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The Silver Sword Grudge—Part 2

Here is part 2 of Chapter 1 of Huang Ying’s The Silver Sword Grudge. There will be one more installment for the first chapter before moving on to the final chapter.

A lamp, a silver lamp, a rich and powerful lamp.

The person next to the lamp was like the moon, shining white wrist like frost and snow.

The person was no more than twenty, quite young. Very pretty, skin really like frost, like snow. She picked up a jade spoon with her right hand, fiddled with the incense in her King Wen cauldron burner, cheek resting lightly in her left hand, her upper body leaning against the bird-carved table, barely sitting.

Lamplight shone from the side, casting a faint silhouette of her face and making her even prettier.

Outside the curtain, rain gurgled, spring coming to an end. But the spring in her eyes was still flourishing.

Wind suddenly gusted in through the window and blow over the lamp.

The lamplight flickered, wisps of smoke wafting up from the King Wen cauldron wavered.

The wisps of smoke suddenly curled around the lamplight and had yet to waft before her when she wrinkled her nose in disgust and she blew at it.

The wisps of smoke dispersed, drifting out far away but quickly coalesced again and were borne back on the wind.

Her nose therefore scrunched up more, she shook her head but didn’t blow at it again, only sighed. “The spring breeze…”

Only two words out and a “person” followed up with, “The spring breeze is a stranger, why have you entered my gauze curtain?”

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The Silver Sword Grudge—Huang Ying

I’ve decided to take on a new, short translation project: the first novel in Hong Kong wuxia author Huang Ying’s 黃鷹 Shen Shengyi 沈勝衣 wuxia series, which ran from 1974 to around 1984. The series was adapted in 1979 into a TV drama in Hong Kong under the title Shen Shengyi (known in English as The Roving Swordsman). It adapted eight of the Shen Shengyi novels, including the first one, the one I’m going to translate here, The Silver Sword Grudge《銀劍恨》.

It’s a short novel, only two chapters, but they are long chapters. I will post it as I translate it, beginning with the first part below.

Huang Ying (1948-1991) is best known for continuing Gu Long’s Six Tales of Fright series of horror wuxia novels. The first one, Blood Parrot《血鸚鵡》, has a partial translation (see the translation list in the main menu. Only the first three chapters. Gu Long began the novel but only wrote the first four chapters. Huang Ying was selected to take over and continue beginning with chapter 5 and he finished the novel. The other five novels in the series were entirely written by Huang Ying.

Huang Ying was one of the main writers at Wuxia World Magazine《武俠世界》during the 70s and 80s, and along with Long Chengfeng 龍乘風 and Ximen Ding 西門丁, they were known as the Three New Swordsmen. They dominated Wuxia World Magazine during this time period. A number of Huang Ying’s novels were adapted to film and TV. His most famous novel series are Reincarnated《天蠶變》(lit. Silkworm Metamorphosis) and The Legend of Shen Shengyi.

His writing style was heavily influenced by Gu Long. I wrote a bit about Gu Long imitators in the past, but I didn’t give any examples of Huang Ying at the time. Now we can see what his writing is like. In this first part translated below, Huang Ying does a good job setting the mood, something Gu Long was very good at.

I guess I will just make a post for each part that I translate, and then consolidate them properly into a novel page like I did with Heartbroken Arrow, and then delete the posts so they don’t clog up the front page. So the next installments will be simple posts with just the chapter text and none of my blather.

And now here is The Silver Sword Grudge, the beginning of a series wherein an assassin becomes a xia…

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A Great Opening Chapter—Wolong Sheng’s Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre

It’s true for any genre: when writing a novel you need a strong opening, something that piques the reader’s interest and keeps it and makes them want to read the next chapter. Well you won’t a much better example of such a chapter than Wolong Sheng’s 1965 novel Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre《天劍絕刀》.

