Classic Epics of Chinese Literature: Search and Destroy

make sure if you read these, get good translations. and not the abridged versions

As for the rest, these are the ones I've heard are the best. All unabridged, for sure.
Three Kingdoms - Moss Roberts
Outlaws of the Marsh - Sidney Shapiro
Journey to the West - Anthony Wu, although I hear that if one must get an abridged version, to go with Monkey, translated by Arthur Waley
The Scholars - Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang

Do these sound up to snuff, or should I be looking elsewhere?

http://www.chinapage.com/monkey/monkey-eng.html
http://snow.prohosting.com/idaz/west/
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Ginza/6142/

http://www.users.nac.net/bobsabella/West.htm

Not classical, but...tell me about Lu Xun if you've read him.

Search: Journey to the West by Wu Ch'eng-en (aka "Monkey")

This is a wild, epic picaresque story, built around the main character, Monkey, who isn't exactly a monkey, but more of an immortal trickster with superpowers. It has no discernable structure, it just bounces from adventure to adventure, but I found it entertaining. I've never read anything else quite like it.

Wish I'd finished The Water Margins a few years ago.

Anyone read The Scholars in English? As it's less famous than the big four, there's not much in the way of competing translations.

i think i'd rather put jin ping mei/the plum in the golden vase on the list if i had to add a fifth book.

i think i'd rather recommend reading the plum in the golden vase than the scholars.

i also contend that none of these have been suitably translated and even recent translations (like david tod roy's translation of the plum in the golden vase) read like they're straight outta 1935, so clunky and weird, the product of someone that can read a ming vernacular novel and understand the text fully and in important ways but is incapable of writing beautifully in their native language.

When Wu Yüeh-niang saw how much snow had accumulated on the T'ai-hu rockery in front of the spirit screen, she got up from her place, told Hsiao-yü to fetch the tea jar, and proceeded in person to sweep up enough snow to brew some Phoenix Tablet Sparrow Tongue tea from Chiang-nan for the company. = google translate with explanatory with footnotes. but i guess the audience for these translations is not meant to be general readers.

to be fair, this is how google translate treats it.

吴月娘见雪下在粉壁间太湖石上甚厚。下席来，教小玉拿着茶罐，亲自扫雪，烹江南凤团雀舌牙茶与众人吃。

The Wu Yue Niang see snow in the Taihu Fenbi even thick. Under seats, to teach Xiaoyu took Chaguan, personally snow, cooking Jiang
Eat the teeth the Nanfeng group Buxus tea with everyone.

The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xueqin, which I have just started

i regard this the most highly of all the works on the list. and it's a key piece of literature to understand what came after, even up to the present. it's the keystone of chinese literature. i was forced to read this for the first time while trying to figure out jia pingwa. and no translation can do it justice but david hawkes' attempt comes the closest.

(Romance of the) Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

i've never read it but i've been forced to google references to it a few hundred times to figure out what people were talking about.

Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Nai-an

one day, i want to check out the pearl s. buck translation of this, but i've never come across it or made any effort to seek it out. i think all men are brothers is such a great wrong title! i bought a foreign languages press edition of sidney shapiro's translation and that was how i first read it and i fucking loved it. i think it has to be the most referenced on this list, too... but that's a tough call.

Journey to the West by Wu Ch'eng-en

or watch the tv show. i can't believe the arthur waley version is still going around because i find it very dated and sort of lame. i must have read the jenner translation because that's who did the foreign languages press version and those ugly little paperbacks are ubiquitous in the english section of every xinhua store in china. read it and then watch a chinese odyssey, the stephen chow movie because it's a great movie.

The Scholars by Wu Ching-Tzu

i'm not sure if anyone reads this anymore and the only translation i know is the gladys yang one for foreign languages press. i was exposed to it via a michael duke course on satire in chinese literature. i'm not a fan.

The Scholars by Wu Ching-Tzu
i'm not sure if anyone reads this anymore and the only translation i know is the gladys yang one for foreign languages press. i was exposed to it via a michael duke course on satire in chinese literature. i'm not a fan.

Ah, cheers - wasn't sure if it'd be, IDK, a Gulliver's Travels/Candide read or a you-had-to-be-there deal - I'm curious about the Imperial examination, but might be better served reading something nonfictional.

