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Sample translations submitted: 2
Chinese to English: Platonic Hair (柏拉图之发) by Qiu Miaojin 邱妙津 General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - Chinese 1
"你的头发好长!"
寒丛我的额头将我的发拨开，撩放在头两侧的枕头上。我和她的枕巾上都张着素面的紫，两块并置的 紫各在相向的角绣着一只黑色的鸟，她的鸟在右上方，我的在左上方，两只黑鸟凝姿觑视。她爱紫， 我爱黑，我常说每天睡在这里要被她的紫淹溺，她就回说是我的黑霸道地锁住她的视线，铺在地上当 床的毛毯都是紫，唯独们被我抢漆成黑。
Translation - English 1
“Your hair is so long...”
Han brushed away the hair from my forehead, lifting and letting it drop onto the pillow on either side of my head. Our pillowcases are both plain purple, and face to face with each other in these corners of these identical purple squares were two black, embroidered birds; her bird in the upper-right, mine in the upper left. Two black birds gazing fixedly upon the beauty of each other. She loves purple, I love black. I often said every night sleeping here, I drowned in her purple flood. She’d reply that it was the tyrannical rule of my black locking her line of sight. Every blanket spread on the floor was purple, I had only succeeded in painting the door black.
“Your hair is way longer than mine.” Using my left hand I absently stroked the bangs fringing her forehead, my right hand cradling her head and moving back and forth through her long, soft tresses.
“But you’re a guy!” she blinked at me, revealing an expression of protest.
“Guys can’t have long hair?” I retorted.
“Nope, men aren’t allowed.”
“Long hair is so beautiful...don’t you love your own long hair?”
“If you also had long hair, you’d surely stop loving mine. And then someone else who love long hair will fall in love with you , so why don't I just cut off my long hair right now and let me be the one who falls in love with your long hair. Sound good?” Her eyes stared rigidly at me, and her voice was so weak I could practically hear the tears filling her voice. But times like these she would promptly try and make up for her obvious weakness with a clumsy display of bravado.
" No, don’t chop off your long hair, you’re a woman! not to mention I’m already so used to the beauty of your long hair, I depend on my love for it and in my heart this love has become a fertile and blessed plot of soil. demanding me to cut off this kind of dependency is too excruciating!”
After hearing my plea, she wore a victorious sort of smile. Calmly, she held me in a tight embrace. Then , leaning against my shoulder, closed her eyes. I could only ardently gaze at her face, repressing my wish to ever so gently kiss her fluttering eyelashes.
2
She is adept at tormenting me. I take a long drag on the cigarette and close my eyes, thinking about the dialogue of this scene and her many kinds of protest and bravado, how in moments of victory, her expression would ever so delicately change. These expressions, her words, all piled in my memory to the point of bursting-- pouring out at once as if my mind were a bag split at the seams. I need only lay back on that purple blanket for these memories to begin climbing out along my hair as each strand grew longer and longer with each passing moment, each memory trying to outdo the other for first place.
First they land all around my body, and then push and shove each other aside rolling into every corner of the room. By the time I had woken up on the first day this happened, already there was no way to walk across the floor without treading on her face. I burst into incredulous laughter: “How can you torment me like this?” kneeling down in tears, I one by one collected these marble-like transparent faces of hers which had overflowed on the floor, and placed them in a drawer.
Now I'm standing under the eaves of an abandoned bungalow in a black leather jacket and pants and sunglasses. Across the street is “her” house. This is a dark and dank alleyway, giving rise to two rows of wretched single-story houses between towering high-rises on either side. The alley is so narrow that, standing under the eaves on this side, if I extend an arm, I can almost touch the eaves on the other side.
At the moment I’d calculated, the guy in the red jacket brings “her” home, and then at the mouth of the alley turns and stomps off, as if in revulsion of the alley. Without another moment to waste I hurried to the other end of the lane and stub out my cigarette on the wall, letting it fall onto the pile of butts in the gutter.
(Han: In 5 years I haven’t written a single word. Everytime I sit down at the desk and pick up a pen, as soon as the tip of my pen touches the paper I find myself uncontrollably drawing you. Your thick and fragrant long hair, your such clearly cut brows and bright eyes, straight nose, glossy lips-- my hand is just like my hair: with the strong psychic force of my longing it’s taken on mysterious new capabilities. How you used to expect I’d write something good. Before you knew me, I already had written a dozen of bestselling romance novels. And with this I was able to support myself even a decade after my school years. But I’d promised you I would would stop using words as a means of making money. You said you would rather make money and support me, and let me concentrate on writing, because you were so sure of my ability to become a respectable writer.)
