"So basically, you were the person who introduced Game of Thrones to Taiwan?"
Interview with Gray Tan, Taiwanese translator and head of the Grayhawk Agency. Plus: upcoming events, a trip to Yunlin in May, and book club on My Name Is Lucy Barton
We’re honored to share our interview with Gray Tan (譚光磊). As the head of a literary agency, Gray brings books from all around the world to Taiwan and champions Taiwanese writers in the international market. He’s probably most famous for having translated Game of Thrones into Mandarin before it got huge, back when he was a college student in Taipei. (As we learned in this interview, he never went to class; “Gray? Who’s that?” was a refrain among his fellow students.)
Taiwan’s marginality on the world stage is often a cause for lament, but we’ve noticed a flipside as well: even in elite cultural spaces, people here tend to be less arrogant and self-important. Gray is simply lovely: easygoing, open, curious, and a self-described nerd.
We met Gray when we first got here. His agency represented Michelle's book Reading with Patrick and sold it to a Taiwanese publisher, leading to the publication of the Taiwanese version, 陪你讀下去, in 2017. But we got to see his work up close when he invited us to participate in a fellowship he hosts, where we spoke to book-loving professionals from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and France.
Below is the first of a two-part interview. We talk about translating Game of Thrones into Chinese and discovering fantasy at a young age. In part two, we’ll talk about the transition from translator to agent, and the Taiwanese book market in general.
But first, a few quick announcements:
Congratulations to our editor, Daniel Levin Becker, whose translation of Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Daniel is amazing! We hope to interview him soon about all of his exciting projects.
Read Nina Rastogi’s beautiful piece on Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, which won big at the Oscars.
If you read Chinese, Michelle has two new pieces out: a translation of our piece on the book fair at Up Media and an interview with the Taiwan Innocence Project.
And we both have events coming up! More info at the end of the newsletter.
Albert: Let’s start at the beginning. We know you’re a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd. How did you get into those books?
Gray Tan: Where should I start? You know Masters of the Universe? I collected those action figures when I was a kid. I didn’t know until later that they were a rip-off of Conan the Barbarian. Then there was The Last Unicorn, an animation I loved.
Michelle: Oh, I loved that too.
Gray: My parents were both middle school Chinese teachers in Taichung. But I was very naughty. Very active, very restless. I was smart and had good grades, but I just couldn’t sit still. I got into all sorts of trouble in school.
Michelle: What kind of trouble?
Gray: In Taiwan there’s a period called 打掃, and instead of doing chores I pushed my classmate into the pond. Or at lunch, because I didn’t like Chinese meatballs, I would just throw them into the girls’ toilet.
So my parents sent me to the experimental Forest School for a semester. I was in the first generation of students. You were basically in the mountains. There were no rules. It was wild. I mellowed out after six months. I came back to the traditional school system and thought, This isn’t so bad.
I have a cousin who lives in San Francisco, and he came back to Taiwan for high school for a year or two. We were very close. One day my dad said, “Since you’re spending so much time together, you might as well practice your English.” That really helped.
Michelle: Were you reading this whole time?
Gray: I wouldn’t say I was a super bookworm. Reading wasn’t the only thing. I loved Legos and toy soldiers. I was always fascinated with pirates and medieval stuff, which led to my fascination with fantasy.
I tested into the gifted and advanced class in Taichung (資優班). In seventh grade we started having English classes. Although I read a lot, I was very bad at grammar. I scored badly on all my homework. My teacher always told me, “You’re so bad, you’re so hopeless.” She was supposedly the star teacher. She might be surprised by what I do now!
Michelle: How do you feel about the way schools teach English and writing in Taiwan?
Gray: I think I was very lucky in a few ways. One: I really like to do homework. I like repetition. And I got lucky—I was transferred back to a school in the countryside, where my parents worked. And there I had an old-school teacher who just drilled us on basic grammar. But that really helped, because that was precisely what I lacked. I didn’t hate that.
