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New Year: The Plan for 2024

With the new year, Wuxia Wanderings enters its seventh year, which may prove to be the last, I don’t know. 2023 was a bad year for me, no energy, mental health deteriorating. But despite only publishing 19 posts las year, the views continued to climb. This is a very niche site, and most pageviews occur only on a handful of the more popular posts, such as the article about the flame stick, the translation list, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms buyer’s guide. 2023 saw 45,222 views total, up from 35,859 in 2022. The site averages around 100 views a day, give or take.

This year, in effort to expand my reach and because I like layout and design, I plan to focus most of my wuxia attention on a wuxia magazine, to feature original fiction, articles on wuxia and xianxia, chapter summaries of novels, and maybe some translations of some public domain works.

I envision the magazine for readers and writers of wuxia, xianxia, or any other Chinese historical (real or made up) fiction, though with emphasis on wuxia. The articles will be about things that people looking to write their own fiction might need to know, and also things that readers and writers alike will be interested in. It’s my attempt to present the genre of wuxia as I know it to a wider audience.

At first I’ll just be writing everything myself as I can’t afford to pay contributors. But if the magazine picks up some traction then hopefully in the future I will be able to afford to pay others to contribute (so this will not be a free publication). I would like the magazine to be a home for original wuxia fiction.

This is just a quick mockup to give an idea of what I have planned. Nothing here is final. I take inspiration from wuxia and Western pulp fiction magazines.

In conjuction with the magazine, I plan to focus this year on my own original fiction, and also on a “crash course” guide to writing wuxia fiction. I just want to get more information out there so that more people who maybe only know wuxia through film and TV can be better equipped to write their own. I’ve talked about such a guide before. It will have practical information that anyone writing wuxia, xianxia, etc. would need to know. Like terms of address, the Chinese time system, major wuxia tropes, weapons, character archtypes, and so on. A quick start guide, if you will.

Venomous Schemes by Ximen Ding

As far as other projects go, I do want to finish the Nangong Xue novel translation I’m about halfway done on. Before that though I’m going to do a Ximen Ding translation of one of his Twin Amazing Hawk Constables novels: Venomous Schemes. That should be starting this month. I just want to get the second chapter translated before I begin, and it’s a pretty long chapter. This is a whodunnit wuxia mystery, but with a different vibe from such series as Wen Rui’an’s Four Great Constables or Gu Long’s Chu Liuxiang or Lu Xiaofeng series. That translation will start in probably a week or so.

That’s all I have planned for 2024 at the moment. It’s enough. The magazine and my own fiction writing will take up the bulk of my time, I suspect. I’d like to do another Snowblade Vagabond novel if I can muster the energy for it, cause those are fun to translate. I’ve got a Yun Zhongyue novella that I’m just about halfway done translating, but I don’t know if I will finish it. I also have some novel excerpts I did years ago that I’d like to finish editing so that I can post. I have a some other excerpts and half-finished story translations that have never seen the light of day. I’d like to get those out eventually. But I don’t know. If this year goes how last year went, then this might be the last year of Wuxia Wanderings altogether. But the above is what I’d like to get done this year if I can.

Comments are always welcome. Everyone is also welcome to the Discord server.

Posted on by Lone Crane

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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Posted on by Lone Crane

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

Posted on by Lone Crane

What I’ve Been Working on Lately

Recently my interest in wuxia has ebbed somewhat, though I am still reading it. I’ve been jumping around a lot between other things, though, reading about Daoism, especially its terminology, reading a lot of sinology papers, especially those by Edward H. Schafer. His papers and books are treasure stores of information, and he contributed a lot of both precisely defining words and advocating for precision in translating, which I have also been thinking about a lot lately. With his writing, the footnotes are invariably more interesting than the main text (though the main text is interesting too). I’m the type who always wants more info about whatever I’m looking into.

I’ve also been reading up on Medieval Chinese, the Chinese spoken during the Northern & Southern Dynasties and the Tang dynasty. Trying to learn how to pronounce it. Been reading dictionaries every day, but that’s not new. Not too long ago I bought Paul W. Kroll’s A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, which I got for Pleco. This is really the best Chinese-English dictionary available right now, hands down. Consider this an endorsement. What I like most about it is the precision and detail of the definitions given. Take a look at this entry for 芙 (fu):

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Posted on by Lone Crane

A New Year — a personal look toward 2020

Wuxia Wanderings 2020 entry

A Look Back

When I first started translating back in 2010/2011, I began with old chuanqi stories from the Tang dynasty. It was pretty tough, not least because they were written in Literary Chinese 文言文, which at the time I didn’t even know was a thing. I ended up translating the entire collection known as the Jianxia zhuan 劍俠傳 after finding vernacular Chinese translations of the stories, 33 in all if I remember correctly. I never published it because I wanted to retranslate all the stories from their original Literary Chinese, which I still have not done, except for a few of them.

Soon after that I found online a repository of stories from a wuxia magazine in China, almost ten years’ worth, and I set about translating some of the shorter stories. I selected the stories based on their length, just wanting to get some translations finished so I could post them to my wuxia forum, Among the Rivers and Lakes. Most of the short story translations I have recently posted here I originally translated back then. I have just done some minor editing on them.

In 2020 I plan to translate and post more stories from that repository. One new story is already translated and ready to post. So in a way, then, I plan for 2020 to be a year of going back to my roots, back to the mindset I was in when I first began translating.

My time in the Chinese webnovel scene from 2017-2019 was not a pleasant one, on the whole. Picked up some bad translation habits/techniques that I have only recently begun to shake off. It was weird looking back at old translations and thinking, wow, I’ve actually regressed! I felt my current translating was inferior to what I had done years before. You’re supposed to get better the more you do something, right? Not worse!

Had I picked up bad habits from fellow translators? Or was it just the faster pace expected of webnovel translation making me succumb to what I call “autopilot” translating? Where you just plug in the same translation every time you come across a certain word or phrase rather than take the time to come up with a good sentence that fits the scene you are translating.

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