Executive Overview
Literary translation is a notoriously fragile art, often dependent on a delicate chain of funding, institutional backing, editorial vision, and sheer serendipity. When any single link in this chain snaps, years of labor can vanish into administrative limbo.
Such was nearly the fate of To the East of the East, a sweeping, geographically and temporally expansive novel by acclaimed Taiwanese author Ping Lu, translated into English by award-winning writer and translator Jeremy Tiang. Commissioned roughly a decade ago by a Taiwanese literary agency and funded by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, the English manuscript completed its initial editing phase only to slip quietly through the cracks of the international publishing apparatus. For years, the project sat entirely dormant, its existence unknown to the broader Anglophone literary market, with neither publisher nor public platform.
That the book was rescued from obscurity is a testament to the quiet persistence of its translator. Last year, while checking in with the project’s original institutional funders, Tiang discovered the manuscript’s orphaned status. Taking matters into his own hands, he pitched the dormant work to World Editions, an independent publisher known for championing international literature. Recognizing its thematic resonance and literary ambition, World Editions swiftly brought the novel into its catalog, ensuring that a decade-old translation would finally see the light of day.
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This article explores the tumultuous journey of To the East of the East, examining the creative impulses that birthed the original Chinese text, the intricate linguistic hurdles overcome during translation, and the broader systemic challenges facing translated literature in the global marketplace. Through insights from both author and translator, we trace the anatomy of a rescued book—from the initial spark of inspiration in Taipei to its eventual home on international bookshelves.
Detailed Chronology: From Taipei to World Editions
The biography of To the East of the East reads less like a straightforward publication timeline and more like a narrative of near-misses, institutional memory loss, and ultimate literary resurrection.
Phase I: Inception and the Original Language
The creative origins of the novel lie in the contemplative mind of Ping Lu, one of Taiwan’s most decorated literary voices. Writing under her pen name, Lu conceived the project as an exploration into the profound disconnects that define human experience. The initial spark, as she describes it, was rooted in the countless forms of misrecognition and misreading that plague the world: the chasms between men and women, parents and children, husbands and wives.
Yet Lu’s canvas was far broader than domestic psychology. She expanded this thematic landscape to encompass macro-level divides—the friction between the ocean and the land, the trauma of being adrift versus scattering apart, the existential polarities of imprisonment and escape, and the rigid boundaries of nations juxtaposed against the human yearning for freedom. This vast imaginative landscape set the stage for a narrative that would ultimately roam fluidly across geographic and temporal coordinates, touching down in Taipei, Macau, and Beijing while bridging the contemporary era with the seventeenth century.
Phase II: The Initial Commission and Translation
Approximately ten years ago, the machinery of international literary exchange first cranked into motion. A Taiwanese agency, recognizing the global potential of Lu’s work, reached out to Jeremy Tiang to commission an English translation. Tiang, who had previously collaborated with the agency and held a deep respect for the region’s literature, readily agreed.
Over the subsequent year, Tiang immersed himself in the linguistic labyrinth of Lu’s text, navigating its historical shifts and regional variations before handing in his completed manuscript. The translation then underwent a rigorous editorial pass overseen by Anna Holmwood—a celebrated editor and highly accomplished literary translator in her own right. By all accounts, the manuscript emerged from this editorial stage polished, precise, and ready for the market.
Phase III: The Institutional Black Hole
What happened next is a familiar tragedy in the ecosystem of translated literature. Following the delivery of the edited manuscript, the project lost momentum. Institutional priorities shifted, personnel rotated out, and lines of communication frayed.
Tiang, caught up in his own proliferating portfolio of translation projects, novels, and plays, lost track of the manuscript. It was not until he proactively checked in with the translation’s original financial backer—the National Museum of Taiwan Literature—that the sobering reality emerged. No publisher had ever been secured. The book had drifted into administrative purgatory, becoming a ghost project sitting quietly on a digital hard drive, effectively erased from the pipeline of contemporary world literature.
Phase IV: The Rescue and Resurgence
Refusing to let a year of intensive labor vanish into the ether, Tiang took the initiative. Armed with the dormant manuscript, he cast about for a publisher whose editorial identity matched the book’s cosmopolitan scope. He sent the work to World Editions, an independent press with which he had previously cultivated a strong, trusting working relationship.
As Tiang had correctly suspected, the novel was an ideal fit for the press’s global literary mandate. Recognizing both the high quality of the translation and the undeniable weight of Ping Lu’s literary reputation, World Editions did not hesitate to offer the manuscript a permanent home. What began as a forgotten digital file was thus restored to the active publishing ecosystem, transforming a decade-long casualty of bureaucratic drift into an eagerly anticipated international release.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Navigating the Labyrinth of Translation
Translating To the East of the East was no routine assignment. The novel’s structural and linguistic complexity demanded an uncommon degree of dexterity from its translator. To fully appreciate the magnitude of Tiang’s achievement, one must examine the specific hurdles posed by the source text and the strategic choices made during the translation process.