Thinking on this, my long hair stirs quietly to life. Beneath the ink-blue shadows of dusk, the moss on the wall seems to spread like spiders.
Before long, “she” reappears, no longer head-to-toe in that white uniform, having changed into a body-hugging, plunging violet evening gown inlaid with an innumerable amount of sequins. “She” takes out a pair of pink sunglasses from her glittering silver handbag, and hurries from the alley. I stand on this side watching behind her,
how the hair she’d pulled tightly into a ponytail draped loose and flowing like clouds over her bare shoulders, in a split second both of my eyes were blinded as if pierced by a sharp sword, in my mind a magnificent burst of light--
3
“You’ve written over a dozen romance novels, but when all is said and done, do you really understand the business of love in the city’s late-night world of desire?”
Seated in front of the illuminated window of the tenth floor of the publishing house, my boss K spun in his high-backed chair to ask me this provocative question.
“I’m pretty sure love is the same as in the novels I write,” I nonchalantly answered.
“Ha! You young people have such cartoonish imaginations.” He snorted, “Pssh, if a person gets past 40 and still uses the word ‘love’ talking about what goes down between men and women, he’s either a total dummy or a genius.” He smugly propped his leg up on the marble desk.
“Then why do you publish so many romance novels?” I felt cheated.
“Because the only people with spare money to spend on books are all under 40! I think of these peoples’ money as the ‘love’ in the world, and then use this money to support you guys to manufacture ‘love’!”
“So...how do people over 40 think about what ‘goes down’ between men and women?”
“Why don’t you use some money to buy someone of your own and see for yourself? I’ll pay you in support of writing about this love experiment!”
K used the long, pointed nail of his pinkie to scratch his beard, the slight tilt of his chin and sidelong glance seemed to be sizing up just how much I was worth. I trusted that his money could buy a romance writer, but certainly couldn’t buy romance itself. So I didn't mind taking his cash and folding it into a love toy. Moreover, I decided the more dramatic and the more expensive it was, the better.
“You still got any Marlboros on you? Give me one.” The girl in the purple vest said to the redhead beside her, who was about ten years her senior.
“You’re still out of cigs? You want a smoke? Go bum one from a dude!” The redhead disdainfully snorted a puff of smoke rings at the purple vest.
“C’mon what’s the big deal? You can’t bear to part with just one cigarette?”
“Serves you right! You think you’re such a badass, those two old timers who just came and asked your price weren’t good enough for you, no you insist on waiting for a young guy, and now you don’t even have a cigarette to smoke!”
“At least I still have my assets. Unlike you, in such a rush you’ll take anybody in your bed no matter who he is!”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, you think your youth is an “asset”? Peel it all back and it’s just two lumps of meat and a hole. That face of yours can only fool a child who comes to play with it for the first time, when men come here looking to buy bliss, what they want is true skill, and it’s not like I don’t know your bag of tricks.”
“Oh, sure! Well before men can taste your true skill, they’re first going to have to throw a bag over your disgusting face. Besides, I get more than just one man coming after me every night, so why can’t I be a little picky?”
“Aw, you poor, cheap girl. Don’t think just because you’ve done a few days’ study you’re some kind of saint, once you’ve done this kind of thing, no matter how much you dress it up, you’re forever left with a used-up corpse of a body!”
With that, the red-haired woman finally threw down the barely smoked cigarette onto the wet sidewalk, grinding it hard into the ground with the sole of her shoe and stalking off.
I was driving K’s Cadillac and had stopped at the intersection of M Street and W Street when I’d wound down the black-tinted window to discreetly eavesdrop on these women’s conversation.
Driving into this area, all kinds of luxury vehicles brushed past, on both sides of the road under the looming buildings crowded packs of people, each sniffing out the scent of their prey while the fantastical neon signs flickered and shimmered in luminous beckoning of these hunters. Women with their faces caked in powdered makeup and rouge emerged from the stream of women flowing down the street. Marking territory on certain spots along M street, they were like the street’s own living fossils.
I scanned the lineup of fossils through the shades of my sunglasses, the dazzling purple vest immediately stood out, she seemed unwilling to station herself at a singular point, my car following behind her as she moved to and fro across the street.