What else did you cover in that course on satire - Qian Zhongshu/Yu Hua/etc, or more classical/vernacular plays &c?

(finally have access to an academic library again after never being able to find anything that wasn't e.g. Waley's Monkey (which I'd guessed was a translation equivalent to Burton's Arabian Nights?); I'd picked up a few of those Foreign Language Press boxes when I was in Europe but that had been the extent of my access)

Not classical at all, but in a post-Outlaws of the Marsh vibe, have you read much Jin Yong et al, dylannn?

one of my chinese lit professors at ubc was christopher rea, who writes a lot about chinese theories of humour and has a new translation of collected qian zhongshu writings out and is really into republican era comic writing and punch-y journals. i'm sure we read yu hua too. it falls well outside of my area of interest but there's lots of contemporary satirical stuff i could recommend.

read the scholars if you have it around.

one thing i dig about, like, journey to the west and outlaws of the marsh is the humour of them... dumb fun slapstick like lu zhishen tearing up a temple and eating dogs and wukong fucking with demons and bajie trying to get pussy and the deeper historical satire that can be glossed over but is sort of interesting once you see what the point of it was.

even dream of red mansions's got some laughs.

but i just hate the mode of satire itself, too, so i'm not to be trusted on the scholars. i don't like it, whether it's boring qing-ming stuff or broad gold toilets and spaceships yu hua or lao she going to mars or qian zhongshu or chan koonchung or WHATEVER. i like despair and bitter polemics.

if you want something else from the same time period roughly, you could check out strange stories from a chinese studio, pu songling ghost stories.

Pu Songling was great in the partial translation I had; Kafka/Borges-length stories are about where my attention span is atm.

Had no idea translator-dudes John Minford & Patrick Hanan were based in NZ for ages, damn.

Need to remind myself to investigate http://mclc.osu.edu/ when I have time.

Copypasta from last year's rolling China thread:

peregrine 2 ----- check out the essay on chinese scifi by kun kun at the start, lots about liu cixin etc. and more peregrine, one of v v v v v v v v v few places to read contemporary chinese fiction in translation by the few people that are in the business of translating it. #6 has brendan okane translating my girl sheng keyi is about as good as this kind of stuff gets (this is me saying: it's okay and i'm excited about it but it's still got the problems that chinese-engl translation often has + it all reads like howard goldblatt + it's a bit boring).

― dylannn, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 10:11 (1 year ago)

Ken Liu's gonna translate the first part of Liu Cixin's Three Body Trilogy

Half-assedly reading Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged & Dung Kai-cheung's Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City atm.

i had a professor that loved qian zhongshu and was unable to instill that passion in me
but he just published a translation of a collection of qian zhongshu's essays and stories: http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/shen.htm

grabbed an In Our Time on Romance of The Three Kingdoms last night, haven't listened yet but might be of interest here.

that was OK, they spent most of the time talking about the printing history of the book, which i'm not particularly interested in. hoped they focused more on the content/cultural aspect of it.

Outlaws of the Marsh probably entertained me more than anything else I've ever read.

NYRB w/a China-related series:
http://nyrevinc.cmail1.com/t/ViewEmail/y/C6E6492E21B3F512/204266847E9197FA6E6039C17E42EE19

New York Review Books is pleased to announce the debut of Calligrams, a new series of writings from and on China. Calligrams will encompass a wide array of poetic masterpieces, classic fiction, thrilling dramas, travel writing, criticism, and histories written by both Chinese and Western writers from antiquity to modern time. The series, made possible by a publishing partnership with the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, is edited by Eliot Weinberger.

Two books into the Hawkes/Minford trans of Red Chamber. P.funny! Random 50s Britishisms for class/status-shorthand (or Latinate things for the monks/nuns) take a bit of getting used to.

wow, this looks like a great project. i'd love to read a good translation of the water margin stories.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/23/wonderfully-elusive-chinese-novel/

Let me put it the other way around. Novels were not the primary language art in imperial China. Measured by volume, xi, translatable as “drama” or “opera,” would be in first place, and measured by beauty, calligraphy or poetry would be. Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily.

