Translation as Divination: Translating Naomi Sím’s Emerald Orchid Love Letter

Taiwanese writer Naomi Sím’s short story, Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭 ê 情批 (Emerald Orchid Love Letter) pivots around what may at first seem to be a curious question: what language do the gods speak? In the story, originally written in Tâi-gí (台語) or Taiwanese (here, I will use the two terms interchangeably), the narrator, a young writer from Taiwan, finds a strange tumour in her mouth. The tumour that grows and shrinks alarmingly: when she speaks Tâi-gí, it dwindles to a pimple, but when she speaks English or Mandarin, it grows. The narrator heads to the doctor, and the medic says they will excise the tumour, but her grandmother has other ideas. She suggests they go instead to ask a goddess—the Emerald Orchid Má-chó͘¹ (翠蘭媽 Chhùi-Lân-Má)—for help. So grandma and the narrator hop on a scooter and head to the temple to see Má-chó͘ (Mazǔ in Mandarin). What unfolds there brings together a potent cocktail of colonial history, comedy, dreams, religion, prophecy, the politics of language and, ultimately, translation.

Sím’s story was commissioned in late 2024 for inclusion in the short story collection, Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic (Stevens and Buckingham). The collection, edited by myself and the writer Hannah Stevens, explores parallel experiences of language minoritisation and survival in both Taiwan and Scotland. For the collection, we commissioned original stories in Taiwanese and Scottish Gaelic, and collaboratively translated between four languages: Taiwanese, Mandarin, English and Gaelic. As well as being editor on the project, I was a co-translator of two stories in the collection—one by Naomi Sím, and one by Kiú-kiong 玖芎—from Taiwanese into English.

Of all the stories in the collection, Sím’s is the one that engages most directly with questions of language and translation. Taiwan is a multiply-colonised nation, where some are old enough to have seen two colonial languages imposed on them—first Japanese, and then Mandarin (Hsiau; Wu). Sím reads questions of language and translation within this colonial and postcolonial context. The title of her story, Chhùi-Lân ê Chêng-Phoe 翠蘭 ê 情批, dramatises this context: the name of the fictional village in the story, Emerald Orchid Village—Chhùi-Lân Chng 翠蘭庄 in Taiwanese, and Cuì-lán Zhuāng in Mandarin—turns out to be a name imposed by the colonial nationalist regime, supplanting the village’s earlier, and distinctly earthier name, Chhùi-Nōa Chng 喙瀾庄, or Saliva Village. This change of name—which is both a prettification and a literary Sinicization of the original name—masks both the village’s original identity, and the colonial violence that has effaced it. However, Sím also goes further to embed these historical questions within a broader set of relationships that extend conceptually beyond the human realm. Her story pivots around the idea that the gods are marginalised in Taiwan precisely because they do not speak the colonial language of Mandarin. In this way, the question “what language do the gods speak?” becomes simultaneously a question about how to read Taiwan’s history of linguistic colonisation, and a question about how we are to communicate with the gods. In other words, it becomes, at least in part, a question of divination. Here, I intend to draw on the experience of translating Sím’s conceptually rich story to argue that this connection between translation and divination is not accidental, and that it may be both fruitful and efficacious to see translation as a divinatory practice.

How are we to speak with the gods? In Taiwanese culture, it is understood that gods, deities, and ancestors (and ghosts too) may sometimes spontaneously make their desires known, or deliver important intelligence, through dreams. But more often than not, the advice of these not-exactly-human entities is solicited through various forms of divination. Taiwan is home to a bewildering array of divinatory procedures, and such practices are not considered unusual, nor are they seen as particularly exotic. Instead, for many, divination is a part of the repertoire of decision-making that runs through everyday life. Anthropologist Stéphanie Homola points out that divination “is so commonplace in Taiwanese society that anyone, interested or not, is bound to have come across it” (“Pursue Good Fortune” 131). Not all Taiwanese divination traditions are conceptualised as communication with the gods. Homola makes a distinction between those practices that consist of “explicit efforts to communicate with divinities or ancestors” (“Pursue Good Fortune” 125), and those, such as palmistry, I Ching divination, and the increasingly popular tarot, that “do not require any interaction with supernatural entities,” but that instead, “aim at understanding the powers and processes that rule the world.” The latter are referred to as “fate calculation” (sǹg-miā 算命), and I’ll return to these towards the end of this essay. But it is the former practices that are more directly related to Sím’s story: divination by “asking the gods” (mn̄g-sîn 問神).

