Breaking the Hinge
How I Learned to Own My Role in Translation
Liz Evans Weber
There are a number of delightful challenges inherent to translation: articulating not just the literal words on the page but also any figurative or contextual weight that they might bear; fitting together and rearranging various pieces to arrive at the “fullest” possible rearticulation of an original sentence; attempting to express an author’s unique voice, style, or sense of humor. If, on top of those, one is able to neatly capture more nuanced things—a witty double entendre or pun, a callback to something said earlier (easily missed!), a playful embedded rhyme—one can get to the end of a working day feeling pretty satisfied. I know I do, anyway.
It took me a long time to achieve the comfort I now feel with the work of translation. I had done my PhD in Chinese literature but had no formal training in translation specifically, which meant that when I decided to translate an excerpt of New Story of the Stone for use in a course back in 2018, I had no real hands-on experience or knowledge of the tools, compensations, philosophies, or debates that inform translation as a practice. I was simply an instructor who wanted to make an important Chinese novel accessible to my students. So I just … started.
I had a duty not just to retain the specificity of the language on the page but also to produce a work of literature that read with the same ease, nimbleness, and vitality as the original.
At the outset, I thought that my task was simply that of mechanical or “faithful” transcription. (Yes, yes, I know.) I still remember the very first few pages I translated, making fanatical use of square brackets around every single “deviation”—things as minuscule as the insertion of an elided subject pronoun, for example—I perceived myself to have made from the words on the page of the original. I wanted so much to be careful, to be respectful of my source material. I used so many brackets! And between those tiny open-flung doors, spilling into the text like uninvited interlopers, were my interventions, intruding uneasily upon some “pure” version of the original I had in my mind and was desperate not to dilute.
I could sense that there was something wrong with this approach—certainly, none of the books I had read and enjoyed in translation had looked like this—but it took some time to understand where the problem lay. After all, I was coming from academia, where the use of brackets is required any time even a single word in a quote being translated is altered. And wasn’t I essentially producing a novel-length quotation? In time, however, I came to appreciate that the rigor required of the literary translator and the rigor required of the analytic academic were not necessarily the same thing: I had a duty not just to retain the specificity of the language on the page but also to produce a work of literature that read with the same ease, nimbleness, and vitality as the original. A bracketed-to-death translation that was concerned only with the former and not with the latter would be a diminishment of its source. Eventually I achieved a level of comfort with the true nature of the task in front of me, which is to say, with what my relationship to the text was permitted to be. So I returned to those early, rough pages and revised heavily: the brackets, the clunky doors I had been using to prevent my gate-crashing interventions from mingling with the “real” text, were torn off their hinges and discarded in favor of a more holistic approach.[1]
This translation project has in fact been a vessel that has carried me, over these long years.
There were many other situations like this where I had to develop strategies and philosophies as I went. Issues—linguistic, stylistic, contextual, intellectual, ethical—that I had never before confronted presented themselves to me, hands on hips, and demanded: Now what? What were my duties to the source text and to Wu Jianren? What did I owe hypothetical readers? Sometimes I sought inspiration and guidance from colleagues, or from how other translators before me had tackled similar problems; other times, I spent hours poring through reference materials; still others, I forged ahead in the quietude of my own thoughts, trusting in my own persistence and creativity. Of course, even now, my approaches continue to evolve.
I have recently noticed an interesting idiosyncrasy: when I look back to describe the very beginnings of my work on New Story, I often default to the word embarked (“When I first embarked on this translation”). A choice made fairly casually, I thought—a polished word for began that suggests the epic proportions of a project that kept me occupied on and off for seven years. However, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why was this the word I had settled on? Eventually I realized: on some unconscious level I return to embarked because this translation project has in fact been a vessel that has carried me, over these long years, across a sea of tensions, possibilities, responsibilities, and decisions, the navigation of which has helped shape me into a different kind of translator than I was at the point of my departure.
In 2018, I came aboard this craft and began to grapple with its proverbial ropes, never fully knowing my destination or how long it would take to get there; now, in 2025, one leg of my voyage is complete and another has begun. I am still not totally sure where the currents are leading, but can say with confidence that I have been and will continue to be much changed by the journey.
Liz Evans Weber is an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese and research assistant professor at the University of Rochester. She is the translator of Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel.