By Prague’s standards, the Bubenec district is relatively sleepy. On weekends, things perk up as tourists perambulate Stromovka, the city’s largest park, and fans pile into the Letna Stadium to cheer on Sparta Prague, the Czech Republic’s most decorated soccer team. One event that enlivens the district each spring is Book World Prague, the country’s largest literary festival. Held annually at the capacious art nouveau Industrial Palace, the four-day event draws around 60,000 visitors, hosts 400 exhibitors and represents more than 30 countries. In recent years, one nation in particular has gained prominence.
“In the past, Taiwan was promoted more like a region than a country,” says Tomas Rizek, founder of Mi:Lu, a publisher of translated literature from Taiwan. “Now, our program has aroused great interest in books from Taiwan and in Taiwan itself,” he says.
The change symbolizes warming ties between democratically governed Taiwan and the Czech Republic, with Prague abandoning the pro-Beijing agenda of former President Milos Zeman, which was a rarity in the developed world. Today, under Zeman’s successor Petr Pavel, the Czechs have become Taiwan’s strongest European ally, even though they do not recognize the island as a sovereign nation.
These developments are part of a broader groundswell of support for Taipei in Central and Eastern Europe, which have grown wary of China’s malign influence — from the public infrastructure projects that have created debt traps to the infiltration of academia and politics to disseminate disinformation. Much of the propaganda relates to Beijing’s false claim that any country’s attempts to cultivate relations with Taiwan infringe on China’s sovereignty. Beijing claims Taiwan is a breakaway province, despite the Chinese Communist Party never having ruled the island. Regular surveys show that Taiwanese overwhelmingly identify as separate from China.
Cultural exchanges have been one strand of Taipei’s bid to counter this and foster informal ties abroad, and literature has been an unlikely beneficiary.
Under the banner “Thinking Like an Island,” Mi:Lu represented Taiwan for the third straight year with a booth at the 2024 Book World Prague. The publisher’s name, the name of a type of deer in Mandarin, is also a homophone for “to lose one’s way.” As part of an extensive program supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, Mi:Lu invited Taiwanese authors to discuss their work, meet readers and participate in other events around the Czech Republic.
A self-taught artist, illustrator and publisher, Rizek established Mi:Lu in 2014, seven years after he arrived in Taiwan. With more than 20 titles under its belt, Mi:Lu has helped make Czech the fourth most popular language for translations of works from Taiwan, after English, French and Japanese.
The theme for Mi:Lu’s Taiwan showcase might raise eyebrows in some quarters: Taiwan is frequently referred to as “the island” in international media as a way to avoid saying “country,” which would provoke Beijing. However, Czech translator and Mi:Lu Editor-in-chief Pavlina Kramska explains that the title alludes to American philosopher and ecologist Aldo Leopold’s injunction to “think like a mountain.” This involves appreciating the interconnectedness of an ecosystem’s many elements. Taiwanese writers, Kramska suggests, use “the unity of the environment and culture, to connect the past, present and future of the island and to introduce it to their readers.”
While Rizek avoids political questions, he acknowledges the change in Taipei’s relationship with Prague. Seven years ago, when he received the Jan Masaryk Silver Medal of Honor Silver Medal from the Czech foreign ministry for contributing to ties between the two countries, it was a low-key affair, with Prague wary of aggravating Beijing. “It seemed like an illegal action,” Rizek tells me.
The contrast when he scooped the Gratias Agit Prize 2023, awarded annually to people who have enhanced the Czech Republic’s reputation abroad, was stark. “Now, it is higher level stuff — no more top secret,” he says. “Taiwan has not changed; it’s just the way they [see] it now is different.”
Growing appreciation of Indigenous culture since Taiwan’s democratization in the 1980s has fostered a market for such works, which highlight Taiwan’s ethnic diversity — little understood by Western publics and media.
