Today, I just want to share a book recommendation!

The novel “Taiwan Travelogue” written by Taiwanese novelist Yang Shuang-zi just won the International Booker Prize -- a prestigious literary award given to a work of fiction translated into English published in the U.K.

(Here is an article in the New York Times about this.)

I read the original Chinese version of this novel last year after it had already won the top translated fiction prize in the U.S. (the National Book Award for Translated Literature) and it was, by far, my favorite book that read in the whole of last year (and I read over 50!).

“Taiwan Travelogue” is set in 1938, during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, and follows a female Japanese novelist travelling around Taiwan with a female Taiwanese interpreter. It is framed as a “rediscovered travelogue”: within the fiction of the book, the text was originally written in Japanese, then later “translated” into Chinese.

This means that even the original Chinese version is already a literary experiment in translation — a Chinese novel “pretending” to be a Chinese translation of a Japanese text. This metafictional structure makes the book especially fascinating as an exploration of language, authorship, and translation, and the real-life translations of the novel into other languages, including translator Lin King’s English translation, add yet another interesting layer to the whole project that makes readers ponder the power imbalances between languages and the role translation plays both in addressing and exacerbating those imbalances.

However, the novel is not just clever as a literary experiment. Through the intimate relationship between its two main characters — a Japanese woman and a Taiwanese woman — it explores colonial power, cultural hierarchy, desire, dependency, and the uneasy closeness between colonizer and colonized.

The author left a lot of room for readers to draw their own conclusions on these heavy themes, but, underneath it all, the book is also just simply just a devastatingly beautiful story of forbidden love.

As such, it is almost too fitting for this book to win the top prizes for translated fiction into English. I have not read the English version yet, but I am definitely interested in doing so if only to see what new layer of meaning the “real-life translation” adds to the novel’s formal and thematic explorations.

Yes, unusually, I am recommending a Chinese book to you for a change -- but one whose English translation recently won all the top translated literature prizes in English.

As such, if you are interested in reading “Taiwan Travelogue,” the original Chinese version would let you experience its internal game of “translation” directly, while the English version adds another real-life layer of translation on top of it. Either way, this is a book that will reward careful reading.

今天想跟大家分享一本書！

台灣小說家楊雙子的小說《臺灣漫遊錄》剛剛獲得了 International Booker Prize（國際布克獎）——這是一個很有份量的文學獎項，頒發給在英國出版、由其他語言翻譯成英文的小說作品。

（這裡有一篇 New York Times 關於這件事的文章。）

我去年讀了這本小說的中文原版；當時它已經獲得了美國最重要的翻譯文學獎項 National Book Award for Translated Literature（美國國家圖書獎翻譯文學獎）。而它是我去年讀過的所有書裡面，最喜歡的一本——而我去年讀了超過 50 本書！

《臺灣漫遊錄》的故事設定在 1938 年，即台灣日治時期。小說講述一位日本女作家，和一位台灣女通譯一起在台灣各地旅行。它的形式是一部「被人重新發現的『遊記』」：在小說的虛構設定裡，這部文本原本是用日文寫成，後來再被「翻譯」成中文。

也就是說，即使是中文原版，本身也已經是一場關於翻譯的文學實驗——一部中文小說在「假裝」自己是一本由日文翻譯成中文的作品。這種後設小說的結構，令它在語言、作者身份和翻譯這幾個層面上都特別有意思；而這本小說在現實中再被翻譯成其他語言，包括譯者 Lin King 的英文譯本，就為整個作品再加上一層有趣的意義，也讓讀者思考不同語言之間的權力不平衡，以及翻譯在處理甚至加劇這些不平衡時所扮演的角色。

不過，這本小說並不只是作為文學實驗很有意思而已。透過兩位主角（一位日本女性和一位台灣女性）之間親密的關係，它也探索了殖民權力、文化階級、慾望、依賴，以及殖民者和被殖民者之間那種不安但又親近的關係。

作者在這些沉重主題上留下了很多空間，讓讀者自己去思考和判斷；但在這一切之下，這本書也很單純地是一個極其美麗、令人心碎的禁忌之愛故事。

因此，這本書會獲得英文翻譯文學的頂尖獎項，幾乎是再適合不過。我還沒有讀過英文版，但我絕對有興趣去讀，哪怕只是為了看看這層「現實中的翻譯」，會為這本小說在形式和主題上的探索再增加甚麼新的意義。

所以，這次很少有地，我是在向大家推薦一本中文書，但也是一本英文譯本最近幾乎拿下英文翻譯文學界所有重要獎項的中文書。

因此，如果你對《臺灣漫遊錄》有興趣，中文原版可以讓你直接體驗它內部那場關於翻譯的遊戲，而英文版則會在這之上再加上一層現實中的翻譯。不論你選擇讀哪一個版本，這都是一本很值得細讀的書。