It's here! A History of Taiwan Wuxia Fiction《台灣武俠小說史》by Lin Baochun 林保淳 in two volumes. The limited blue booklet that comes with it has a few chapters excerpted from this book and the upcoming History of Hong Kong Wuxia Fiction by Chen Mo (Aug 2022) #wuxia#武俠
Each volume is 600 pages, so altogether this is twice as long as the previous Developmental History of Taiwan Wuxia Fiction by Ye Hongshneg and Lin Baochun.
Here's a link for anyone who wants to purchase it: books.com.tw/products/00109…
There's other online sellers you can by from (such as Momo), but this is where I ordered it from and they are trustworthy (at least for domestic purchases). They do ship overseas.
What I'm most excited about is there's a lot more discussion of books by lesser known authors like Xue Yan, Cao Ruobing, Sima Ziyan, and there's more book discussions of more well known authors whose work is usually not discusses as much, such as Xiao Yi, Murong Mei, etc.
This discussions of books that no one ever talks about is really great in this. Such as Sun Yuxin's 孫玉鑫 Number One Flower Awes the Jianghu 威震江湖第一花, which has a woman MC and she is the one getting revenge! #wuxia#武俠
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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.
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.
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.....
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
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.
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.
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).