One of Mi:Lu’s Czech publications, “Memories of Mount Qilai” by the late writer Yang Mu, was presented to Taiwan’s former President Tsai Ing-wen by Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil during a 2020 visit to Taipei. Renowned for his stylistic accomplishments, Yang was “a brilliant writer,” Rizek says, and the book was an appropriate gift.
Comprising autobiographical essays, the book spans the transition from Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) to the regime of the Kuomintang — the Chinese National Party that governed the Republic of China and retreated to Taiwan in 1949 following its defeat by the communists in the Chinese Civil War. Included are recollections of childhood encounters with the Amis — the most numerous of Taiwan’s 16 officially recognized Indigenous peoples. As allied forces strafed Taiwan’s cities during World War II, Yang sheltered in the mountains near his birthplace of Hualien City on Taiwan’s east coast. There, he embraced Amis customs and legends, even learning the language, a non-Chinese, Austronesian tongue.
Amis folklore also features in a series of children’s picture books from Mi:Lu, as do myths from the Atayal and Rukai, two of the other Indigenous groups. Books in the “Songs of Mountain, Forest, and Sea” trilogy are available in Chinese, Czech and English, with illustrations by Rizek and English-language text by Atayal author Kate Dargaw. The Chinese versions appear on reading lists in Taiwanese schools.
Among Mi:Lu’s titles by Indigenous writers is a Czech translation of “Seven-Day Reading,” a collection of essays by Atayal writer Wallis Nokan.
Rizek notes the ecological turn in literature from Taiwan, with a focus on Indigenous lifestyles amid Taiwan’s spectacular mountain landscapes — another underrepresented aspect of the country.
Meanwhile, Czech works translated into Mandarin include the folk ballad collection “Kytice” by Karel Jaromir Erben, which Rizek likens to the Brothers Grimm, the folklore scholars who collected fairy tales in 19th-century Germany, and the surrealist tales of Ivan Vyskocil, best known for his contributions to Czech theater. Far from obvious, these choices complement the magic, mythmaking and biophilia of Mi:Lu’s other titles and Rizek’s idiosyncratic illustrations.
Reflecting the appetite for Taiwan’s literature, Czech translations of contemporary works have been published with support from the Taiwan Literature Translation Center at the National Taiwan Museum of Literature. Another initiative is Books From Taiwan; funded by the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) under the Ministry of Culture, it offers translation grants of up to $18,000 per project.
Czech is not the only Slavic tongue to have gained traction as a target language for literature from Taiwan. Parallels between Ukraine and Taiwan as democracies threatened by authoritarian neighbors have become common since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
A TAICCA grant helped Svitlana Pryzynchuk publish Wu Ming-yi’s Man Booker Prize-nominated novel “The Stolen Bicycle” in Ukrainian.
Following six years in China learning Mandarin and studying for a master’s in art history and theory via a scholarship at Beijing Normal University, Pryzynchuk returned to Kyiv in 2014. While she had fond memories of China, she eventually itched to leave. Her departure corresponded with the beginning of the end of a so-called “golden era” before jingoistic rhetoric, creeping xenophobia, and tighter visa conditions under the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping left many foreigners feeling unwelcome.
“It would have been easy for me to stay for my Ph.D., but the atmosphere was different,” says Pryzynchuk. “It was obvious, because I saw the challenges many friends faced in trying to stay.”
With Ukraine riven by the Euromaidan protests and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, Pryzynchuk struggled to convert her language skills into meaningful employment. By 2016, she was considering a move into publishing. Thanks to growing patriotic sentiment, there has been a surge in Ukrainian-language publications, after decades of Russian works dominating the scene.
“Independent publishers of Ukrainian authors were surviving, but that was it,” says Pryzynchuk.
Intrigued by the dearth of works from Asia, even in Russian — which has many more speakers than Ukrainian — Pryzynchuk detected a niche. She spent two years assembling an international team of translators and editors and securing funding. With a focus on Asian literature in translation, Safran emerged in 2018. The publisher’s first major exhibition came the year after at the Arsenal Book Festival, Ukraine’s biggest literary event, which began in 2011 and has been another driver in the resurgence of Ukrainian literature.
