My first book length translation is out! It’s glorious. It’s in Danish. And it’s blue.

Translating Chi Ta-wei’s 膜 (The Membranes, Membraner) – an amazing deep sea exploration of the human mind-body – has been a tremendously enjoyable ride with nothing but kindness and support from both Ta-wei and the publishers Korridor (as well as generous funding from Books from Taiwan and the S. C. Van foundation). The amazing cover art and bookmark are by Ida Marie Therkildsen.

This outwardly simple novel elegantly chronicles the story of skin care specialist Momo and her intimate yet alienated relationship with her subsea surroundings. But below the surface, so many of the narrative’s deceptively innocent scenes lead to convoluted and uncomfortably relevant questions about how we perceive, interact with, and take care of our world.

A work of speculative fiction, Chi’s work takes nothing for granted. The novel addresses several personal and societal issues that are easily as relevant today as they were 25 years ago when it was first published in 1996: Here queer identities and non-heterosexual relationships are the norm, humans rely on biochemically constructed androids to survive the environmental disasters they have caused, and giant publishing houses are among the most powerful players under the sea.

At the same time, Chi Ta-wei has created an intimate and sensual reading experience that I have done my best to rewrite with Danish words. A major challenge for me was the way repetition of a single term and its near synonyms works well in Chinese but appear clumsy and annoying in the more limited vocabulary of Danish. So, rather than constantIy repeating phrases like “under havet (under the sea)” and “oppe på land (up on dry land),” I ended up developing the fictional place names Underhavet (The Subsea) and Landjorden (Dryland) for the new futurist world Momo inhabits. Creating and curating a terminology that conveys the stark contrast between the liveable underwater atmosphere and the barren landmasses above was one of the absolute perks of translating Membraner.

As I wrote in my own review of the English translation in 2021, “The Membranes is a fascinating and beautifully conceived novel, deceptively simple and alluringly deep.”