Brief acknowledgement that I have translated a book: Mai Jia's The Colonel and the Eunuch
I translated this novel by Mai Jia years ago now. I sometimes wondered if it would ever see print. This is how it goes. Especially these days, books seem to take forever to go from the first contract to publication. Always, in the meantime, I keep silent about these projects, waiting until I am sure they can be safely born.
And, now, I will dash off some comments and then perhaps never say another word about it. This is how it goes. This is the loneliness of this kind of lowly translation work: I may feel a sense of ownership over the book, since I selected each word, crafted each sentence, and so on, even if nobody else feels that way.
My only hope is that you will read it and say something about it. I wonder what people will make of it. It’s a peculiar book, I can tell you.
Mai Jia is known for intelligent espionage fiction. His first three novels are available in translation by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne. He has won the Mao Dun Prize. He’s a sharp storyteller.
It occurs to me to share that he helped a lot with my work here. I might claim ownership over the translation, but in this case, at least, it is shared. This is rare for a Chinese author whose book is translated into English. Most writers take minimal interest in the process. Why should they?
Mai Jia even suggested a new title for the translation. The working title was a more literal translation of the original, which is Rénshēng hǎihǎi 人生海海. The narrator hears the phrase from a Fujianese woman he meets in Italy. She pronounces it lin-sing-hai-hai and says that it means something like, “life is an ocean.” This is a beautiful phrase. When it pops up, it’s a beautiful moment in the book. I think it works as an English title, and it looks a lot like how every book is named these days, but the argument was that it doesn’t tell the potential reader what’s inside.
And so The Colonel and the Eunuch is from the two nicknames given the central character. Nobody is sure of his rank. Nobody is sure whether or not he is actually a eunuch. But those names stick. His strange story—called up by the Nationalists, working for the Communists, scything his way through the Shanghai underworld, fighting in Korea, battling with juvenile revolutionaries, finding love at the end of his life—leaks out through the narrator’s investigation. A boy, then a young man, then a middle-aged man, he remains obsessed with the Colonel that lives down the lane. We hear the Eunuch’s story in rumor and gossip, a Red Guard interrogation, his own retelling…
This is Mai Jia’s ambitious attempt at something he perhaps considers more likely to be taken seriously. And, so, this is one of those books that Chinese authors write: it is a history of the twentieth century told through a single narrator. There are stories of the countryside under tuchunism, and, of course, espionage and counter-espionage in the brothels of wartime Shanghai, but also scenes of collective madness during the Cultural Revolution, explosive wealth during Reform and Opening, a detour through the Fujianese migrant worker underworld in Italy, and a moving present day conclusion. I can imagine this could be off-putting. As with the last book I translated—The Shaanxi Opera by Jia Pingwa—it contains a type of obscenity—filthy, misogynistic, hateful, all reflective of the eras and the people being described—no longer tolerated in modern fiction written in English. And, on top of all that, as with many Chinese big books, it’s deeply indebted in its form and its style and its concerns to nineteenth century Western literature. It’s shaggy. It sprawls. It moves at a languid pace across a hundred years. This is not a recipe for a literary hit.
It doesn’t matter. Mai Jia can tell a story. There is a mystery to be uncovered in the book. Mai Jia could not abandon this need to place a riddle at the center. It is useful, anyway, since any failures in form and style are forgiven by revelation of that secret, in a conclusion that is sentimental and sad in a way that is, as if it were also a type of obscenity, also not tolerated in modern fiction.
I should put here an excerpt from the novel, but I don’t think I will. I haven’t seen the final draft, so I could only work from the most recent edits I worked on. I am terrible at choosing a section of a book to share, too.
Please read it, if you can. More importantly, tell me that you have read it and give me your thoughts, however you felt. It will be out in a few months.