By high school, since my English was quite advanced, my teachers let me do whatever I wanted. They didn’t bother me—they said, “If you really like English novels, go for it. Do whatever you want, as long as you keep your grades up.”
In high school, I wanted to go to medical school. My maternal grandfather is a doctor, and my uncle is as well. So for a time I thought, Yeah, I’m going to be a doctor. But then I entered Taichung First Senior High School, a very good school, and started to play computer games and Magic: The Gathering. That was a real money pit.
Because of that, my grades started to go down. I realized there were ways to get into college besides testing. I realized you could baosong—get directly admitted—if you have special skills. So I got directly admitted into the English major at National Taiwan University. That’s when I went full-on into literature and fantasy. I started translating Game of Thrones when I was college.
Michelle: Wait, what? You were in college?
Gray: Yeah, that was my sophomore year. [We all laugh]
Albert: How did you get introduced to GoT?
Gray: Have you heard of BBS? It was a kind of discussion board that was really popular in Taiwan in the early days of the internet. It was very slow at the time—you had to dial in with a modem—but it was really popular. After I got into college, I had a couple of months before the semester started, so I basically stayed at home and went online all day. I got into BBS and found this discussion board called “Fantasy.”
At the time, fantasy didn’t exist in Taiwan. That was before Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings hadn’t even been translated.
Michelle: Oh my God.
Gray: Yeah. People didn’t know what this thing was. And the little knowledge you could get came from computer games, since a lot of them were based on Dungeons and Dragons, which in turn is based on Lord of the Rings. So it was this sort of third-hand iteration. I started reading English-language fantasy novels.
Albert: How would you get the books?
Gray: There were a couple of bookstores that had English novels, like Caves Books. But there was also a bookstore close to NTU, Lai Lai, that imported books. It was the early days of online ordering. But generally English books were pretty hard to get. In my high school days I basically read whatever I could find. I would go to the bookstore every day and see if they had something new. If they did, I’d just buy it. Unlike today, everything was very precious. When I got into college, there was Amazon, and I got a credit card and started to find things.
Yeah, so I bought Game of Thrones based on some good reviews. Right before that I had read a really bad fantasy novel. But when I read Games of Thrones I immediately thought, This is a masterpiece. This is fantastic. So I wrote a lot of reviews, introducing the book to the message board.
Albert: So basically, you were the person who introduced Game of Thrones to Taiwan?
Gray: Yeah, yeah. [We all laugh]
Michelle: What was the process of translating it like?
Gray: Oh, it was both exhilarating and hell. [We all laugh] You figure out some keywords, you come up with some good names, and then you’re like, “Oh, I’m a genius.” But 98 percent of the time it’s hard work figuring out, say, ways to translate speech. For instance, as you probably know, George R. R. Martin is very good at describing food. That’s difficult to translate.
Part of the reason I didn’t keep translating is that it’s very much like writing. When you’re doing a book, you have to get into the zone every day. You have to dive deep into it. You can’t be on the surface. You have to get into the flow.
And it can be very lonely. When you’re translating a book, which can take months, you always feel like there are so many other interesting things out there. You think, I want to read other books, I want to translate other things, but I have this seven-hundred-page monster I need to finish. So it took me forever. People think the quality of my translation is good, but I was too slow in finishing it. I understand that publishers can’t wait forever.
It was funny: I got fired after I finished the first book, but I had to find out from someone else. The publisher had divided each book into three volumes. I was a third of the way through translating the second book, A Clash of Kings, when I went to a book fair. Someone came up to me and said, “Hey, so you’re not translating anymore?” Confused, I said, “No, I’m still working on the translation.” And they told me they’d seen an advertisement from the publisher saying the next two volumes would have different translators.
