Hard lives, big dreams

The English version of Happy Dreams, translated by Nicky Harman. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Liu and his friend, Wu Fu, arrive in Xi'an in 2000 from their village and move into a semi-completed building.

Speaking about the book, Nicky Harman, the English translator of the novel, says: "In depicting the life of Happy Liu, Jia Pingwa gives us a fine-drawn character. He is complex and contradictory as all human beings are. And he can be by turn pretentious, engaging, scheming, honest, foul-mouthed, affectionate and unintentionally comic. In many ways, Happy Liu is an unlikely hero, but he wins sympathy, because he is so very human.

"Like what Jia Pingwa says in the postscript... he did a lot of research about migrant workers before writing the novel, but this work is first and foremost a novel, fiction."

During the translation, she says, she came across a lot of big and small challenges. The biggest ones were getting the translation of the dialect and the local color right.

"The story consists of Liu's monologues or conversations with his friends. Chitchat is by nature elusive. So, it's even more difficult to understand what the protagonist was getting at when dialect is added to the mix. In some cases, Jia Pingwa invented his own expressions," she says.

Another difficulty was to find convincing voices for Liu and his friends in English.

"I couldn't let them speak an equivalent English dialect. I couldn't make Happy Liu sound like a Glasgow taxi driver," she says.

When dealing with local food that Jia wrote about in the novel, Harman did a lot of research online. When she sometimes still could not understand things, she would ask Jia for help. The writer would then send her hand-drawn sketches to answer the questions.

She says she enjoyed reading the story of Liu Gaoxing and his friends.

Harman came across the novel in 2008 and immediately empathized with the characters. Then, after several unsuccessful attempts to interest Western publishers, she translated an excerpt for the Guardian in Britain.

But it was not until 2015 that an Amazon China editor, trying to find Chinese literary works for a translation project, spotted the Guardian excerpt and approached Harman to translate the novel.

Happy Dreams is one of the 19 Chinese literary works translated by Amazon into English. Fifteen have been published.

Li Jingze, a Chinese literary critic, says: "They (readers) can now read the story of common Chinese people in Happy Dreams and learn about how they live in a fast-changing society.

"From this point of view, it is the most representative work by Jia Pingwa."