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akujunkanHa! And you thought I wouldn't be reading anything because of the move. Well, you thought wrong, as demonstrated by these two reviews.
1) Six Records Of A Floating Life - Shen Fu
Six Records Of A Floating Life is perhaps my favorite pre-modern Chinese novel, perhaps because I see so many parallels between Shen Fu's lifestyle and those of me and my friends today, which is pretty neat when one considers the vast cultural and temporal gulfs between the two. His devotion to his wife is also quite endearing, even despite his frequent affairs with prostitutes. T
he first and third chapters are my favorites and I recommend that casual parties read them first as they're the most accessible. (This is a departure for me; I usually read books straight through or don't bother reading them at all.) Penguin's translation reads nicely, captures what I imagine must have been something of the feel and poetry of the original language, and is carefully notated.
My quibbles are as follows: some of the notes seem to assume a reader of lower-than-average intelligence (it doesn't take a mental giant to infer that scatological humor might be offensive in Chinese too, for instance); notes and explanatory sections (most frequently involving weights and measures) are often unnecessarily repetitious; and dates are inconsistently translated (sometimes given in "during such-and-such a year in the reign of Emperor Qianlong" format and sometimes by the Western calendar). Most daming of all, translator Leonard Pratt has chosen to use the idiotic Wade-Giles romanizations system but to forgo the use of apostrophes--thus rendering said system useless for anyone interested in correctly pronouncing (sans tones) the transliterated words. (I will never understand why some scholars of Chinese language and literature harbor such an animus to pinyin.) That said, this is a book well worth reading, even if--especially if--you've tried reading other Chinese classics and not found them to your taste. So go read it!
2) Samurai William - Giles Milton
Samurai William is a quick, easy-to-follow read. This is highly unfortunate, because it might convince the casual reader toward whom it's geared that it has merit as a history book. It does not. Milton's apparent inability to research his subject prior to writing about it should have precluded him from ever attempting to write a historical book, especially one for a general audience.
Unfortunately, it didn't, and the mistakes and inaccuracies begin even before page one. "The Englishman Who Opened Japan," proclaims the cover. Except that this claim is belied by the first third of the book, which Milton (without any sense of irony) devotes to an abbreviated history of all the other Europeans who arrived in (and "opened") Japan before William Adams. (Of course, one could also make the case that Japan was never "closed," to begin with, given its long history of cultural exchange with China and Korea, but I don't even want to get into Milton's raging--and unacknowledged--Eurocentric biases.)
On second thought, maybe I do. Milton has precious little knowledge of Japan and its customs, and evidently made no attempt to educate himself before writing a book about a Westerner's experiences in Japan. Not only does the text fail to contextualize or even explain many necessary aspects of Japanese culture, it is also riddled with inaccuracies: Milton places the Japanese New Year on January 1st; he misspells countless place names, personal names, and other Japanese words; he refers to katana as scimitars... the list goes on and on. He also--by his own admission--needed others to translate much of the original source material (all Western) on which he relied. And he didn't even bother to have those materials translated in their entirety. So he can hardly be said to have a gained a firm grasp on his subject matter.
He compounds these problems (one rather thinks he was attempting to hide them) by failing to provide footnotes or citations for his claims, and there are many (Japanese retainers being buried alive with their lords, for instance) for which I would have liked to have had sources, for they seemed dubious in the extreme. He also harps upon the amazing brutality and callousness of the Japanese, failing to contextualize this brutality at all--Japan had just emerged from centuries of civil war during the book's time period. I also had issues with the illustrations, all of which are engravings, seemingly done by a single artist. The captions are vague to the point of uselessness, and no information is provided as to the name and nationality of the artist, or even the time period during which he worked. I doubt the engravings were done by who had ever visited Japan; indeed, I doubt many of them are even meant to depict the Japanese at all, for the places and people they show resemble Southeast Asia/ns more than anything else. So, while Samurai William succeeds as a light read, it is ultimately a useless book; its myriad inaccuracies will frustrate Japan buffs and do a great disservice to the general reader. Avoid it.
SBS: No clue, since the majority of my books are in INakaville. You cannot conceive of the separation anxiety I'm currently suffering.
