Carlos Rojas on Translating Yan Lianke

New Books in East Asian Studies

In this episode, Carlos Rojas shares with us his experience as a translator. He has translated several renowned authors in the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, and Ng Kim Chew, into English. Among the literary translations, Carlos has translated ten books written by Yan Lianke, including novels, short stories, novellas, and essay collections. The books include Lenin’s Kisses (2012), The Four Books (2015), Marrow (2016), The Explosion Chronicles: A Novel (2017), The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas (2017), The Day the Sun Died (2018), Three Brothers: Memories of My Family (2020), the most recent Hard Like Water (2021) and Discovering Fiction (2022), and the forthcoming Heart Sutra (2023).

Yan Lianke is one of the most famous and prolific authors in China. He is the winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize and a two-time finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He teaches at Renmin University in Beijing and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Czech, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian and Portuguese.

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on modern Chinese literature and culture, as well as gender, sexuality, and feminist studies.

Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

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