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An Excerpt from The Golden Boat Bloodbath by Long Chengfeng

Last year I wrote a post about some authors who imitated Gu Long’s signature style. One of those authors was Long Chengfeng 龍乘風. I translated the full first chapter of his novel Snowblade Vagabond《雪刀浪子》 to illustrate his imitation of Gu Long’s writing style. That novel was first published in 1977 and was the first of what would eventually become a 50-novel series.

I’m currently reading the fifth book in the series, The Golden Boat Bloodbath《血洗黃金船》and wanted to share a short excerpt from it. I’ve heard it said that Long Chengfeng’s work captures the form of Gu Long’s work but lacks its spirit. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. When Long Chengfeng wrote this series he was a young man clearly having fun, and he did a fine job copying many of the tropes and features and effects that made up Gu Long’s signature style. It’s just that his work often feels like it’s lacking something, a certain je ne sais quoi. Still, when Long Chengfeng is at the top of his game he is highly entertaining, and at times he even writes Gu Long so well you could be forgiven for thinking it really was a lost Gu Long novel.

The following excerpt from The Golden Boat Bloodbath is just a simple scene that really shows, in my opinion, how close Long Chengfeng can get to Gu Long. I could easily see this scene in a Gu Long novel. It has the same humor, the same easy, casual voice, and it features eccentric characters which became part of Gu Long’s stock-in-trade. Although I often do find the Snowblade Vagabond series a bit lacking in substance, there’s still enough of scenes like this that keep me reading the series.

If you like Gu Long, take a look at this.

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New Translation: Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons by Wolong Sheng

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.

Soaring Swallows Startle Dragons
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An Early Translation of Legend of the Condor Heroes That Never Came to Be

There’s a book called The Question of Reception: Martial Arts Fiction in English Translation (1997) which is a collection of papers presented at a conference on translation. Included among these papers is a sample translation of about half of chapter 1 of Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes, which the translators (John Minford and Sharon Lai) called Eagles and Heroes. At this time, John Minford had already translated two of the three volumes of Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron, and many of the papers collected in the book deal with that translation, either directly or indirectly. Eagles and Heroes was to be translated next, but for whatever reason it never came to fruition.

I first stumbled upon this book years ago when I was a graduate student at National Cheng Kung University. The recent official publication of Legend of the Condor Heroes made me think of this excerpt by John Minford and Sharon Lai, and I wanted to compare them. So I finally made it down to the library at NCKU after all these years to get the book, not being able to find it anywhere else. And I have taken the liberty to re-typeset the translation and present it here.

What follows is the entirety of the excerpt included in The Question of Reception, about half of chapter 1, about 10,500 words. I have kept the text as is, leaving the spellings and punctuations as they are in the original text. The one exception to this is the footnotes, which are just unnumbered paragraphs as the bottom of the page in the book. Here I have converted them to numbered footnotes. Other than that the text is the same as it appears in the book.

Before the transltion there is a title page on which is the following description:

This extract from the first chapter of Louis Cha’s novel Shediao yingxiong zhuan (1957-59) is the fruit of discussions held during 1996, in a Martial Arts fiction translation workshop funded by a grant from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee. Other members of the workshop, who contributed ideas and drafts, were Chan Oi-sum, Ko Ka-ling, and Tong Man. The complete translation will be published by Oxford University Press (Hong Kong).

Here it is, an early translation of the first chapter of Legend of the Condor Heroes:

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New Translation: Dream Shattering Sabre—Wen Rui’an

Having just finished translating Huang Ying’s novel The Silver Sword Grudge, I was still in the mood to translate. I had been translating Chapter 2 of Long Chengfeng’s Snowblade Vagabond, planning to finish that novel, but I started reading The Silver Sword Grudge at the same time and liked the opening to that so much that I decided to translate it instead. I would still like to finish Snowblade Vagabond one day, but right now I’m in the mood for mystery novels.

I’ve been reading a couple novels in Ximen Ding’s Amazing Twin Hawk Constable Series to see about maybe translating one of them. There’s 30 to choose from, so I’m going to read some first and find a good one (they’re standalones). I have read one that’s pretty good, but I want to read some more and see what else there is.

Until then, I’ve decided to translate one of Wen Rui’ans Four Great Constable novels: Dream Shattering Sabre. There’s 14 chapters, so it’s a bit longer than the last translation project, but the chapters are much shorter as well. I’m not going to make a post for every update. But I will post update notifications on Twitter and on the Wuxia Wanderings Discord server. Also the novel is listed on Novel Updates.

