Executive Overview
In the ecosystem of contemporary international literature, the journey of a book from its genesis in a source language to its eventual arrival on English-language bookshelves is often fraught with invisible perils. For every title that transitions seamlessly across cultural boundaries, scores of others quietly founder in administrative limbo, lost to shifting publishing priorities, institutional oversight, or simple misfortune.
Such was nearly the fate of To the East of the East, a sprawling, structurally ambitious novel by celebrated Taiwanese writer Ping Lu, translated into English by the acclaimed translator, playwright, and novelist Jeremy Tiang. Commissioned nearly a decade ago by a Taiwanese literary agency and brought through a rigorous initial editorial phase, the English manuscript slipped between the cracks of the global publishing apparatus. It spent years languishing in institutional dormancy, its existence known only to its translator and its original funding body.
This article details the extraordinary resurrection of To the East of the East. Through exclusive insights shared by both author and translator, we explore the thematic architecture of the novel—a narrative web stretching from contemporary Taipei, Macau, and Beijing back to the seventeenth century—and unpack the labyrinthine challenges of cross-cultural translation. From the linguistic gymnastics of rendering historical riddles into English to the structural metaphors of mirrors and painted horses, this is the story of how an orphaned manuscript found its rightful home at World Editions, proving that exceptional literature, much like the characters that populate its pages, can transcend borders, time, and institutional neglect.
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Detailed Chronology: From Original Conception to Resuscitation
The trajectory of To the East of the East reads like a geopolitical and administrative odyssey, illustrating the fragile pathways through which world literature must travel to reach global audiences.
1. The Initial Spark and Original Composition
The genesis of the novel lay in Ping Lu’s meditation on the fundamental disconnects that govern human experience. Writing under her pen name, the decorated Taiwanese author conceived of the book as an exploration of the profound misrecognitions and misreadings that ripple through the world. For Ping Lu, these gaps in understanding exist not only in interpersonal relationships—between men and women, parents and children, husbands and wives—but also manifest on a grander, geographical and existential scale: the tensions between ocean and land, the states of being adrift versus scattering apart, the dichotomy of imprisonment and escape, and the eternal friction between borders and freedom.
To capture this rich and varied imaginative landscape, Ping Lu deployed a narrative technique akin to musical composition. Drawing inspiration from Arvo Pärt’s minimalist masterpiece Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), she structured the novel around a central conceit: multiple mirrors arranged at varying angles, reflecting one another in an infinite regress of perception and identity.
2. The Translation Commission and Early Editorial Phase
Roughly ten years ago, the life of the manuscript took a decisive turn when a Taiwanese literary agency contacted Jeremy Tiang, commissioning him to render Ping Lu’s intricate Chinese text into English. Tiang, who had previously collaborated with the agency and possessed a strong reputation for handling complex Chinese-language texts, accepted the assignment.
Over the course of the following year, Tiang labored over the translation, navigating the novel’s vast temporal and spatial shifts. Upon completion, the manuscript underwent a thorough editing process guided by Anna Holmwood—a celebrated editor and highly accomplished literary translator in her own right. With a polished translation in hand, the project appeared poised for international publication.
3. The Lost Years and Institutional Dormancy
Despite a strong foundational translation and expert editorial oversight, the momentum behind To the East of the East ground to a halt. As is frequently the case with translated literature lacking an immediate Western publishing partner, the project drifted out of the public eye. Tiang himself lost track of the manuscript’s whereabouts as years passed without updates from the commissioning agencies.
The turning point arrived approximately a year prior to the book’s rescue, when Tiang proactively checked in with the translation’s original funder, the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. To his astonishment, he learned that despite the completed manuscript and professional edits, no commercial publisher had ever been secured. The project was officially dormant, consigned to the bureaucratic archives.
4. The Resurrection at World Editions
Refusing to let a decade of labor and a brilliant piece of literature vanish into obscurity, Tiang took matters into his own hands. Armed with the manuscript, he approached World Editions—an independent publishing house with whom he shared a pre-existing, positive professional relationship.
Sensing that the ambitious, border-crossing narrative was an ideal fit for World Editions’ catalogue of international fiction, the publisher eagerly agreed to give the book a home. Through proactive advocacy by its translator, To the East of the East was pulled back from the precipice of oblivion, setting the stage for its long-delayed global release.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Art and Mechanics of Translation
Translating To the East of the East presented a unique constellation of linguistic, historical, and stylistic hurdles. The novel’s refusal to remain tethered to a single geography or era meant that the English translation had to operate on multiple stylistic levels simultaneously.
