Bringing Taiwanese literature to the world

"Another novel I'm working on is My Life as Emperor (我的帝王生涯) by Su Tong (蘇童), author of Raise the Red Lantern (妻妾成群) and Rice (米). It's about an imaginary boy king in an unspecified period of China's history. The author lives in Nanjing and is still quite young. I'm preparing a third of it to submit, but one publisher has already made an offer so we're OK.

"Crystal Boys (孽子) by Taiwan's Kenneth Pai　(白先勇). Yes, I translated that in the 1980s. It did well, in part for the wrong reasons. They put a sexy young Asian boy half-clad on the cover. But it's not a gay book in the soft-porn way. It's a very good novel, about things like fathers and sons, and marginalization.

"I hope to break into the commercial market. I have friends in the publishing business, but unfortunately, as in the UK, all the smaller publishers are being bought up. The publishers of Please Don't Call Me Human are now owned by Disney, for crying out loud, and have to take orders from idiots in Los Angeles who want to see only the bottom line. When I published Red Sorghum (紅高梁) Penguin did a printing of around 5,000. It did pretty well and is still in print. But the same month they published a Stephen King novel in an edition of 950,000. They said the one could support the other. But nowadays it's different, and each book must make a profit on its own. That's very hard.

"Have I read Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World? No, but it was reviewed just recently in the New York Times and didn't get very high marks. Everyone knew Zeng He was a great sailor who went to lots of places, but America was not one of them, and nor was the Antarctic!

"Columbia University Press's Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan series is running into trouble unfortunately ... contracts, royalties, rights ... it's an administrative problem essentially. But no one else publishes Taiwanese novels in translation as such, and I very much hope it survives. There are some young writers here who really deserve to be better known.

"Which books have I enjoyed translating most? Well, Mo Yan's Red Sorghum and Republic of Wine (酒國) were both wonderful. And so was Rose, Rose, I Love You (玫瑰玫瑰我愛你) by Taiwan's Wang Chen-ho (王禎和). And I'm on the look out for new things all the time."