Today begins the translation of one of the most important novels in the entire wuxia genre: Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons《飛燕驚龍》by Wolong Sheng 臥龍生. I have avoided picking up a long project such as this for a long time, not wanting the commitment it requires. But I can’t put it off any longer, because to tell the truth, it’s pretty lonely being a wuxia fan. Even among Chinese readers the genre is pretty much dead, only really one active forum for it online, and that barely active. In English it’s even more barren.
And that’s simply because there hasn’t been much translated into English. What has been translated is almost entirely confined to two writers: Jin Yong and Gu Long. No surprise there as they are the most lauded and most popular. But that’s only two drops in a very large ocean. Though there are a few translations by other authors, mostly shorter pieces and teasers, still most of the major wuxia novels have yet to be touched.
This project will take care of one of them. (If you don’t care about me babbling on about the history of wuxia, you can skip to the Soaring Swallows novel page here.)
Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons is one of the most influential novels in all of wuxia. The tropes it established or employed set the tone for how wuxia fiction was to be written for decades, and Wolong Sheng for a time was one of the biggest names in the genre, second only to Jin Yong, and even surpassing Jin Yong in Taiwan (on account of Jin Yong being banned there).
Let me give you a quick rundown of the history of wuxia. And I mean lickety-split.