Communicating directly with the gods in Taiwan is not straightforward, and thus requires mediation. There are at least two ways this may happen. The first is through temple spirit mediums, or tâng-ki 童乩, who undergo possession by the gods, thereby allowing the gods to speak. Spirit mediumship is found almost everywhere in Taiwan. In a typical session, a medium, after becoming possessed by the god, will speak in a strange, hybrid language conceptualised as being either in part or whole the language of the gods themselves. This “gods’ language” may also be blended with elements of Tâi-gí (Jordan, Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors 76-77). Given that these mediumistic utterances are difficult to understand, the services of a toh-thâu 桌頭, or temple interpreter (the name literally means “head of the table”), are often required to further translate the god’s words into Taiwanese (Chao 130). The second method is through using “moon-blocks”—in Taiwanese, poa̍h-poe 跋筶 (Pas). These are crescent-shaped blocks of wood, flat on one side and curved on the other so they somewhat resemble croissants. Unlike spirit mediumship, divination with poe does not require the services of a professional. Anyone can stop by a temple, make offerings to the gods, and put a question. The precise procedure differs from temple to temple but, in outline, is usually something like this. First, you make offerings of incense and introduce yourself, giving your full name and address, date of birth, zodiac sign, and information about your family and ancestors.² Then, you put a question to the god, and throw the blocks to see if the god is willing to answer. A “yes” (siūⁿ-poe 聖筶) is indicated by one block falling flat side down, and one flat side up. Both blocks falling flat side down (im-poe 陰筶) indicate “no”—in this case, the god’s refusal to answer. And if both blocks fall curved side down, it means the god is laughing (chhiò-poe 笑筶), an ambiguous response open to multiple interpretations. Usually, three consecutive siūⁿ-poe judgements are required before a question is approved, making the chance of approval roughly one in eight. After approval of the question, you draw at random a numbered bamboo stick (chhiam 籤) from a nearby container, place it on the altar, and ask three times whether this is the right selection. If it is not, you draw another, and the procedure repeats. Eventually, you have a chhiam the god is happy with. Now you can go to a nearby cabinet, open a little drawer with a number corresponding to the number on the chhiam, and take out a divinatory verse as an answer, written in Chinese characters in Classical style (Hatfield). This slip too requires interpretation: some busy temples will employ an official to help you make sense of your divinatory judgement. Or, as in the Grand Mazu temple (大天后宫) in Tainan, there may be a publicly accessible booklet that you can consult for further illumination.

By way of example, here is a divination (figure 1) I received from the Anping Kaitai Mazu temple (安平開台天后宮, An-pêng Khui-tâi Thian-hiō-kiong in Taiwanese). The top gives the name of the temple, while beneath is the number of the chhiam (in this case 47), and the related divinatory verse. At the bottom, there are more specific judgements relating to matters such as fame and success, sickness, official positions, agriculture, marriage and so on.

As a procedure, poe divination can be long-winded. David Jordan writes that, “as any worshipper knows, it sometimes takes a long time before you can get a god to agree to something” (“Taiwanese Poe Divination” 116). And throughout this process, the petitioner is engaged in chains of translation and interpretation. The language of the gods is translated by the poe into yes/no answers, which are then translated into a particular chhiam in Classical Chinese, which must in turn be further interpreted by the reader, so the petitioner can make sense of the text and what it means for them. Tâng-ki spirit medium divination involves similarly complex chains of interpretation. It requires a toh-thâu to translate between the language of the gods and Taiwanese, after which further hermeneutic effort is required to work out what all of this means. Divination is always translation: this is true for divination traditions from the Delphic Oracle in Ancient Greece, to African spider divination (Zeitlyn, Mambila Divination). Interpreting divinatory judgements involves taking a source text—often obscure and difficult to parse—and drawing meanings from it that may be put to work within the target domain of the everyday. As David Zeitlyn argues, “when analysing actual processes of forecasting or divining, it may help to approach them as sequences of putative translations, or discussions of suggested translations” (“Divination and Ontologies” 145).

