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Title: The Tiger Killers: The Marshes of Mount Liang by Shi Nai'An, Luo Guanzhong, John Dent-Young, Alex Dent-Young, Luo Guanzhong, John Dent-Yuong ISBN: 9-6220175-1-7 Publisher: The Chinese University Press Pub. Date: December, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting work by the translation isn't top notch
Comment: The novel is no doubt one of the great masterpieces of Chinese literature. Yet, the tranlsation isn't that well executed and much of the original flavor has been lost in the process. Quite a pity.
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful Tales
Comment: This wonderful and amazing book should delight anyone who has any interest in China, and perhaps even a great many who don't, so long as they have at least a sense of humor and a sense of adventure. Here, in relatively short, action-packed chapters, a large cast of well-defined characters, with nicknames such as "Iron Ox" (a.k.a. "The Black Whirlwind"), "Bee Sting Huang," "The Three-Inch Poxy Midget," "Short-Arse Wang," "The Magic Messenger," and "The Opportune Rain," to name a few, hurry you irresistibly along through stories of heroic combat, political intrigue, judicial corruption, last-minute rescue from execution, drunken brawling, adultery, revenge, murder, cannibalism, you name it. The book amuses your sense of adventure in a subtler sense, too, in that you get caught up in time travel and experiences of cultural difference and strangeness that make this narrative unlike anything you've ever read before--really one of a kind.
In terms of style, for example, the translators have worked hard to give you a feel for how perhaps this "novel," a vast collection of diverse tales, was originally derived from or always close to conventions of oral storytelling: characters are dismissed from the scene with verbal formulas like "we say no more of him"; the audience is sometimes primed for action, like a barehanded fight with a tiger, with the comment, "it's slow in the telling, but it happens in a flash"; and the storyteller/narrator sometimes draws himself up to deliver a short, often humorous poem to commemorate or point the moral to what you feel must have been a familiar tale to the audience. The greatest triumph of the book for me, though, in terms of style--and it's certainly related to this matter of oral storytelling--is that the characters, all of whom have plenty to say out loud, speak in distinct styles or accents: colloquial and even slangy for low-life types and the rough-and-ready sense of manliness many of the characters aim to project, but sometimes almost comically formal and elaborate in scenes where characters meet and strive to outdo each other in politeness and a sense of honor.
In terms of what's happening, too, you are carried away into a wonderfully unfamiliar world. Take this matter of the cannibalism, for example, which has often been suppressed in earlier translations of this ancient saga. In their little shop of horrors, the inn by the great tree at Crossways Rise, Zhang Qing, "The Gardener," and his wife, Sister Sun, "The Ogress," drug the wine of hapless travelers, chop up the hefty ones for sale as buffalo meat to people thereabouts, and "turn the skinny ones into mince meat for pie fillings." When Wu Song, one of the heroes of the tale, rescues himself from an attempt by "The Ogress" to carve him up, "The Gardener" realizes they're dealing with someone special, someone with The Right Stuff, Chinese style: he bows to Wu Song, prostrates himself and loudly regrets that his wife "couldn't see what was staring her in the face." The hero, "seeing the husband's manner was so correct," not only releases "The Ogress," but laughs it up with both of them and joins them in a feast (not on mince pies). "The Gardener," to make conversation, says he has to be careful about whom he kills. If he and his wife were "to meddle with"--that is, make mince pies out of--any of the young women who make their living as traveling performers, for example, word might get out and someone "might proclaim it from the stage" that he's no "gentleman." Wow, what an insult! And what an injustice! The incongruities here seem to me wild and funny. But the underlying truth, I suppose, is that we're traveling, as readers, through a world whose values differ from our own in ways that often amuse, sometimes shock, and (at least for me) always fascinate. "Murder one can forgive," as one of the heroes elsewhere says, proverbially, expecting everyone to nod in agreement, "but not an insult to one's feelings." Oh? How would that play in Peoria?
Some readers of this review may be put off by observing that the present volume is the second in John and Alex Dent-Young's on-going translation of this classical Chinese narrative, the SHUIHU ZHUAN, more generally known in the West as THE WATER MARGIN. The first volume, which they title THE BROKEN SEALS, is also in print with the same publisher, of course; but the important thing to say in the present context is that this second volume stands very well on its own, and in fact contains some of the most famous and arresting episodes. For "episodic" is the right way to describe it, I think. The book as a whole (I'm waiting for their translation of the rest of it!) seems to have a large, wave-like rhythm, as these ambiguous outlaw-heroes, outcasts in a divinely inspired but humanly corrupt imperial system, full of toadies, hypocrites and cowardly cheats, gradually converge on a mountain stronghold near the marshes of Mt. Liang. But the real fascination and life of the book for me are more immediate: they lie in the moment-by-moment rendering of the characters and their actions, narrated in this new translation with unmatched vigor, humor and colloquial ease; the insights you get into daily life of Chinese peddlers, soldiers, petty bureaucrats, bawds, outcasts, gentlemen, and countless others; and (as I've suggested) the really absorbing experience you get of seeing what very different things people from another culture--and not only, I suspect, in days gone by--cherish or take for granted. Treat yourself to a classic but completely novel novel!
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