Putting together a post comparing the original opening of Legend of the Condor Heroes with the revised version, and have noticed even more mistranslations and cut passages in the official translation. =\
#wuxia #武俠 #JinYong #金庸
江畔一排數十株烏柏樹,葉子似火燒般紅
"Ten cypresses stand proudly along its banks, their leaves red like fire."

A cypress with fire-red leaves?!?! No. It's a Chinese tallow tree (Triadica sebifera). Also should be "tens" or "dozens", not exactly "ten". Simple errors like this.
一件青布長袍早洗得褪成了藍灰
"in robes once black, now faded a blue-grey"

Black robe became blue-grey? it's bcuz 青 is blue, not black. It's right there in your own translation! Even in 青絲 referring to black hair, it's the blue glint or tint of light off of black hair.
This post will really show why revising is so necessary to improve one's writing. The original opening is a dull infodump history lesson, while the revised version weaves the material in more naturally through the voice of an oral storyteller.

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More from @WuxiaWanderings

Mar 19
Wuxia author Qin Hong 秦紅 has just released a short story collection and a novella collection in ebook format (in Chinese):
novella:play.google.com/store/books/de…
short stories: play.google.com/store/books/de…
If you can read Chinese I highly recommend his work.
#wuxia #武俠 #fantasy
These were put out by Qin Hong himself. He is still around, though not in great health. That pic on the cover is pretty recent. He recently underwent heart surgery. He once invited me to his home and treated me to lunch and patiently answered by fanboyish questions...
I know he's wanted to put out his own official versions of his work for a while; there's many mistakes and false attributions on what few works of his are online already. So it's good to see him start doing this. Dunno what or how much more he plans to publish.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 17
More questionable translating from A Hero Born, vol.1 of LOCH. (pg. 199) "Chimpanzee"??? You know cause of all those chimps in CHINA. lol. (Chimps are native to Africa).
#wuxia #武俠 #JinYong #金庸
This is a martial arts move from the YUE MAIDEN swordplay, which should have been a tip off to what this meant. 白猿 refers to a famous Tang dynasty story. 猿 is often translated generally as "ape", but strictly speaking it's a gibbon.
Also seeing an unprofessional number of typos as I flip through this. I believe I have a first printing, so I dunno if they were corrected later but, whew.....
Read 6 tweets
Mar 15
Checked out some Jin Yong books from the library. Biographies, an essay collection written by Jin Yong, and some books about his work from wuxia author Wen Rui'an.
#wuxia #武俠 #JinYong #金庸 Image
There's a book on the top by Shen Xicheng, former editor of Wuxia World Magazine. In it he talks about the Eng translations. Criticizes the titles of Book and Sword and Deer and the Cauldron, says once he read them he was "extremely extremely disappointed." So it's not just me!
Also mentions the new LOCH A Hero Born which was just set to come out at the time. Likes the title better ("though it's not a condor") and hopes it will be a success.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 5, 2021
So about this, I asked Lin Baochun, a wuxia scholar, if he knew exactly when Rusty Sword was published. Turns out it was May 11, 1961, making it definitely later than Jin Yong's ROCH. Funny thing is, the 1959 date I had for Rusty Sword came from his book lol...
#wuxia #武俠
That's how it is with wuxia research though. The few resources out there are not quite reliable enough, and it's very hard to find first editions of wuxia novels now to find out the exact dates of things (which is why I asked Lin Baochun)....
Dunno why the dating was wrong to start with, but I'm glad I asked first before I made a blog post about it. So turns out Gao Yong just copied Jin Yong, which makes sense since many authors did.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 4, 2021
Just finished the first iteration of a romanization system designed to help people who don't know Chinese learn how to pronounce it. Basically a crib for how to pronounce pinyin.
Ex. wuxia: ooh-shyah (NOT woo-shuh)
xianxia: shyen-shyah
Xiao Yan: Shyow-Yen
....
Will be looking to test this soon, see how easy/difficult it is for people to pick up. The idea is you pronounce it exactly as it's spelled. So "Lai" is L(eye)...in other words, L + the word "eye". Dunno how it will work out, but hopefully it can be honed into something useful.
Wanted something as a pronunciation aid for my wuxia/xianxia encyclopedic dictionary I'm working on, that's why I made this. The goal is to allow readers to feel confident they have a basic gist of how to say the names/terms in Chinese novels (or other lit).
Read 4 tweets
Jul 8, 2021
Birthday presents I got for myself: (1) A Survey of Chinese Wuxia Fiction Classics 中國武俠小說名著大觀 (2) 刀劍風雲 by Situ Yu (3) 沉劍飛龍記 by Zhang Menghuan (4) Six Harmonies Spear 六合槍 by Yan Pingle
#wuxia #武俠 #ChineseLit #Chinese
This one, by Zhang Menghuan, apparently once competed with Legend of the Condor Heroes for popularity back in 1957 when they were each initially serialized. I'm reading it now. #wuxia
Six Harmonies Spear by Yan Pingle is pretty new published Oct. 2020. Only in ebook format. Great artwork by the renowned artist Ye Yutong 葉羽桐
You can get it on Google Play Books: play.google.com/store/books/de…
#wuxia
Read 4 tweets

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