Nowadays, however, neither readers nor critics make a fuss when works like Jia's hit the shelves. Censorship of such novels has also become more relaxed. The Abandoned Capital is now regarded as part of Jia's famous trilogy, alongside Turbulence and Qin Qiang.

"Writers are observers of society. They watch over the pace of a nation as it moves forward. They should narrate social ethics. What's more, they should face reality and truth. In this way, they will fulfill their responsibilities as writers."

A ray of light

Hu Zongfeng had thought about translating The Abandoned Capital as early as 1993 when it was first published. But he didn't get it started because he was afraid of taking up such a daunting task.

In 1987, he translated six pieces of prose by Jia, whom he subsequently befriended. "In person, I like Jia's work very much, and I have always wanted to introduce them abroad."

Fortunately, Hu met Gibank, which rekindled his dream of translating The Abandoned Capital. Gibank, a doctor of literature, specialized in medieval British literature.

"Robin has an amazingly big vocabulary," said Hu. "At that time, he had taught British and American literature appreciation in the Northwest University for more than a year. And he supported me when I translated Jia's medium-length novel The Country Wife. The translated book was published in New Letters in 2010. He then told me he wanted to meet the writer, so we visited Jia on Robin's birthday with a copy of New Letters. It was that conversation that gave me the idea of translating The Abandoned Capital."

New Letters is one of the oldest literary magazines published in the United States that continues releasing award-winning poetry and fiction. The novel occupied 56 pages of the publication's 150.

As both Hu and Gibank were busy at work, the two had to do the translation in their spare time. An agreement was reached that each of them spend a day on it per week. Thus it took the two more than three years to complete the 400,000-word novel, The Abandoned Capital.

For this translation, Jia had only one requirement: don't delete one single sentence. The resulting English version is based on the 1993 version of the novel.

Process of translation

Indeed, translation is no easy work. All of Jia's trilogy—The Abandoned Capital, Turbulence and Qin Qiang—proved to be headaches, because of their distinctive local characteristics.

So far, only Turbulence has been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, a famous American sinologist and translator who has won the Mobil Pegasus Prize for Literature in the United States. Goldblatt also tried to translate Qin Qiang, but finally gave it up due to an abundance of native phrases in the original version.

Luckily, things were different for The Abandoned Capital.

"Robin is specialized in medieval literature, and I am very familiar with Shaanxi dialect. So we don't find this kind of translation too difficult," said Hu.

Annotations are necessary in translation. "Many names, places and events that Chinese people are familiar with are totally new to foreigners, such as the Wild Goose Pagoda, Yang Yuhuan, and so on. In this case, Robin is definitely a detector. When he doesn't understand something, we would discuss whether or not and how to add annotations," Hu added.

Language is also a big problem. "Take the book's name for example, we tried several translations, and finally chose The Abandoned Capital. The name of the hero Zhuang Zhidie, we chose the phonosemantic translation technique and changed it into Butterfly. Of course, this name relates to Zhuangzi, a Chinese Taoist philosopher who lived during the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.). So we added an annotation to it."

During the translation process, Jia gave his support. "I took Robin to his study at least five to six times for in-depth discussions," Hu explained.

"Jia has approved of our work. He once sent Robin an ancient eaves tile with an inscription as a present.

Goldblatt expressed the difference between Chinese and Western writers. He pointed out that the former loved to describe the background of a story first. For Chinese people, hometowns are important. But Westerners found this verbose. They love to impress readers with the very first sentence.

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