Chinese illustrator Xiong Liang is widely regarded as a pioneer of Chinese picture books. Wholly self-taught, his ink wash paintings are inspired by, among others, the 17th-century painter Xiao Yuncong, the ninth-century painter Guan Xiu, as well as William Blake’s late 18th-century paintings and prints. Xiong made his English-language picture book debut in 2005 under the name Kim Xiong with The Little Stone Lion (Heryin), also called the first Chinese picture book to achieve success internationally. PW called it a “quiet elegy to village life in China,” and praised its “spare and whimsical illustrations” at the time.
Since then, Xiong has published more than 70 books, mostly in his native country, and, in 2018, he became the first Chinese artist to be shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to an illustrator of children’s books. In 2020, he was nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, given in honor of the beloved Swedish children’s author.
This September, Brooklyn-based Archipelago Books’ Elsewhere Editions imprint is publishing the first of several picture books by Xiong, Take a Walk with the Wind, translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts.
Elsewhere Editions director Emma Raddatz, who acquired the rights to publish Xiong’s books in the U.S., said she learned of his oeuvre through the dossiers that accompanied his three Andersen Award nominations. “I was enchanted by his illustrations, and also by the specificity of his process, she said. “His brilliant body of work traverses calligraphy, woodblock prints, ink wash, and other forms. He works with pigments created by hand—with names like cinnabar, malachite, and muddy gold—and rice and silk-paper.”
Take a Walk with the Wind is a nature-centered story about a mythical miniature being called a Treeling who takes a disruptive “walk with the wind.” On each spread, Xiong’s paintings introduce the reader to animals that are swept up by the wind’s might. Bending bird legs, flapping wings, a pony’s wild mane, boulders and stones all quiver and fly in the wind’s wake. In its review, PW wrote: “Meditative depictions of the fanciful relationship cast an atmospheric spell.” Xiong’s illustrations are full of movement and spontaneity, Raddatz added, but are simultaneously precise and intimate. “There are surprising moments of stillness just as a great gale blows by, or the wind fiddles with rushes on the surface of the water,” she said. “He really captures both of these states, and evokes the feeling of being in a natural world that both quiets and overwhelms.”
Garcia Roberts, a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese, who previously translated Cao Wenxuan’s Feather for Elsewhere Editions, likewise did not know Xiong’s work, but was struck by the beauty of his art, and praised his “wonderful, evocative paintings in this kind of modernized mashup style. There are clear references to classical Chinese painting, but it’s extended into the present day. And the text also mirrors that. Take a Walk with the Wind comes out of a classical Chinese text and ends with a classical Chinese poem. The artwork is looking both into the past and into the future.”
The challenge of translating picture books generally, Garcia Roberts said, is that the text needs to work on two levels: to be read on the page and to be read aloud. “It needs to sound good in the mouth of the reader and in the ear of the listener,” she said. As a practice, she incorporates aspects of a text’s origin language into her translation. “The term ‘Treeling’ is a tangential translation of a Chinese term that refers to an existing body of folklore that I couldn’t really translate directly into English because we don’t have the exact same folklore,” she explained. “But we went with ‘Treeling,’ an existing word in English, because the ‘ling’ [syllable] is similar to the sound vocabulary of Chinese. There’s a nod to the sounds of Chinese, even if it’s not exactly the same.”
Raddatz is excited for new readers to know and appreciate Xiong as his compatriots do. “He is regarded as one of the most important living illustrators in China,” she said.
Garcia Roberts takes a wider view: she believes that children’s literature in translation is a necessary and worthy endeavor. “These are stories that connect to the primal universal state of childhood, but give us the particularities of a different culture’s experience and approach to that,” she said. “We have so many stories of brave girls heading into the forest. This [book] felt both familiar and new in an intriguing way and made me want to spend my time translating it. I hope it makes children want to spend their time reading it.”
Take a Walk with the Wind by Xiong Liang, trans. from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts. Elsewhere Editions, $19.95 Sept. 30 ISBN 978-1-962770-26-2
