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Return of the Condor Heroes: A Past Unearthed is Out Now

The first volume of Jin Yong’s Return of the Condor Heroes has been released in paperback and ebook editions. It should now be available wherever you buy your books. (EDIT: It seems paperback versions are currently only available from UK booksellers. Try Blackwells.) Translated by Gigi Chang, Return of the Condor Heroes is a direct sequel to Legend of the Condor Heroes and is a fan favorite. This is just volume 1 of as planned four volumes, so if the release schedule is the same as it was for LOCH then it will be another three years before the novel is completely translated. For those new to these novels, do note that Return of the Condor Heroes is one novel being split into four parts for practical reasons. It’s not a series, so do not expect any kind of resolution at the end of this volume.

I think I will be sitting this one out. I was not a fan of the previous translation and don’t really want to spend money now on something that will just raise my blood pressure. I’m trying to mellow out. But those who don’t have strong opinions about how wuxia should be translated will likely have no problem with this one. Certainly if you liked the Legend of the Condor Heroes translation then you will like this one as well. One huge advantage of this new translation is that it utilizes proper English grammar, so it’s a smoother, easier read than the fan translation (I did check out the available reading sample on Amazon).

One notable difference between this new official translation and the fan translation is that the official translation is presumably based on the 3rd edition (I assume this since their LOCH translation was) while the fan translation is based on the 2nd edition. The major difference is how the main antagonist is dealt with at the end of the novel. I’m not sure of the other differences, but nothing too drastic anyway.

So you all have fun with this one. Someone let me know how it translates Xiaolongnü.

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Martial-Arts Fiction and Martial-Arts Practice: The Concept of Qi in Jin Yong’s Novels

The following paper by Meir Shahar reproduced below was originally included in the book Proceedings of the International Conference on Jin Yong’s Novels 金庸小說國際學術研討會論文集, 1999, Yuan-Liou Publishing. The book collects the papers presented at said conference. I have re-typeset it based on the original, except for fixing a few typos. All the footnotes are the same as in the original with the addition of two short notes I added for correction.

Martial-Arts Fiction and Martial-Arts Practice: The Concept of Qi in Jin Yong’s Novels1

Meir Shahar
Department of East Asian Studies
Tel Aviv University

I. Introduction

In one of the climactic moments of Jin Yong’s 金庸 (1924-) Extraordinary Beings (Tianlong babu 天龍八部), Duan Yu 段譽, who is the novel’s principal protagonist, discovers inside a mysterious cave a jade statue of a divine maiden. Like Baoyu 寶玉, after which he has been fashioned, and with which his name resonates,2

Duan Yu is consumed by admiration to women, which he considers as superior to men. Perhaps for this reason, the discovery of the lifelike images touches the depths of his soul. Overcome with emotion, he kneels in front of it.

Inadvertently, Duan Yu’s romantic impulse transforms him into a martial-artist. This is because from his kneeling posture Duan Yu chances upon a tiny inscription on the maidens’ fee. It reads: “After kowtowing to me a thousand times, even if you experience a hundred deaths you will have no regrets.” All too happy to comply with the instruction and worship the lovely creature, Duan Yu prostrates himself on a small mat, which he finds spread in front of the statue. By the time he completes his prostrations, the mat is torn to shreds, revealing underneath it an ancient book, which endows Duan Yu with invincible powers. This sacred book contains the secret fighting methods of the “Free and Easy Sect” (Xiaoyao pai 逍遙派).3

In many ways this episode is characteristic of Jin Yong’s writing. Its plot is full of surprising turns, connecting as it does the veneration of beauty with hidden martial techniques. We find in it mysterious caves and sacred books, love and invincible fighting methods. Perhaps most significantly, the protagonist of this episode is, from the perspective of martial-arts fiction, an anti-hero: Duan Yu is, at least initially, much more interested in romance than in warfare.

