Thousand Autumns

I started translating Qian Qiu in March of 2021. It was winter. The pandemic had been around for about a year. Translating at least I had control over this cross section of my life from the world’s wild indifference.

Thank you to the other translators of this novel. Thank you for everyone who is about to read, or has read and followed along. I hope it brought you joy and sustenance. Thank you to those who left me a comment – I do read all of them and some have made me laugh rather abruptly in the middle of the night. To the person who hoped that I would find $20 on the ground, I actually did find one in the hallway but I asked the man who was sitting close by if it was his and he said it was.

The Qian Qiu world is a remarkable one for me: one so far removed from my daily life I can run to it for escape (if only I can level injustices and petty annoyances with one sweep of my OP wugong, my enemies quaking in their boots, drink fish head soup, look at interesting rock formations with my love interest, etc.) but also one so resonant with the world today. It is a deeply personal and political novel.

The prose of the novel is beautiful. I have tried hard not to alter its sentence structure for an English audience for the sake of ‘readability’, I quite enjoy sentences that go on and on, comma after comma, that by imperialist grammar standards would be considered run-on, but why obliterate the original text’s non-English non-familiar cadences? In short: I do what I want. This is my translation and these are my words.

I want to leave you with the novel’s opening paragraphs. I translated them on a whim many months before taking on this translation project, to apply to a translation workshop that I didn’t get into.

This scene is seared onto my brain. The mountains, the cloud sea, the precarity of where we stand, how we live, alone, in relation to.

半步峰，顾名思义，脚下进退方寸之地，往前半步即是万丈悬崖，其上怪石耸立，异木横生，其下雾霭茫茫，神呼鬼立，嶙峋险恶，天地不接。

悬崖前面，另有一座山峰，名曰应悔峰，却比半步峰还要更加险峻高耸几分，壁立千仞如刀削，仿佛无可立足之地，纵有些许苍翠，亦是根生石外，不假土壤，令人望之不寒而栗，悔不该登上此峰，应悔之名正源于此。

两峰之间有一道天堑，由上往下看，云海凝滞，不知深浅几何，隐约还能听见渴虎奔猊，川流不息的水声，寻常樵夫猎民尚且不敢攀登，就连先天高手立于此地，只怕也会生出几分人不胜天的感慨。

然而就在云雾之下的崖底，江水与山壁之间，有一条狭长崎岖，由怪石垒成的石道，此时却有两人一前一后走在上面。

Banbu Peak, per its name, a square inch underfoot kind of place, half step forward was a ten thousand zhang precipice, above: strange rocks stood, rare trees, below: vast fog cloud, gods cried ghosts startled, an austere rockface, distinct from heaven and earth.

In front of the precipice, there was another mountain named Yinghui Peak which compared to Banbu Peak stood even higher and several parts more drastic, its surface as if cut by knife, truly the semblance of nowhere to stand, green runs and roots rising aboveground, the view made one tremble without a breeze, made one regret stepping onto this particular peak, thus Yinghui named after this exact feeling.

Between the two peaks there was a stretch of river, from above, the cloud sea looked semisolid, just how deep, vague sounds of rushing beasts, the water falling without cease, nevermind the commonfolk who wouldn’t attempt this climb, even if it was a talented martial artist standing here, they too would probably feel in part something wordless about their mortal timeline.

And yet, below the fog at the base of the precipice, between river and cliff, was a narrow rock path, and right now two people— one ahead, one behind— were walking on it.