You can read Dream Shattering Sabre here: https://wuxiawanderings.com/dream-shattering-sabre/

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The Silver Sword Grudge—Finale

Today we reach the finale of Huang Ying’s 1974 wuxia novel/novella, The Silver Sword Grudge. This is the final installment. Sometime in the next few days I will combine all these parts and put them together in full chapters and post them on a page dedicated to the novel similarly to other novel translations on this site.

This is the first of 29 stories in the Legend of Shen Shengyi series. The next one in line is called《十三殺手》(The Thirteen Assassins). I don’t currently have any plans to translate it. But that might change if people want it. I don’t know if people will liked The Silver Sword Grudge or not. Let me know in the comments!

EDIT: I’ve got the novel page up if you want to read the full chapters all at once instead of broken into multiple installments: https://wuxiawanderings.com/the-silver-sword-grudge/

Have you ever heard Huang E’s Windblown Plum Blossoms, Gu Gu’s Venting Inner Feelings, Zhu Tingyu’s The Devotee, Yao Mu’an’s New Water Command?

Have you felt the pent-up bitterness of them, how melancholy and bleak they are!

Do you know how melancholy and bleak , how bitter Huo Qiu’e felt when playing those tunes?

If you don’t know, if you haven’t felt it, if you haven’t heard them, then you might as well take note of this.

It’s not Windblown Plum Blossoms or Venting Inner Feelings.

Nor is it The Devotee or New Water Command. It’s Water Immortal, Black Liu the Fifth’s Water Immortal:

Hate piling up, piling up hate, continuous hate, filling the lady’s boudoir of an evening.

Woe building up, building up woe, getting more and more intense, filling a jade-green cup.

Lazy to dress up, dressing up lazily, languidly lighting the incense burner.

Teardrops spilling, spilling teardrops, teardrops flowing and flowing nonstop.

Feeling unwell, unwell feeling, this sickly state is my mood.

Flowers with me, I with the flowers, flowers even more wan and withered.

Moon faces me, I face the moon, the moon even more bashful.

Complaining to Heaven, with Heaven complaining, Heaven too looks sad…

With a tinkle the zither stopped playing and the lady’s bedchamber became more silent, her figure more forlorn.

Huo Qiu’e stood up absently and moved to the roseleaf raspberry stand under the flowering crabapple blossoms.

The crabapple blossoms were in full bloom. Another drizzling rain tomorrow and they would all turn to rouge tears.

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Master Guan—Qu Yehe

This wuxia short story was first published in an issue of the Chinese wuxia magazine《今古传奇·武侠版》 (Legends Old and New: Wuxia Edition). I’m not sure which issue or which years because I can’t find the original Chinese text I translated it from about ten years ago. So I also couldn’t check the original text for translation mistakes.

This post is another interlude while I work on finishing The Silver Sword Grudge, which should be done early next week. I split the final chapter into eleven parts for my own convenience and have published the first six of them. I’m working on the last five and plan to release them all at once, so just one more update for The Silver Sword Grudge.

Master Guan

Qu Yehe

Among the rivers and lakes, the news had already spread: “Ruthless Mad Demon” Situ Lang had challenged “Boundless Sky Swordsman” Guan Yuechen to a duel on the top of Huashan on the seventh day of the seventh month.

The news spread like a plague throughout the rivers and lakes. It caused a huge stir, and people were already comparing it to the duel between Ximen Chuixue and Ye Gucheng at the Forbidden City.

When Guan Yuechen heard his friends make such comparisons, he only laughed. “Ximen Chuixue and Ye Gucheng are unique and unparalleled. I’m no Ximen Chuixue, and Situ Lang is no Ye Gucheng; he and I are just ordinary fighters. Duels such as the one between he and I happen all the time within the rivers and lakes. It’s more common than eating.” What a pity that out of all swordsmen, there may never be a matchup as worthy as Situ Lang versus Guan Yuechen.

The five managers of the Silver Hook gambling house did the unthinkable and closed their doors and discussed for three days and three nights before declaring the odds: 1:1. Really no one could guess which of the two would emerge the victor.

The Silver Hook gambling house had information on almost all famed fighters. For example, there was special mention of Situ Lang’s weapon.

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Wuxia Fiction and Me—Dongfang Yu

In the January 1, 1978 issue of Taiwan’s 《時報週刊》China Times Weekly, wuxia author Dongfang Yu 東方玉 began serializing his new novel《金笛玉芙蓉》Gold Flute, Jade Lotus. To coincide with this release, Dongfang Yu wrote an autobiographical introduction called “Wuxia Fiction and Me”. I have translated that introduction below. The original article, as it was posted by another wuxia fan online in Chinese, is structured in a few very long paragraphs. I have broken these up somewhat to make it a bit easier to read (though they are still a bit long). Aside from that, I have interpolated a few illustrations that accompanied the weekly installments during the novel’s 47-week run.