In many Taiwanese temples, the working language for divination is Tâi-gí. This is also the language spoken by most of the old folks hanging out under the cool of the temple eaves, particularly in Taiwan’s south. It is the language you hear spoken by the snack sellers outside the temple gates, the language of worship, spells, and incantations. And is widely acknowledged as being the best language for speaking to the gods. And if the gods—speaking through the mouths of tâng-ki—deign to mix human languages with the own tongues, it is Taiwanese, not Mandarin, they favour. When toh-thâu comes to translate this hybrid speech, again, it is usually into Taiwanese. Sím, whose maternal grandfather was a toh-thâu, argues that Tâi-gí is central to the smooth operation of this cycle of communication between humans and gods. “One day [when asking questions of the gods in Mandarin] I was getting negative poe,” Sím told me. “But then I switched to Taiwanese, and we found we could communicate effectively.”³

Initially, given that my Mandarin is still significantly better than my Taiwanese, I had planned to translate Sím’s story from the Mandarin version—provided by Sím’s fellow writer, Kiú-kiong—rather than direct from Tâi-gí. But I began to worry that, in this story about the hegemony of Mandarin, working from the Mandarin version risked betraying the story’s fundamental argument (and perhaps also risked upsetting Má-chó͘, the story’s divine protagonist). After some discussion with the author, we decided I should attempt translating to English directly from Tâi-gí. I settled down with my Taiwanese dictionary, and got to work. Over the following weeks, between us, Sím and I refined and tweaked not only the English drafts, but also the original Taiwanese, in a process of back-and-forth dialogue. And as this process went on, I was drawn more deeply into the world of the story. Gradually, it became apparent to me that, to translate effectively, I needed to engage in deeper dialogue not just with the text and its cultural contexts, nor with the author, but also with the story’s presiding deity: Má-chó͘.

The goddess Má-chó͘ was first brought to Taiwan by seafaring settlers from Fujian in the late 16th Century. Today, she is Taiwan’s most widely worshipped goddess, with somewhere around one thousand officially registered temples to her name (Tischer 10). The goddess is omnipresent: you can’t live long in Taiwan without stumbling across her. But it was only after beginning to translate Sím’s story that I actively started to seek her out, throwing myself into what anthropologist Adam Yuet Chau calls the “red-hot sociality” (486) of Taiwanese temple life. At weekends, when I had nothing else to do, I developed the habit of stopping by temples. There, I soaked up the friendly hubbub of firecrackers and fireworks, shouts and yells, clamorous processions of gods taken for circuits in their sedan chairs to the music of reed instruments, drums, and gongs (Zheng). And in the middle of this “hot and noisy” (lāu-jia̍t 鬧熱) social uproar, I began to train myself in the subtle arts of Taiwanese divination. I practiced how to poa̍h-poe 跋筶. I put questions to the goddess, and interpreted the answers I received. I asked about writing, about the wisdom of translating between Taiwanese and Gaelic, and about the art of translation.

All this is not to imply that, through this work of translation, I somehow become a believer in Má-chó͘. My position, instead, is closer to that of Adam Grydehøj, in his auto-ethnographic work on the goddess, when he writes, “I do not believe in Mazu [Má-chó͘], but neither am I entirely sure what belief in Mazu might look like. To take a religion seriously is to act as though its deities exist and have power” (2). This subjunctive “as if” brackets out questions of belief, and allows us to recognise that Má-chó͘ has undeniably real effects in the world. The goddess is, to borrow a term from the anthropologist Geoffrey Samuels, a potentiality within the cultural world of Taiwanese religious life. In his work on Avalokiteśvara’s place in the Tibetan cultural world, Samuels writes:

If we regard Avalokiteśvara not as a deity but as a mode of feeling, cognition, and behaviour, then to say that Avalokiteśvara is present whenever his practice is done is not some kind of a poetic statement but a simple description. Clearly, though, such an Avalokiteśvara has no specific external location or existence, for all that, he may be regarded as more strongly present in particular people or places or within particular rituals […] Avalokiteśvara, in other words, is best seen neither as a person nor as some kind of free-floating spirit entity. He is a potentiality that can be realised within the body and mind of a particular practitioner, and thus at the same time within the whole field of Tibetan Buddhist religious activity. (247-8)

My engagement with Má-chó͘, then, was less a matter of belief, and more a strategic attempt to activate her potentiality, free from any anxieties about her existence or otherwise. This approach is entirely in keeping with the overall context of Taiwanese religious life. Taiwanese gods are, by their very nature, ontologically slippery, and their followers are often unconcerned about fixing them ontologically, or locating them in a way that is coherent or stable.