Wolong Sheng 臥龍生 was a master at crafty interesting, intricate plots that kept the reader turning pages. There’s a reason he was called the “Mount Tai and Northern Dipper of Taiwan Wuxia” (台灣武俠泰斗) and was one of the “Three Swordsmen” 三劍客 of the Taiwan wuxia literary circle, along with Sima Ling 司馬翎 and Zhuge Qingyun 諸葛青雲. He is criticized for not taking his work seriously enough and allowing other authors to publish their work under his name, but I feel is strong points are too often overlooked in favor of repeating these same criticisms. It’s true his novels tend to suffer from having the “head of a tiger and the tail of a snake”, starting strong but then petering out by the end. But that’s true of many wuxia novels by many different authors, a product in part of the long serialization process (novels typically ran in newspapers for two to four years), and in Wolong Sheng’s case, also because he often wrote multiples novels for different newspapers at once. During his prime years, at one point he was concurrently writing Flying Swallow Startles the Dragon《飛燕驚龍》for Great China Evening News, Jade Hairpin Oath《玉釵盟》for Central Daily News, Red Snow, Black Frost《絳雪玄霜》for Sin Chew Daily, and Heavenly Whirlwind《天香飆》for Public Opinion Daily. Writing daily installments for all of those novels, it’s easy to see why he might have issues with consistancy. Keep in mind too that unlike Jin Yong 金庸, who spent years revising his entire body of work, Wolong Sheng’s novels that we have today still use the original text he published in the newspapers. He (and this is true for almost all wuxia authors) never revised his work.

Despite all that, Wolong Sheng still managed to produce some good work, great at times, and the first chapter of Heavenly Sword, Supreme Sabre is about a good an opening to a story as one could ask for.

But rather than just vaguely telling you why, I took the liberty of translating the first chapter so you can see for yourself. That chapter follows below. Afterward, I will discuss why I think this chapter is so effective.

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An Interview with Cang Yue and Jiangnan

About a decade or so ago, when I was still new to translating, I ran a short-lived wuxia forum called Among Rivers and Lakes. I translated several short stories for that forum, a few of which I have posted here as well (check the translation list). I also translated an interview from 2006 that I found online with wuxia/fantasy authors Cang Yue 沧月 and Jiangnan 江南.

Jiangnan, the man in the pic above, is most well known for his fantasy series Novoland《九州縹緲錄》which was adapted in 2019 as a cdrama titled Novoland: Eagle Flag starring Liu Haoran and Song Zu’er. Cang Yue started out writing such wuxia novels as Listening Snow Tower series《聽雪樓》 and Seven Nights of Snow. Her wuxia novella Turbulent Times is translated on this site. She later switched to writing fantasy and is now most well known for her Mirror series. Her work has been adaped to cdramas several times, including Listening Snow Tower, Mirror: A Tale of Twin Cities, and coming soon, The Longest Promise starring Ren Min, Xiao Zhan, and Wang Churan and adapted from her Mirror novel Zhu Yan《朱顏》. Both of thes authors are from China and are part of what is now termed the “Neo Wuxia” 新武俠 school of wuxia, a term denoted the new mainland China writers who began writing wuxia after the ban was lifted in China around 1980. It includes words written mainly in the late 90s and early 2000s, along with the rise of web novels.

The below translation is the same as when I translated it a decade or so ago, except for some spellchecking for typos.

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Wuxia Excerpts #1: Ninefold Flute by Dongfang Yu

I’m currently reading Ninefold Flute《九轉簫》by Dongfang Yu 東方玉. I’ve had a few of his novels for years but never got around to reading them. He’s one of those authors who was really popular during his time but then later ignored or slighted by critics. I’ve seen comments by readers and critics that are kind of dismissive; I get the impression that his work is kind of generic and mediocre. But I am researching for my Writer’s Guide to Wuxia and I knew that Dongfang Yu wrote about “palaces” 宮, one of the many organizations commonly seen in wuxia fiction, so I decided to read one of his books. Another reason I had stayed away is I heard he liked to use disguises for his characters, and that is my most hated trope. It’s so lazy. You think it’s one character, than tada! Turns out it was someone else, but they had a mask on or makeup that was so lifelike it looked exactly like the other person. It’s really common in wuxia, but I was trying to avoid it.

