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Title |
Ghost Narrative in Queer Translation: A Worlding Attempt |
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Author |
Lee, Ming-Che |
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Assistant Professor, Department of Applied Foreign Languages, National Taipei University of Business |
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Abstract |
Taiwanese novelist Kevin Chen's (1976-) Ghost Town (2019) ambitiously explores contested issues such as trauma, homophobia, violence, desire, and identity reconstruction, wryly portraying the scarred history of White-Terror Taiwan (1949-1992) through ghost narratives. Translated into thirteen languages, it has garnered critical recognition and commercial success beyond the Sinosphere. This article first examines the book's worlding agency — the mechanism that has facilitated its circulation and reception across international book markets—and identifies the key factors that account for this. Second, it addresses two core questions: Why is Ghost Town able to capture worldwide attention despite culture-bound barriers and discursive specificity? What role does the novel's English translator play in reframing the original text through a queer lens? To answer these questions, I draw on David Damrosch's theory of world literature, Marc Démont's framework of queer translation, and Emmerich's concept of translingual editing. I analyze selected excerpts from Darryl Sterk's rendering of ghostspeak to show how his interventional adaptation has reconfigured the queer-crafted original in ways that might expand or confine its interpretive liminality. In sum, this study elucidates the interrelated dynamics of the novel's worlding agency and Sterk's active intervention, which coordinately shape the book as a work of world literature and extend scholarship on Queer Taiwan in literary translation. |
