Some literary works excite us because their linguistic fabric is so rich; each sentence describes not only an event or an action, but a way of thinking through language and narrative, a way of looking at, living in and representing the world, full of cultural residue, philosophical implications, personal memories and associative capacity.

How can we as (would be) literary translators encompass both syntactic melody, narrative pace, semantic connotations, metaphoric content and intertextual aspects of our source texts while rendering them at all readable in our target language? Last week, I attended a workshop organised by Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild and Mai Corlin Bagger-Petersen at University of Copenhagen, featuring experienced and new translators of Chinese fiction into Danish, which addressed these daunting questions.

Professor emeritus of Chinese language and literature, Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg used Franco Moretti’s allegory of translation as waves that bring new life to the shores of national literatures, while the renowned Danish translator of James Joyce and Herta Müller, Karsten Sand Iversen stressed the importance of integration rather than  assimilation as a method for translation. This strategy includes avoiding what Iversen referred to as ‘normalisation’; the act of trivialising inventive and even weird literary language, in order to satisfy editors and the perceived cultural laziness of prospective audiences.

Danish translator of Haruki Murakami’s works, Mette Holm described the collaborative efforts of translators around the world to deal with the complexity as well as the specificity of fictional narrative: On the one hand, translators must understand and retain the literary ambiguity of Murakami’s texts, his fantastic elements, his literary subconscious, while on the other, they struggle to incorporate his use of highly specific brand names, sometimes unknown or unnamed in the target language.

Most translators from Chinese, including Susanne Posborg and Sidse Laugesen, agreed that the issue of dialects, idioms and jargon represented a huge hurdle in terms of translation. One cannot simply interpolate Danish dialects for Chinese, as the whole fictional geography clearly does not conform to the cultural sphere known as Denmark. Conversely, more subtle differentiations might go unnoticed by the casual reader.

Despite all the difficulties and challenges to good translation practice raised by the speakers (a commercial book market with, according to Klim publishers‘ representative, an active readership of only about half a million was another factor that was mentioned), the all-day workshop was very well attended by old hands and young students alike, a fact that seems to raise hope for the future of literary translation from Chinese in Denmark.