The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded Pelham resident YZ Chin a grant of $20,000 on Jan. 14 to support her work translating “This Timeworn Land” by Lu Zi Shu.
She is a translator of literature written in the Mahua language. Some of her translations include works by Lu Zi Shu and King Ban Hui. Chin is also the author of two novels, “Edge Case” and “Though I Get Home.” “Edge Case” was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice as well as an NPR Books We Love selection in 2021.
Since Chin is both a translator and a writer, she said she’s found it interesting to learn how these artistic forms inform and influence each other. “I just want to be part of this human conversation that has been going on a long, long time that’s in the form of literature,” Chin said. “Writing is a way of participating in this conversation, and translating is another, where I represent a work of art and introduce another way of seeing it into the conversation.”
Childhood struggles made stories a big draw for her. “I was often bullied when I was younger, so books became an escape for me,” she said. In addition, her upbringing in Taiping, Malaysia, allowed Chin to appreciate and love literature.
She moved to Pelham from Long Island in 2022. “I was drawn to Pelham because of its open space with lots of trees,” she said.
In college at Northwestern University, Chin received her first grant to translate a short story collection by King Ban Hui, “which I had no success with because I had no idea what I was doing,” she said. “Now I am translating his novel for a major publisher as well as many of my other literary heroes, writers I first loved and read when I was a teenager.”
Currently, Chin is working on “This Timeworn Land,” the translation project for which she won the NEA grant. “I am only about twenty percent done with this project,” she said. “So far, it is a very compelling emotional piece with a large cast of characters, which is definitely one of the challenges of translating this work. It is also set near where I grew up in Taiping, so it is fun for me to translate.”
Chin said that she is able to preserve the nuances of a work of literature and present it to an English speaking audience by “capturing the vibes and the effects versus trying to translate down to the nitty-gritties.” For example, she would consider changing an original joke into something that works in English. “The point is to recreate the effect, which is to make the reader laugh.”
The translations and her own writing have deep personal meaning, but she hopes that readers will be compelled by her messy yet vulnerable storytelling: “I think my journey has reinforced time and again to me that purity is an illusion and that hybridity helps us approach our lives in healthier, more meaningful ways.”
