Executive Overview
Literary translation is often romanticized as a solitary bridge built across linguistic divides, but the reality is frequently far more bureaucratic, circuitous, and fragile. Such is the remarkable resurrection history of To the East of the East, an acclaimed novel by celebrated Taiwanese author Ping Lu, rendered into English by award-winning translator and writer Jeremy Tiang. Nearly a decade after its translation was initially commissioned, completed, and quietly shelved by industry dormancy, the English-language edition of the novel has finally found a permanent home with World Editions.
This deep dive explores the genesis of Ping Lu’s sweeping historical and contemporary narrative, the intricate linguistic and mechanical hurdles faced by Tiang during the translation process, and the systemic vulnerabilities within international literary exchange that nearly left this masterwork unpublished in the Anglophone world. Through exclusive commentary from both author and translator, this article illuminates how a text that navigates centuries, geographies, and human misrecognition was rescued from oblivion to finally meet its global readership.
Detailed Chronology: From Original Conception to Resurrected Manuscript
The timeline of To the East of the East reads like a testament to persistence in the literary arts. The novel’s trajectory spans decades of conceptualization, an initial translation phase in the mid-2010s, a near-decade-long hiatus, and its ultimate reclamation.
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Phase 1: The Spark and the Source
The germ of To the East of the East originated in the observant mind of Ping Lu, one of Taiwan’s most decorated contemporary literary figures. Reflecting on the thematic core of the novel, Lu notes that the initial inspiration arose from a profound meditation on the prevalence of misrecognition and misreading in human existence.
"The initial spark of inspiration behind To the East of the East was the thought of how many misrecognitions and misreadings exist in the world: between men and women, parents and children, husbands and wives, but also between the ocean and land, being adrift and scattering apart, imprisonment and escape, borders and freedom . . . A rich and varied imaginative landscape," Lu explains.
This thematic tapestry naturally demanded a canvas that could stretch across vast geographical and temporal coordinates. The narrative roams effortlessly between contemporary hubs like Taipei, Macau, and Beijing—each utilizing its own distinct variant and register of Chinese—while simultaneously slipping backward and forward to the seventeenth century.
Phase 2: The Initial Translation and the Silent Abyss
Approximately ten years ago, the journey toward an English edition began when a Taiwanese literary agency approached Jeremy Tiang. Having previously collaborated with the agency and recognizing the caliber of Lu’s work, Tiang readily accepted the commission. Over the course of the following year, he completed the English manuscript.
Upon submission, the translation underwent rigorous refinement, receiving a polished edit from Anna Holmwood—a celebrated translator and editor in her own right. However, following this editorial phase, the project encountered a silent institutional bottleneck. Tiang lost track of the book’s administrative progress. It was not until he proactively checked in with the translation’s original funder, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, that the sobering reality came to light: no international publisher had ever been secured, and the project had languished in a state of indefinite dormancy.
Phase 3: The Resurrection at World Editions
Refusing to let a year of meticulous labor and a vital piece of Taiwanese literature fade into obscurity, Tiang took matters into his own hands. He requested permission to spearhead the hunt for a publisher and submitted the manuscript to World Editions, a publishing house with which he shared a pre-existing, trusting professional relationship. Recognizing the novel’s global thematic resonance and alignment with their literary list, World Editions immediately grasped its potential, rescuing the manuscript from the archives and setting the stage for its publication.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Navigating Linguistic and Cultural Chasms
Translating a text as structurally and temporally complex as To the East of the East presents a masterclass in literary localization. The novel’s movement across disparate geopolitical zones and centuries required Jeremy Tiang to operate not merely as a linguistic conduit, but as a cultural archaeologist.
The Challenge of Polyphonic Registers
Because the novel moves fluidly between modern Taipei, Macau, and Beijing—as well as casting its gaze back to the 1600s—Tiang had to master a delicate balancing act of tonal shifts. Each setting carries its own sociolects, political histories, and idiomatic markers. Capturing these distinct voices in English without collapsing them into a homogenized monoculture required an acute sensitivity to narrative register.