So I decided on Ninefold Flute, which was published from April 20, 1967 to April 23, 1969 in China Times newspaper. Dongfang Yu was a mainstay of this paper for most of his career. This was the same paper in which Gu Long first published Horizon, Bright Moon, Sabre《天涯‧明月‧刀》 in 1974. But it only ran for 45 installments before it was pulled from the paper, apparently because of reader complaints due to how different the writing style was. This was the first and only time such a thing happened to Gu Long, and it was a heavy blow to him. The last installment ran on June 8, 1974. Two days later, on June 10, 1974, Dongfang Yu’s novel Seven Steps Startle the Dragon《七步驚龍》began. According to Gu Long’s student Ding Qing, it was another famous author along with reader complaints that caused the novel to be pulled. Given that Dongfang Yu’s novel started just two days later, the assumption is that Dongfang Yu was the author who pressured the editor to pull Gu Long’s novel.

Anyway, back to Ninefold Flute. The title of the novel references the nine rounds of refinement used in making certain Daoist elixirs of immortality, but it also references nine tunes played on the flute in question. This is a vertical flute 簫 (xiao) as opposed to a transverse flute 笛 (di). 簫 can also refer to panpipes, but that’s not the instrument in question here.

It’s pretty good so far. The excerpt I have translated below is a scene from chapter 1. Let me give you the setup before this scene.

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Return of the Condor Heroes Official English Translation Coming Oct. 2023

Just a quick update cause I’d say this is significant wuxia news. The official English translation of the first volume of Jin Yong’s Return of the Condor Heroes, titled A Past Unearthed and translated by Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant, is scheduled for release on October 10, 2023 from Maclehose Press. They also published the four volumes of Legend of the Condor Heroes previously.

Source: https://www.hachette.com.au/jin-yong/a-past-unearthed-return-of-the-condor-heroes-volume-1

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Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era” — Part 2

Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era”

by Lin Yao

3

Luo Bin’s founding of Wuxia World was the first magazine specializing in wuxia fiction. It was a weekly and readers could read more words at a time, much more satisfying than what readers got with what was published in newspaper supplements. For a time, Wuxia World was a bestseller, every week publishing over 10,000 copies, and it was available all over Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Luo Bin was a businessman. He took the wuxia fiction that had been published in the other magazines under the “Global” banner: West Point and Blue Book, and reprinted them in Wuxia World. Aside from printing old manuscripts, new manuscripts shifted to this battlefield, simultaneously serialized in the magazine and published as standalone volumes by Global Publishing and Wulin Publishing, each thin volume around 70-80 pages. These are still being sought after by wuxia fans and collectors today.

Besides Wuxia World, on October 5, 1959, Luo Bin also founded Hong Kong Daily News. In addition to publishing Hong Kong news, it mainly focused on horse racing and sports forms.

Ti Feng’s wuxia fiction and horse racing reports were well-written, but he was also a skilled calligrapher. The masthead of Hong Kong Daily News was written in his calligaphy, and he wrote horse racing forms for the paper as well.

Luo Bin had his “business sense”: “Every day I had to publish periodicals and the Hong Kong Daily News; some of them were no cost, like when it came to printing I could use the leftover paper from the newspaper. Hong Kong Daily News was a bit narrower, so there was more leftover paper. Typesetting and printing after all has personnel and machinery, you do what you can. Publishing so much, some would make a lot of money, some not so much, but still it’s something.”

The publication of Wuxia World made Ming Pao’s proprietor, Jin Yong, want to have a go at it himself. Jin Yong, possessing a mind for business, naturally wasn’t going to let Luo Bin have a monopoly. Once Ming Pao had been in operation for over half a year, on Janurary 11, 1960, he started publishing the magazine Wuxia and History. In order to attract readers, Jin Yong wrote another wuxia novel—he gave 1959’s Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain a prequel, The Young Flying Fox, to compete with Wuxia World.

