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short answer: broken wings. happy dreams which you can get on amazon since they published it but nowhere else, more fun, trash pickers in xi'an. turbulence which grove put out in 2013, same translator, but hard to find. also earthen gate, part of a ruined city and white nights xi'an trilogy, great novel, translation lacking, but necessary if you want more ruined city vibes.
long answer: for 25 years while jia pingwa was at his most productive, nothing was translated. the author wasn't interested in moving the rights and there wasn't much interested in purchasing the rights. after ruined city came out, he was mostly cut off from the rest of the world and was basically blacklisted, and then after that, there was minimal interest from publishers in the west, so... you had turbulence in 1991, reissued by grove in 2003. it's an early novel, before ruined city, very different vibe. right after ruined city, five jia pingwa books suddenly make it into translation. jia was pushed by his people to make a go of it in english. most of the books are not very good. by next year, there will be eight jia pingwa novels in translation, since 2016, with seven different translators, through four different publishers, and there's been no real attempt at either quality control or promotion. jia is the most important chinese novelist of the last fifty years, read by hundreds of millions, but will probably never find much of a readership in english (french, swedish, spanish, much more hopeful).
so, after ruined city, there was carlos rojas' translation of the lantern bearer, which is a later novel, about a plucky female civil servant out in the countryside, but it's not very good, translated by an academic, riddled with strange errors (not like, quibbling about a translation errors, but errors in the english-language text), typos, and other problems. it was put out by a publisher called cn times, whose other books include mainly books about xi jinping, "china renaissance," "great power strategy," and also a book by a tampa cigar aficionado with recipes for cocktails that appear in pulp novels. then happy dreams released by amazoncrossing, which we discussed further up this thread. fun book! good translation! when the original came out in chinese in 2007, it was his most accessible and least dense book and reintroduced him to a new readership. it's about trash pickers in xi'an. definitely look this one up, if you can. after that, there was the broken wings translation, which i do think is very good. the cover design is shocking. (i hate the title, too. it was originally titled 极花 or "the pole flower" and translated as la flora extrema in spanish by its mexican publisher.)
there's also a translation of a much earlier book, put out this year, earthen gate, which is part of a trilogy of sorts with ruined city and white nights (untranslated). unfortunately, it came out on a small press who did no marketing. i tried to ask for a review copy, got turned down, offered to buy one, and they told me, "why bother reviewing it at all? we're not even selling it." it was done by two chinese translators, who did a surprisingly good job. although it's clearly the work of someone not a native speaker of english, it's idiosyncratic language is kind of a plus, if you can get into it. this follows ruined city pretty well, same setting, same concerns, about a village on the outskirts of xi'an (or xijing) which is being swallowed up by the city, local residents' attempts to have the village protected as "cultural heritage," basically turned into a museum, while other residents abandon ship and rush to make a living in urban xi'an. this is one of jia's best novels, not one of his best in translation, but i think it's worth checking out, if you want that ruined city vibe.
next year, there is a translation of jia's 2005 later period masterwork qinqiang coming, also through amazoncrossing, which should be okay! a thicc epic, clocking in at around half a million words, setting is a village in the late-1990s, slowly losing its vitality and identity, the city drawing away its young people... also master of songs another late rural novel is coming, too, often considered one of jia's most political novels, sweeping history of modern china-type novel. and possibly jia's cultural revolution novel ancient kiln.
― XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxXxxxx (dylannn), Tuesday, 16 July 2019 21:25 (four years ago) link
four years pass...