Navigating Linguistic Registers and Historical Epochs
The novel roams fluidly between three distinct urban centers—Taipei, Macau, and Beijing—each of which utilizes a distinct variant and flavor of the Chinese language. Compounding this regional complexity is the novel’s temporal agility, leaping back and forth between the present day and the seventeenth century.
For Jeremy Tiang, this required a delicate balancing act of shifting registers to capture the diverse, polyphonic voices of the original text. Unlike works with a singular, uniform narrative voice, Tiang had to ensure that the historical sections retained their archaic resonance while the contemporary segments felt immediate and visceral, all without alienating the English-speaking reader.
Case Study: The Untranslatable Riddle
One of the most revealing moments in the translation process involved a seemingly minor interaction that carried immense character-driven subtext. In this scene, two characters discuss a traditional Chinese riddle.
The mechanics of the riddle in the source text hinge on Chinese orthography:
- The characters for "burnt troops" ($text燒兵$) are modified by adding the heart radical ($text心$ or $text⺗$).
- When the heart radical is added to "burnt troops," it yields the character for "fragile" ($text怯懦$ or related ideographic formations).
Faced with the challenge of making this linguistic puzzle legible to a readership entirely unfamiliar with the formation of Chinese characters, Tiang weighed his options. A heavy-footed explanatory footnote or an extended textual explanation threatened to bog the narrative down in an overly intricate academic discourse on Chinese character etymology.
Ultimately, Tiang made the conscious editorial decision not to explain the literal mechanics of the riddle to the reader. His rationale was rooted in narrative priority: the precise structural formation of the ideograms was secondary to the scene’s emotional function. Within the narrative, the riddle serves as a thinly veiled maneuver by a female character to signal her own vulnerability and fragility as a form of flirtation with her male interlocutor. By preserving the emotional transition—moving from the violent, fiery imagery of battle to something infinitely more delicate—Tiang maintained the scene’s dramatic integrity without sacrificing narrative pacing.
The Autonomy of Creation
Interestingly, the translation process was defined by a strict division of labor. Ping Lu remained entirely uninvolved in the translation phase, allowing Tiang to work independently. Rather than viewing this distance as an obstacle, Tiang noted that the worlds constructed within the novel were so thoroughly and vividly realized that every contextual cue and atmospheric detail required for the translation was already present on the page.
Official Statements & Metaphorical Frameworks
To fully grasp the psychological landscape of To the East of the East, one must look to the metaphors and artistic touchstones invoked by its creator and its translator.
The Author’s Perspective: Mirrors Within Mirrors
Reflecting on her creative process, Ping Lu revealed the auditory and visual anchors that sustained her during the writing of the novel:
"When I’m writing, I often listen to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), 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 architectural metaphor explains the recursive structure of the book, where characters, histories, and geographies refract one another, creating an endless hall of mirrors that challenges the reader’s grip on objective reality.
The Translator’s Perspective: The Painted Horse
Jeremy Tiang pointed to the striking cover art chosen by World Editions as the ultimate visual metaphor for the novel’s thematic core:
"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."
This motif of imposture, disguise, and hidden identity runs deep through Ping Lu’s oeuvre, highlighting the ways individuals mask their true natures against the backdrop of historical displacement.
Future Outlook
The publication of To the East of the East by World Editions marks a triumph not only for its author and translator, but for the broader community of international literature advocates. It serves as a stark reminder of the structural vulnerabilities facing translated works, where brilliant manuscripts can languish for a decade simply due to a lack of institutional bridging.
With the book finally finding a permanent English-language home, literary critics anticipate renewed global attention for Ping Lu’s extensive body of work. Already recognized in Taiwan with the prestigious National Award for the Arts, the National Literature Award (for The Gaps), the Golden Tripod Award (for Heart Mandala), and the Wu San-lien Award, Ping Lu’s translation pedigree is formidable. Her previous works—including Love and Revolution, When Will My Love Return, and The River Darkens—have broken linguistic barriers across French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Czech markets.
Similarly, Jeremy Tiang continues to cement his status as a titan of literary translation and contemporary fiction. Fresh off a longlist placement for the International Booker Prize with his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building, and decorated with the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency, Tiang’s tireless advocacy for orphaned manuscripts demonstrates the profound impact that dedicated translators can have on the global literary canon.
As To the East of the East finally reaches English-speaking readers, it opens a vital portal into the complex historical entanglements of East Asia, proving that stories buried in the archives of institutional memory can, with persistence and artistry, step out from behind the mirror and into the light.
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