Abstract
Naomi Sím’s Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) language short story, "Emerald Orchid Love Letter" (Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭ê情批) engages deeply with the questions of politics, language and religion in contemporary Taiwan. The plot of the story pivots around the central question of what language the gods speak. In the story, the narrator—caught between Taiwanese, Mandarin and English languages—finds a strange growth on her inside lip. The cure turns out to involve the sea goddess Má-chó͘, and a renewed commitment on the part of the narrator to the Taiwanese language. In this paper, I read the process of translating Sím’s story from Taiwanese to English in the light of anthopological understandings of divination, and the theory and philosophy of translation. In this way, I propose that divination—talking with the gods—shares a number of salient similarities with divination, to the extent that translation may be fruitfully considered as a practice akin to that of divination.
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Recommended Citation
Buckingham, Will
(2026)
"Translation as Divination: Translating Naomi Sím’s Emerald Orchid Love Letter,"
Living in Languages: Vol. 4, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/liljournal/vol4/iss1/5