Spotlight On…Christopher Payne

Dr Christopher Payne, Lecturer in Chinese Studies

Your work, along with Olivia Milburn, in translating the novels of one of China’s best-selling novelists, Mai Jia, has brought his award-winning books to a whole new audience. How did you feel about taking on such a challenging project, with the weight of such responsibility? 

Our relationship with Mai Jia has been excellent and supportive; he’s been involved with the translations from the beginning. It was a great experience translating his works . When we first set out to do it, I don’t know if we were entirely aware of what was in store. Mai Jia was huge in China when we started, he’d won the Mao Dun literature award (akin to the Man Booker, say), had film and television adaptations of his work already on air, but his agent hadn’t identified a specific translator. Instead, the agent put out a call for samples, so Olivia and I put one together, submitted it and waited. Once our sample was accepted, we continued to translate the rest of the book, Decoded. The agent then shopped our sample at various book fairs while we continued with the full text. So we started without a publisher, simply translating it because we really enjoyed the work. Then we heard the news that Penguin had bought the rights to Decoded and Mai Jia’s second book, In the Dark. I think that was when we realised that we were working on something really important. Mai Jia’s novels don’t really fit into the common rubric of Chinese translated works, ie those about the country’s long history, the weight of communist history, etc. His works are related to this history, but they come at it from a different angle, and that’s what we enjoyed most about translating them. So I guess that’s where our responsibility lay: we had to bring this different Chinese voice to an English reading audience.. Needless to say, we wanted to do justice to the works, not only translate them, but bring them to life. I like to think that when The Telegraph named Decoded as one of the 20 best spy novels of all time that we succeeded, at least to some extent, in broadening the horizon of expectations for what a Chinese novel can be; that’s the role of the translator, our responsibility.    

The University of Manchester has more academics engaged in China and China-related studies than almost any other UK university. What is it about the University, and the city, that has helped our China-related projects to flourish? 

I think the University has been very active in fostering links with China. We’ve made efforts to connect with academic institutions there and to encourage collaborations across a range of disciplines. Of course, some of this has been about securing funding for very large endeavours, but the fact that there is this awareness that Chinese partners can be equal and beneficial partners has really helped the myriad relationships the University has to grow and expand. The city of Manchester, too, has a rich Chinese-British history. From the early immigrants that came at the turn of the last century, to the establishment of Chinatown in the 1960s, to the holdings at the John Ryland’s Library and the soon-to-be-launched Dr. Lee Kai Hung China Gallery in the Manchester Museum, there are so many levels of engagement with the Chinese-speaking world that the city and the University are ideally positioned to make the most of it. The launch of our research-oriented Manchester China Institute further demonstrates the importance the University puts on collaboration with China, locally, nationally, and internationally, so all in all, these are exciting times. It’s this awareness of what we have and what we can accomplish, I think, that has allowed for Manchester to become a flourishing centre for Chinese Studies across the board.    

What do you think is the place of literary translation in academia and do you plan to translate other authors in the future?

I think the place of literary translation in academia is vital. For many of our students, translation is the first means by which they engage with other languages; it’s the first way they see and learn about other societies and cultures. It would be ideal if everyone was multilingual, but that’s a hope and not reality (and machine translations just don’t cut it). Therefore, we need literary translation. We need these works in our library; we need our students to have access to them; we need to teach them in our classrooms. It’s also a form of public engagement, too. If our literary translations are out there for the general reading public, then we’re performing a service as academics, we’re giving people access to different worlds, cultures, and ways of thinking. That’s how we build relationships across linguistic barriers. To my mind, that’s a vital service we, as academics engaged in literary translation, can provide. Far too often, translation is given short shrift in academia. There are claims that it’s not ‘research’, it doesn’t merit inclusion in REF, etc. This is shortsighted.  When I translate a work, I can’t do it without research, not only research about the work itself, but about the culture, the history, the language, all of these things that go into making the literary work itself. I have to make sure my translation reflects the original, that it is filial to the original. Will I translate others in the future? Yes, definitely. For me, there are so many novels in Chinese that ought to be translated. What we have in English thus far is only a small glimpse of what Chinese language writers have written; there’s just so much more out there and I hope I can do my part to bring that to a wider audience.  

If you could invite anyone to dinner, living or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them?

I think I would invite a fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen. I never had the chance to meet him in person, only in word and song, but I grew up reading and listening to him. When I studied in Montreal, I frequented the places he did, and I like to think he taught me about love and relationships, the good and bad. So yeah, definitely, I’d invite him. As for what to ask, I’d ask him to make me a Red Needle.