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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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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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The Original Opening of Legend of the Condor Heroes

It’s easy to forget that the Jin Yong novels we know nowadays are actually revised versions. From 1970 to 1980, Jin Yong revised his entire oeuvre. In 1999 he underwent another round of revisions, though the changes made here were relatively minor. The first round of revisions were major overhauls, some sections being completely rewritten.

The opening of Legend of the Condor Heroes is a good example of this. So I thought it would be interesting to compare the opening of the current edition with that of the original edition serialized in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily.

We start then, with the current edition, as translated by Anna Holmwood in the official English translation of Legend of the Condor Heroes, volume 1: A Hero Born.

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Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés

by Jin Yong

For the last six months I’ve been reading a lot of wuxia novels. Recently there hasn’t been much wuxia novel output from Hong Kong authors, but on the Taiwan side it’s been surging like a storm, works emerging one after another. I read this kind of fiction exceptionally quickly, reading two books a night, each book between ten and twenty volumes. So the reason i can read these so fast is very simple, it’s because the novels’ plots are all pretty much the same, the stories formulaic, rarely seeing something new when flipping through them.

The following plots can be found in the great majority of Taiwan wuxia novels:

  1. A “dashing” young xia’s parents are killed by an enemy, so he is forced to roam the jianghu and undergo many adventures.
  2. Lots and lots of lady xia love him, among them will definitely be a licentious girl with the nickname of “Peach Blossom Something-or-other”, and there will be a lady xia disguised as a guy. This xia will certainly be drugged with an aphrodisiac and won’t be able to help himself from getting involved with one of the lady xia, “making a serious mistake”.
  3. The backbone of the story will be vying for a secret manual of the martial world or some rare jianghu treasure.
  4. This young xia will definitely obtain a secret martial arts manual left behind by an extraordinary person from a previous generation, and he will train until his martial arts is unmatched under the heavens, and the manual left behind will definitely have the words “left for one who is fated to receive it”.
  5. The young xia will definitely incur the favor of a senior who will help him open up his Conception and Governing vessels, get through a life-or-death training trial that will increase his strength one-, two-, or threefold.
  6. The xia’s antagonist will definitely be a master of a heretical school, some Demon Lord, Divine Lord, Ancestor, or old woman, all written the same, their appearance as grotesque as their martial arts, but with unexceptional personalities.
  7. Masters from prominent schools like Wudang, Shaolin, Kunlun, Kongtong, etc., will, when faced with the young xia, become completely worthless mediocrities.

The plots are mostly the same, and the language used to write them is also clichéd, stuff like “if it’s a blessing it’s not a disaster, if it’s a disaster you can’t avoid it”, “felt like ghosts were everywhere”, “a rare bud of the martial world”, none of them used by Hong Kong wuxia novelists. Wuxia fiction has been all the rage for less than ten years, but on the Taiwan side it seems to be even more popular than in Hong Kong. But in ten years for so many clichés and formulas to have already become so deeply rooted is really astounding.

Ming Pao, April 25, 1963

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On the translation of Huang Rong as “Lotus” Huang

In Appendix III of A Hero Born, the first volume of the official English translation of Jin Yong’s Legend of the Condor Heroes, we get this note about Lotus Huang:

Lotus Huang is known to many fans by the pinyin transliteration of her name, Huang Rong. I wanted to translate her name as Lotus, however, as at this point in the story we the readers are let in on a secret that Guo Jing is not party to. As soon as we see her name written down, we know at once this “beggar boy” is, in fact, a girl — the character for “lotus”, “rong” 蓉 is far too girly to be used for a boy’s name. But due to the fact that there are several Chinese characters that could be pronounced the same way or similar, Guo Jing doesn’t pick up on this. We know that Guo Jing is barely literate in Chinese, so he can be forgiven for his mistake. He is an honest young man, but clearly not the most perceptive, and this moment in the novel is an important way in which Jin Yong develops Guo Jing’s character, while letting Chinese readers in on the joke. If I had kept Lotus’ name in the pinyin, we English readers would be left feeling just as dim as poor Guo Jing.

In the novel, as translated on pg. 275 of A Hero Born, the scene plays out like this:

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