Why We Should Translate Literature About Trauma

Translating trauma and violence is not just about deciphering pain but also about recreating an emotional language that helps us to understand each other better.

Last summer, I began translating a sample of Taiwanese author Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, a novel currently seeking English-language publication. The book addresses sexual violence taking place within the corruption of the Taiwanese educational system, which has long been overlooked. I later discovered that I was in the same university around the same time with the author, but we never met. Yi-Han led me to her story with places I am familiar with, with voices I previously only heard whispering. She reminded me of my childhood friend.

My childhood friend and I met in our elementary school. Her voice was deep and scratchy. She highlighted her hair in crimson red and she picked up smoking at a very young age. Our classmates, especially the boys, liked telling stories about her. They laughed at her boobs, calling her a cow, and they asked her to join the pop dance club so she had a chance to show her “sexiness.” My childhood friend didn’t like studying, and we never shared the same homeroom class. Instead, we shared corridors and the public bathroom. We talked when we found each other lingering around the bathroom sink, reluctant to return to our separate classrooms.

She had a boyfriend, knew about sex, and owned a cell phone before middle school. When she talked on the phone in the corridor, she would look down from the pale school building and frown. I’d sometimes see her grabbing her phone, pushing it tight to her right ear, and withholding the urge to shout at someone on the other end. One time, my childhood friend and my other friends visited my family apartment. Without my parents home, it was just the six of us, boys and girls, blasting 5566 music on the TV screen and indulging ourselves with videos full of sleek-headed boys who sang with their eyes closed. I noticed my childhood friend quietly picking up her buzzing phone and leaving to talk on the outside stairs. We heard her shouting nonstop, and we couldn’t tell if the scratchiness of her voice was a new kind of scratchiness.

My childhood friend stopped going to school after that day. I learned she had an abortion. Our classmates spread rumors about her. I didn’t understand what rape meant at that time; I thought it was a rumor. I didn’t know what was real and what was not. Our classmates told me I was too naive, that because I was half from Taipei, I wasn’t able to understand what things were like in the countryside. They said not every family was like mine, and that her uncles were not so nice to her. While I learned new fancy languages like French and Spanish at a young age, she learned a language of emotions. She seemed to understand the complexity of expressing herself.

And it was then that I first understood that no matter how many languages we get to learn and become fluent in in our lives, it is the emotional language of others that really shapes the essence of translation. Translation, in a way, doesn’t only mean understanding the story from another language, but understanding each other better.

Translation is one of the most profound ways for us to understand trauma and violence from around the world. Through words, sentences, and literature, we get to explore how emotions take shape culturally. Translating trauma and violence is not just about deciphering pain but also about recreating an emotional language that gives the narrative its unique strength, the power of transformation across languages, and brings us all together as human beings.

Trauma and violence share a parallel existence. To me, trauma tastes like the drifting incense smoke that merges with tears, rolling with a slow, burning bitterness against my tongue and blossoming with the fragrance of memories. It is a language that is defined by smell and taste. It is a language that is whispered, not primarily meant to be spoken, but it shares an existence with our memories and defines who we are as people.

In the process of translating narratives swarmed by emotion, I often wonder how we navigate our word choices in translation and how we ensure that we convey the “right level” of meaning without further inciting harmful narratives. Should we avoid “excessive” violence? If violence and trauma coexist in the original narrative, doesn’t the violence help readers understand the actual impact of the trauma? What does it mean to bring the unspoken language of trauma to a wider audience?

Translating Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, for me, was a process of reconnecting with my childhood friend. It was through the process of recognizing myself as a woman, of understanding the preexisting violence and trauma that haunted both our worlds, and learning these new languages that I was able to revive the bond that was long lost. Translation is an attempt to feel what others feel, to build literary experiences that allow space for empathy and understanding. Translation helps us to process the shared universal language.

What does it mean to bring the unspoken language of trauma to a wider audience?

It is already complex to translate our own grief, let alone translate grief that is shared by others in many forms. What does it look like when we carry our grief while witnessing or reading agony descending on others? How do private narratives bond with the universal language? What does translating collective grief look like?

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Before I came to America, my cousin passed away prematurely after years of lasting health issues. Traditional funerals in my Taiwanese family are conducted in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Hakka. Sanskrit is the language of power, of transition, and is deemed to be the language of our ceremony, while Chinese and Hakka are languages of home and heritage that bond the living family members with the deceased. Among all the languages spoken at the occasion, it was the unspoken emotional language that truly defined our relationship to my cousin and brought memories in reminiscence of this loved one.