The Riddle of the Heart Radical
Perhaps the most telling window into the micro-decisions of literary translation involves a specific scene where two characters discuss a cryptic word game. In the original Chinese text, the riddle hinges on orthographic morphology: adding a heart radical (心) to the characters for "burnt troops" (焮兵) yields the character for "fragile" (惙慄).
For a translator working into English, this poses a classic dilemma: how to render a visual, ideographic pun intelligible to an audience largely unfamiliar with Chinese character structures without alienating them through dry linguistic exposition. Tiang’s editorial decision offers a profound lesson in narrative prioritization:
"I decided that the better choice would be not to explain it, because we risked getting bogged down in an overly intricate discussion about how Chinese characters are formed, whereas the purpose of the riddle in the narrative is for the character to not-so-subtly allude to her own fragility as a way of flirting with the man she’s asking the riddle to. The exact mechanics of the riddle are less important than the images it evokes—a movement from violent, fiery battle to something much more delicate."
This choice underscores a core tenet of advanced literary translation: the emotional and atmospheric truth of a scene must consistently supersede mechanical literalism.
The Anatomy of an Independent Process
Interestingly, the collaborative dynamic between author and translator was entirely non-interventionist. Ping Lu operated with complete trust, remaining entirely uninvolved during the translation phase. For his part, Tiang found that the internal consistency of the source text rendered direct consultation unnecessary. The worlds constructed within the pages were so meticulously fleshed out that, as Tiang notes, "everything I needed was right there on the page."
Official Statements and Artistic Metaphors
To fully grasp the architecture of To the East of the East, one must examine the artistic metaphors employed by its creators to describe the work. Both author and translator rely on striking visual and auditory imagery to encapsulate the novel’s soul.
The Sonic and Visual Mirrors of Ping Lu
For Ping Lu, the creative act is deeply intertwined with musical minimalism. When writing, she frequently listens to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror). The structural philosophy of the piece mirrors her literary ambitions:
"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 mise-en-abyme structure explains why the novel’s themes of misrecognition feel so pervasive; every character, setting, and historical epoch serves as a refracting surface reflecting distorted, partial truths of the others.
The Deceptive Zebra of Jeremy Tiang
Jeremy Tiang finds the ultimate metaphor for the novel in the very artwork chosen for the World Editions cover—an image that plays brilliantly with perception.
"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 beast encapsulates the psychological undercurrents of To the East of the East: masquerade, identity, performance, and the unsettling realization that surfaces rarely match internal realities.
Future Outlook: The Global Trajectory of Taiwanese Literature
The arduous path of To the East of the East serves as both a cautionary tale and an inspirational model for contemporary world literature. It highlights systemic vulnerabilities within the current global publishing ecosystem—specifically, the high attrition rate of completed translations that fail to secure commercial homes due to a lack of institutional pipelines linking regional funding bodies with Western publishing houses.
However, its eventual triumph under World Editions signals a growing appetite for sophisticated, cross-cultural literature that refuses to flatten historical and geographical complexities for Western palates.
About the Creators
- Ping Lu is the pen name of distinguished Taiwanese writer Lu Ping. A titan of contemporary literature, she has been honored with Taiwan’s National Award for the Arts, the Taiwan National Literature Award for The Gaps (尋路), the Golden Tripod Award for Heart Mandala (摯愛鮮師), and the prestigious Wu San-lien Award. Her expansive bibliography—including novels and short story collections such as Love and Revolution, When Will My Love Return (當妳猶豫的時候), and The River Darkens (黑水) has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Czech, and numerous other languages, cementing her status as a vital voice on the global stage.
- Jeremy Tiang is an exceptionally versatile novelist, playwright, and literary translator who has successfully translated over thirty books from Chinese. His literary acclaim is vast: his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize; his novel State of Emergency captured the Singapore Literature Prize; and his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was similarly shortlisted for the accolade.
As To the East of the East finally reaches English-language readers, it does so not as a fragile, painted imitation, but as a brilliant, multifaceted mirror reflecting the intricate depths of human misrecognition across time and space.
Copyright © 2026 by Words Without Borders. All rights reserved.
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