Translating and literary agenting: Anna Holmwood’s Legends of the Condor Heroes

ABSTRACT

The role of literary agents in translation is intriguing yet under-researched. The mechanism of literary agenting vis-à-vis the initiation and promotion of translated literature is unexplored. This essay attempts to fill the gap by analyzing how Anna Holmwood, the principal translator and co-literary agent of Legends of the Condor Heroes, has initiated and promoted the translation. It first lays out how Holmwood’s professional habitus as a literary agent was prototyped and developed. Drawing on firsthand materials such as email exchanges, speech transcriptions, interview records, and agent reports, it then examines how Holmwood’s professional habitus empowered her to act as the initiator (selecting the book to be translated, signing the agenting contract, pitching, recommending co-translators, and titling the volumes) and sales promoter (coining the tagline ‘A Chinese Lord of the Rings’ and promoting the book on BBC) of the translation project, and recounts the process by which this translation came into being. This essay endeavors to refresh our understanding of literary agenting of translation and to foster the conjunction of translation studies and publishing research.

KEYWORDS:

• Literary agenting
• professional habitus
• translation publishing
• Anna Holmwood
• Peter Buckman
• Legends of the Condor Heroes

Acknowledgments

This paper is based on my PhD thesis at Lingnan University of Hong Kong. I am particularly grateful to Professor Rachel Lung and Professor Darryl Sterk for their valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments which improved the exposition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The parties involved consented to the use of their materials in this study.

2 MacLehose Press is the original publisher of the translation, and it is mainly responsible for the British market; St. Martin’s Press is the secondary publisher and is mainly responsible for the American market.

3 Peter Buckman is notable for having discovered and represented Vikas Swarup, the Indian author of Q & A, which is filmed as Slumdog Millionaire. His clients also include renowned authors such as Georgette Heyer and Alex Rogers. Buckman started the Ampersand Agency in 2003, and before that he was on the editorial board of Penguin Books (official website of The Ampersand Agency: https://theampersandagency.co.uk/about).

4 The records are transcribed from Holmwood’s speech Bringing Chinese Martial Arts Battles to Life in English at National Taiwan University, Taipei on 7 October 2014. The speech was recorded by Darryl Sterk.

5 This document was obtained from Buckman, and its use in my research was consented to by both Buckman and Holmwood.

6 As a matter of fact, it is Liang Yusheng (梁羽生) who published the first ‘new school’ wuxia fiction Longhu Dou Jinghua (‘龙虎斗京华’) (Dragon and Tiger Fighting in the Capital), and is widely hailed as the founding father of modern wuxia fiction (e.g., Hamm, 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Project of the Ministry of Education, P.R.C. (Project No. 18XJC740001).

Notes on contributors

Hong Diao

Hong Diao is Associate Professor of translation at Chongqing Technology and Business University. He completed his PhD program at Lingnan University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Jin Yong wuxia translation, translation history, and corpus linguistics. His work on Jin Yong wuxia translation has been accepted for publication in Across Languages and Cultures and Publishing History among others.