douqi

Finally started reading this (after owning the book for at least a couple of years) and this Goodreads review was right: it IS much more rewarding and meaningful reading it as an m/m book rather than an f/f one (despite the first book in the duology being pretty heavily pushed as part of the 'sapphic trifecta' of fantasy novels that came out that year, alongside The Jasmine Throne and The Unbroken). It cares deeply about the relationships, romantic/erotic and otherwise, between its major male characters, and very little about femininity despite also having an uneasy awareness that it should, perhaps, care a little more about femininity. It cares so little about its nominally central, nominally lesbian couple that it Highlight for spoilers!*keeps them apart for large swathes of the book, has both halves of the couple sleep with men (for plot-relevant reasons, but still), and depicts relationships and sexual encounters between just about everyone else in more detail and with more emotional charge than it affords them. Also, an important plot/emotional point from end of the last book that seemed as if it was going to have a deep impact on their relationship seemed to have been dropped completely!* Most of the major male characters angsted deeply and constantly, in a sophomoric way that felt as if (as another Goodreads reviewer put it) they were Experiencing an Emotion for the first time Highlight for spoilers!*Wang Baoxiang (a man far from the epitome of masculinity), to his dead brother (the perfect embodiment of masculinity): YOU HATE ME??? FINE I WILL GO AND DEBASE MYSELF BY GETTING FUCKED UP THE ARSE BY A MAN! WE'LL SEE HOW YOU LIKE THAT!*

It also feels very much like a book not written for me, where me = person fluent in chinese language and culture (or at least one version of it) and having extensive familiarity with c-media of all kinds. This is perfectly fine; I've made my peace with the fact that a lot of genre books with Chinese historical/fantastical elements published in the West are not written for me.

I saw a post about the TV adaptation of Jin Yong's The Young Flying Fox (飞狐外传), sequel to the more famous Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain (雪山飞狐), which reminded me that it's the only historical c-novel I've ever come across that does a credible instance of the 'girl disguised as boy lets down her hair, everyone realises instantly that she's a girl' trope.

Normally that trope does not make obvious sense in Chinese historical settings because everyone had long hair, for Confucian reasons (I've come across doubtfully-sourced social media posts claiming there are visible differences in hair length for women vs men; please point me to any that you know of to be reliable). However, The Young Flying Fox is set in the Qing Dynasty, when Han Chinese men were required to wear their hair in a queue — shaving the front of their scalp and putting the hair at the back into a plait. So when Cheng Lingsu, who's been roaming the jianghu in boys' clothes, plucks off her cap and unties her hair, revealing the absence of shaved forehead/scalp, onlookers realise instantly that she's a girl.

In university I took a course on twentieth century women's literature in English. One of the books we read for that was Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own. In it, as part of constructing a critical historical account of women's writing in England, Woolf discusses the Restoration era writer Aphra Behn, one of the first women to earn her living by writing professionally.

At the time, our lecturer gave us a brief autobiographical sketch of Aphra Behn to contextualise the reference. What he did not tell us was that she wrote at least one genderfucked lesbian poem. Or that she may have been bi. I had to discover that for myself at my current great age. Thanks, Malaysian higher education.

I just think there's no reason why Shakespeare's Richard II couldn't be staged as a drama set in imperial China. It's even got all the son of Heaven stuff in it.

As I stare down the barrel of possibly translating a novel that may well end up being more than a million words long, I was slightly reassured to come across this article discussing translation speed among professional translators. A good number of the translators quoted in the article seem to agree that 800 to 1,000 words per day as an average makes sense. Interestingly, most of them do not report getting noticeably faster at translation with time and experience.

I generally think of myself as being quite slow, but honestly towards the middle and end of translating Purely by Accident, I was translating on average about 500 to 600 words per day (first draft), and I'm not even doing it full time. Purely by Accident took me three years and a bit to finish translating, and it's about 185,000 words long in Chinese. So I was actually averaging 60,000 words' worth of translation (including first draft, second draft and revisions) per year. That's about the length of a short novel, in Western publishing. So really, the issue is not that I'm slow; it's that c-novels are long.

