Owlish and Other Translated Languages with Natascha Bruce

Sinophone Unrealities – UiS podkast

In this fourth episode, Natascha Bruce talks about wormbooks, birdcats and owlfish, about haunting Hong Kong protests, and about keeping alive uncanny textual elements across languages. She reveals how it was to translate 謝曉虹 Dorothy Tse’s 鷹頭貓與音樂箱女孩 Eaglehead Cat and the Music Box Girl (which I make a hash of explaining in the episode) into Owlish (which Natasha has brilliantly come up with as the English title). We talk about literature that speaks to you in its own voice and begs to be translated, about taming or not taming long, meandering sentences and about the strangeness that spills over from one language to the next.

Migratory Catbird

Natascha Bruce translates fiction, creative non-fiction and, occasionally, poetry from Chinese into English. Her work includes many short stories, especially by the Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse, as well as the novel Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon and the short story collection Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong. Her current projects include the novels Mystery Train by Can Xue and Owlish by Dorothy Tse. She has recently moved to Amsterdam.

Resident Birdcat

Astrid Møller-Olsen is international research fellow with the Universities of Lund, Stavanger, and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has a degree in comparative literature and Chinese studies and has published on fictional dictionaries, oneiric soundscapes, digital chronotopes in science fiction, ecocritical temporalities, and sensory urban spacetime. Her first monograph Sensing the Sinophone will be published in January 2022 by Cambria Press. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism: https://xiaoshuo.blog/