Dear Ijeawele is a forthright and frank book, a 15-step letter about how to raise a feminist child. But when it’s published in China around April this year, it will garner its author, the celebrated Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a new status: becoming one of few African writers whose body of work has mostly, if not all, been translated to Chinese.
“By far the hottest African writer among Chinese fans today is Nigeria’s Adichie,” says Bruce Humes, an American linguist and Chinese literary translator. For years now, Humes has compiled a bilingual list of contemporary African fiction published in Chinese since the 1980s, putting together a list of novels, poetry, drama, and short story collections available to readers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Humes, who has lived and worked across China since the late 70s, has so far identified 146 translated works from 66 African authors.
The list of translations, including the 13 interpreted in 2018, features a great variety in terms of language (French, English, Arabic, Portuguese), nationalities (Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, and more) and also genres. Yet only a few authors have had more than one volume dubbed into Chinese, and even fewer with two or more books. These include the likes of Nigerian authors Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and the sole Lusophone writer with at least three novels now in Chinese, Mia Couto of Mozambique.
By having all her three novels (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah), lone short story collection (The Thing Around Your Neck), and two essays (We Should All Be Feminists, and Dear Ijeawele) translated to Chinese, Adichie proves that she’s a literature icon in China, says Diane Pan, who has edited her work at Shanghai 99 since 2013. (Yilin Press published Half of a Yellow Sun in 2010.) By tackling current issues including gender inequality, the immigrants’ experience, and racism, Pan argues the 41-year-old novelist helps readers introspect about life’s major questions.
By tapping into questions about human mobility, aspirations, and personal fulfillment, Adichie she adds, also builds a kind of intimacy between her protagonists and young Chinese readers many of whom are living and studying overseas. Read more