It turns out they felt I was too slow, so they hired someone else without even telling me! That translator, of course, didn’t get my glossary, which included something like a thousand names. We later got in touch and became good friends. And even she quit after translating the second book because they asked her to finish the third one faster. So the translation quality went downhill after each volume. It became a scandal within the field.
The publisher got lucky. They put out books with really lousy covers and put no effort into marketing them. But then HBO happened. They actually hired me back to revise a new edition. I decided I would revise the first two volumes but also assemble a team to work on the rest. I hired two trusted friends who are fellow nerds. But again, we worked too slow for the publisher’s taste—so they fired me again. It’s very funny. I only finished the first two, but they’re much improved because it was ten years after my college days.
Michelle: So you’d become an agent by that point?
Gray: Yeah, and I had just got married. So it was a really crazy time.
Michelle: What are some of the keywords and key names you’re proudest of?
Gray: The easiest one is the Stark family motto, “Winter is coming.” I translated that as 凜冬將至. Otherwise you could have literal, clunky translations, like 冬天來了, or 冬天快要來了. The literal translation doesn’t have the same feel. My version makes it sound more like a chengyu [Chinese proverb]. And then there’s the Night’s Watch Oath, which also became a fairly famous translation.
Albert: How did people in your program respond when you told them you were translating fantasy? I can imagine them being more focused on traditional “high” literature.
Gray: I never went to class. [We all laugh] One of my classmates once said, “Who’s Gray Tan? I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never spoken to him.” None of my classmates got it. But that’s fine. I know it’s very niche, very nerdy. My friends were all from BBS. And most of them were older than me. They were already working. We had some gatherings, and I was the young kid on the block.
Albert: I want to know more about that community. So these people were probably ten years older than you, growing up more under martial law. Did they talk at all about that transition?
Gray: No, most of them didn’t talk about politics at all. The first generation of fantasy lovers started using really old computers, like Apple III, playing those really old text-based games like Ultima and Wizardry. That’s where a lot of the fantasy lore came from—from gaming. And when they started to realize the lore and the world were based on novels, they wanted to read them. That was the beginning for the first generation. That is, of course, the American side of the fandom. The other side is from Japan. They play Nintendo, watch anime, read manga. I’m much more on the American side.
Albert: Did you ever link up with the fantasy fandom in America?
Gray: Not really.
Michelle: How do you feel about fantasy being mainstream now? Does it feel less subversive?
Gray: I’m very happy—I don’t have to explain everything anymore! [Laughs] The funny thing is to think about the young readers now. To them, even Harry Potter is old. A lot of my colleagues are ten years younger than me. They grew up with Harry Potter. But people in their twenties now don’t necessarily read Harry Potter, because those are old books. To learn that Harry Potter is old—you know what? You’ve reached a new era. [We all laugh]
But in the beginning people really didn’t know the context of the genre. So, for example, somebody would claim Lord of the Rings was plagiarizing the computer game Diablo! Of course that’s not true—they just didn’t know what came first and what was derivative.
Albert: What do you think drew you to fantasy? You mentioned that your parents were in Chinese literature, but what was it about this genre that excited you?
Gray: It was the medieval atmosphere, I’d say. The world building. That’s always been the most fascinating to me. And then, of course, when I read Game of Thrones, I realized I love human drama and political intrigue.
But at the time, I had this very narrow definition of what fantasy should be. I thought it had to take place in a pseudo-medieval world. It had to have knights and magic and whatever. Anything that wasn’t couldn’t be categorized as fantasy. But as I grew and started reading more, I realized that anything that contains elements of the impossible or the supernatural is fantasy. And so of course I read much more. I read a lot of horror now, for example. And sci-fi is part of that. It’s all one big genre of non-realist realism.
Albert: Were you ever into wuxia or Chinese martial arts?
Gray: I read some and liked it, but was never crazy about it. And I’ll say you can call it Chinese fantasy. When Jin Yong (Louis Cha) was published in the UK a few years ago, they tried to market him as the Chinese Tolkien. And in a certain sense he is! They build worlds in a similar way, and they both command a huge readership.
