Na Zhong
I Bet People Will Join Us
Na Zhong
Years ago, as an intern at an English-language publication that champions translated literature, I asked the editor how he dealt with the thorny issue of “translation style.” He looked at me, puzzled. “What’s that?” It was my turn to be tongue-tied. “It’s a quality… permeating a work of translation… that immediately tells you it is a translated text.” He didn’t get it. I let the topic drop. I later realized...
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Na Zhong
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
