Bringing Jin Yong to ordinary English readers started with her urge to explore the world

The West is increasingly drawn to the episodic storytelling of television — a form that has a lot in common with the chapter-by-chapter structure of Jin Yong's novels.

Legends of the Condor Heroes began its run in Ming Pao 60 years ago, and this novel — a sensation across Asia — still has no official English edition. Mai Jia, the author of Decoded, once pointed out that the problem lies with the wider environment: Chinese, written in characters, and English belong to different language families, so translation is hard to begin with; and in the middle of the last century came decades of isolation from the outside world, which left a missing generation of sinologists and a broken chain of translators. Both make it hard for Chinese literature to travel abroad.

Anna Holmwood, a 32-year-old British translator who goes by Hao Yuqing in Chinese, has translated A Hero Born, the first of the four volumes into which Legends of the Condor Heroes has been split for publication. The book comes out in February. She has studied Chinese for ten years, spent several years in Taiwan, and translated a number of Chinese novels before, among them Under the Hawthorn Tree.

Holmwood was born in Edinburgh in 1985 to a British father and a Swedish mother, so Swedish became her second language without any effort. She also studied French and Spanish at school as a child, and had always been interested in learning foreign languages.

On a chance trip to China she felt it was a shame that she couldn't read Chinese, so once she got home she decided to learn it.

"Learning a foreign language opens up your perspective," Holmwood said. "You come up with a lot of new views. You find a language far removed from your own culture, you come into contact with that culture, and then you see what you learned as a child in a new light. It's a precious experience." Learning a foreign language doesn't have to mean learning it perfectly, she added — fretting over pronunciation, for instance, gets you nowhere.

Holmwood started studying Chinese at Oxford in 2006. Two years later the idea of translating full-time took hold. She loved reading novels, she said, she loved writing, and she was keen on learning languages; that these three interests could come together in a single job was itself a pleasure.

Her Chinese was still fairly ordinary then, so she kept studying while working out how translation actually gets done — how to find sample-translation jobs, and how to go about "literary translation" more professionally. It was an "exciting" stretch: picking up scattered freelance jobs, she felt that with every sentence she translated she was both learning and "playing." She picked up something new each time, so she kept improving, and kept finding her own weak spots.

Over the seven or eight years of work that followed, she found that the hardest part of translating Chinese into English had most to do with her command of English. "When I write my own things, I have my own ideas and habits," she said. "But translating someone else's Chinese work challenges my understanding of English and my habits in it."

That challenge is also why Holmwood has stayed with the work. "If I felt there wasn't much challenge or room to learn, I probably wouldn't do this kind of work," she said. "Part of why I like it is that it demands I keep improving."

Between 2012 and 2015, one Holmwood translation after another came out: the novels Under the Hawthorn Tree and A Perfect Crime, the short stories Killing the Melon and Monsters Play Volleyball, and a run of excerpts from Taiwanese literature — she was editor-in-chief of the anthology Books from Taiwan 2014–2015, a project that set out to showcase around 100 works of fiction, nonfiction and illustrated fiction published in Taiwan in recent years.

Translation, as Holmwood sees it, is a peculiar line of work. "You're at your most successful when no one notices you exist. As a translator you have to stay humble — you want no one paying attention to you. You don't do this work to get famous or to make money; that's not possible. It may not carry much social standing either. It asks you to find a deeper meaning in the work itself. And at the same time it lets you keep learning and growing."

"What makes Jin Yong so remarkable is that reading his books gives you the feeling of going back to adolescence"

Chinese friends had recommended Jin Yong's novels to Holmwood when she first began learning the language. But, she said, "all through learning Chinese I kept finding out … that my Chinese wasn't good enough. Every time I tried to get into the books it was hard going, so I decided not to force it. Reading them too early would have cost me the pleasure."

By the time she picked Jin Yong up again it was 2012. She had two years of literary translation behind her, some experience with publishers, and a growing grasp of how rights sales work and what publishers look for in books brought in from abroad. So she came back to Jin Yong with the "professional" eye of someone in the business sizing up goods.

She quickly became a fan. "I stopped judging it purely professionally and turned into a reader who enjoyed it. I developed something close to a friendship with the characters, sinking into their stories … What makes Jin Yong so remarkable is that reading his books gives you the feeling of going back to adolescence — you can't quite put them down."

Of Jin Yong's 15 novels, only The Book and the Sword, Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain and The Deer and the Cauldron have ever been translated into English, and those editions were aimed at Western academic institutions and libraries rather than general readers. Yet there is real demand for wuxia in the English-language market: plenty of unauthorized fan translations circulate online. A group called WuxiaSociety, for instance, has translated The Return of the Condor Heroes, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils and Sword of the Yue Maiden, among others, and links out to fan translations of many more.

