Yan Lianke in Basque: Notes on translating sensory images

The Basque language, with around 750,000 speakers, of whom the majority reside in Spain and a small proportion in France, is a minority language with a peripheral literature, meaning that Basque does not have a big share in the world market of translated literature. Chinese, a dominant language with millions of speakers, has a similarly small share in the global market of translated literature. The peripheral position of these two literatures means that most translations from Chinese into Basque have so far been indirect, mediated by more central languages such as Spanish, English, and French (the Spanish translations used as source texts are also often indirect translations). The translation of Yan Lianke's Balou Ballad (Balou tiange) is an exception to this trend. Published in 2018 and translated directly from the Chinese by Maialen Marin-Lacarta and Aiora Jaka Irizar, it is one of the few direct translations of Chinese literature into Basque. This chapter examines Yan's poetic language through the analysis of the Basque translation of Balou Ballad. I compare our translation to the English translation by Carlos Rojas, entitled Marrow, published by Penguin in 2015, as a means to highlight the specificities of Yan's sensory images, as well as to emphasize our own choices in Basque. The examples show the multiple sensory images that proliferate in Yan's writing and the Basque translators’ choice to seek creative solutions while remaining as close as possible to the author's style.