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A review by half_book_and_co
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories by Yu Chen, Regina Kanyu Wang
4.0
As the subtitle states, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories is a short story anthology of speculative fiction stories translated from Chinese "From a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators". The stories span a wide variety of speculative from myth retellings to science fiction. As with such anthologies often the case, there were some stories I liked more than others but all stories had me throughout engaged and introduced me to writers I had not read before.
But what I really loved about this book was that between the stories, there were also a couple of essays included which looked at gender and Chinese speculative fiction wrtiting, the role of online publishing ("internet novels"), and the ins-and-outs of translating. While I wished for a bit more depth with the solely gender focussed essay, I wholeheartedly loved the essays thinking through issues of translations.
For example, Yilin Wang states in the essay "Translations as Retellings: An Approach to Translating Gu Shi's 'To Produce Jade' and Ling Chen's 'The Name of the Dragon'": "I want to give Anglophone audiences the same immersive reading experience as readers of the soruce texts and not present the tales as unknowable Other, yet at the same time I also want to preserve linguistic and cultural differences, even if they may at times distance non-Chinese readers." And Rebecca F. Kuang asks in "Writing and Translation: A Hundred Technical Tricks": "Perhaps it was once reasonable - say, in the eigteenth century - to think white Americans were unfamiliar with dim sum and guanxi; today, those terms are firmly entrenched within the English lexicon. Why bring the text closer to the reader, when the reader has already moved closer to the source?"
But what I really loved about this book was that between the stories, there were also a couple of essays included which looked at gender and Chinese speculative fiction wrtiting, the role of online publishing ("internet novels"), and the ins-and-outs of translating. While I wished for a bit more depth with the solely gender focussed essay, I wholeheartedly loved the essays thinking through issues of translations.
For example, Yilin Wang states in the essay "Translations as Retellings: An Approach to Translating Gu Shi's 'To Produce Jade' and Ling Chen's 'The Name of the Dragon'": "I want to give Anglophone audiences the same immersive reading experience as readers of the soruce texts and not present the tales as unknowable Other, yet at the same time I also want to preserve linguistic and cultural differences, even if they may at times distance non-Chinese readers." And Rebecca F. Kuang asks in "Writing and Translation: A Hundred Technical Tricks": "Perhaps it was once reasonable - say, in the eigteenth century - to think white Americans were unfamiliar with dim sum and guanxi; today, those terms are firmly entrenched within the English lexicon. Why bring the text closer to the reader, when the reader has already moved closer to the source?"