While Safran was showcasing groundbreaking translations of texts such as the eponymous work of Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and “The Classic of Tea” by Lu Yu, a meeting with a Taiwanese trade representative rekindled Pryzynchuk’s curiosity about Taiwan. This dated from her student years when Ukrainians in China had little reliable information about Taiwan because of censorship. “We knew it was different, and I’d dreamed of visiting,” she says. “But it was unimaginable as we had to go to Moscow for visas.”
There is a symmetry between Pryzynchuk’s experiences and those of the person who sparked her interest in the literature of Taiwan.
When Hsu Yu-hsuan arrived in Ukraine in 2010, contact between Kyiv and Taipei was minimal, and visa applications went through Tokyo. That year, the signing of a memorandum of understanding on strategic partnership with China by then-President Victor Yanukovych ended official interactions with Taiwan. “After that, all applications went to the embassy in Beijing or the consulate in Shanghai,” says Hsu.
Following a bachelor’s degree in Russian language and literature, Hsu pursued a master’s in diplomacy and international relations, spending his second year honing his Russian and acquiring Ukrainian at Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv through a scholarship from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. His affinity for Ukraine developed while couch surfing throughout the country. Back in Taiwan, Hsu wrote his thesis on 19th-century Ukrainian nationalism and began plotting his return.
Hsu says there are similarities in the tragedies that beset artistic life in both Ukraine and Taiwan in the 20th century. During the White Terror period in Taiwan under the Kuomintang, which began in the late 1940s, artists and writers were among the thousands of victims of repression, says Hsu. This, he says, is analogous to the Executed Renaissance, a generation of Ukrainian-language literati exterminated by the Soviet regime 20 years earlier.
Since the 2022 invasion, humanitarian assistance has engendered goodwill toward and increased interest in Taiwan among Ukrainians. Cooperation in areas such as smart agriculture, drone technology and recognizing disinformation has blossomed, and cultural exchanges have provided respite from doom and gloom reporting, showing there is more to the relationship than an alliance of plucky underdogs. “As a student, I longed to find people to polish my Ukrainian [with], but there were only 10 or 15 living in Taiwan,” says Hsu. “Now there’s a community of around 300, with initiatives, events and gatherings.”
To realize his plan to return to Ukraine, Hsu took an alternative path. While classmates chose careers in Taiwan’s foreign ministry, the absence of official Taiwan-Ukraine ties made that route a dead end. Instead, Hsu took up a role with Taiwan’s quasi-official trade body, TAITRA. Eight years after his first visit to Ukraine, Hsu was appointed director of TAITRA in Kyiv. It was in this capacity that he approached Pryzynchuk at Arsenal, describing how he recommended “The Stolen Bicycle.” “She loved it,” he says.
Snapping up the rights, Pryzynchuk found an experienced translator, but he was not comfortable with the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan. Given the difficulty of the text, extra assistance was required. Having completed a second master’s degree in translation studies, Hsu stepped in.
Aside from structural and thematic complexities, Wu’s novel features Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, English and Tsou — another of Taiwan’s Indigenous tongues, with around 4,000 speakers. All but one of these belong to the Austronesian language group — the world’s most widespread language family. Since the family’s primary groups are all found on Taiwan, current scholarship on the spread of Austronesian languages favors an “Out of Taiwan” theory.
Although the Formosan languages, as they are known — after the old, Portuguese name for Taiwan — lacked writing systems, in 2005, Taiwan’s Council of Indigenous Peoples introduced romanization for each of the 16 languages. Since then, efforts to develop written language have enjoyed limited success, and most Indigenous writers use Chinese characters.
