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A review by alisarae
Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong
#AlisaReadstheWorld: Malaysia
This little collection of stories features female protagonists who have experiences with the liminal. There is usually an element of a ghost-like being in every story. In looking at the collection as a whole, you can see that the ghosts refer to women's experiences of being overlooked, unheard, unseen, unimportant.
I really enjoy reading about and eating food from "crossroads cultures," the term I use for countries that have an overlap of languages and peoples. Malaysia has a melting pot of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino cultures, among others, and the author gives nod to that with descriptions of accents, languages, and street scenes. Some of the conflicts in the stories are based on the differences that arise when you have people with very different backgrounds living together in the same spaces.
I read a few reviews on Goodreads where people complained about the translation, but I don't think that is at all the problem with this book. As someone who is paid to translate, I always pay close attention to the flow of a translation when I'm reading it. This one is quite good, and there were several times I thought, "That must have been a tricky sentence," or "That was a clever solution." It's hard to erase the awkwardness and clunkiness of the original language when you are translating, and it usually takes several passes to get all the kinks worked out. Of course, Asian languages tend to have a clipped quality to the sentences and romance languages often retain a (tiresome) long-windedness, because that's a reflection of how the author thinks and expresses themselves—it's a shadow of the original language that doesn't need to bed erased. My hunch is that these complainers were placing the blame in the wrong place: many of the individual stories do not have strong explanations of the metaphors or satisfying endings. I, too, wasn't overly fond of the stories where the ending just dropped off, but it is what it is.
This little collection of stories features female protagonists who have experiences with the liminal. There is usually an element of a ghost-like being in every story. In looking at the collection as a whole, you can see that the ghosts refer to women's experiences of being overlooked, unheard, unseen, unimportant.
I really enjoy reading about and eating food from "crossroads cultures," the term I use for countries that have an overlap of languages and peoples. Malaysia has a melting pot of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino cultures, among others, and the author gives nod to that with descriptions of accents, languages, and street scenes. Some of the conflicts in the stories are based on the differences that arise when you have people with very different backgrounds living together in the same spaces.
I read a few reviews on Goodreads where people complained about the translation, but I don't think that is at all the problem with this book. As someone who is paid to translate, I always pay close attention to the flow of a translation when I'm reading it. This one is quite good, and there were several times I thought, "That must have been a tricky sentence," or "That was a clever solution." It's hard to erase the awkwardness and clunkiness of the original language when you are translating, and it usually takes several passes to get all the kinks worked out. Of course, Asian languages tend to have a clipped quality to the sentences and romance languages often retain a (tiresome) long-windedness, because that's a reflection of how the author thinks and expresses themselves—it's a shadow of the original language that doesn't need to bed erased. My hunch is that these complainers were placing the blame in the wrong place: many of the individual stories do not have strong explanations of the metaphors or satisfying endings. I, too, wasn't overly fond of the stories where the ending just dropped off, but it is what it is.