This, of course, doesn't solve the problem that I might be spending the next six years of my life translating a single novel, but it does make me feel ever so slightly better.

Back when I was still dipping my toes in the c-novel/c-ent translation scene, I was ambivalent about MTL, primarily on the basis of 'it's bad but at least it gives people access'. Having spent a couple of years in the scene, I am delighted to announce that my views have matured and that I am now firmly on the side of Just Say No to MTL, for the following reasons.

1. It inculcates very, very bad reading and writing habits. It trains people to accept incoherent word salad in place of clear, polished, competent prose. It drags people's standards and taste for prose writing (which, let's face it, is already hovering between the sixteenth and seventeenth levels of Chinese Hell) straight into a Stygian black hole. If no one knows what good work is, then good work will simply not be produced (or at least, be produced only by accident). This leads to the phenomenon known as Shit Translations Beget Even More Shit Translations.

2. It devalues the craft of translation in itself. It teaches people (erroneously) that translation is a largely mechanical process rather than a series of considered artistic choices made with the aim of achieving a particular literary effect. This perception of translation as a mechanical, art-free exercise finds its way into popular thought, further negatively affecting both audiences' AND translators' perception of translation, leading once again to the phenomenon known as Shit Translations Beget Even More Shit Translations. 

3. It devalues the craft of translation economically. Publishing firms that would previously have felt compelled to put at least SOME investment and thought into commissioning competent translations have now realised that certain audiences will happily fork over obscene sums of money for barely-comprehensible word salad renderings of the works they claim to love. There is therefore no incentive at all — indeed, an actual DISincentive — for these publishers to invest in translations that meet an actual baseline of competency. This too, gives rise to the phenomenon of (surprise!) Shit Translations Beget Even More Shit Translations.

4. The sense of access which MTL creates is largely illusory. You cannot be sure that the MTL is even conveying the basic MEANING of the work accurately, much less tone, style, implications and connotations, literary quotations and references, or anything approaching nuance.

5. It disrespects the work of the original creator. If you claim to love the work of a creator so much, why is it that you're happy reading an incomprehensible word salad rendering of it spat out by a machine, instead of demanding competent translations that realise the full promise of the work and present the work in its full glory?

What frustrates me is that I don't know what to DO about this. I already do as much fan translation as is permitted by me having (1) a life (2) a demanding day job and (3) a fallible human body. I'm also happy to edit and beta the work of other translators who share the same views about the value of translation as an art. Other than that I'm finding it difficult to figure out how to create conditions under which people will learn to demand and value reasonably competent translations and under which fan translators will feel supported in engaging in such work. It may be that there IS no real way of doing this under current economic, political and socio-cultural conditions, and that all I can is to provide a small counter-example of what reasonably competent fan translations might look like. In which case, all I can do is sigh, turn to the latest page of the novel I'm translating, and figure out how best to convey meaning and tone and style and nuance with my all too human brain. You carry on doing the work, because it's the only thing TO do in these circumstances. 

 Me: I hate contemporary, showbiz/entertainment industry, insta-lust/love. I'm also wary of tragic endings.

This novel: Not only am I all those things, but I'll end up being your personal best baihe novel of the year, and a strong contender for your personal best novel full stop of the year.*

( spoilers for Burn ).

I read the Chinese original of the novel on Changpei. There is also a completed audio drama and an ongoing manhua adaptation of the novel.

*The other novel is End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower (桥头楼上) by priest. 

Over the last couple of years, I've noticed a dismaying trend in my responses to new-ish, Western-published genre titles: they tend to leave me disappointed, frustrated, and in the worst cases, enraged enough to write ranty Goodreads reviews. I've begun wondering miserably whether the problem is with me: do I just... hate books now?

Then a book like this comes along, and I realise that, no, it's the children who are wrong.

( spoilers for The Assassin Tao Buhuan )

I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC.

I decided to read this Thai GL novel ahead of the release of its live-action adaptation on 19 November (link to the trailer here). I read the Taiwanese-published Chinese translation. There is an official English translation available (link here), but the summary did not fill me with confidence.

( spoilers for GAP Pink Theory )