However, this is not to say that Taiwanese actors, when engaged in temple life, conceive of themselves acting “as if.” For many Taiwanese, including Sím herself, this engagement is committed and fully-felt. But neither is this to suggest that my own “as if” engagement within this context is in any way coolly-distanced, ironic, or some kind of empty performance. Instead, my invocation of the subjunctive “as if” here has a more modest aim: to unseat any assumptions we may have about the centrality of belief within the context of these practices, and to suggest that these practices can function in a way that is, at least partially, independent of strong metaphysical commitments. What coherence or stability there is in Taiwanese temple divination—and there is a lot—comes less from a determinate set of beliefs about the precise nature of the gods, and more from the way their potentiality is realised over and over, within the hot and noisy interactions of Taiwanese religious life. Má-chó͘ comes to life again and again—as a mode of feeling, cognition and behaviour—through temple fairs, religious processions and ceremonies, and through practices such as poa̍h-poe and the making of offerings. And for me, she also came to life in conversations with Taiwanese friends, in my reading and rereading of Sím’s text, and in the work of translating. In entering this milieu, I found myself entering a set of relationships in which Má-chó͘ was conceived of as being a key player; and thus to engage fully, I could not but act “as if” Má-chó͘ existed and had power.

For my main means of communicating with Má-chó͘, I relied on the practice of poa̍h-poe, coming to see this ritualised use of poe divination as part of an array of rules of engagement for translating Sím’s text. Drawing on the work of Roberte Hamayon, Homola argues that divination is analogous to a game. To enter into the game successfully, what is crucial is not belief so much as commitment.

The game-like structure of divinatory procedures explains why many practicing persons feel evident discomfort when questioned whether they truly “believe.” This unease stems from an essential component of play, namely that adherence to its performative aspect should be considered in terms of “entering the game” and not of belief (Hamayon 192–99). According to Hamayon, the performative nature of play requires a personal commitment from the player, but one that is customary rather than spontaneous. In the case of divinatory practices, I would rather qualify such commitment as “procedural.” […] It is the act of performing the technical procedure—either directly when throwing divination blocks or indirectly through a diviner—that triggers the commitment: one is either in the game or out, there is no middle ground (Art of Fate Calculation 26).

Thus, by using the poe in an ongoing process of committed play, Má-chó͘ became a conversation partner in my process of translating and retranslating Sím’s text. And, along the way, divination and translation became increasingly difficult to separate.

If divination is necessarily also a process of translation, we might ask in what ways the reverse also holds. Is translation also a process of divination, of if so, how? Michael Nosonovsky argues that, at root, divination and translation are entirely unalike, claiming: “Divination is based upon random and unpredictable occurrences, while translation is rational and causal” (14). And yet, through translating Sím’s fiction, I have come to see that the two are much closer than they might at first appear. It is no doubt true, as Nosonovsky writes, that divinatory processes are, by design, never fully within our control. Divination always entails an element of unpredictability. We have no say over how the poe will fall, what the spider in Cameroonian spider divination will do next, or which tarot card will be drawn. And yet, for all this, divination is far from being wholly unpredictable: the randomness that is in play takes place within the larger context of a structured, ritualised, and determinate order. This larger context involves astonishingly large doses of predictability. When a god speaks through the tâng-ki, one may not know what they are going to say. But one knows that they will say something, and one understands how the ritual will unfold. Similarly, in poe divination, the chhiam verses, the rituals one follows, the courtesies extended to the gods are all more or less fixed in advance. And it is precisely these fixed forms, although highly restricted, that not just allow but also make possible infinite invention, giving rise to a myriad of different responses.