Michelle: How would you compare Western and Eastern fantasy?
Gray: Oh, that's a tough one. One thing I find interesting is that, as a native Chinese speaker, coming across a Chinese concept written in English feels very different. For example, there’s a new generation of young Asian American writers writing fantasy. They take a lot from Chinese mythology or history. But when I read them in English, it feels weird; something just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that English isn’t our native language, so there’s a level of unfamiliarity there. It makes me think that maybe when British readers read a modern Arthurian legend, they might think the writer is messing around with it in the wrong way.
But translating Western fantasy into Chinese also presents a lot of interesting challenges related to language and history. For example, how do you translate court into Chinese? Or “King’s Landing”? Some might translate it as 朝廷, but to me that evokes a Chinese dynastic court, not a fantastical world rooted in some sort of quasi-Western tradition.
Albert: How did you translate “King’s Landing”?
Gray: I translated it as 君臨. A couple more interesting translation examples: I mentioned family mottos before. I wanted to translate them as four-character idioms, which I think is unique to Chinese. So the Lannister motto, “Hear me roar,” was easy: 聽我怒吼. But the Baratheons gave me problems. Their motto is “Ours is the fury.” At first I translated it literally as 怒火燎原. But when I revised the book I realized that the motto comes from their origins in the Stormlands, where there are constant storms. Their castle is called Storm’s End. So “Ours is the fury” reflects that part of their legacy, their environment. So I retranslated it as 風雨無懼.
*
For Mandarin readers, here’s the Night’s Watch Oath followed by Gray’s translation:
Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.
「長夜將至,我從今開始守望,至死方休。我將不娶妻,不封地,不生子。我將不戴寶冠,不爭榮寵。我將盡忠職守,生死於斯。我是黑暗中的利劍,長城上的守衛,抵禦寒冷的烈焰,破曉時分的光線,喚醒眠者的號角,守護王國的鐵衛。我將生命與榮耀獻給守夜人,今夜如此,夜夜皆然。」
Events Coming Up, plus Yunlin Trip
Albert has been organizing a series of talks by global historian Sebastian Conrad. His talk is titled “Colonial Times, Global Times: History and Imperial World-Making” and takes place Thursday, March 23rd at 3 PM at Academia Sinica.
On March 30th, Michelle will be reading and speaking at New Bloom alongside Amy Zhang, Karissa Chen, and Daniel Yo-ling.
Chao-ju Chen, a feminist legal scholar in Taiwan, has organized a talk with Suzanne Kim, in which Michelle is a discussant. It takes place on March 25th at 12:30 PM at National Taiwan University.
Poet Simon Shieh will be speaking at Klartext Salon at Tacheles at 8 PM.
Back in September, we wrote about an arts organization in Yunlin, a rural area in Taiwan. “I reject the idea that the arts are only for the elite,” the co-founder Jennifer Chen told us. “The arts provide us a common ground; they resonate with every spirit and soul.” She and her husband hope to invert rural–urban relations, drawing artists and audiences from the city. “Rural people sometimes feel like second-class citizens. Why should we always have to go to Taipei or Kaohsiung to access the arts? We want people everywhere to think: The best arts and culture and be found here.” We believe in Jennifer’s vision, and we’re organizing a trip to Yunlin at the end of May because we believe in her vision. We’ll listen to jazz music and tour the area. If you’d like to come, reply to this email.
Book Club: My Name is Lucy Barton
We’re reading Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. The next meeting is Friday, March 31st, Friday at 3 PM PST, 6 PM EST / Saturday, April 1st at 7 AM Taiwan time. Reply to this email for a zoom link.
Finally, our one-year grant from Substack expired back in November. Since then, we’ve been breaking even. If you’ve been reading our newsletter for awhile and find it valuable, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This has been a labor of love for us! Thank you for being here and reading.