That will be all.
1) Six Records Of A Floating Life - Shen Fu
Six Records Of A Floating Life is perhaps my favorite pre-modern Chinese novel, perhaps because I see so many parallels between Shen Fu's lifestyle and those of me and my friends today, which is pretty neat when one considers the vast cultural and temporal gulfs between the two. His devotion to his wife is also quite endearing, even despite his frequent affairs with prostitutes. T
he first and third chapters are my favorites and I recommend that casual parties read them first as they're the most accessible. (This is a departure for me; I usually read books straight through or don't bother reading them at all.) Penguin's translation reads nicely, captures what I imagine must have been something of the feel and poetry of the original language, and is carefully notated.
My quibbles are as follows: some of the notes seem to assume a reader of lower-than-average intelligence (it doesn't take a mental giant to infer that scatological humor might be offensive in Chinese too, for instance); notes and explanatory sections (most frequently involving weights and measures) are often unnecessarily repetitious; and dates are inconsistently translated (sometimes given in "during such-and-such a year in the reign of Emperor Qianlong" format and sometimes by the Western calendar). Most daming of all, translator Leonard Pratt has chosen to use the idiotic Wade-Giles romanizations system but to forgo the use of apostrophes--thus rendering said system useless for anyone interested in correctly pronouncing (sans tones) the transliterated words. (I will never understand why some scholars of Chinese language and literature harbor such an animus to pinyin.) That said, this is a book well worth reading, even if--especially if--you've tried reading other Chinese classics and not found them to your taste. So go read it!
2) Samurai William - Giles Milton
Samurai William is a quick, easy-to-follow read. This is highly unfortunate, because it might convince the casual reader toward whom it's geared that it has merit as a history book. It does not. Milton's apparent inability to research his subject prior to writing about it should have precluded him from ever attempting to write a historical book, especially one for a general audience.
Unfortunately, it didn't, and the mistakes and inaccuracies begin even before page one. "The Englishman Who Opened Japan," proclaims the cover. Except that this claim is belied by the first third of the book, which Milton (without any sense of irony) devotes to an abbreviated history of all the other Europeans who arrived in (and "opened") Japan before William Adams. (Of course, one could also make the case that Japan was never "closed," to begin with, given its long history of cultural exchange with China and Korea, but I don't even want to get into Milton's raging--and unacknowledged--Eurocentric biases.)
On second thought, maybe I do. Milton has precious little knowledge of Japan and its customs, and evidently made no attempt to educate himself before writing a book about a Westerner's experiences in Japan. Not only does the text fail to contextualize or even explain many necessary aspects of Japanese culture, it is also riddled with inaccuracies: Milton places the Japanese New Year on January 1st; he misspells countless place names, personal names, and other Japanese words; he refers to katana as scimitars... the list goes on and on. He also--by his own admission--needed others to translate much of the original source material (all Western) on which he relied. And he didn't even bother to have those materials translated in their entirety. So he can hardly be said to have a gained a firm grasp on his subject matter.
He compounds these problems (one rather thinks he was attempting to hide them) by failing to provide footnotes or citations for his claims, and there are many (Japanese retainers being buried alive with their lords, for instance) for which I would have liked to have had sources, for they seemed dubious in the extreme. He also harps upon the amazing brutality and callousness of the Japanese, failing to contextualize this brutality at all--Japan had just emerged from centuries of civil war during the book's time period. I also had issues with the illustrations, all of which are engravings, seemingly done by a single artist. The captions are vague to the point of uselessness, and no information is provided as to the name and nationality of the artist, or even the time period during which he worked. I doubt the engravings were done by who had ever visited Japan; indeed, I doubt many of them are even meant to depict the Japanese at all, for the places and people they show resemble Southeast Asia/ns more than anything else. So, while Samurai William succeeds as a light read, it is ultimately a useless book; its myriad inaccuracies will frustrate Japan buffs and do a great disservice to the general reader. Avoid it.
SBS: No clue, since the majority of my books are in INakaville. You cannot conceive of the separation anxiety I'm currently suffering.
That will be all.