This interplay between constraint and invention, between the causal and the unanticipated, is also central to translation. There may, perhaps, be elements of translation that are fully, or at least largely, rational and causal. But, as Derrida has argued, uncertainty also plays a significant role. When we translate, Derrida argues, we are far more exposed to happenstance, unreason, and the unexpected than we might at first imagine. Translation, for Derrida, involves “transaction, transformation, travail, travel—and a treasure trove [trouvaille]” (Derrida and Venuti 198). It is a demanding process that, as Batchelor and Wright argue, can “lead to trouvailles that unearth new and unexpected readings, opening the work up not only to the translators themselves but also to their readers” (402). Through the travails of translation, we may find opening up, as Mary Ann Caws writes, moments of surprise, or sudden illumination—the unexpected appearance of new vistas, new clearings (130), or new trouvailles, serendipitous new futures for the text. To anybody who has tried to cast the poe when the gods are having a particularly stubborn day, only to get a final, illuminating insight, this is an experience that will be all too familiar.

If we enter into the game of translation in an attempt at some kind of fidelity to the original, then we quickly become aware that we are bound by certain constraints. In divination, we choose to faithfully engage in (or to invent) a particular form—poa̍h-poe, or spider divination, or what have you—accepting the constraints of this form in the hope of finding something new. In translation, these constraints are set by our initial choices, and by our understanding of what “fidelity” might mean in any particular case. For example, when I came to translate Emerald Orchid Love Letter for an English-speaking audience, my aim was to produce an English-language version that communicated the sheer fun and pace of Sím’s original—the wry humour of her writerly voice—while remaining faithful to the rich context of Taiwanese language, religion, culture, and literature. But as I went further into the translation process, it was with the unsettling sense that this choice was not the only one I could have made. Different kinds of fidelity were possible, each of which would have led to a radically different kind of translation game. Not only this, but even when you are playing the same game with as much fidelity as you can muster, the way things turn out is by no means fixed in advance. That is to say, offered the same brief, other translators would have handled Sím’s text entirely differently. As Canadian poet Erín Moure puts it, in an interview with Words Without Borders: “get six translators to translate the same poem, and you’ll end up with different results; there are always choices to be made even within what we call fidelity” (Chaffee).

To translate is not to embrace strict causality, then; it is to expose ourselves to risks, to chance our arms. This makes Nosonovsky’s claims as to the rationality of translation—in contrast to the irrationality of divination—puzzling. Of course, critiques of divination as inherently unreasonable are nothing new, and they reach back to the ancient world. But, as Peter Struck argues in his work on the cognitive history of divination in Greece, the binary pair reason/unreason is, at best, an unilluminating way to frame questions about divination’s nature and effects. Struck argues that rather than consigning divination to the realm of “unreason,” we could usefully see Ancient Greek discourses around divination as occupying a similar space to contemporary discourses around forms of cognitive intuition. When the Greeks thought about divination, that is to say, they were grappling with the curious phenomenon of what Struck calls “surplus knowledge”: the fact that “our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability” (15). The work—the play—of divination takes place, at least in part, in the shadowy hinterlands of hunches, intuitions, and gut feelings. But divination is not just a set of discourses about surplus knowledge or cognitive intuition. It is also a set of practices that put into place the conditions whereby this surplus knowledge might arise—a spur to invention, generating new hunches that can then be made available to reason. It may do this through apparently unreasonable practices such as the drawing of cards at random, the fall of blocks in a temple, or the wanderings of spiders, but the result is a proliferation of both reasons and reasoning. In this way, divination is better seen as a tool for finding ways to reason differently (see, for example, Zeitlyn, “Divinatory Logics: Diagnoses and Predictions Mediating Outcomes”). And we can fully acknowledge that divination may be a worthwhile enterprise, in that it generates new reasons and new reasoning, without feeling committed to the claim that divination, in itself, is reasonable.