Love this - do we have any compilations of poetry knocking around anyone would care to recommend?

http://news.asiaone.com/news/lifestyle/unpublished-english-translation-chinese-classic-dream-red-chamber-found

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/calligrams/products/mirage

"First published anonymously in 1804—its author remains unknown—Mirage is set in Guangzhou (Canton), some decades before the city was overwhelmed by the opium trade and the Opium War. Su Jishi, the adolescent son of the head of the Chinese traders’ association, the men licensed to deal with foreign merchants in the port, is suddenly burdened with responsibility for his powerful family after his father’s unexpected death. More interested in sex than money, Su Jishi learns to navigate between pleasure and commerce as rebellions erupt just outside the city.

At the crossroads of two of the greatest Chinese books—the aristocratic coming-of-age novel The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and the military epic Outlaws of the Marsh—Mirage is panorama of libertines and concubines, lecherous monks and celibate soldiers, corrupt officials and drunken scholars. As entertaining as a bestseller, it is a hectic re-creation of vanished mores and customs, and the life of a Chinese city as it was beginning to discover—and deal with—the rest of the world."

Can't wait for the paperback of Mirage to come out; the hardback at Garden Books in Shanghai is 550RMB.

Mildly curious about the Love Stories and Tragedies from Chinese Classic Operas series, but maybe I'd be better with e.g. NYRB republishing the Chen/Acton/Birch xlation of The Peach-Blossom Fan and reading wiki-style summaries of the rest.

maybe it's my limited interest in pre-republican literature but i don't think i've ever heard of mirage. i went through a few pages of an online version.... i'd flip through a translation.

an interesting note from wikipedia: 清朝统治者为了稳定政权，控制文化，列出了各种各样的禁书，其中有六大禁书，《蜃楼志》为其中之一。六大禁书为：《载花船》、《蜃楼志》、《品花宝鉴》、《闹花丛》、《株林野史》、《绿野仙踪》。6 books that i've never read / aren't translated?

except 《绿野仙踪》 which is the wizard of oz, right?

in the interests of political and social stability, the rulers of the qing maintained control over the cultural sphere and banned various books. mirage was among the six major banned works, which included: "boat of passion" (? only visible translated title), "mirage," "treasured mirror for the connoiseur of flowers," "noise in the shrubs" (just a literal translation but 花丛 = world of brothels), "a rough history of zhulin" (or, dirty stories from zhulin?), "the wizard of oz" (??).

http://www.amazon.com/Ruined-City-Novel-Chinese-Literature/dp/0806151730/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450285333&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3AJia+Pingwa

definitely the modern successor to say dream of red mansions. took almost 25 years but it seems howard goldblatt's translation has been cleared and is going to be published.

Holy shit. Just picked up the original a month back. Lol at fleshy orchid cover, zzz. More info at

http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/2080/ruined%20city

Had been thinking about picking up their Chutzpah! collection.

What translations are thought to be the best for Journey To The West and Warriors of The Marshes? I'm semi familiar with the 2 as tv shows I saw 30+ years ago so would like to read the text.

how many translations are there even? like, still available. i read the wjf jenner translation of journey to the west and i remember the abridged the monkey and the monk anthony c yu version from undergrad introduction to chinese lit class. and i read the sidney shapiro translation of outlaws of the marsh.

i have issues with goldblatt as a translator and the one and the only jia pingwa novel in translation was done by goldblatt and is a disappointment. these issues might be irrational and at the very least he's pushed lots of worthy chinese language books into english translation and won mo yan a nobel prize.

selling feidu as pornographic or something after so long, or... playing up that element of it.... if it helps sell books, but the sex stuff is pretty mild and usually played for laughs. the genius of the book is harder to convey and i'm curious to see how the translation will be received.

feidu chapter 1 part 1 http://jiapingwa.blogspot.jp/2015/01/abandoned-capital.html part 2 http://jiapingwa.blogspot.jp/2015/01/abandoned-capital_27.html

oh also. back in 2008 nicky harman translated an excerpt from gaoxing http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/08/jiapingwa and there were rumors that a translation would be released by penguin. it's a much more accessible book, based on a real acquaintance of jpw http://www.danwei.org/books/the_most_famous_junk_collector.php. a translation never arrived but a new translation is coming and it might beat howard goldblatt's feidu to publication.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/09/amazon-publishing-translated-fiction-amazoncrossing-sales

