Been on a Long Chengfeng kick recently. First I translated the second half of Snowblade Vagabond and finished it, then I tackled another Snowblade Vagabond novel, The Tang Sect Crisis, taking about a week to translate that. But I was still in the mood to translate Long Chengfeng, so I translated another one, this time a standalone novella called Roaming the Jianghu for Twenty Years《闖蕩江湖二十年》.
I think that’s enough Long Chengfeng for now. I may decide to translate another of his novels in the future, maybe another Snowblade Vagabond or something else. But if I do, I need to read some more of them first to find a good one. At least for now, though, I have no current translation projects planned. Click the button below to read Roaming the Jianghu for Twenty Years.
My translation of Book 15 of Long Chengfeng’s Snowblade Vagabond series, The Tang Sect Crisis, is now complete. You can read it at the link below. Ebook downloads are also available on the page linked. Just click/tap the button below.
Today begins a new project that I hope to have completely translated in a month or so. It’s the fifteenth installment of Long Chengfeng’s Snowblade Vagabond series: The Tang Sect Crisis《唐門風暴》. Originally published in Wuxia World Magazine on November 20, 1978, issue #1012, this story deals with internecine strife within the Tang Sect, one of the most famous sects in wuxia fiction from Bai Yu to Liang Yusheng to Gu Long to Wen Rui’an. Here is Long Chengfeng’s contribution to Tang Sect lore, Snowblade Vagabond style!
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.
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”.
When it comes to wuxia authors, there are two names that are often bandied about: Jin Yong and Gu Long. And with good reason, because it is these two authors who have received the most critical acclaim and the best reader response. Nowadays, wuxia is more or less a dead genre. There are still wuxia novels being published, but they are few and far beween. In the West, of course, it’s even worse. In the rare event you do find an article about wuxia in English, nine times out ten (and that’s a conservative estimate) it’s going to be about Jin Yong. Gu Long might get a namedrop. One article I saw not too long ago on the “history and politics” of wuxia didn’t even mention the Republican period or wuxia in Taiwan at all!1
But Gu Long had quite an influence and impact on the development of wuxia fiction as a genre. More than anyone else, Gu Long strove for change, for “breakthroughs” as he called them, trying to come up with a new way to write an old genre. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not, but he kept trying to the end. He began writing his own wuxia novels in 1960 with Divine Sky Sword, at first imitating the major writers of his day, such as Jin Yong, Wolong Sheng, Sima Ling, and Zhuge Qingyun.
Gradually his style changed. With Cleansing Flowers, Refining the Sword in 1964, Gu Long was already experimenting with his fight scenes, moving away from the detailed descriptions of moves with flowery names that was (and remained) common in wuxia. By the 1970s, he had already found his own voice. At the same time, more and more of his novels were being adapted to film and TV, bringing him more readers. viewers, and notoriety. The rise of film and TV in Taiwan also led to more and more wuxia authors switching to screenwriting, which Gu Long dabbled in as well. And so wuxia as a genre of literature began to decline.
New book day!《雨中殺手》(Killer in the Rain) by 龍晟風 (Long Chengfeng). Cover & frontispiece that might have been the cover art used when it was most likely published in a wuxia magazine in Hong Kong.
