Mui Poopoksakul’s translation of Duanwad Pimwana’s story “Sandals” appears in the spring 2019 issue of The Southern Review. Here, Poopoksakul shares how she came to translate Pimwana’s work, her process for translating a living author, and the complexity of the flip-flop in Thai culture.
Rhiannon Thorne, Editorial Assistant: First, thank you for introducing me, and, in a very real way, the Anglophone world to Duanwad Pimwana. When did she first come on your radar, and how has your relationship to her work developed as you translate her stories?
Mui Poopoksakul: I started reading her five years ago, not long after I took up translation. At the time, I was translating Prabda Yoon, who is a male author, and I was curious who local writers thought were the contemporary female authors to read, so I asked around. Other writers recommended Pimwana to me, so I went to look for her books. The first one I bought was Changsamran, the Thai of Bright—this novel won the S.E.A. Write Award so you can find it everywhere. I absolutely loved it and began reading more and more of her work, quickly realizing that she has written more stories than anything else (although she’s writing two novels at the moment).
Being her translator, I get to find out the back stories behind some of her works. As a reader, I’m not sure I’d necessarily want to know—I was a “The Death of the Author” kind of person for a long time. But as a translator of a living author, I do think there’s real value in understanding where the author is coming from—the images they have in mind when writing a certain scene, for example. So, I would say, our conversations have informed my reading and, in turn, my translation.
RT: Walk us through your translation process for “Sandals.” What did that first draft into English look like, and what decisions led to the final version?
MP: “Sandals” was one of the first stories I translated for the Arid Dreams collection because I did it as part of my sample for this book. In my translations so far, I’ve always banged out a pretty literal first draft, although after the fact I keep telling myself to stop doing this because it’s probably not the most efficient way to translate, but the process has become compulsive at this point. From there, I clean up the text, but the second draft will still have some different options for the same Thai words/phrases and bracketed questions for the author. With Duanwad, I unleashed all my questions on her over the phone before I moved on to my third draft—that’s the draft where I try to make firmer decisions, doing my best to spot what still sounds stilted, seeing how the flow is compared to the Thai. Then I prune some more.
In translation, there are a million micro decisions, and I’d be lying if I said they were all consciously made, but many of them are, particularly the sticking points. One kind of decision that always pains me is when I find the “right” noun for the corresponding Thai and then the “right” verb, but they don’t work together in English—because Thai and English are such different languages, they often approach the same thought a little differently—and then I have to sacrifice the one that seems more dispensable.
RT: Pimwana recently posted an old photograph of her at her writing desk, where she wrote “Sandals,” on twitter. Where does the magic happen for you?
MP: I also work from home mostly. One of the luxuries of living in Berlin, where space is more abundant than in New York, is that I have a home office. Here’s a picture of my desk:
The foot stool is all-important because I’m small.
RT: “Sandals” appears in Arid Dreams, a collection you’ve described as “full of unsettling, social realist stories” that rely on the tension between urban versus rural life—and all the ensuing socioeconomic and ideological divides. Can you speak to us a bit about how Kui and Tongjai, the two protagonists of this story, and their playful preoccupation with the sandals commercial fit into this literary tradition?
MP: The story “Sandals” has been described by Pimwana herself, as well as others, as classically Thai social realist (locally called “literature for life”). I think her use of the rubber sandal as the central image for the story is brilliant because it’s a footwear that embodies two disparate lifestyles. In Thailand, the flip-flop is a very humble shoe—since it’s always hot there, you never really need close-toed shoes, and it’s the cheapest footwear you can buy, so it’s the shoe of the poor. At the same time, people also wear them to the beach or the pool, and the idea of going to the beach for the weekend or having access to a swimming pool is something more aspirational.
The commercial in the story picks up on this latter association by having, in one scene, a glamorous couple lounging by a beachside pool wearing these sandals. Tongjai and Kui are of course poor children, but flip-flops would be something that they know and most likely wear, and yet their lives are worlds apart from the on-screen couple’s—they aren’t familiar with bikinis and speedoes and think they’re underwear. To me, the sandals in the story are a powerful symbol for how the class divide can make a shared world so different for different people.
RT: Besides your translations of Pimwana and Prabda Yoon, if you could translate any three additional contemporary Thai works, what would they be?
MP: There’s a particular novel by Saneh Sangsuk (also known by his pen name Danarun Saengthong) that I’m really keen on. It’s a people vs. nature tale with dark supernatural elements. Except for the opening, the book is in the form of an oral narrative, and it’s the life story of a now-elderly monk whose mother, somewhat early on, is killed by a tiger and whose father then spends his remaining years trying to get revenge. Saengthong is definitely a writer who tells big stories.
Because of timing, I just missed out on translating a play by Toshiki Okada (who’s Japanese) that was adapted from a novel by the Thai writer Uthis Haemamool (The script is actually in Thai, but there was some back-and-forth translation in the process, so which version(s) is/are the original(s) is an interesting question). I like the novel that it’s based on as well, but I think the adaptation brought it to another level. The play, called “Pratthana – A Portrait of Possession,” is touring the world, so look out for it! The production team is also putting together a book documenting the whole process, and it will include a translation of the play.
Uten Mahamid, a poet / artist from northern Thailand, has a poem that I’ve been trying to figure out how to translate for years now. It’s a lipogram with no vowels or tone marks (in Thai, with one exception, consonants and vowels are separate, and there are words that only contain consonants). Visually, the poem is remarkable because the lines look incredibly flat—normally you’d see lots of tone marks and vowels above and below the letters. A couple of years ago, when I was the guest translator at a Poetry Translation Centre workshop, we—the participants, the poet Clare Pollard and I—actually translated a couple of his poems, but not that one. I was tempted to workshop it, but it seemed like the kind of thing you really need to sleep on.
Lastly, I’d love to do a small anthology of ghost stories. The fear of, or belief in, ghosts runs so deep in the Thai psyche—I’m afraid of ghosts only when I’m in Thailand!
RT: Are there any other projects that we should keep an eye out for this year?
MP: I’m looking forward to Hiromi Kawakami’s The Ten Loves of Nishino, translated by Allison Markin Powell, and Marguerite Duras’s Me & Other Writing, co-translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes. Also, this already came out this spring, but I’m really excited about the new issue of Music & Literature, featuring a large collection of stories by the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel, translated, among others, by Madeleine LaRue, who introduced me to his work.
Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. She recently completed her translations of Duanwad Pimwana’s story collection Arid Dreams (Feminist Press) and novel Bright (Two Lines Press), both forthcoming this April. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the U.S., she now lives in Berlin, Germany.
Rhiannon Thorne is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review. Additionally, she is the managing editor of cahoodaloodaling, an associate editor for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and President of Tandem Reader Awards. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Manchester Review, and Midwest Quarterly, among others. She is an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University.
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