She didn’t hesitate to sign my contract for this love experiment, fishing out her ID card from her purse and flashing it in before my eyes, where the three characters of her name had been carelessly scrawled: Wang Xiujuan. As I wondered why exactly she was willing to participate in this ridiculous experiment, she then leaned across the cafe booth and extended her hand remove my sunglasses:
“There’s nothing you need to hide from a woman like me,” she said, teasingly. “You want to spend money to buy an imitation of a man’s experience of love? That means, starting now, we both need to become dedicated actors.”
She got up, taking a black blouse from her handbag and slipping it on, carefully fastening each tiny button one by one until the purple vest beneath it was completely obscured. fully fastening each tiny button, one-by-one, until that vibrant purple vest beneath it had been completely obscured. As I watched her button with such concentration lining her expression, I couldn’t help but become a bit curious about this 20-something girl. That expression quickly vanished into an elusive smile, and she said with a somewhat bashful laugh:
“For the next six months, you can just call me Han Han.”
4
I took her home that night. My place is a little concrete room resting on top of a four-stories apartment block, with the toilet outside by the rooftop water tower. Aside from my room, the rest of the whole rooftop had been taken up by heaps of junk. As soon as I opened the wooden door to the rooftop, Han let out a gasp of excitement-- making a beeline for the scrap heap and squatting down to pick through it like a real professional dumpster-diver. Before long she’d unearthed a plank of rotten wood, a small bronze statue with the lacquer flaking off in glittering dust, and broken round-bellied coffee mug, and then excitedly leapt over to me, stuffing these things into my arms and saying, “There! These welcome gifts are for you. May our love last forever!”
Suddenly hot, I opened a window to let in the cold, night sky. After gulping a few breaths of that mild and sweet midnight air, and then keeping my back to Han, I lit myself a cigarette with trembling hands. Although I was ten years older than this girl in front of me, with her here I appeared even less at home in my own room than she did. You could say I lacked any sense of security.
I started regretting having been so naive in getting pulled into this prank of K’s. It was as if I’d overstepped the boundaries I’d drawn in my youth to keep myself protected, and now all of the alarms were blaring and sirens shrieking for me to return. It seems to me that only now did I finally understand-- those wayward fantasies I’d tried to pass off as sex scenes in my novels were really nothing else but
elaborate murals I’d painted on the walls of my own inner rooms. To actually walk into the true landscape, was to leave that room of murals and imitation.
We didn't say anything during the first hour, she just
went back and forth from the room to the bathroom arranging her clothes, cosmetics, toiletries, and a few leisure magazines, all of which she’d kept with her in a canvas tote bag. Kneeling on the floor of the blue and yellow
checkerboard linoleum floor, Han’s face betrayed that same expression of absorption in pondering how best to arrange her belongings. It was like a dove coming to peck at the birdseed teeming in your palm, this exchange so fragile you hold your breath and dare not move, lest the bird fly off in fright; this kind of expression well suited her age while at once in striking conflict with her professional facade.
The surer I was that she could easily move under my gaze, in my environment, as at
home as a fish in the water, the more afraid I became of her. She, a traffic-stopping beauty who so readily embraced this ridiculous game, who’s lived in a corner of the world I found so dirty it had struck a nameless fear in my heart, I was completely baffled as to what she possibly wanted to do with me.
“Han Han...why did you agree to this?” I’d somewhat returned to my senses that I’d taken K’s money and now this girl had come home with me, and I now had to just brace myself for the absurd charade that was to go down.
“Wouldn’t it be simplest to think I did it for the money?” She slyly rolled her eyes while continuing to kneel and scrub the floor.
“It can’t be so simple, can it? The money I gave you is nothing compared to what you’d earn working.”
She sat up, hands on her hips. “Hey! During this half year living with you, I can still go out at night and work!”
“Oh, so you took the money and found a free hotel instead. No wonder you said yes!”
“You’re wrong, I’ve got a place of my own ten times more comfortable than this. I got myself a suite after my second year in the trade. So, no. The main reason I came to your place is because I like adventure. And I like making love with totally different people.”
“‘Making love’? ‘Completely different people’? Including people like me, too?”
When she spoke those two words I nearly screamed. In the countless fanciful novels I’d written, regardless of age or gender of the characters, as long as they were people, then any combination of the two of them together unequivocally resulted in uninhibited passion and wildly imaginative “sex”. But now when the person here in front of me used the words making love as freely as I did in my writing, she’d shattered my taboos so entirely that I’d felt I’d stumbled into a wasp’s nest hiding in the shade, my fingers so covered in stingers that the hot pain wouldn’t dissipate.
“Yeah for sure! I may never get a client like you again, all the people who come find me are all focused around certain personality types, like dirty old men, poor impotent guys who act real pretentious, and even a few rotten old sisters of the trade. I feel like I can experience a little novelty in you while also teaching this novelist how to make love.”
