Most people, in their off hours, enjoy hobbies like knitting, hiking, drinking, or scrolling their phones. Durham’s Carlos Rojas, in his spare time, translates Yan Lianke, China’s perennial Nobel Prize hopeful, into English.
“I started doing Chinese because I wanted to do literary research,” Rojas says from a busy café in Barcelona, on vacation before the semester starts. “I was doing comparative literature. My father was an academic who was both a literature scholar and an author. So I kind of had an image of what that was, but I didn’t see translation as a career path.”
A graduate of Cornell and Columbia, Rojas’s full-time job is at Duke University, where he’s a professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He has published three academic books, edited or co-edited roughly a dozen more, and written scores of chapters and articles about his research. He co-edits Sinotheory, an excellent series about modern China, through Duke University Press.
“I’m usually working on something,” Rojas says. “Generally, when I take something on, particularly novels, I usually give myself a year to finish them, since I’m doing them in my spare time.”
Despite his towering scholarly reputation, Rojas is better known, fairly or unfairly, in literary circles for his award-winning translations of Yan Lianke. To date, Rojas has translated 15 of Yan’s books—novels, novellas, lectures, and literary theory, almost all published by Grove/Atlantic Press. This translation work, and his closeness to Yan, is the occasion for our interview, for my interrupting his vacation with more work.
With a writer like Yan, there is no perfect place to start.
Yan has won virtually every prestigious literary award in China, and two of his novels, The Four Books and The Explosion Chronicles, were finalists for the prestigious International Booker Prize. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize (which has previously gone to the likes of Haruki Murakami and Philip Roth), and between 2019 and 2022 the betting odds of Yan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature fluctuated between 25/1 and 12/1. In 2020, for example, anonymous bookies favored him over Annie Ernaux, Don DeLillo, and Can Xue, his avant-garde compatriot who is the favorite to win this year.
Another difficulty in finding a place to start with Yan: His versatility. No two books are the same stylistically, even while all of his work, somehow, touches on modern China.
Rojas compares Yan to Ang Lee, the versatile Taiwanese filmmaker with an oeuvre ranging from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Hulk and Sense and Sensibility. In his introductory translator’s note for The Day the Sun Died, Rojas explains Yan’s preoccupation with light and darkness motifs as a means to “draw attention to actual communities and social phenomena that remain hidden in the shadows of contemporary China’s rapid growth.”
Rojas quotes in that note a speech Yan gave when he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in which Yan describes powerful modern China as “a bright ray of light illuminating the global East. But beneath this ray of light, there lies a dark shadow.”
“Some people experience warmth, brightness, and beauty under that ray of light,” Yan continues. “Whereas others, because they are naturally anxious and depressed, feel the cold darkness that lies beneath. As for me, I am one of those people who is fated to experience darkness.”
That speech and 11 of Yan’s lectures from a rare tour of North American universities in 2014 were translated, collected, and published in April 2024 under the title Sound and Silence as part of Duke University Presses’s Sinotheory series. The lectures serve as a perfect introductory text for readers interested in learning more about Yan’s artistic exploration of China’s shadow realm.
That exploration, however, has led to China’s censorship apparatus banning Yan’s work; in addition to being one of China’s superlative authors, Yan is also one of the most banned.
As Yan’s artistic portal from east to west, Rojas provides insights into Yan’s work, censorship, and creativity under authoritarianism.
“In my initial intro, I made a reference to the Xi Jinping ‘Chinese Dream’ slogan, because it’s about dreams. I was talking about linking it to this other dream tradition in Chinese literature,” Rojas says of his experience writing the translator’s note for The Day the Sun Died. “A lot of the British reviewers picked up on that, and it’s obvious to me. I think they would have done that anyway even if I hadn’t mentioned it. But I guess he and his agent felt uncomfortable that it was being linked in that way to Xi Jinping. So we deleted that paragraph from the American edition.”
“He’s very careful in his public statements, which is part of the reason why he’s managed to negotiate this tightrope for as long as he has,” Rojas adds. “He’s quite canny. I think personality is maybe a good way of putting it. It is true that he worked for the [People’s Liberation Army] for more than 20 years, in the propaganda arm—and that probably taught him a thing or two.”
He’s very careful in his public statements, which is part of the reason why he’s managed to negotiate this tightrope for as long as he has.”
In a lecture titled “Fear and Betrayal,” Yan recounts his youth in rural Henan Province, watching the local military cadres, hoping to one day, like them, enjoy “a monthly salary, with abundant food, dignity, and reputation”; how he joined the military at 20 and learned about power’s cruelty.
After publishing his book Lenin’s Kisses, a 2004 satire about a village turning the corpse of Vladimir Lenin into a money-making attraction, he was asked to leave the army. This sense of abandonment by his country placed Yan on the tightrope, balancing a life spent serving his country and opposing it.
“Even as my writings scrutinize, resent, and criticize that reality,” Yan continues in “Fear and Betrayal,” “they also contain a layer of love—like a recently released prisoner who remains nostalgic for prison life. I don’t know what this is. The one thing I do know is that when I am writing—when I’m facing a sheet of paper with pen in hand—I inevitably feel I am a living person, a living person with a certain degree of dignity.”
After I speak with Rojas for about an hour, tracing the difficulties of being an artist in China, we begin discussing similarities between Yan’s experience and the current creeping academic censorship in American universities.
“You’re at UNC,” Rojas tells me. “I’m at Duke. We’re both in North Carolina. North Carolina is not the worst state in terms of academic freedom, but it’s not the best—I mean, the state legislature is basically a clown brigade. Before coming to Duke, I taught at Florida, which wasn’t as bad at that time as it is now, but now you have serious concerns about academic freedom within the Florida university system.”
“We’re in an era,” he says, “where that type of tightrope-walking is not unique to China.”
For a moment, we leave Yan’s China and focus on the threat of far-right political censorship in America.
“We are observing a fairly alarming dip towards authoritarianism in a fairly sizable portion of the electorate,” Rojas says. “I teach a gateway course for students who are majoring in the Department [of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies]. We have fairly wide-ranging discussions. I can’t remember what the topic at the time was, but one of the students, who had spent 12 years living in Saudi Arabia—he’s American—said, ‘Well, authoritarianism is underrated.’ I was not sure whether or not he was joking. We have a free-form discussion. We had a little back-and-forth. I said, ‘Well, let’s take a straw poll. Who agrees with that, that authoritarianism has its benefits?’ And more than half the class raised their hands. And they were being sincere. They were like, ‘If you have the right leaders, benevolent authoritarianism is not a bad thing.’”
What makes Yan’s Sound and Silence such an extraordinary project is its fearlessness. In his lectures for American university audiences, he speaks with honesty and bravery about the unavoidability of political writing in China. The tightrope, in Yan’s comments in America, free from the hovering state apparatus, is abandoned.
“When politics permeates everyone’s daily lives,” Yan says, “authors’ collective avoidance of politics is ridiculous but also tragic. With respect to contemporary China’s complex politics, literature’s avoidance of power and politics makes it possible for power and politics to win without even trying.”
So how does a writer create under authoritarian conditions, when the expectation is to have your work banned in your homeland?
The afterword to Sound and Silence offers some perspective.
“Perhaps someday I’ll write a new volume of confessions,” Yan writes. “Or perhaps I’ll instead be like a bee that is unable to produce honey and instead forever flies around blindly. Who knows? Perhaps the significance of writing and speaking is that they yield a set of riddles and proverbs we use to describe a time that we’ll never be able to crack open, yet it is because of these riddles and proverbs that we must continue to read and write.”
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