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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/

Posted on by Lone Crane

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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Posted on by Lone Crane

Writing Fast and Writing Well

Writing Fast and Writing Well

by Wen Rui’an

Writing is a pleasure. The inverse of that sentence is: if you find writing to be a chore, then please stop writing at once. Forced work will never be a success, and the craft of writing cannot be carried out casually; you have to write your best in order to see results.

I can write 3,500 characters an hour. Among Chinese authors, I’m naturally not the fastest, but I’m already fast enough to be considered a “swift pen”. Some doubt that word count, but actually there’s really no need to:

  1. Writing fast does not mean writing well. If you write fast but slipshod, then fast is not a good thing.
  2. This kind of speed requires focus, plus some practice, and then anyone can do it. When I write I am often unfocused, so much of the time I can’t reach even half of that speed.
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