The Austronesian languages predate by several millennia those of Taiwan’s Han Chinese, who arrived en masse under the Dutch East India Company’s partial colonization of Taiwan between 1624 and 1668. These settlers spoke Minnan — commonly known as Taiwanese — and Hakka, which has five recognized dialects in Taiwan. Mandarin Chinese, which is widely, if controversially, known as “guoyu” (national language), was barely spoken until the Kuomintang took power in the second half of the 20th century.
An ethnic Hakka who is keenly aware of Taiwan’s rich sociolinguistic heritage, Hsu hopes that translations of works such as “The Stolen Bicycle” will highlight Taiwan’s multicultural history, free from associations with China. “This novel showcases to outsiders and even Taiwanese themselves that Taiwan’s history can be understood in a way that is entangled with world history,” he says. “Not just the stereotypes we always hear about the ‘other China.’”
For Grayhawk, the Taipei-based literary agency that sold the rights for “The Stolen Bicycle” to Safran, the considerations are practical, with emphasis on commercially viable works targeting general readership. While Wu’s novel and others such as Kevin Chen’s bestselling “Ghost Town” — which Hsu and Pryzynchuk also collaborated on — might have a Taiwanese flavor, they communicate universal themes and concerns. “It’s not always about specifically Taiwanese values,” says Grayhawk Vice President Jade Fu, “but what Taiwan looks like now, rather than 30 years ago.”
Emphasizing Taiwan’s present-day realities has also motivated Polish literary translators to take on the work, despite outmoded perceptions and historical inaccuracies that have long clouded Polish scholarship on the nation.
Last year, Wei-Yun Lin-Gorecka, a freelance translator of Polish literature into Chinese, published “The Keys of the World,” a Chinese-language cultural history of Taiwan-Poland relations. Part of the book focuses on the peculiar phenomenon of locations in Poland nicknamed “Taiwan.” These places, Lin-Gorecka observes, are generally remote, rainy or close to water. Some have associations with poverty and instability, which can be traced to post-World War II reports about Taiwan in Eastern Bloc countries.
Through her work, Lin-Gorecka had hoped to improve understanding of Taiwan in Poland, but after more than a decade, she calls for “a two-sided dialogue.” Taiwanese, she observes, are failing to convey their identity. They must “speak out [on] what they think, and who they are” if Poles are to see them clearly, “not through a glass, darkly,” Lin-Gorecka says, referencing Corinthians 13:12. This knowledge, she emphasizes, cannot be taken for granted.
“Many Taiwanese like to think the world cares about Taiwan and that they don’t need to explain in English or other languages what Taiwan is,” she says. “It’s nonsense. How would the world know, if Taiwanese don’t speak out?”
Polish attitudes in academic and literary publishing toward Taiwan have been shaped by the faculty of Oriental Studies at Warsaw University, popularly known as Warsaw Sinology, since it was established in 1932.
The thinking and language remain tethered to Cold War binaries: the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name) versus the People’s Republic of China, Free China versus Communist China, the real China versus the other China.
“They have never discerned between Taiwan and China,” says Olimpia Kot. A sinologist and former research assistant at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s premier research institute, Kot also spent seven years working on cultural diplomacy projects at the Polish Office in Taipei. She is currently a senior project coordinator for the Czech-based European Values Centre for Security Policy, which in 2022 became the first European think tank with a permanent office in Taiwan.
“To Warsaw Sinology, it is Chinese-language literature and there is nothing more to it,” says Kot. “Fortunately, there have been great alternative sources of Taiwanese literature in Polish, not only of Han writers but also Indigenous writers.”
One example is a short story collection from 2023 that translates as “Taiwan on the Tip of the Tongue.” Representing a collaboration between the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, Taipei’s Soochow University and the University of Torun in Poland, the volume was edited by Maciej Gaca, a sinologist and former director of the Polish Office in Taipei. Gaca, who founded and served as the first director of the Polish Institute in Beijing, promoting Polish culture in China, is familiar with the fusty perspective that hampers treatments of Taiwan in Polish academia.
