Since Chinese nouns don’t indicate quantity, the title of this book could be translated as My Mother’s Parasite or My Mother’s Parasites. So as I translated Wei-Yun Lin’s memoir, a meditation on life, growth and interdependence, I kept asking myself, "Parasite or parasites?"
It isn’t really a question of quantity—there are a lot of parasites in the book. Wei-Yun’s mother is a distinguished scholar of parasitology, which, yes, means she is as smart and eccentric as you might imagine. One of the book’s main elements, and great pleasures, is Wei-Yun’s nuanced and funny insights into her loving, complex relationship with her mom.
Singular “parasite” seems more emphatic: My Mother’s PARASITE. It also suggests the concept of being parasitical rather than the creepy crawlies themselves. And “What makes something a parasite?” is a question the book seeks to answer. The straightforward answer is that, for at least part of their life cycle, parasites derive nutrients from other creatures at their expense. But the book leads us to wonder: Doesn’t everything, maybe even especially humans, more or less live off of other creatures—particularly our mothers? Are we harming them? Do we give them anything in return? (And the questions we all cry from the rooftops.) Do we ever stop relying on our mothers for nutrients? Do we ever stop asking them to make sacrifices for us?
Are we all our mothers’ parasites?!?
In the end I asked Wei-Yun what she thought—parasite or parasites? And she said “parasites,” so I went with that. But, as a translator, I love that this difference between Chinese and English allowed me, above and beyond the richness of Wei-Yun’s narrative, to ask these questions and conjecture these possibilities.
- Emily Goedde
Hungarian | Hungary | Short Fiction
April, 2019My major concern, when I sat down to translate this story, was whether the weight of the post-Soviet bloc and Hungarian history would carry over to an American audience--whether readers would get lost in the many significant dates that are mentioned. At the start of the story, we are told “it was November 16th, 1989, and God could once again step behind the Iron Curtain.” What’s helpful for an American reader to know is that by November 1989, Hungary was well into reforming from a communist state into a democratic republic, with opposition parties already established and with free elections not far on the horizon. Later, we learn that 1947 was the last year God had stepped foot inside a Hungarian pub, which was also the year the Soviets had officially gained governmental power by manipulating the political landscape and holding the last “free elections” the country would see for the next forty-three years. Finally, when the bartender asks God, who clearly looks out of place in the small-town pub, whether he’s a 56-er, he’s referring to the 200,000 Hungarians who fled Hungary after the 1956 Revolution against the Soviet Union, which lasted twelve days, saw the death of nearly three thousand Hungarians during the revolt and the execution of 299 after the Soviets regained power.
What I learned in the process of translating this story is that while knowing the historical significance behind these dates brings with it a richer reading of the work, it is actually the emotional truths that Ferenc Czinki conveys through his characters that make this story so resonant. Czinki makes it easy for readers to empathize with a people who have been forgotten, even by their own God, and readers likewise understand why God feels forgotten, too. Everyone is a stranger to one another here until God meets Somebody, and it is this shared sense of being forgotten that allows them a moment of connection.
The summer I discovered this story, Ferenc Czinki drove me around Inota. The old factory is still running; he pointed out the massive, cylindrical chimneys in the distance. We retraced God’s footsteps into the pub and drank a local Hungarian light beer with the few men who were there that lazy summer afternoon. I can attest to the fact that that countryside still feels rather forgotten, but in this story, as in much of his work, Czinki gives voice to this place and its people.
- Timea Balogh
Children's Literature | Estonia | Estonian
July, 2015On finishing up an “extracurricular” project (I am a Romanticist, currently writing a dissertation on William Wordsworth), a new English translation of Eno Raud’s Sipsik, an enduringly popular Soviet-era Estonian children’s book, and considering its chances for US publication, I found myself anticipating the ambivalent reactions: This lovely story is too quiet and too circumscribed for a contemporary North American audience—too quiet for, say, five- to eight-year-olds who may already have acquired a “thirst after outrageous stimulation” (Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads) and too circumscribed for parents who prefer that the narratives offered their children engage, however distantly, with social realities. The story, of a five-year-old girl and her imaginary companion, unfolding against the backdrop of the daily life of a sketchily, if realistically, rendered immediate family, might seem to float in some just slightly exotic and geographically unplaceable but otherwise comfortably familiar world of an idealized postwar, urban, petit-bourgeois domesticity.
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- David Sassian
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