Executive Overview
Literary translation is a quiet architecture, a delicate bridge built across chasms of language, geography, and culture. Yet, as the turbulent journey of Taiwanese author Ping Lu’s acclaimed novel To the East of the East demonstrates, getting that bridge built is only half the battle; finding someone willing to walk across it can take a decade.
In a recent, revealing dialogue with its translator, Jeremy Tiang, published by Words Without Borders, the intricate backstory of the novel’s English edition has come to light. The book—a sprawling, geographically fluid narrative traversing Taipei, Macau, and Beijing across both the modern day and the seventeenth century—spent nearly ten years languishing in bureaucratic limbo. Despite being translated a decade ago under the auspices of a Taiwanese literary fund, the manuscript nearly faded into permanent obscurity after losing its initial publisher momentum.
This article explores the anatomy of that literary rescue mission. By examining the creative genesis of the novel in Ping Lu’s mind, the labyrinthine technical hurdles overcome by Tiang during the translation process, and the serendipitous intervention that finally landed the book at World Editions, we uncover the fragile ecosystem of international publishing. Through the lenses of its author and translator, To the East of the East emerges not merely as a translated text, but as a complex hall of mirrors reflecting identity, misrecognition, and the deceptive nature of human connection.
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Detailed Chronology: From Conception to Resurrection
The biography of To the East of the East is a testament to the unpredictable, often precarious life cycle of international literature. The timeline of its creation, translation, and nearly deferred publication offers a fascinating case study in modern literary logistics.
Phase 1: The Spark of Inspiration
The genesis of the novel lay in Ping Lu’s fascination with human alienation. Long before a single sentence was drafted in Chinese, the conceptual "germ" of the book was rooted in the countless ways human beings misunderstand one another. According to the author, these misrecognitions manifest everywhere: between men and women, parents and children, husbands and wives.
However, Ping Lu expanded this thematic scope far beyond domestic friction. She mapped human estrangement onto larger geopolitical and environmental landscapes: the tension between the ocean and the land, the conditions of being adrift versus scattering apart, the psychological binary of imprisonment and escape, and the rigid violence of borders contrasted with the abstract yearning for freedom. This vast conceptual landscape set the stage for a narrative that would refuse to stay put in any single era or physical space.
Phase 2: The Initial Translation (Circa 2014–2015)
Nearly ten years prior to its eventual rescue, a Taiwanese agency reached out to acclaimed translator Jeremy Tiang with a proposition to render To the East of the East into English. Having collaborated with the agency previously and drawn to the ambition of the source material, Tiang accepted the assignment.
Over the course of the following year, Tiang completed the primary translation. He subsequently submitted the draft to Anna Holmwood—a celebrated translator and editor in her own right—who provided a rigorous and insightful editorial pass. With the manuscript polished, the translation phase concluded, and the text was handed over to its funder, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, to secure an English-language publisher.
Phase 3: The Dormant Decade
Then, silence. For reasons common in the under-funded landscape of international publishing, the project fell through the cracks. No Western publishing house was secured, and the manuscript quietly slipped into a state of dormancy. Tiang, immersed in his own prolific career writing plays, novels, and translating other major works (such as Zou Jingzhi’s International Booker-longlisted Ninth Building), naturally lost track of the book.
Phase 4: The Resurgence and Publication
The turning point arrived last year. While checking in with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, Tiang inquired about the status of the long-forgotten English manuscript. To his surprise, he learned that the project remained completely homeless.
Refusing to let a year of labor and a brilliant work of literature vanish, Tiang asked for permission to spearhead a search for a publisher himself. He immediately thought of World Editions, a publishing house with which he maintained a strong professional relationship and a history of mutual artistic alignment. Suspecting that the culturally rich, boundary-pushing narrative would be "right up their alley," Tiang sent them the manuscript. His intuition was correct: World Editions embraced the project enthusiastically, finally setting the stage for the book’s long-overdue English-language debut.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Mechanics of a Literary Masterpiece
Bringing a work like To the East of the East across the linguistic divide required navigating extraordinary technical and stylistic hurdles.
Linguistic Geography and Temporal Shifting
One of the primary challenges for Tiang was the novel’s shifting geography and chronology. The book roams fluidly between Taipei, Macau, and Beijing. In the Sinophone world, each of these regions utilizes a distinct variant of Chinese, carrying unique cultural connotations, vernacular rhythms, and historical weight. Furthermore, the narrative leaps back and forth between the present day and the seventeenth century.
To capture these vast shifts in the English translation, Tiang had to masterfully manipulate linguistic registers. The voices of contemporary urbanites in Taipei required a vastly different stylistic cadence than characters navigating the historical intrigues of seventeenth-century Macau or Beijing.
