Translating Qiu Miaojin: Challenges and Historicity

I will discuss the challenges of translating Qiu Miaojin’s last novel, Testament from Montmartre.  Commonly called the “Taiwanese Mishima,” Qiu produced a body of works before her suicide in 1996 that mark her as one of the premier Sinophone modernists of our era.  As such, her most mature work requires of readers a reasonable fluency in cultural reference-points for late 1990’s Taiwan and Europe, a fluency that makes the task of the translator even more complex.  How to situate the novel historically?  How to translate its experimental style and powerful affect?  How, in translation, to incorporate stylistic and structural references from Woolf to Mishima to Genet and beyond?