On Ken Liu: Jan 23 Reading Response

I was introduced to Ken Liu in 2017 when I read The Legends of Luke Skywalker because I’m a big Star Wars fan. I wasn’t familiar with his other work at the time, but the novel was so enjoyable, hilarious, and at times heart-wrenching that I fell in love with his writing style. After reading the short stories for the week, I see a similar style in Liu’s translations as I do in his own work, which speaks to the translator's ability to also serve as a writer. I particularly enjoyed his introduction to Invisible Planets, where he noted that “science fiction is the literature of dreams” (14). 

I carried this phrase with me as I observed the cautious, detail-oriented decisions Liu made in his English-language translations of Xia Jia’s “Tongtong’s Summer” and Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing.” For example, in his translation of “Tongtong’s Summer,” Liu establishes Tongtong’s initial unease around her grandfather with adjectives like “long, bushy” to describe eyebrows that “stuck out like stiff pine needles” (113-114). The phonetics of these words play with the image Liu paints, contrasting with the deep affection that Tongtong holds in the last line: “when you wake up, everything will be all right” (130). What I thought would be a social commentary on technology's dangerous, exponential growth turned out to be a heartwarming, tender story. I think that choices like keeping “erhu” (124) in the translation and the rendering of “Rainbow Bear Villiage” (127) added great depth to the story, and I’m wondering about Liu’s overall approach to domestication and foreignization in these stories. 

In “Folding Beijing,” I saw Hao Jingfang’s “fabulism and sociological speculation” that Ken Liu mentions in the intro. I noticed it toward the end where Lao Ge explains the class segregation and economic division between the First Space, Second Space, and Third Space, as well as how the First Space “caught up to Europe and America” (255). I wish the story were longer so readers could dive into these issues, but that’s not a statement on the overall translation. Like in “Tongtong’s Summer,” Liu is careful in his word choice so readers can enter this world. For example, I would love to see the original for the rendering, “As soon as he entered, he felt the flavor of the past hanging in the air” (224). Many of these lines are poetic in how they play with the senses and a higher, literary register. I am also interested in how Liu translates markings of time since they are a large part of the story, especially in how exposure to the earth’s surface for the different spaces can be another status symbol. For example, Liu writes “ten after six” and “twenty after six,” and then “six thirty,” “six forty,” and “six forty-five” (258-260), so I’m curious about the original and how time is generally told in Chinese. On a more general note, Ken Liu’s diverse professional background in law, consulting, and programming impresses me, and I wonder how these areas tie to his work now as a full-time writer and translator. I’m looking forward to Lianbi’s presentation tomorrow and Ken’s talk on Friday!

-Rose