Here, once again, the concept of play can do some useful work. As Ian Bogost argues, play occupies a space belonging neither fully to reason nor to unreason. To play is to “take something—anything—on its own terms, to treat it as if its existence were reasonable” (x). We are back with Grydehøj’s “as if,” where the subjunctive acts as a condition for engagement. Sím herself acknowledges play as a crucial component of her practice of divination. In the evenings, she told me, she will often, “drop by and say hi to my local gods.”⁴ There, she will use the poe to help work through potential decisions in her life. Her practice of divination involves complex chains of reasoning: choosing which god to consult, selecting the appropriate offerings, shaping a question worth asking, reformulating the question if necessary, drawing a chhiam. But the answers the gods provide can never be taken at face value, and they are in turn a spur to further reasoning, further play. In this way, Sím argues, poe divination becomes a “gamified cycle,” one that is neither wholly reasonable nor wholly unreasonable. Instead, acting in this subjunctive space of “as if,” divination can, unreasonably, give rise to reasons that are worth having.

These reasons arise not purely from the fall of the poe, but also from the total context in which the game is played, or what Bogost calls the playground (20-21). The playground of divination is the specific milieu of the temple: the sounds and smells, the incense coiling up to the rafters, the bustle of people coming and going, the stories of the gods, the bodily context of ritual engagement, the palette of feeling, sensation and movement as one goes through the prescribed forms—in fact, the whole gamut of Taiwanese religious life. Sím acknowledges that, when stripped down to the fall of the blocks, poe divination may be “purely mathematics”; but when the game is set back in the context of this playground, “mathematics becomes narrative.”⁵ Here, once again, the parallels with translation are striking. While Nosonovsky places translation (to use Sím’s metaphor) firmly within the realm of mathematics, most translators would acknowledge that in translating, one of the challenges is managing the constant slippage between mathematics and narrative. Even if one attempts the most forensically precise translation, as Caws writes, translators and readers know that one finds, “in the rendering of a single word the explanation of an entire thought, poem, way of being, world” (120). And one reason for this slippage between mathematics and narrative is that, as Moure argues, we never just translate a text, but we translate a reading practice enacted on a text. This reading practice—one might call it a reading game—is always embodied. And in this embodiment, the translator finds themselves both implicated in and sometimes struggling against—ideology, culture and history (My Beloved Wager 173). This, for better or worse, is the translator’s playground. And if, at least in theory, there does indeed exist a mathematics of translation, there is no pure mathematics of translation. Everything is, to use a term from Derrida’s translator John P. Leavey Jr., contaminated, and it is precisely this contamination that makes translation possible. Moure claims: “contamination would equal the sitedness of the translator—i.e., the contribution to the translated text that comes from the translator, from the translator’s experience of reading” (McCance and Moure).

The translator, that is to say, comes to translate a text much as a petitioner comes to stand before the altar of a Taiwanese temple. They bring their preoccupations, questions, stories, habits of body and mind, cultures, histories, and varieties kinds of reason and unreason. And as they into the game, whether divination or translation, they navigate continually between mathematics and narrative, reason and unreason, chance and order, in the hope of writing new futures.

Divination is often imagined as an attempt to read a future already written. But the evidence of Taiwanese temple divination suggests that it is better understood as an attempt to write a possible future. In Taiwanese divinatory traditions, the play of mathematics and narrative—constraint and freedom, reason and unreason—is often theorised in terms of the concept of miā-ūn 命運, or, in Mandarin, mingyun. Homola explains miā-ūn 命運 as follows (using the Mandarin reading of the characters):

Today, fate is designated by the term mingyun, composed of two elements. Ming refers to the unalterable fate assigned at birth. It applies to an individual’s whole lifespan and their deepest tendencies, such as character. Yun refers not to the self, but to the way in which one relates to the environment. This corresponds to the variable aspect of fate that accounts for the vagaries of life. Yun (meaning “movement,” “fate,” or even “luck”) represents the configurations, good or bad, that emerge from the encounter between one’s inner ming and the outside world. (Art of Fate Calculation 122)

