尼尔克拉克(Neil Clarke)
2018年4月
It''s hard to believe that three years have passed since we teamed up with Storycom to regularly publish translated Chinese science fiction in the pages of Clarkesworld Magazine. The roots of the project dig a bit deeper, when in 2011, Ken Liu submitted his translation of "The Fish of Lijiang?by Chen Qiufan to Clarkesworld. In an interview for the Speculative Fiction in Translation blog in 2016, Ken describes how this came to be:
"I got into translation purely by accident. My friend Chen Qiufan a.k.a. Stanley Chan had one of his stories translated professionally, and then asked me to take a look at the result. I started to make a few suggestions, but then told Stan that I thought it would be easier if I just did the translation from scratch.?
That happy accident set us on our course. I bought the story for our August 2011 issue and encouraged Ken to translate more. He followed up a few months later with Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonightby Xia Jia, which we published in February 2012. The Fish of Lijiang?would go on to receive the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award for Short Fiction in May.
Later that year, I suffered a near-fatal heart attack and the permanent damage done to my heart required the implantation of defibrillator in my chest just six months later. Now part cyborg, the whole endeavor inspired my first themed anthology and Upgraded was born. When I invited Ken to write a story for it, he asked if I抎 also be interested in including any translations. Enthusiastically, I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to have the chance to work with Chen Qiufan Oil of Angels? and Xia Jia Tongtong''s Summer? again.
Little did I know, these efforts were developing a reputation in China. In April 2014, Storycom reached out to me to see if Clarkesworld would be interested in publishing Chinese science fiction on a more regular basis. Over the next few months, we discussed our goals and what it would take to make translations a regular feature in the magazine. It was new territory for both organizations and, so far as I''ve been able to tell, the first time a US-based science fiction magazine had attempted to do so.
After settling on a plan, we decided to launch this new feature in our one hundredth issue, January 2015, and featured 揈ther?by Zhang Ran, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan and Ken Liu. We published nine Chinese translations during that first year and those stories were eventually gathered together in a bilingual anthology, Touchable Unreality 未来镜像-yes, I know it translates differently, published in China. The book you are currently reading is technically a sequel-with a bit of overlap-celebrating the stories we thought were the best of those we published since launching the project.
I am quite proud of all the stories weve translated and grateful for the the opportunity to introduce several Chinese authors-many for the first time-to an English-language audience. Science fiction is global and for far too long, our readers have had limited access to works in translation. In short, they didn''t know what they were missing. The quality of these stories has contributed to a growing interest in world science fiction, one that I hope to see continue to develop and grow for a long time.
None of this would have been possible without Ken Liu, who''s worked and supported to open the door for us and Storycom for having the vision to step forward and help make this possible. Over the years, our relationship has adjusted to meet the needs of this evolving project, and everyone I''ve worked with has added something valuable to the mix and made it better. You can have great stories, an amazing plan, and even an audience, but if you don''t have great translators, the whole house will come crashing down. So a big thank you goes out to each of the translators that built these bridges between our worlds. Now even more people can enjoy these stories and that抯 the way things should be.