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- South China Morning Post
A new generation of translators bringing Hong Kong literature to the world
'I already knew they were at the door when the doorbell rang. It was an afternoon in plum rain season, lush mold blooming all around. May had always been punctual; I just hadn't thought the person she'd joined her body with would be the same.'
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So goes the beguiling passage that opens Hong Kong writer
Hon Lai-chu 's Mending Bodies, a 2010 novel that follows an unnamed narrator trying to decide whether she wishes for her body to be sewn to another – the shadowy city in which she lives encourages this procedure – as she finishes her dissertation about conjoinment. It's an unsettling read that interrogates the distance between human beings and the nature of free will, and a translation published this April by San Francisco-based Two Lines Press means the text is available in English for the first time.
Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu, who has authored more than 10 books. Photo: Hong Kong International Literary Festival
A leading writer in Hong Kong, Hon has authored more than 10 books, so it is perhaps surprising that she's only had one other book translated, The Kite Family, first published 2008 and translated from Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter in 2015 for the now-defunct publisher Muse. But much has changed over the past 10 years: demand for translated literature is booming and acclaimed publishers are picking up more works by Chinese-language writers from Hong Kong.
It is hard to determine what exactly contributed to this growing hunger for translated literature, but in 2016, Deborah Smith's translation from Korean of Han Kang's The Vegetarian marked the first time a translator has been awarded the Man Booker International Prize, the rules having been changed to
split the prize between author and translator that year. 'All of a sudden, Korean literature was seen as edgy and fierce,' wrote translator Anton Hur. The popularity of
Elena Ferrante 's Neapolitan Novels translated from Italian and Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series from Norwegian may have also helped. In 2023, Britain's International Booker Prize (the Man Booker International Prize having been renamed as the International Booker Prize in 2019) revealed that sales of translated fiction in the UK jumped 22 per cent in 2022 from the year before, with readers aged under 35 accounting for almost half the sales in that category.
These days, from bestsellers such as Baek Se-hee's I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (2018), translated from Korean by Hur in 2022, to the works of
newly minted Nobel Prize winner Han Kang , translated from Korean by Smith, translations are often found on shelves in the West alongside titles originally written in English. This trend has also benefited Hong Kong literature: Britain's Fitzcarraldo Editions published Natascha Bruce's translation from Chinese of Dorothy Tse's Owlish in 2023, and last year, The New York Review of Books released Jennifer Feeley's translation from Chinese of the
late Hong Kong writer Xi Xi 's semi-autobiographical Mourning a Breast.
Author Han Kang (right) from South Korea and translator Deborah Smith, winners of the Man Booker International Prize 2016. Photo: EPA
Previously, many translators of Hong Kong literature were academics who translated for the purpose of including a text on their syllabus, and they often hailed from elsewhere. Now, there is a generation of budding translators who were raised in the city or belong to the Cantonese diaspora, and are sometimes writers themselves. This includes May Huang, who translated Derek Chung's A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist (2023), and Fion Tse, who has translated novelist Lo Yu.