Next to mainstream popular fiction, though, wuxia in the English-speaking world is still plainly a niche: no one has introduced it, no one is pushing it, and it has no name recognition. Even so, the timing now isn't bad.

The literary agent Peter Buckman came across Jin Yong by chance. He searched the internet for one phrase, "best-selling authors," and Jin Yong's name came up in the top 10. Buckman bought the rights first. Then he met Holmwood, and once he saw how big the market might be, he decided to get the project moving at once.

"Anna translated a few sample chapters first, and I sent them to some publishers. My old friend Christopher MacLehose bought the rights to three novels — Legends of the Condor Heroes, The Return of the Condor Heroes and Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre — and had Holmwood start on the first volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes."

This may be the beginning of a very large undertaking: if wuxia takes off in Britain, they can build it into a hit on the scale of A Song of Ice and Fire. Foreign outlets, in a round of coverage, in fact settled on the same framing — China's A Song of Ice and Fire, China's Lord of the Rings — with the honest, guileless Guo Jing cast as "China's Jon Snow."

Holmwood says she doesn't know much about Jon Snow or A Song of Ice and Fire, but she does know that Guo Jing, the central character, can "absolutely" give Western readers something familiar to hold onto. "In fantasy there's a gap between the West and China, but it isn't as wide as people imagine."

The difference is one of genre. Both get filed under fantasy, but Jin Yong's wuxia, in her view, contains history, facts, and characters who really existed rather than being invented; at the same time, nobody could actually perform its martial arts moves — they are a bit like film special effects. So the work carries elements of both fantasy and historical fiction, or in the trade's term, a "crossover."

What East and West share comes down to the protagonist. Guo Jing is the book's hero, and telling the story from his point of view fits what Western readers expect. Fantasy novels always have a cast of characters, but people still want one central figure to carry the whole story. And the core emotions and relationships this character passes through are "universal": he loses a father who was a good man, a hero and a patriot, and sets out to take revenge and inherit that heroic glory, meeting many challenges along the way.

The historical background may be unfamiliar to Western readers — the tangled grievances among the Song, the Jin and the Mongols, for example. But, Holmwood said, "what makes Jin Yong so skilled is that he attaches the historical background to the characters' feelings and to what they are dealing with themselves, instead of dropping the history on your head first and making you face a pile of questions all at once. He lets you learn the culture of the time through Guo Jing."

And what is unfamiliar is exactly what makes it interesting for Western readers. They meet a new world, they want to learn more through these entertaining stories, so they go and look things up themselves.

She used The Lord of the Rings as an example. Western fantasy is always good at building a complete world, a place entirely invented, and yet many readers want to know that world's history, and some go off to study Elvish. In Jin Yong's novels, Chinese history and language become that same kind of "backdrop," one you can't help wanting to explore. What the two have in common is that they let people find richer material and deeper layers of story. Read plainly, it may be no more than an entertaining novel; but you can just as well dig into the history, learn the dynasties, or work out which fighting techniques are real. Younger readers may even take up Chinese because of it.

The translation has one more subtle advantage right now: the West is increasingly drawn to the episodic storytelling of television, a form that has a lot in common with the chapter-by-chapter structure of Jin Yong's novels.

Jin Yong first serialized Legends of the Condor Heroes in Ming Pao chapter by chapter, 40 in all. That isn't how an ordinary novel is written; it is closer to 40 episodes of a TV show, where a detail in episode 1 may not show its point until episode 15. Given how popular TV series and episodic storytelling are now, the timing is better than it would have been five or ten years ago.

Following the story's narrative arc, the publisher and the translator also had to split it into four volumes to suit how people read. The first volume ends at chapter nine. They found that the end of chapter ten might not be the kind of ending readers like — the cliffhanger it leaves is a bit too big. But that is precisely how a TV show is written: it tells the audience the story isn't over and the characters still have room to grow. It works better as the opening of the next volume.

"Nine Yin Skeleton Claw"

Jin Yong's "stature," Holmwood said, puts her under real pressure.

Readers keep asking her how she translates the names of the martial arts moves. "Everyone keeps asking me this and it makes me nervous too. Word by word, some parts might put people off. But in the context of the whole novel it isn't so strange. I hope there aren't too many mistakes. With this many words it's impossible to have none, but I hope none of them are big ones …"

In an earlier interview with the BBC, Holmwood let slip one of her techniques: she acts the moves out herself as she translates, because only doing it tells her whether to write "hack" or "slice." The move Lan Lü Da Gun she rendered literally, as "Lazy Donkey Roll," because the image is so plain to see. For the Nine Yin White Bone Claw — which Jin Yong shows as five fingers driven into five holes in a skull, a fairly gruesome picture — she swapped "bone" for "skeleton" and made it "Nine Yin Skeleton Claw."

