When Chinese novelist Su Wei and his translator Austin Woerner first met in 2005, little did they know that their friendship would spark a ten-year-long experiment in creative co-translation that would take them from the classrooms of Yale to the mountains of southern China and back again. Join Austin as he recounts this literary odyssey, culminating in the publication of his English translation of Su’s novel The Invisible Valley in English this April, by Small Beer Press. Austin will reveal the story behind the story, a coming-of-age narrative set during the Cultural Revolution against a backdrop of rainforest landscapes, Taoist mysticism, and Cantonese folklore. In the process he will share the joys and complexities of literary translation and his adventures in Chinese literature both on and off the page.
In tropical southern China, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a teenage boy named Lu Beiping stumbles upon a band of woodcutters living deep in the mountains. Outcasts from mainstream society, the “driftfolk,” as they call themselves, practice a secret faith whose central tenets would be heresy in the world Lu Beiping comes from. As he is drawn deeper into their way of life—a realm of strange freedoms and restrictions, where the line between magic and reality is not always clear—Lu must struggle with what is natural and what is truly deviant, and learn to play a precarious balancing act between two taboo-ridden worlds. (You can read an excerpt here.)
Like many Chinese writers of his generation, Su Wei spent his teenage years being “re-educated” through farm labor in the countryside, working for ten years on a rubber plantation in the mountains of tropical Hainan Island. He is known for his nonfiction essays as well as for his highly imaginative novels, which are seen as unique in their treatment of the Cultural Revolution. He fled China in 1989, and since 1997 he has taught Chinese language and literature at Yale University. The Invisible Valley is his first book to be translated into English.
A Chinese-English literary translator, Austin Woerner has translated two volumes of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and Phoenix, and edited the English edition of the innovative, bilingual Chinese literary journal Chutzpah! Together with Ou Ning, he co-edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah! New Voices from China. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and he is currently a lecturer at Duke Kunshan University.