anything written by Dorothy is worth reading, anything translated by Natascha Bruce is worth reading, so I wanted to mention that, and I'm really excited because in 2025, a translation of Hon Lai Chu’s Mending Bodies  is going to be published by Two Lines Press translated by Jacqueline Leung, who is a Hong Kong based translator, and I'm so looking forward to that because Hon Lai Chu is another Hong Kong writer, we have one book of her short stories, Kite Family, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, but she has written several novels and she's just so interesting, so be on the lookout for that in 2025 from Two Lines. 



Cameron

Oh great. That's really, that's really exciting, I think maybe in the show notes will even have to have a “coming soon” section just for some other books that are coming out

in the future.



Jennifer

It's exciting, there are a lot of works from Hong Kong being translated. What I hope we get more of actually is popular writing, like popular fiction, you know, graphic novels. 



Cameron

Yeah, I think that would be fascinating, too, just because if it's not translated, people assume that Hong Kong doesn't have it–



Jennifer

Right!



Cameron

Even though I do some research that is, has to do with film,I always tell people about how Hong Kong has stuff other than film too.



Jennifer

Right? Yeah people are just not aware. 



Cameron

Well thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today, your experience. 



Raymond

Yeah. Thank you!



Jennifer

I don't think I shared anything, but yeah, it's wonderful to talk to other people interested in Hong Kong literature and Cantonese culture and language.



Cameron

Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We really hope our listeners learned a lot and also, go buy books and go read translations.



Jennifer

Yeah, and thank you for having me. I'm really excited and will include some links where you can find some of these resources, and if you want to translate Hong Kong literature, please do seek us out and we'll direct you to resources that will help you.



Raymond

Yeah, thank you Jennifer, I learned so much just through today's conversation. 



Jennifer

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.