After finishing my translation of Ximen Ding’s novel The Bloody Bridal Chamber, I was still in the mood to translate. So today I’m starting a new novel: The Killer Star by Murong Mei. This one is longer, 99 chapters. Two chapters are up at the time of this posting. You can read about it on the novel page:
This is a standalone novel, not part of a series. Here’s the back of the book copy:
Renowned and well-regarded members of the martial world are being killed off one after another. The culprit: The Killer Star, Shen Wuhai, now hated by the entire martial world. But efforts to stop him have been futile, so the Sword King Palace has put up a reward for 10,000 taels of gold to anyone who captures the Killer Star alive.
Now the scourge of the martial world has also become a nice piece of fatty meat, a gold mine for anyone who can get to him.
Forgive the crappy graphic, I will fix it when I get back home. Anyway, my translation of Ximen Ding’s fourth book in his Amazing Hawk Constables series, The Bloody Bridal Chamber, is complete! You can read it here at Wuxia Wanderings, or download the ebook file. If you click the ebook download link, the download will begin immediately. It’s an epub file. If you’re using a Kindle I recommend using Send to Kindle to send it to your device.
This is a short novel, about 50,000 words in English. If you like whodunnit murder mysteries mixed with your wuxia, give it a shot!
I’m away from home at the moment and away from my main PC to make graphics and such, but I have still been working. I’m starting to post chapters to a book in the Amazing Hawk Constables wuxia murder mystery series by Hong Kong author Ximen Ding. Well it’s not Venomous Schemes like I said in my previous post, but The Bloody Bridal Chamber is another book in the same series, book 4 to be exact, first published in issue #1129 of Wuxia World magazine on February 16, 1981.
I’m just posting as I translate it, three chapters up right now. Almost done with the fourth. Proper title card graphic and ebook (if ready to be made by then) and such will have to wait till I get back home in a month or so.
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.
Trawling through old archived posts of the old Oldrain (Chinese language) wuxia forum, posts from around 2003-2004, and I got in the mood to check out Sima Ziyan 司馬紫煙, who I have not read much from. Because back then, in the early days of online wuxia fandom, Sima Ziyan had his own subforum on Oldrain. Aside from his, there was also a subforum for Huang Yi 黃易, Huanzhu Louzhu 還珠樓主, Yun Zhongyue 雲中岳, Sima Ling 司馬翎, and one shared between Wen Rui’an 溫瑞安 and Gu Long 古龍.
That was it.
There was a general subforum for posting about any author, but there was no dedicated Jin Yong 金庸 subforum, no Liang Yusheng 梁羽生 subforum. Later on, Oldrain would add subforums for them, but here, in 2003, there were only a few dedicated subforums, indicating which authors had a cult following at the time. It was refreshing to see healthy and varied discussion of an entire genre, wuxia, and not just endless circlejerking over Jin Yong, which is just about all you see on the English side of the internet.
The Oldrain forum 旧雨楼 back in 2003
Sima Ling’s dedicated forum makes sense because he was championed by wuxia scholar/researcher Ye Hongsheng 葉洪生, who was also a moderator of the forum at the time. The cult followings of Yun Zhongyue and Sima Ziyan though, are more surprising because these two authors have not garnered much attention outside these dedicated fandoms. Yun Zhongyue is far and away my favorite wuxia author. I will be posting more about him soon. And he did at least warrant a section in Ye Hongsheng & Lin Baochun’s 林保淳 book on the development of wuxia fiction in Taiwan. But Sima Ziyan did not, though he was later included in Lin Baochun’s solely authored history book on the same topic in 2022.
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.
When it comes to wuxia in the English-language community, film and TV are definitely more popular media than novels. No surprise given that there are relatively very few wuxia novels translated to English. But there are more and more people trying their hand at writing wuxia in novel form, or short stories, etc. So then how are they learning how to write wuxia novels?
Unfortunately, it seems for the most part that wuxia film and TV are the teachers. You can easily watch Shaw Bros. movies or wuxia TV (or now online) dramas, and many people grew up watching some Jin Yong adaptation or another. But after all, a Jin Yong adaptation is just an adaptation—it’s not Jin Yong. If you’ve only seen Jin Yong dramas and movies then you have never experienced what in my opinion is the best thing about Jin Yong: his fight scenes.
On the screen you see the actors swing a sabre or thrust a sword, but you don’t get the details about the martial art being used and how it stacks up against the martial art it is being wielded against. You see characters touch each other rapidly and then someone can’t move, but you don’t get the details of which acupoints are being sealed and what’s going on internally in the body. With Jin Yong, and any other wuxia author, you do. These details, along with the detailed descriptions of characters’ appearances, thoughts, etc., are the essence of wuxia novels, in my opinion.
I hadn’t planned on translating anything else so soon after finishing my spate of Long Chengfeng translations, but then I remembered the Legend of Nangong Xue series I started a while back and never finished. Back then I was working on the 18th book in the series. Today I am beginning a translation of the 1st book in the series: Treading Blood to Sky’s End《踏血天涯》. I had halted the 18th book because it was getting too talky and I wanted more action. This book starts off with action.
This is also the rare wuxia novel/series with a female protagonist. Not just a a prominent female lead to accompany the male MC. No, she is the MC in this one, Nangong Xue, orphaned daughter of a courtesan now roaming the jianghu seeking to avenge her mother.
I don’t know anything about the author, Fu Hongxue 傅紅雪. The pen name comes from Gu Long’s famous character, but I don’t know if the author is a he, a she? All I know is that beginning with this novel in issue #1429 of Wuxia World Magazine the series ran for 18 books (as far as I have counted; I don’t think I missed any). Fu Hongxue also authored two spinoff stories featuring a side character from the Nangong Xue series, as well a few standalone novels. I can’t find any information about the author otherwise. As far as I know, none of the stories were ever printed in book form.
This project won’t be translated as quickly as the Long Chengfeng ones. I can’t maintain that pace. But I’ve got the first two chapters up aleady.
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.