I've just seen that there appears to be a series of Chinese Classics whose covers appear to be marketed to Children that appeared in 2013 from a brand called Real reads.
http://www.bookdepository.com/Dream-Red-Chamber-Xueqin-Cao/9781906230364
http://d20eq91zdmkqd.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/large/9781/9062/9781906230364.jpg

I just came across them when I was looking to see if there were cheap copies of things available on Book Depository.

now, you should check out the 1987 dream of the red chamber tv series.

i started reading 'dream of the red chamber' / 'story of the stone' years ago, and made it about 600 pages in, before my lack of reading time or intellectual focus got to me. it was pretty great -- in hindsight it vaguely reminds me of gene wolfe's 'book of the new sun,' only, like, good

I'm a fan of the Hawkes/Minford Red Chamber, but it's sort've in the ballpark of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin Proust, eh. I remember comparing some passages between it and some of the FLP or Victorian-era translations (maybe the "I'll fuck your dad" schoolroom quarrel?) and it was so much more alive. Enjoyed the Shapiro Water Margins, read a decent chunk of the Jenner Journey To The West (IIRC yr earlier Waley translations are in the vein of Burton's Arabian Nights).

Yeah, pushing the pornographic side of feidu seems really weird in terms of general literary trends? it's not like there's either a giant readership familiar with, IDK, jin ping mei; it's not exactly like Shanghai Baby/Beijing Doll are that current + obv authorial differences re: marketing; uh did the marketing/reception of stuff like Serve The People! focus on or elide the sex?

Don't really have a high opinion of Doldblatt via you & Y1yan W4ng. when i'm back in NZ, i'm half-interested in interloaning Rewriting in Literary Translation: The Case of Howard Goldblatt's Translations of Contemporary Chinese Fiction which I heard was p.takedown-y for a thesis.

just from memory, without actually checking, lots of the reviews of serve the people mentioned sex + emphasized the political heresy involved with the sex. feidu's sex scenes are weird and maybe more exciting for the suggestion that jpw deleted sections but it's mild compared to the online genre fiction that is 95% of the chinese literary market. when it was officially re-released in 2009, most chinese language reviewers made mention of the sex, which is integral to the novel, but the reputation was no longer a dirty book that people hid behind more respectable volumes on their bookshelf.

i would encourage anyone reviewing the book or seeking a deeper understanding of it to read y1y4n w4ng's narrating china: jia pingwa and his fictional world which has the only serious writing about feidu in english and not buried in academic journals.

it's a good guide too if you want to read it in the original.

yes something should be appearing soon! the funding is from 贾平凹文化艺术研究院--a nonprofit but must be some chinese government funding, right? i'm excited to see what everyone else comes up with because these are astonishingly dense and complex novels.

i'm working on a book for clt/uoklahoma press-- different author-- at the same time and flying thru it compared to the sentence by sentence battle that translating jia has become.

any recommendations on legit online magazines for contemporary fiction?

is the consensus that the goldblatt translation of abandoned capital/ruined city isn't all that good? it's kind of affectless and lightly twee but idk how much that reflects the original

https://twitter.com/GraniteStudio/status/773517865852936192

he had the hardest job in modern translation (all previous attempts that floated around were unimaginably bad) + supposedly wasn't that into it/wasn't impressed with his own work.

as someone about to hopefully publish a jia pingwa translation + knowing the challenges and how much he was paid/work involved, i'm not going to last into it but it wasn't very good, no.

lay into it

what makes jia so difficult to translate? i am hopelessly monolingual so all of this is alien to me

combination of low language-- dialect/levity/local references -- + high -- classical references, admissions to poetry/opera etc. hard to get the tone right. sexuality/earthiness feels hard to bring into english.

long books.
really require extensive footnotes top really get a lot of the layers/references. narrative mode (?) more similar to i dunno a 19th century epic or work of late ming/qing vernacular-- dissimilar from modern western novel in many ways.

thanks, that's very interesting. i would welcome extensive footnotes but i suspect these are not exactly big-budget blockbuster productions.

i typed "profanity" not "levity."

footnotes nearly always discouraged by editors.

http://www.ugly-stone.com/shaanxi-opera/

sweet! had blanked on this revive but y1y4n just fwded me nick's email about the website + talking about an mla conference in ny early 2018 - you going?

cashed in a bunch of book vouchers to order in the gei fei & mirage on nyrb + shenzheners; friend home for xmas from chengdu gave some 90s diary-ish pop lit to read in the original but been a bit lazy w/it.

maybe. any thoughts on the sample? it's tough to grind jpw into english.

i'm reading/translating dong xi right now, another bestseller unknown outside china-- decent writer, often hacky sometimes brilliant.

