Posted: April 5, 2013 at 11:12 am
The first two chapters of my translation of Wolong Sheng’s (臥龍生) Escort Banner 《鏢旗》 are now up at Among the Rivers and Lakes. This is a long translation project, but it is going well so far.
You can read the translations here.
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Posted: March 1, 2013 at 1:30 pm
I’m going to be starting a new full-length wuxia translation project soon at Among the Rivers and Lakes. But which novel should I translate? The choices are between these two:
《鏢旗》(Armed Escort Agency Banner) by Wolong Sheng (臥龍生)
OR
《風雲十七劍》(Seventeen Swords of the Winds and Clouds) by Huang Ying (黃鷹)
Which of these two novels do you want me to translate for the forum? Escort Agency Banner is longer, four volumes, published in 1969, but it’s written by Wolong Sheng, one of the most important wuxia writers (top 5 I would say, he created several of the tropes associated with wuxia today).
Seventeen Swords is much shorter, only one volume, but Huang Ying is not as “important” a writer in the wuxia world as Wolong Sheng.
That said, I have not read either of these books yet, so who knows which one is better. I don’t know the plot of Escort Agency. Seventeen Swords seems to be about seventeen assassins who teamed up to wreak havoc among the rivers and lakes, and now three years later three prominent families get together to take them out.
So which will it be? Help me decide by voting in the poll here.
Posted: February 7, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Just a quick post to let you know about a new wuxia short story translation up at Among the Rivers and Lakes. The story is “Friend, Are You Dead?” by Wen Rui’an. Below is a very short excerpt:
The Assassin Circle unexpectedly went public with the order for its next hit, and the news quickly spread to the ears of “Taiping Sect high priest Liang Jinjin.
He knew he had brought this trouble on himself.
He was bold and thought highly of his own skills. He had successfully avoided thirteen assassination attempts, and he eight assassins had died fighting him. Groups including Dead Man Gang, Assassin Group, and Sky Full of Glittering Stars Sect all dispatched assassins, and he encountered them, yet he still wouldn’t die.
So he boasted: “No matter which assassin, none can kill me.”
This sentence was of course made a big noise and brought him great renown.
But he also incurred a lot of enmity.
He certainly knew his statement would cause the Assassin Circle to put out a hit on him.
His words offended and enraged the assassin groups.
When the Assassin Circle put out a hit on someone, they always succeeded, and this time they had issued the order openly, so it was clear they were determined.
The order was for Liang Jinjin to be disposed of within a month. He knew that the Assassin Circle, up to this point, had been impossible to defend against, its methods unpredictable. And the target of the hit, they never knew how they would be taken, or by who. This was the calling card of the Assassin Circle.
Be sure to check out the other Wen Rui’an story translations while you’re there, including “Brother, Lend Me Your Head” and “Cheat”.
Posted: February 3, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Blood and Honor by Chelle Ang is a wuxia novel that is, according to its author, a “martial fantasy set in a fantasy-inspired Qing Dynasty, China, during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor”, though there isn’t anything really fantastic about the story, nor any reason why the story should be set specifically in the year 1793.
The story stars Xiao Meiying, daughter of retired pugilist Xiao Yong, whose wife died some years before after losing the Honor sword. Xiao Yong has its companion, the Blood sword. After a thief enters their home in an attempt to steal the Blood sword, Xiao Meiying, our heroine, leaves home to enter the jianghu in order to find and retrieve her mother’s Honor sword. Someone else is after the Blood sword, however: Pan Lei, a young man who has a past with Xiao Meiying. The two journey separately seeking the similar ends, and eventually meet up in order to rescue Meiying’s father and uncle who have been captured by warlord Yu Tai, who also seeks the Blood and Honor swords.
Blood and Honor is being sold as an ebook only at this time. I don’t know if a print version is planned. I bought the Kindle edition and was immediately annoyed when I discovered there is no table of contents for this ebook, meaning I cannot easily navigate from one chapter to the next, an essential feature for an ebook. So already one strike against the publisher, Northampton House Press. The first strike of many to come, unfortunately.
You see, this book makes it so difficult for the reader to like it because of the many errors throughout, making it look like the manuscript was neither proofread nor edited. The first example of this comes right from the start:
第一章中
Each chapter heading has the chapter number written in Chinese, then in English below that. But the first chapter has a mistake: the 中 character should not be there. And it’s clearly a mistake since the next fifteen chapters are written correctly. But then with chapter 17, it changes again:
十七篇
This is chapter seventeen, but with a different character used for “chapter” and no number indicator (第). Every chapter thereafter is different in some way, yet none of them written correctly:
章十八个, 章十九, 章第二十, 章二十一, 章第二十二, 章第二十三个, 二十四章, and 章二十五
The lack of consistency is disturbing for a published book I paid money for. I don’t know how such a glaring mistake could be made in the first place. Did anyone go over any proofs before is was published?
If that were all then I could chalk it up to an annoyance and move on, but there is much more inconsistency. Given that this is a novel set in China, there are many foreign words used in the book. The author uses the international standard, Hanyu Pinyin, to romanize the Chinese words. She even includes tone marks. Sometimes. You’ll see a Chinese word romanized with tone marks, then later the same word romanized without tone marks. Sometimes the word will be italicized, sometimes the same word isn’t italicized. There is seemingly no method to it at all, making the text look like no one has bothered to proofread it. An egregious error, especially since the publisher page at the end of the book states that:
Northampton House LLC publishes carefully selected and meticulously edited fiction
Well, they didn’t this time, obviously. Even the glossary at the end of the book is not consistently romanized. Some words include tone marks, some do not. Very unprofessional. (more…)