The real challenge, though, is one fight scene after another.

"There's a lot of people hitting each other in Jin Yong's novels, so the action has to flow. Most contemporary literature doesn't have this many action scenes — it leans more on what characters are thinking. In Jin Yong, I have to translate them fighting each other so that it's fun, and so readers can tell who is fighting whom as they go. So I spend time working out what this person's hands are doing, what their feet are doing. I get it straight first, and only then turn it into English."

This is the hardest part and also the most fun, Holmwood said, and it tests her English hard. She did a fair amount of homework for it, looking at classic novels with hand-to-hand combat in them, such as The Three Musketeers.

"Pace" matters just as much. "Sometimes the fighting is very fast, so you use a lot of short verbs, so the reader moves fast too — like a quick cut in a film. Sometimes it slows down, like slow motion in a film, and then how do you put a slo-mo into words? You stretch the words and the sentences out, you use a lot of commas, so the reader feels it slowing. At the start I didn't think I'd go into that much detail, but along the way I found I really did have to study the habits of English closely. Chinese and English are so different in grammar and other ways that I had to go back to English grammar and rhythm and try to bring Jin Yong's content across through them."

A few more personal questions

Q: QDaily

A: Anna Holmwood

Q: Is Guo Jing your favorite character in Legends of the Condor Heroes?

A: My favorites are actually the Seven Freaks of Jiangnan. They're funny and full of character, each with different strengths but obvious flaws too — too stubborn, a bit full of themselves. It's because they have flaws that I like them more; you can feel with them, and find things in them that look like yourself. The chemistry of the seven of them together is a lot of fun.

Q: What effect do you want the translation to have in the end?

A: Readers should get a rush out of it, should find it fun. I think the core of Jin Yong's novels is "entertainment." That comes first. Let people read it and enjoy themselves.

After that, I hope to carry the complicated cultural elements into English — a bit like setting up a new "vocabulary." English simply has no words for some of this, the I Ching, internal power, so I want to find a fitting way to put it across without making any large errors. It may not match 100 percent, so I have to make some decisions, as long as the difference isn't too great. I hope English readers can understand through my translation why Jin Yong is so popular and why so many people in Asia have fallen in love with these novels.

Q: What keeps you translating?

A: At the core, I like this novel — I find it fun myself. It's what I do every day, after all, so I have to be interested in it. Then there's my belief that the work means something. I believe Jin Yong will find more readers in other languages. An English edition may make it easier to translate into other languages too. I believe that if other people get the chance to read this novel, they'll like it as well.

For eight years I've been pushing Chinese literature abroad. Chinese literature is rich, in many different styles. Those of us who've been busy with this have kept thinking that the field lacks a real bestseller. Plenty of excellent Chinese writers have made it into foreign markets, of course, but I think it still lacks a little attention. Western media — you can't say they ignore Chinese literature, but they haven't fully grasped its appeal. I hope Jin Yong's novels can open this up. Maybe it's open a crack already, and I hope we can push it further now, so more Chinese novels get translated into other languages.

Q: Where do you get new knowledge?

A: Sources for learning are everywhere. It's a bit like asking writers where their "inspiration" comes from — they'll say "everything." When I'm not reading novels I research all sorts of odd things. The most important thing for a literary translator is to keep a curious mind, to want to keep learning. It's not that because the book is a history book you only read other history books for reference. Doing literary translation, I might need to research tableware — what did utensils look like in that era? Did they have that kind of wood back then? A lot of people would look down on this sort of knowledge. But to me it's genuinely crucial: I have to know it to translate well. I have no notion of "high culture and low culture," where I read only specialist books and nothing else. I can read anything, and anything can be used to learn from.

Q: A book you've been reading lately that you'd recommend?

A: Can I recommend a podcast instead? It's probably not a very mainstream thing in China yet. Podcasts have caught on in the English-speaking world lately, and I find that interesting — it's as if a new kind of narrative potential has opened up. If your English is reasonably fluent, try This American Life. It's an hour a week, telling one small story about America today. It has so many stories, covering all sorts of ground — rich material. I think it's good for people who take the subway: convenient, and you get some really interesting stories.

I'd love to listen to some Chinese-language radio. My husband and I have been talking about making a Chinese-language radio show. He's from Taiwan, and we want to tell a Taiwan story. We've started on it. It's a bit like the one I just recommended — a documentary, and a series too, 10 to 12 episodes is the plan. Right now we're interviewing witnesses. It's something about our generation of Taiwanese people, about their lives, that sort of thing.

Cover images from Kung Fu Cult Master and Legends of the Condor Heroes.