大唐双龙传 [Da Tang Shuang Long Zhuan] by Huang Yi

[akolaw]

continue my above post.

I have read Da Tang 3 times already, and I still find interest in following Fox's translation. What a good ride.

I am a fan of Huang Yi, but I am also a fan of many other writer, Jin Yong and Gu Long and many more, But I think HY's fan base outside China HK , Taiwan and Thailand know less about HY because of the lack of movie and quality tv to attract readers and HY's book is not easy to translate, and some terms are not easy to understand.

I have said before and I said here again, translation is not a easy task, squeeze time to offer to do this is a huge commitment, in this marathon test, I come to rejoice and explain some terms.

I would like to bring constructive comment here and help keep a positive environment.

Fox and I don't always agree, I bring my comment and respect his choice and leave it to his choice as this is his baby.

I wish this forum will continue as good deed should .



I understand how tough it is to offer oneself to translate without financial interest, Da Tang is not easy to translate and this is a a long marathon,

[徐中銳]

I encourage you to translate your favourite passages and provide, alongside, supplementary notes.

The best intention will be for people to progress towards reading this novel in its original text ?

I have read Da Tang 3 times already… I wish this forum will continue as good deed should.

It's too early for me to thoroughly scrutinise foxs' valediction.

[Jayariyin]

I wish this forum will continue as good deed should .

Me, too.

How do I pm?

[anurman]

My first Huang Yi's novel is A Step into the Past/Search for Qin from this forum, translated by Jean and many other translators. What a great novel!
There are mistakes made by the translators, such as the name or some generals/historical figures. But it doesn't really matter. One of the translators even added one scene of his own fantasy, but none objected about it.
Without hardworks of the translators, I doubt I will ever read it, or even hear the name of Huang Yi. I'm not Chinese by ethnicity, and I doubt I will have time to learn Chinese language in the future.
So, please continue to translate this great novel here Fox. I would love to have it in my email, but read it here will be much better. I can read some great insights from Akolaw and others, or some funny comments from fellow readers.

[徐中銳]

Let's be constructive, SPCNET is after all a community,「多情公子」can be approximated closer to what ?

For example, ‘Passionate Prince’ is not an accurate translation, but it sounds better than ‘son of an official/son of nobility with a lot of love/passion’; you see what I mean?

Break it into 2 parts, 多情 & 公子。

Myself, the Chinese 情 isn't as simple as "love/passion" because of I remember the following famous 13th century poem titled 摸魚兒, by 元好問：
問世間，情是何物？直教生死相許。
天南地北雙飛客，老翅幾回寒暑。
歡樂趣，離別苦，就中更有痴兒女。
君應有語，渺萬里層雲，
千山暮雪，隻影向誰去！

橫汾路，寂寞當年簫鼓，
荒煙依舊平楚。
招魂楚些何嗟及，山鬼暗啼風雨。
天也妒，未信與，鶯兒燕子俱黃土。
千秋萬古，為留待騷人，
狂歌痛飲，來訪雁丘處。

Anyone can link a notably accurate translation of it ?

[bchin22]

What if only one of you contacted me? That’s okay too. I promise that I will still share it with you. What if none? Then I will keep it for my own collection. Simple.

Foxs you have a PM from me.

[hungryhero]

Foxs you have a PM from me.

Mine as well. Thanks foxs for your hardwork!

[bchin22]

Also, 98% of your readers just appreciate the translation IN GENERAL Foxs.

Most of us don't give a flying crap if words should be interpreted as SEAL vs PRINT vs BUTTHURTTHATFOXSISNTUSINGMYWORD. People dont care of it it's Undying or Immortal or whatever. If there are people who are overly opinionated and "OH SO SMART," they should just translate it themselves.



Don't ruin the restaurant for the rest of us just because some idiots keep on insisting the quality of the food isn't up to par. You have too much time on your hands and/or are just a petty and shallow human being.

[wangxiaohu]

Foxs you have a PM from me.

Me too..me too..

[wangxiaohu]

Also, 98% of your readers just appreciate the translation IN GENERAL Foxs.

Most of us don't give a flying crap if words should be interpreted as SEAL vs PRINT vs BUTTHURTTHATFOXSISNTUSINGMYWORD. People dont care of it it's Undying or Immortal or whatever. If there are people who are overly opinionated and "OH SO SMART," they should just translate it themselves.



Don't ruin the restaurant for the rest of us just because some idiots keep on insisting the quality of the food isn't up to par. You have too much time on your hands and/or are just a petty and shallow human being.

