The translator championing Chinese women writers for English-language readers around the world
- With 11 novels published, Nicky Harman hopes to promote contemporary Chinese literature
- She studied Chinese at university and made her first trip to the country in 1974
Country girl: I grew up in the village of Dauntsey, in rural southwest England, where my parents were farmers. At the age of 12, I was sent to a boarding school in south Wiltshire. I was rather lonely but there was one major compensation: it gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn languages.
My French teacher was inspirational. She was from Adel, outside Leeds, and spoke French with a strong Yorkshire accent. But she made Racine’s tragedies and Mérimée’s Carmen come alive in a way that I’ve never forgotten. I also did Italian and Russian, and was determined to be able to speak and read them.
I remember I tackled Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. It was challenging for someone with only GCSE Italian but even though I struggled to understand it, it opened a window into another world for me.
Learning Chinese: I had rheumatic fever at age 13 and was off school for months. My parents got a retired schoolteacher to tutor me, and she brought me books about the Silk Road. Reading about Central and East Asia immediately had me hooked. Then when I was applying to university, an uncle suggested Chinese was the up-and-coming language. He was almost half a century ahead of his time but I didn’t know that. I decided Chinese was for me.
Joining the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) gave me my first chance to take a trip to China. I couldn’t wait to see this country I’d been studying for four years
The University of Leeds was the only choice back then for a course completely focused on the living language as opposed to classical Chinese (then taught at Oxford and Cambridge universities). Doing a degree in Chinese from scratch was extremely hard work. There were a certain number of characters to learn every day.