Given his experience on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and understanding of the “traditionalist approach to classical Chinese studies,” Gaca is measured in his criticism of the old guard. “I don’t like to politicize any problem, particularly literature,” he says. “But it’s always in the background whenever I speak publicly about [Taiwan] literature or culture.”
Although attitudes have shifted, scholars still struggle to afford Taiwan agency, continuing to define it in relation to China and Chineseness. Like Hsu, Gaca draws parallels with Ukraine in this respect. “It’s a kind of uniqueness,” he says, “but firmly within the Chinese cultural scope.”
An example is “Taiwanese Exceptionalism,” a collection of English-language essays by Polish scholars, which perpetuates the characterization of Taiwan as a “unique entity” within a “divided state.” In a piece for The Reporter, a Taiwan-based independent news website, Lin-Gorecka lambastes the assertion by political scientist Krzysztof Kozlowski that “Taiwanese civil society does not meet the standards of established Western democracies.”
Such a notion would indeed surprise anyone with firsthand knowledge of nonprofit organizations and activism in Taiwan. However, as both Gaca and Lin-Gorecka note, Taiwan’s authorities bear responsibility for the problems with “Taiwanese Exceptionalism.” The book was published with support from the Taiwan Studies Center, which was established by the Ministry of Education in 2016 at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University.
In contrast, “Taiwan on the Tip of the Tongue” adopts a very different approach, says Gaca, exploring the “inevitable, ongoing, expanding process of national identity in Taiwan.” In a manner reminiscent of another Wu Ming-yi novel, “The Man With the Compound Eyes,” one story situates Taiwan at a pivotal juncture in Indo-Pacific and world affairs. Whereas Wu’s eco-fantasy depicts an environmental refugee from a mythical island who reaches Taiwan’s shores, the climate migrants in Huang Chong-kai’s story are from Tuvalu, one of three Pacific island nations to officially recognize Taiwan.
The story, which was untitled in the original 2017 Chinese version and bears the Polish name “Emptiness,” imagines Tuvaluans resettled on Taiwan’s east coast after their country is submerged. Ostensibly, the tale is about the marriage of a Taiwanese man to a Tuvaluan refugee, but the idea of Taiwan and Tuvalu merging to help the former gain de jure independence forms a backdrop.
If such a suggestion sounds far-fetched, it was raised 10 years earlier in a letter to Taiwan’s Chinese-language Liberty Times, apparently influencing Huang’s narrative. In his 2021 novel “The Formosa Exchange,” Huang takes such ideas in a different direction, imagining the transposition of the populations of Taiwan and Cuba.
Some analysts are unimpressed by the “Emptiness” parable. Jess Marinaccio, an Asia-Pacific expert who worked for Tuvalu’s embassy in Taiwan and later as an adviser to the Polynesian island’s government, notes that Tuvalu, its people, and their concerns are peripheral to the plot. This reflects Taiwanese understandings of Pacific allies that foreground Taiwan’s international status and environmental concerns, Marinaccio argues. “The intertwining of Tuvalu with Taiwanese sovereignty issues via climate change also shows how Taiwan’s fraught national status affects its imaginings of allies,” she writes.
Still, for Gaca, the story was an ideal channel for conveying Taiwan’s relevance while eschewing portrayals of the country as a pawn in U.S.-China relations. Published alongside an anthology of literature from Taiwan, which guides readers from Indigenous oral traditions through to contemporary works, “Taiwan on the Tip of the Tongue” reveals a multifaceted Taiwan seldom seen in Poland.
The power of literature to change perceptions should not be underestimated, Gaca believes. “It helps when you have a physical book that is accessible to readers in their language,” he says. “Without the engagement of editors, translators and people who understand Taiwan, it won’t work.”
Yet literary exchanges alone will not substantively alter relations between Taiwan and countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Like all but 12 countries in the world, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Poland do not enjoy official diplomatic relations with Taipei. With this unlikely to change soon, Taiwan will hope that expanding cultural, economic and civil society ties will eventually render the lack of political normalization irrelevant.
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