+1. .

[徐中銳]

What connection are you to Cambridge Analytica ? Because, where did get "98%" ? And you're their representative ? Have you been ordering 左公雞 netflix.com/watch/80011853 ?

Also, 98% of your readers just appreciate the translation IN GENERAL Foxs.

Most of us don't give a flying crap if words should be interpreted as SEAL vs PRINT vs BUTTHURTTHATFOXSISNTUSINGMYWORD. People dont care of it it's Undying or Immortal or whatever. If there are people who are overly opinionated and "OH SO SMART," they should just translate it themselves.



Don't ruin the restaurant for the rest of us just because some idiots keep on insisting the quality of the food isn't up to par. You have too much time on your hands and/or are just a petty and shallow human being.

"GENERAL Foxs" stew…

[徐中銳]

當然的識少少，扮代表。

Me too..me too..

[foxs]

Rui, you are right, I misread Lance’s post. Apology. You know what, since you have much, much more superior translation skill than me, why don’t you do your own translation? No, don’t ask anybody else; I am challenging you. You are not scared, are you? Who knows, we’ll probably gain another translator (‘superior’ translator, I might add), so that this forum might come alive again. The only thing I am asking is that you don’t post it here (I noticed that you have your own thread?).

Anurman, I hear you, and I totally agree. I’d hate to lose reading your comments as well. But let me sort it out first; we’ll see, okay? I have received your email (and several others’ as well). Y’all will hear from me soon, like in a day or two. Thank you all for your support.

Jaya, I am sending you a pm. You should see next to ‘Welcome’ (upper right corner), the ‘Notifications’, which should tell you, you have a private message. Just click on that, it should be self-explanatory. Or use the main menu (upper left corner): ‘New Posts’, ‘Private Messages’ …

To you all, please don’t worry, I give you my word of honor that I am not going to abuse your email.

[foxs]

I just realized that you can also click on my username, a sub-menu will appear, one of them is 'Private Messages'.

I also forgot to mention that the next part is ready to be posted, I just want to sort this problem first. Thank you for your patience.

[bchin22]

I arbitrarily threw that number out.

I'm sorry, should I run every damn number, statistic, commentary, translation, and grammatical issue by you "SIR??"

As I recall you were one of the trolls who has to comment on everything. We get it. You're smart. Whoop the freaking do for you. You must feel very proud of yourself.

*slow golf clap*

What connection are you to Cambridge Analytica ? Because, where did get "98%" ? And you're their representative ? Have you been ordering 左公雞 netflix.com/watch/80011853 ?



"GENERAL Foxs" stew…

[bchin22]

Also just realized the beauty of the newly-discovered "Ignore" function so I no longer have to listen to the mouth-farting of certain individuals who try to tout themselves as "modern sino-scholars."



In fact it wipes every message they can post, on the board (from my view that is).

[徐中銳]

« Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And [Vladimir Nabokov can explain to] you why. »

If I already read the story, why would I want to translate it for you guys?

"How to be a Good Reader" or "Kindness to Authors"—something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions to various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Comme l’on serait savant, si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq à six livres: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well some half a dozen books."


In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.


Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels ? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.


Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and it name the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwasher Lake. That mist is a mountain—and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and linked forever if the book lasts forever.


One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.


The students heavily leaned on emotional identification, action, and the socio-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.


Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards the book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.


Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make ; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.


There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.


So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important.


We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience—of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience—he will hardly enjoy great literature.


Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.


Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.


Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little wooly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around a camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.


There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.


To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet—this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia. Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.


The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

[wangxiaohu]

I just realized that you can also click on my username, a sub-menu will appear, one of them is 'Private Messages'.

I also forgot to mention that the next part is ready to be posted, I just want to sort this problem first. Thank you for your patience.

Foxs, have you tried the 'add to ignore button as mentioned by bchin22? It works wonder.

Thanks bchin22 for informing the 'mute' accupoint.

[wangxiaohu]

Suddenly I understand the silence after Murong Fu slapped Bao Butong's Zhiyang and Lingtai accupoint.

[bchin22]

Foxs, have you tried the 'add to ignore button as mentioned by bchin22? It works wonder.

Thanks bchin22 for informing the 'mute' accupoint.

To discover an ideal is one thing, but to spread the knowledge is another.

Thanks Brother Wang, for gently reminding others of this. Now we can ignore certain rabid dogs and never ever know if they're even barking