The Interview: Jack Hargreaves, translator of Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

Fion: In your translator’s note, you mention the many different versions of this book that exist in Mandarin Chinese, as well as some passages that were written exclusively for the English translation. What was that collaboration like? How do you view your role as a translator-editor, or perhaps a translator-curator?  

Jack: It was a delight to be part of the collaborative effort to bring this work into English. My earliest involvement was the first conversation the agent and US editor, Patrizia van Daalen, and I had after we’d been introduced to each other, in which we passed suggestions back and forth for recent books from China that had caught our attention. Parcels was one we had both clocked. We chatted about it a little, then weeks later the book topped the yearly roundup of the most popular and highly rated books for 2023, on Douban Reads (China’s sort-of equivalent of Goodreads), and she asked me if I’d put together a sample for the publisher to consider. The conversation really just continued from there, throughout the process. I would complete a section and send it to her, sometimes with questions or comments, and she would respond and ask questions of her own. She might suggest moving a paragraph elsewhere, or I’d run it by her if a sentence felt like it could be majorly condensed or a repetitive passage could be omitted. It’s fairly standard that I signpost for editors any departures from the source text that feel, maybe, bold, but it’s rare that I consider those changes excessive, otherwise I wouldn’t make them. I’m not asking for permission with these comments, just pointing out a thought process and laying a paper trail. This, I suppose, is where my editorial role comes in, whereas the curatorial part of the work to me is more the deciding which books to translate and selling publishers on them—playing a part in shaping the Chinese-language-literature-in-English-translation ecosystem.  

But back to Parcels, and asking authors questions. This I usually do to double-check what exactly an author was intending by using a particular turn of phrase in a particular place, something like that. To clarify meaning, basically.  We sent some to Hu, this book’s author, a handful maybe. But generally, Patrizia and I were able to clear up any uncertainties about the effect or precise nuance of an expression by talking it out together, since she also reads Chinese, which obviously not every editor at an English-language publisher does. It was Patrizia who suggested to Hu that he add some extra paragraphs to the end of section one, for me to translate. There, in the Chinese, he explains he quit his job and moved to Beijing for personal reasons, and Patrizia felt, if Hu was comfortable doing so, that readers might appreciate him divulging more about those reasons. Hu was very conscious of what he wanted to include and keep out of the book about his personal life and relationships outside of work. The book was always intended as a work memoir. But he was happy to do it.  

A further layer (or two?) of collaboration that I found really enjoyable and productive involved the Finnish and Dutch translators, Rauno Sainio and Silvia Marijnissen. They were translating the book at the same time as me, in the hope of getting out versions in their respective languages before or around when the English was going to be published. Unfortunately, I can’t read either Finnish or Dutch, so the limit of my contribution was sending them sections as they were completed, for them to read through and compare with their own. But they were fantastic first readers and assured me they also found it a very useful activity.  

One really wonderful thing about this book is that it feels like a work of collaboration that started way back when Hu first posted those early sections online. His first collaborators being everyone who read them, everyone who commented, all the people who jointly created the enormous buzz that built around the individual essays and Hu himself; then the editors who approached him about fleshing out what he’d already written and putting down his remaining work experiences for a print publication, and so on. This English translation is just one extension of this long collaborative project that has branched in various directions.  

Fion: You also discuss navigating the balance between audiences who are more familiar with Beijing and its Mandarin Chinese, and audiences who are not. I love your assertion that “the language of real estate can be quite bombastic and ostentatious when it wants to be, so why shouldn’t these translations be, too?” To that point, there are several moments in the text that sound highly anglophone (the phrase “sniff at” makes an appearance) alongside others that remain in pinyin with a gloss (“erguotou”, for instance). These moments are also representative of voice and characterization. How did you end up striking that balance between “authentic and realistic” language, as you put it, and finding Hu’s voice in English?(On that note, there’s a gradual shift in Hu’s voice and language as he becomes more jaded across the course of the book. I was so impressed to see it working on the more microscopic level of individual sentences, too!) 

Jack: I’m glad that resonated with you as a fair justification for approaching the place names how I did. I know some readers have been disappointed they can’t easily look up the various locations Hu describes. But I couldn’t bear all the long strings of pinyin (the official phonetic spelling system in China) that would have allowed them to. I wanted the book to be easy to read, at the sentence level. Easy for who to read is, of course, the natural next question, given “erguotou” isn’t the most straightforward word to wrap your tongue around if you don’t speak Mandarin Chinese. But it can be parsed and, critically, is very readily searchable online. Plus, most everyone who does read Mandarin will recognise the word right away (I think?). And what’s more, there’s a gloss, like you pointed out, so readers don’t even need to look away from the page to know, at least vaguely, what “erguotou” is. 

While I’m on the topic, I was surprised when one reviewer complained about the lack of concessions in the translation for non-Chinese readers, because he’d had to look up what Singles Day and Double Twelve are (they’re the enormous, like inconceivably large, online sales and shopping events that happen every year). All the information about them that’s in the previous sentence is also in the book in some form or another, so I’m really not sure how big a gloss he needed to get what was going on. I suspect what he was hoping for was a different book.  

But to answer your question: my aim is for the whole translation to come across as authentic and realistic. By which I mean believable. As in, believable as something someone would write or say in the context of this kind of work, this kind of writing. And more specifically, something this narrator would say in such a context. That to me is Hu’s voice in English, regardless of the composite parts; though of course those parts also, ideally, help to make the voice believable. So, I’m basing a lot of his voice on the Chinese and how that feels to me (the effect it has) when I read it, and on trying to recreate that same feeling, or a close approximation of it, in English. But also sometimes I’m going with my intuition and, to me, it’s perfectly reasonable that someone who knows the word “erguotou” might say “sniff at”. We live in a very cosmopolitan world; Hu lives in a very cosmopolitan world, and he reads very widely. His tone might be casual, understated, unaffected, but you can occasionally spot the influence of other writers he’s read (many of them anglophone).