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Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era” — Part 1

Hong Kong’s “Great Wuxia Era”

by Lin Yao

1

On May 20, 1959, many events probably transpired in the world. But for Hong Kong, there were two events worth remembering. At the time these were minor events; aside from those involved, probably no one else took notice. Like the seed of a garden balsam or a soybean seed, even though you plant it in the ground, if it doesn’t sprout, no one will know it will have flame-red blossoms or countless bean pods.

The first event was that Jin Yong began publication of Ming Pao. Jin Yong was thirty-six years old, his eleventh year after moving south to Hong Kong. Once Ming Pao had made a name for itself, many rumors went around, some saying that Jin Yong had received funding from the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency to start the company, and there were rumors that Jin Yong was being secretly backed by Taiwan’s Nationalist Party. In his later years, Jin Yong was interviewd by Bai Yansong for China Central Television and said, “I put most of the royalty money I received, about 80,000 yuan, plus 20,000 from Shen Baoxin, toward starting Ming Pao. If we had had backing, we wouldn’t have needed to work so hard.

At that time, Jin Yong had already written The Book and the Sword, Sword Stained with Royal Blood, and Legend of the Condor Heroes, the latter being especially popular with a large readership. In 1958, it was made into a film by Hong Kong’s Emei Film Group and remained a trendy Cantonese wuxia film till 1970. And because of this, Jin Yong had acquired a substantial amount in royalties, so he had some capital. In those days, the cost of running a newspaper was low, and having worked in the newspaper business for many years, Jin Yong didn’t want to work for anyone else anymore and naturally decided to “run his own business”.

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“Wuxia Flavor” — Ximen Ding on What it Takes to Write Wuxia

During the 1980s, wuxia fiction was on the decline, but it still had a large audience in the Hong Kong pulp magazines, particularly《武俠世界》 Wuxia World, and Ximen Ding 西門丁 was one of its most important authors. He was Wuxia World’s in-house author, having signed a contract in 1980 to furnish the magazine a piece of fiction each issue (it was a weekly) totaling 25,000 to 30,000 words. He soon began writing much more, including his own novel series, the best known of which is the《雙鷹神捕》Amazing Twin Hawk Constables series, which spanned 30 novels from 1980 to 1982. Yeah, 30 novels in two years! Plus all the other stories he wrote during that time.

He also wrote Republican era martial arts stories, stoies set during contemporary times, and horror stories. Later, Ximen Ding had a popular assassin series that spanned more than 20 novels. He also wrote under many different pen names; often more than one of his works appeared at the same time in Wuxia World magazine.

Together with Huang Ying and Long Chengfeng, Ximen Ding was known as the Three Swordsmen. These three, along with Wen Rui’an, dominated wuxia fiction in the 1980s. Wen Rui’am had his Four Constable series and was experimenting with new styles and forms of writing, Long Chengfeng had his Snowblade Vagabond series, his style imitating Gu Long, and Huang Ying, after taking over for Gu Long with his horror wuxia series, began his own series featuring assassin-turned-xia Shen Shengyi.

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The Winner — Ni Kuang

The Winner

by Ni Kuang

He stood proudly on the mountain top, sword lightly gleaming off the rocks. The sun was setting, sunlight reflecting off the tip of the blade, shooting out rays of dazzling light.

About two staves away, on a large, flat boulder, stood four men, all facing him, watching him, faces red with anger. Sweat rained down the foreheads of two middle-aged men. They looked really nervous, but he, standing there with his sword, was the opposite.

Directly below the boulder, for as far as the eye could see, people lay on the rocks, in the trees, seventeen or eighteen in all, all clearly dead, blood dripping from their bodies. In the distance several vultures circled in the sky.

He was only in around thirty or so, a cold, detached look to go with the pride on his face. His sword had been soaked with blood for sure, because now a drop of it trailed down the glittering blade toward the tip. Just as the drop of blood was about to drip off, he suddenly swung the sword up and the drop of blood whizzed off and splashed down on the face of an elderly man among the four.

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