Panda Books 1

I just tapped into a massive new to-read list: Panda Books. This big 1980s effort to put out a high volume of modern Chinese literature into the English market was lauded with some reservations at the time by Leo Ou-fan Lee, Robert Hegel, and Beth McKillop -- I found their reviews in various China journals, all dating from 1984. It sounds like these books never had much influence, probably because many of the translations were flat and also because they were not marketed very well (Hegel apparently tried to get classroom copies of several, but could not). At any rate, it's going to be my task to begin combing through this series. Even though they are in English, this seems daunting!

Here's a couple that I'm thinking of using:

"Shen Congwen's stories evoke his childhood in the remote south-west, in a society untouched by the outside world. This is a haunting collection, beautifully translated, which brings the inhabitants of Fenghuang and their timeless customs and rituals to life with a sharp immediacy." -- Beth McKillop. Too bad no translator has yet been celebrated for capturing the regional dialect feel in Shen Congwen (perhaps me, someday? I can dream, right?)








"Beneath the Red Banner (Zhenghongqi xia) is an autobiographical novel begun by Lao She in the early 1960's according to an appendix by his widow Hu Jieqing. Only eleven short chapters were ever written, even though the novel promised to be a long
one; it was left unfinished when Red Guards drove Lao She to suicide in 1966. The portion here narrates events of the protagonist's infancy with a great deal of humor; the novelist's satire quickly becomes as bitter here as it did in one of his earlier novels, Cat Country (Maocheng ji, 1933). Yet his skill at characterization and at capturing the vibrancy of living speech is everywhere visible. Don J. Cohn makes a valiant attempt to recreate Lao She's style in English, but that is a formidable undertaking. Not surprisingly, the translation is flat by comparison with the original." - Robert Hegel