Wuxia Fiction and Me

Author Introduction

Dongfang Yu, real name Chen Yu, courtesy name Hanshan, from Yuyao, Zhejiang province. Graduated from Shanghai’s Chengming College of Liberal Arts Department of Chinese, served in the military administration office for a number of years. Skilled in calligraphy, proficient in poetry, wrote several collections of poetry including Hanshan Poetry Anthology, Embracing Splendor, Southern Thunder, Sharp Peak Lodge, and Green Scented Studio Lyric Manuscripts, and he wrote wuxia novels under the pen name Dongfang Yu with such works as Release the Crane, Capture the Dragon, Seven Swords of Lanling, etc., about 30 or so works totaling tens of thousands of words. Now he is a contracted writer for the eight major newspapers inside and outside of the country.

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The Silver Sword Grudge—Part 5

Here is the second part of Chapter 2 of The Silver Sword Grudge by Huang Ying. Sorry about the poetry parts. I didn’t really know what it was saying at times and to be honest didn’t want to take the time figuring it out in detail. Trying to get this translation done soon. So that part could be better, sorry!

Liu Zhanqin opened his mouth in sudden realization.

“There’s a saying that skill is born from experience, and this experience is real-world experience, not theory or experience from working in isolation.”

Liu Zhanqin just nodded.

“Experience can’t be passed on to others, one of life’s sad realities, and no one can gain experience through others’ hard work. He must do the work himself.”

“I know.”

“It’s not too late. After all, you’re still young.”

“But now it is too late.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Pretty soon I have to go kill someone, a very skilled someone!”

“Oh?”

“For you I don’t know whether you will be grateful or resentful. If it wasn’t for your self-assurance making things bode ill for me then at least I would have a bit of will to fight left, but now I don’t even have that.”

“Oh…”

“No need to apologize. In any case you made me recognize something, that a person must understand oneself thoroughly. And to understand oneself thoroughly one must personally face up to the test.”

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The Silver Sword Grudge—Part 4

Today’s update begins the second chapter of The Silver Sword Grudge by Huang Ying. See previous posts for the earlier parts. This is the final chapter of this short work, but it’s a bit longer than the first chapter. Probably three or four posts before it’s finished. On my side I split the chapter into 11 parts to make it more manageable to work with. Today’s post is the first 3 of those parts.

Chapter 2

Upstairs an Aggrieved Wife,
A Killer Looses a Thunderclap

Yu Qian wasn’t disappointed.

It was just as Sun Yu had said, Xiang Zulou was waiting at the bridge.

A dead man naturally isn’t going to leave.

Xiang Zulou’s eyes were wide open, the spitting image of the eyes of a dead fish, staring straight ahead unchanging without any emotion.

A dead man’s eyes naturally wouldn’t change or have feeling.

Yu Qian and Cui Qun unconsciously knelt down to the left and right and sat Xiang Zulou up.

They didn’t speak.

What would they say?

And they had no tears.

A real man was said to shed blood not tears.

They were completely steeped in the pale yellow lanternlight, but their faces were still unmistakably pale, even more so than a dead man’s face.

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The Silver Sword Grudge—Part 3

Here is the third and final part of the first chapter of The Silver Sword Grudge. There’s only one more chapter left in this short novel (or novella). It’s just a bit longer than this chapter.

Shu Mei was silent for some time, then suddenly sighed. “So why hasn’t your sword struck yet?”

“When facing me people always try to survive, no one tries to die, except you. Facing someone who’s talking and laughing like it’s nothing, helpless waiting to be executed, has extinguished all my murderous intent.”

“So then what are you going to do?”

“Wait, wait till your will collapses, wait till my murderous intent is reignited.”

“And if it doesn’t happen?”

“I haven’t thought that far yet…”

“Actually, you needn’t worry…” Shu Mei laughed sadly and suddenly let out a high-pitched cry!

Such an alarming sharp cry! Sun Yu’s silver sword involuntarily stabbed! The cry was cut off, the sword, clogging up her throat!

The muscles of Shu Mei’s face spasmed, but she was still smiling, a contented smile, so dreary.

Sun Yu was stunned. Gradually his hand holding the sword shivered, and then his body. Although he was masked, the change in his expression indiscernible, but his exposed eyes revealed his complex inner turmoil. He didn’t know if it was pity, admiration, or surprise.

The shivering sword came out of Shu Mei’s throat.

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