She asked me if I wanted to join her for a shower just as casually as someone may ask if you wanted to share a meal. When I immediately moved to wave my hand in enthusiastic refusal, she gave a strange sort of laugh, as if she had peered straight into my heart and wanted deliberately to tease me for my discomfort.
I was honestly surprised at myself for not absolutely loathing her casual approach to physical intimacy. And it wasn’t that I aspired to some Western notion of “sexual liberation” or something, but rather that her words had been so elegantly and fluently delivered. Had someone else said them, then maybe the would have reeked to me as malevolent and rotten.
She’d finished showering and emerged wearing an ethereal kind of filmy purple nightdress, glimpses of her bra and panties looming beneath the gossamer threads. The slender curves of her body showed up as clearly as those molded on a statue. For the first time in my life, I was so close to the naked body of a young woman, and while I shouldn’t have been, I was ever so stirred with excitement. It was reminiscent of that feeling I’d had seeing myself naked in the mirror for the very first time.
“According to the rules of our agreement, you are now my man and in any case should look like the kid of man I fancy. So first things first, it’s time to cut short those beautiful locks of yours.”
Getting some scissors, she instructed me to sit down in front of the floor-length mirror; first hacking off the length of my hair in one clean snip so that the rest reached only t the nape of my neck, continuing on with fine little snips to trim up the rets. So engrossed in this delightful process, she threaded the scissors left and right, coming at my hair from different angles, completely forgetting of my existence she was so entranced. Now she cut the ends of my hair at the back into a precise shape, and then, after shaping out those two perfect pointed sideburns in front of my ears, she appeared to wake form that trance. Cheering, she hugged my head and impulsively kissed my forehead, crying out, “My man has arrived!” I looked up at her in amazement at her actions, until she noticed and shyly released me.
(if you wish to read the rest of the story, please do not hesitate to reach out for the complete translation!)
Chinese to English: The Pigs Who Couldn't Lie General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - Chinese 奇奇、皮皮、花花都是新來到這個豬場。新環境新規矩，豬豬們都懂的。每天都要輪班工作，要清理飼料盆、清潔豬舍和更換垃圾袋。要將飼料放在豬舍，確保每隻豬都有足夠的食物。確保所有豬都安全健康，因此要監視豬場工作，協助其他豬進行田間工作，種植作物或收割農作物等。
Translation - English Qiqi, Pipi, and Hua Hua were all newcomers to the pig farm. The three pigs understood that with a new environment comes new rules to follow. Some of these rules included daily work shifts for emptying feed bowls, cleaning out the pig pens and changing the garbage bags.
Additionally, to ensure that no pig on the farm goes hungry, they must keep the food troughs in the pigsty brimming with feed. They also must make sure that all of the pigs on the farm are safe and healthy, which meant monitoring the farm work and assisting the other pigs with work in the fields, whether it be planting seeds in the spring, harvesting the full-grown crops in the autumn, or anything in between.
Qiqi and Hua Hua were well-prepared for work on the farm; they had already written pages and pages of notes outlining the long list of chores for each day. However, Pipi had always had his own way of doing things, only ever putting in 70% effort. For example, if the trash bags were supposed to be changed three times a day, he would only change them twice.
If the pig farm was supposed to be monitored five times a day, Pipi would only do three times. And if he was ever discovered, he would come up with endless excuses to explain away his lazy behavior. Pipi always had this kind of attitude towards work.
And yet, there was one more rule in the Pig Employee Code, one the three pigs had never seen before: “No lying! Absolutely no lying!”' If caught, they would be banished from the pig territory! The Pig Employee Code repeated ‘no lying’ twice, so the farm clearly took this rule very seriously.
(end of sample)
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Hello and welcome! I'm Rachel Szpara, I also go by the pen name R.R.S. in the literary world, and I am keen to translate your creative works! I've studied Mandarin Chinese in the US and abroad in both Taiwan and China for over a decade. I have a BA in Chinese language and culture and I'm now pursuing graduate education specifically in translation to sharpen my skills. I am open to working with virtually any genre and length of creative fiction and poetry, but especially love translating modern fiction, romance, adventure, LGBTQ+, dystopian, and fantasy. Additionally, I'm a published novelist of two books (currently working on the third!) and would also love to help you with English copywriting and editing/proofing. Reach out to me with a project and I'd love to do a free translation sample to demonstrate my capability! I can't wait for us to work together!
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