I remember wearing a long black robe at the funeral. Next to a winding incense forest, my cousin’s mother inserted a cigarette. She said that was what he used to enjoy. The smoke of the cigarette intertwined with the curvy white smoke drifting out from the incense, pricking my nose and welling many eyes with tears.

During the service, my family was told to follow the funeral director and recite the Sanskrit scripture with phonetic translation in Chinese. Without understanding the contents, we were able to read without letting out any emotions in public, believing the language was spoken as a process of bringing someone we love to a better place. An unknown language has the ability to erase the border between life and death. Through distance and unfamiliarity with the language, my family was able to process our grief.

When Mandarin Chinese or Hakka was spoken at the funeral, these languages brought all of us closer. We said what we wanted to say in our languages—even in silence—to bid farewell and to give our emotional language a place to reside, to have its identity. I watched my cousin’s mother whimper when they carried the coffin out toward cremation. Following the tradition, the marching began after my cousin’s mother raised a black cane above the coffin and tapped three times on the cover. It was her last gesture as his mother. The moment she raised the cane, I saw days of tears swollen together and piled on her eyelids, her near inability to raise the cane, her lips tightening together, refusing to release her language, and her crestfallen gaze that met mine. That gaze, my observation of her pain, was our shared language.

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For years, English has been my language of shelter. When I was young, I wrote my journals in a mix of French, Spanish, and English, documenting the weddings and funerals happening at home. Being born in a family where we revealed our emotions only very occasionally gave me the urge to build multiple language barriers. The fact that my handwriting was easy to read and that most of the people still understood English gave me the idea of building layers into my narratives.

I documented what I saw on the news: the memorial of the 921 earthquake in 1999 that left our apartment with a huge deep crack; the many floods from powerful typhoons that sunk our cities into a town of water; the political threat of China that brought the members of my family to start each of our own immigration plans; the 2014 Taipei metro attack that put almost all Taiwan citizens into deep fear and panic. Taiwan is such an isolated island in the global society, so it was through writing multilingually that I was able to identify emotions in my surroundings and deep within myself. Through multilingualism, I found a way to properly process and remember the meaning of collective grief and build a space for myself as a writer and translator.

What does translating collective grief look like?

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, I started translating Taiwnaese author Wu Ming-Yi’s short story “The Descent.” The story primarily focuses on the relationship between a father and daughter, who were closely connected with their memories but separated due to the onslaught of the pandemic. In response to the collective grief that took place globally, Wu Ming-Yi weaves together the metaphor of captured monk crabs with the quiet bonding and fading memories of a family that was torn apart by the virus with such elegance. Translating this story showed me one way beauty and elegance can have a place in a story of suffering and trauma.

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When translating violence and trauma, what are the ways to take care of ourselves while engaging with deep, turbulent emotions?

Before I started translating, I tried engaging myself not just with the author’s work, but also with the author’s intention. I asked myself, How do they want to give life to their work? By seeking out this understanding, I was able to translate and address the topic in a more objective way. And when I translate work with content that is triggering to me, I keep a list of things to do that allow me to temporarily detach from the work so that I can come back with a better mental state. When I was translating Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, I allowed myself a long walk toward Gantry Park in Queens to watch the full skyline of Manhattan, accompanied by light music in a language I don’t speak; I watched the sun and shadows playing in the park before closing my eyes to bring the best memories back through voice, smell, and sights. I might wear the perfume I wore during my road trip in Germany, listen to recordings of the waves back in Rio de Janeiro at New Year’s Eve, and watch the sun descending down the horizon right in front of me, reminding myself to enjoy that very present moment.

Why should we translate literature about violence and trauma? How do we render these emotions as a translator? I view the experience as an opportunity to engage with the unfamiliar that is bonded by emotions and translation. Being a translator is like being trusted with long-withheld secrets, and through my words in another language, I am able to transfer these memories and emotions so they can be shared by invested readers who seek to understand stories that need to be told from everywhere in the world.

Sometimes, I imagine trauma and violence as a forest of our own. There is darkness and fear upon approaching the place at certain moments, but deep inside, there is magic and strength that burst with elegance that comes from within us. During my childhood, I was taught to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in English. And to this day, the story stays with me as a reminder that there is always beauty in the darkness, and sometimes it is through the existence of darkness that we find power and strength to seek perpetual solace.

For me, literature that contains trauma is a treasure each author hides in their forests: They flourish with their own elegance and magic. And it is through reading about the history and culture, and deciphering the beauty in a diversity of literary forms, that I am able to build a solid bond through the emotions we have mutually weathered. The fact that we, as writers, translators, and readers, have the power to feel and live with these emotions, through perseverance and hope, gives me the courage to continue exploring the world through translation.