Roughly speaking, then, our miā is that which is already fixed in our destiny. What this exactly is, alas, is never entirely clear. In life, we never fully know the rules of the game we find ourselves playing. And yet, it is widely acknowledged in Taiwan that there are strategies that help us understand these rules better through techniques of “miā calculation” (sǹg-miā 算命, suànmìng in Mandarin). These include techniques such as I Ching divination, palmistry, astrology and so on. Ultimately, however, our miā is something we might learn to read, but it is not something that we have the power to write.⁶ Our ūn on the other hand, is changeable, and although we don’t have complete agency in how it unfolds, we have the agency to at least be co-writers in unfolding script, in dialogue with others (gods, our fellow humans, the environments in which we find ourselves etc.). But, even if our miā remains obscure, Taiwanese religious life provides us with another strategy that we can pursue. We can make offerings, cast the poe, and mn̄g-sîn—ask the advice of the gods, enlisting their help. Then, through the guidance that we receive—if we have patience and cunning enough—we can alter our ūn, and write ourselves better futures. And this, perhaps, is potentially a helpful way of understanding the complexities of translation. In seeking fidelity, what are we doing if not seeking ways to read the miā of a text? To search for fidelity is to sǹg-miā 算命. But this attempt to fully understand the parameters within which the text operates is always doomed to remain incomplete: texts are no less ontologically slippery than Taiwanese gods, or—for that matter—our own lives. So we necessarily end up settling for a fidelity we feel we can live with, fixing the rules of engagement, knowing that other forms of fidelity are possible. And yet, this is not the end of things, because fidelity to the miā of a text is only part of the story. We are constrained, always; but the future wide open—both are true. If we are inventive enough—moving between reason and unreason, mathematics and narrative, chance and order—we rediscover that the ūn of the text not determined by its miā, even while it is constrained by it. It is down to us to co-write and co-rewrite the text, in dialogue with the many forces in which we find ourselves enmeshed. And in the space opened up by the game of translation, we invent again and again, bringing the text to new unthought-of futures, in the hope that—as Sím writes in her essay on translating Emerald Orchid Love Letter—we can bring into being “a constellation of love letters scattered across time, awaiting to be read by future generations who will trace the lines we left behind and find the way we once understood the world” (Sím).

Once my translation of Sím’s story was complete, I found myself still not quite satisfied, as if there was still more to be said or more to be done. This was, after all, a story about addressing the gods in a language they did not know. What business did I have translating it into English? If Má-chó͘ struggled with Mandarin, what would she make of English, or Gaelic? And how can we address the imbalance between larger, more dominant, hegemonic languages and smaller, minoritised languages? This debate continued among us as writers and editors throughout the long process of working on the book, and it is a debate that has continued since the book’s publication. Sím herself raises this question in her essay, when she asks, “does promoting Tâi-gí mainly through translations of dominant works risk further marginalising Tâi-gí, and other minoritised languages worldwide?” (“Rosettating Between Minoritised Languages”) Her own response to this is to see this process of bridging minoritised languages through more dominant languages—which she terms “Rosettation,” after the Rosetta Stone—as a both necessary and flawed way of building solidarity. Sím writes as follows:

Ultimately, rosettation is not about achieving perfect equivalence. It is about building a bridge where none existed and accepting the imperfections of translation in order to amplify marginalised voices. In our context, it was also about coming to terms with Taiwan’s linguistic past and imagining a multilingual future. Rosettating stories between Tâi-gí and Gàidhlig not only brought two minoritised languages into dialogue but also sparked critical conversations among readers about memory, fairness, and how we carry meaning across cultural gaps.

This was reassuring to read. But still, I wanted a second opinion. So caught a taxi to the Anping Kaitai temple, to go and speak with Má-chó͘. At the temple, I made all the appropriate offerings, introduced myself in Taiwanese and posed my question. Then I cast the poe.

At first, Má-chó͘ was uncooperative. Perhaps it was my poor Taiwanese. Or maybe she hadn’t got time for my nonsense. I reformulated my question again, with no result. Doggedly, I kept going. Finally, I found a formulation that she was willing to answer: “What do you, Má-chó͘, hope for from the translation of Sím’s story?” Three positive poe. I drew a chhiam and cast the poe again. Again, Má-chó͘ approved of my choice. It was No. 47, the chhiam represented in figure 1 above.

I read through the verse slowly, trying to sound the words out in Taiwanese. “Those in the same boat share the same fate (miā)” (tang chiu kāng miā 同舟共命). Because, whether translators or diviners, we’re all in the same boat. Working between languages and contexts, we are trying to divine some kind of sense, trying to make something new.

Same boat, same miā. But as for our ūn, as for the futures we might co-write… here, there is everything to play for.

And perhaps this is the best place to leave things. Because, as I see it—for the moment, at least—this is Má-chó͘’s last word on the matter.