Half-way through this profile on chinese novelist Yan Lianke. What I love is the way the writer relates most episodes in this encounter to some aspect of Yan's satires of modern day China.

it's a hell of a piece. i love scene with the former party secretary in the old town.
i think we discussed it on the rolling china thread. yan lianke occupies a weird position in the literary bureaucracy inside china but most view his overseas acclaim with jealousy.

I really want to read some of his books next year.

has to be among the least read threads on old ilx, but i always see it at the top with its bookmark.

my translation of jia pingwa's shaanxi opera is coming out probably late this year... the fifth jpw book in like three years, all different translators, crappy publishers printing a hundred copies to get the chinese government subsidy, no reviews or readers, a real mess, but that's how things go sometimes, and this'll be on amazon's translation imprint and flogged hard.

i'll be back in beijing and xi'an from the end of march to mid-april, if anybody's around, too.

in AmazonCrossing? Cool! I will be getting that.

you got it.

amazon is a wicked force but they pay
translators well and promote books.

global capital, it's a mixed blessing

They publish so much translated literature. More than anyone else, i think?

at least in english. in other languages they're mostly cranking out genre fiction and it makes sense i guess. in chinese it's been a book of short stories from shaanxi, lu nei's young babylon, jia pingwa, maybe I GUESS because some prc bureaucrats help choose what amazon gets the rights to. apparently the rates are bad for translators from french or german but global capital, it's a mixed blessing.

What does the translator application entail? Can anyone sign up?

i think it's invitation only but you can submit a title https://translation.amazon.com/submissions. i'm not sure to what extent this supposed marketplace/bid process actually exists because the only title i see up for "bid" is a dutch title (jij zegt het) listed at an opening price of 13k flat fee and 2% royalties. (that rate is much lower than what they're paying for translations from chinese and, based on what the association of literary translators in france's <a href="https://www.ceatl.eu/open-letter-from-association-of-literary-translators-in-france-to-amazoncrossing";>open letter</a> says, not very good at all.)

for me, i queried them with something through that submission thing that they were vaguely interested in but were put off by the rights situation (never clear in china), then, introduced by a a translator that previously worked with them, they made me an offer for something they'd gotten the rights to and negotiated a contract in the usual way.

constantly forget to convert html to bbcode.

it would appear that for languages other than german, french, dutch that the rates they pay are good enough.

maybe originally or eventually, it was or will be part of a scheme to get all those self-published kindle books translated? like, you self-publish a kindle and some guy bids 100 bucks and 50% of royalties to translate your novel into dutch? i really don't know what they're up to.

Chuck Tjingle

Pounded in Das Boot

(jij zegt het figures I guess as it's about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, though I wonder how this works w/ her publisher.

Thanks for the info though, appreciate it.

thank god we have a chinese literature thread. i wrote something about a jia pingwa novel: ‘Broken Wings’: Jia Pingwa’s Controversial Novel Explores Human Trafficking And Rural China

I'd like to read that, but there seems to be no link in that link?

oh, damn
https://supchina.com/2019/07/11/broken-wings-jia-pingwas-controversial-novel/

Nice! Thank you.

👍

hey thanks.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds i also want to recommend the jiayang fan liu cixin piece here if anyone missed it. i've mostly sat out liu cixin fever and this didn't encourage me to pick up the books.

Yeah that's excellent I've just got "Ruined City" what would you recommend next?

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.

I was wondering about the different translators, that explains a lot

This is a Chinese literature podcast. They have just wound it down at the 100th EP. The guy who ran it is doing a twitter thread on the EPs.

To mark the ending of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, I thought I'd make a thread covering all 100 episodes. So here we go...https://t.co/aXNTl8CaC3

— Angus 「安安」 (@AngusLikesWords) February 10, 2024