The Puzzle of Untranslatable Wordplay
Perhaps the most telling technical challenge faced by the translator involved a subtle, highly localized literary device. In one scene, two characters engage in a flirtatious exchange revolving around a Chinese character riddle.
The riddle hinges on the morphological formation of Chinese characters: adding a "heart" radical ($mathbfheartsuit$) to the characters for "burnt troops" ($mathbftextburnt troops$) yields the character for "fragile" ($mathbftextfragile$).
Faced with this graphic, character-based puzzle, Tiang had to weigh the options for an English-reading audience lacking knowledge of Chinese characters. An extensive explanatory footnote or an awkward in-text breakdown of Chinese radicals would instantly derail the narrative momentum. Tiang made the bold, aesthetically sound decision not to explain the mechanics of the character formation.
As Tiang noted, over-explaining the linguistics would bog the reader down in dry etymological trivia. More importantly, it would miss the emotional forest for the trees: the purpose of the riddle in the narrative is for the character to subtly hint at her own fragility to the man she is addressing. The exact structural mechanics of the Chinese characters matter far less than the visceral imagery they evoke—a deliberate transition from a violent, raging battlefield to something infinitely more delicate and vulnerable.
The Author-Translator Dynamic
Interestingly, this massive translation effort occurred entirely without direct communication between the author and the translator. Ping Lu noted that she remained completely uninvolved in the translation process, leaving Tiang to work independently.
Rather than presenting an obstacle, this distance underscored the structural integrity of the original text. Tiang observed that the worlds of the novel were so fully, vividly, and meticulously realized on the page that he felt he required no outside clarification. Everything he needed to build the English equivalent was already embedded within Ping Lu’s prose.
Official Statements & Metaphorical Frameworks
To fully comprehend To the East of the East, one must look at how both creator and translator conceptualize its artistic soul through metaphor, imagery, and music.
Mirrors Within Mirrors: Ping Lu’s Musical Metaphor
When discussing her creative process, Ping Lu reveals an auditory and visual inspiration that dictates the structure of her writing. She frequently listens to Arvo Pärt’s minimalist masterpiece Spiegel im Spiegel ("Mirror in the Mirror") while composing.
"When I’m writing, I often listen to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, because I love its central image—and that’s exactly what I hoped to convey in To the East of the East, one mirror after another arranged at different angles, reflecting each other. Mirrors within mirrors."
This metaphor illuminates the novel’s architecture. The book is not a linear sequence of events, but a reflective chamber where historical eras, geographical locations, and human psychologies refract one another indefinitely.
The Deceptive Zebra: Jeremy Tiang’s Visual Metaphor
In a striking coincidence, the official cover art chosen by World Editions provides an uncanny visual echo of the novel’s central thematic undercurrents.
"The image on the World Editions cover is a pretty great metaphor for the entire novel," Tiang explains. "It appears to be a zebra, but on closer examination, turns out to be a white horse with stripes painted on. This deceptive creature is only briefly mentioned once in the book, but it has a potent symbolic connection to the wider themes of the narrative, in which no one is quite who they pretend to be, even to themselves."
This painted horse encapsulates the psychological landscape of Ping Lu’s characters: identities are constructed, surfaces are painted over realities, and authenticity is constantly negotiated against performance.
Future Outlook: The Legacy of a Rescued Text
The eventual publication of To the East of the East via World Editions represents a triumph not only for its author and translator, but for the broader infrastructure of international literature exchange. It highlights the systemic vulnerabilities that allow major works to slip through the cracks of institutional funding programs, while simultaneously proving the power of grassroots persistence—embodied by a translator taking the initiative to find his orphaned text a deserving home.
Ping Lu enters this next chapter of the book’s global life with an already formidable international reputation. As a recipient of Taiwan’s National Award for the Arts, the Taiwan National Literature Award (for The Gaps / 婠婠), the Golden Tripod Award (for Heart Mandala / 香斯拉的微笑), and the Wu San-lien Award, her literary footprint in the Sinophone world is deep and enduring. Her extensive bibliography—including Love and Revolution, When Will My Love Return (愛別離苦), and The River Darkens (水影)—has previously crossed language barriers into French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Czech.
Similarly, Jeremy Tiang continues to cement his status as one of the most vital conduits between Chinese-language literature and the Anglophone world. Having translated over thirty books, secured a Singapore Literature Prize for his original novel State of Emergency, and earned an International Booker Prize longlist nomination for his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building, Tiang’s dedication to championing complex marginalized texts is proven.
As To the East of the East finally reaches English-speaking readers, it serves as a timely reminder of the literature that remains hidden in institutional filing cabinets around the globe. It demonstrates that with skilled translation, editorial care, and relentless advocacy, even the most dormant manuscripts can find their light, holding up their multifaceted mirrors to a world eager to understand its own complex reflections.
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