Like I said yesterday, reading Uketsu was getting me in the mood for more Asian literature. I find Asian books of almost any kind produce a greater feeling of escapism than western books, which is what I really want sometime. What I ended up settling on for breezy bedtime reading was Jin Yong’s wuxia novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. It’s extremely long, nearly a million words, and I honestly don’t know if I have the wherewithal to chip away and complete any book that long, but we’ll see. Wuxia is a Chinese genre concerning the world of martial artists (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an example of a wuxia movie) and Jin Yong is widely considered the GOAT of it, having published many very long novels serially in Hong Kong newspapers.
There is not much demand for this genre’s works to be “officially” translated into English so many translations are done by teams of adoring fans, and this book’s is one of those. One extremely bizarre and inexplicable aspect of this translation is that the story can’t decide if it wants to be in past or present tense, sometimes mixing them up even within the same sentence. It’s so sloppy, yet it’s also kind of like that one sudty werhe tehy sercw up the oderr of ltretes in wrdos and you can slitl raed it awanyy— you just eventually stop noticing it and worrying about it.
Similarly with Uketsu, it’s hard to tell whether the childlike aspects of the dialogue and narration are a product of the translation, some sort of cultural difference, or something else. The “jianghu” and “wulin” (the underworld and the martial world) in which the wuxia stories take place are cozily timeless; although the technology seems medieval there are some modern word choices like “Mr.,” “guy,” and even… “retard.” Yes, the mean word. I wonder what Chinese phrase that was the translation for. Also, the translator likes to interject his own opinions on characters or references with astonishing frequency. (He said that the Taoister master Zhuangzi was incoherent, LMAO).
All in all, though, I’m having lots of fun. The story is extremely dragged out to the point where I’ve already read a novella’s length’s worth of content and it’s only like three chapters in and nothing even close to a complete story has taken place, but I think that’s part of the fun of this format. Let’s see how long I can keep this up.