Linguistic Geographies and Historical Frictions
A central challenge of the novel lies in its refusal to remain fixed in time or space. Roaming effortlessly between the modern metropolises of Taipei, Macau, and Beijing, the narrative must capture the distinct linguistic flavors of these urban centers, each of which employs its own variant and cadence of the Chinese language. Furthermore, the text oscillates between the contemporary world and the seventeenth century, requiring the translator to pivot smoothly between modern registers and archaic prose styles.
Rather than flattening these distinctions into a homogenous English voice, Tiang had to consciously modulate his registers, acting as a sonic director to ensure that the various characters retained their distinct cultural and temporal resonance.
The Riddle of the Heart Radical
Perhaps the most telling window into the intellectual rigor of the translation process is an episode involving a literary riddle embedded within the narrative.
In this scene, two characters engage in a flirtatious exchange revolving around a Chinese character puzzle. The riddle hinges on the mechanics of Chinese character formation:
- The characters for "burnt troops" ($u70acu4f0d$)
- When modified by the addition of the "heart radical" (u5fc3)
- Transform into the character for "fragile" (u60b4u60d4)
For readers intimately familiar with Chinese orthography, the visual and conceptual pun is immediately clear. However, for an Anglophone readership lacking knowledge of Chinese character structure, presenting this puzzle posed a formidable editorial dilemma.
Tiang faced a critical fork in the road: should he burden the narrative flow with an elaborate, footnoted explanation of character radicals, stroke orders, and orthographic evolution? Ultimately, he made the executive decision to bypass the literal mechanics in favor of narrative momentum. He realized that bogging the reader down in a linguistic lecture would detract from the scene’s true purpose.
In the narrative architecture of the book, the riddle is not a linguistics lesson; it is a subtle, vulnerable maneuver. The female character is deploying the riddle to hint at her own emotional fragility while flirting with her interlocutor. By prioritizing the emotional cadence—the evocative movement from a violent, fiery battlefield to something profoundly delicate—Tiang preserved the psychological truth of the scene without sacrificing readability.
The Autonomy of the Artistic Process
Interestingly, this complex translation was executed entirely without direct collaboration between the author and the translator. Ping Lu notes that Tiang worked with total independence, meaning she had no hand in guiding the English rendering of her prose.
For his part, Tiang found that this distance did not hinder his work. The fictional worlds constructed by Lu were so meticulously realized, so vividly populated and detailed, that he felt every necessary clue, atmospheric tone, and emotional cue was already permanently embedded on the page. The text stood on its own, robust enough to be mapped into a new language without requiring a compass from its creator.
Official Statements & Creative Visions
To understand the soul of To the East of the East, one must look to the metaphors and artistic inspirations invoked by its creators. When asked to define the book through an image, song, or metaphor, both author and translator offer profound conceptual windows into the novel’s architecture.
Ping Lu on the Infinite Mirror
For Ping Lu, the writing process is intimately bound up with auditory and visual repetition. While drafting her manuscripts, she frequently listens to Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s minimalist masterpiece, Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror).
"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."
— Ping Lu
This metaphor of infinite reflection illuminates the novel’s structural core. Just as Pärt’s composition utilizes simple, triadic tintinnabuli patterns to create an illusion of infinite, reverberating space, Lu’s narrative constructs a hall of mirrors. Characters, historical echoes, and geopolitical borders reflect, refract, and distort one another across time and space, inviting readers to question which reflection is the true original.
Jeremy Tiang on the Painted Zebra
Jeremy Tiang finds his metaphor not in classical music, but in the striking cover art chosen by World Editions—an image that serves as a brilliant proxy for the novel’s overarching themes.
"The image on the World Editions cover is a pretty great metaphor for the entire novel. 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."
— Jeremy Tiang
This motif of disguise, masquerade, and fundamental self-deception anchors the human drama within Lu’s sweeping historical canvas. In a world defined by borders, political upheavals, and shifting identities, every character wears a mask—sometimes painted on by society, and sometimes painted on by their own psychological defense mechanisms.
Future Outlook: The Resurgence of Taiwanese Literature in English
The rescue and impending publication of To the East of the East arrives at a pivotal moment for Taiwanese literature in translation. For decades, the global Anglophone market suffered from a profound blind spot regarding literature from Taiwan, often subsuming it under broader, mainland-centric Sinophone publishing categories or ignoring it entirely due to a lack of institutional infrastructure.
However, the landscape is shifting. Bolstered by the tireless advocacy of translators like Jeremy Tiang, institutional support from bodies like the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, and the growing willingness of independent presses like World Editions to take calculated risks, works of immense literary weight are finally breaching the language barrier.
Ping Lu’s stellar international track record—spanning novels like The Gaps (winner of the Taiwan National Literature Award), Heart Mandala (recipient of the Golden Tripod Award), Love and Revolution, When Will My Love Return, and The River Darkens, which have collectively been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Czech—demonstrates the global appetite for her work. Yet, breaking into the English-language market remains notoriously difficult for translated fiction, where translated titles historically constitute a tiny fraction of total annual publications.
The story of To the East of the East serves as both a cautionary tale about the fragility of the international literary pipeline and an inspiring blueprint for how persistence can overcome systemic neglect. As the book finally prepares to reach readers, it stands as proof that great literature, no matter how long it lingers in the shadows, possesses an uncanny resilience—waiting patiently behind its mirrors and painted stripes for the right moment to step out into the light.
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