For me it’s gotta be “Morte e Vida Severina”/ “Severino Death and Life”. It’s an epic poem narrating the journey of a poor man from Northeastern Brazil, a famously poor and segregated region that’s frequently affected by severe droughts, fleeing from his home and walking to the big city to survive the season. On the way he describes all the misery he experiences and sees.
One stanza that has stuck with me for years goes something like this "And all of us Severinos/With the same lives/Will die of the same/Severe Severino death,/The death died of/Old age before thirty/Of an ambush before twenty/And of hunger day by day/(Of weakness and plague/The Severino death/attacks at all ages/even those not born)
金庸 Jin Yun and all his series
More people read it than Lord of the rings probably
Basically the grand daddy of martial arts fantasy. It was so successful it killed the genre for like 30 years. Too bad it is very difficult to translate and do it justice into English.
I bought a translation of A Hero Born last time I was in Taiwan. Translator is Anna Holmwood. I’ll have to start it soon.
Any recommendations for the best English translations?
I should read this ! My Chinese is proficient enough that I got through 3 body problem but I’m not Chinese nor live in a Chinese community anymore and therefore really don’t know what to read unless something is big enough to make it into western media.
chinese web fiction sphere is popping. Idk if you’re into fantasy, but there’s a chinese web serial called lord of mysteries which weaves together eldritch deities, mysticism based paths to godhood, intricate conspiracies from literally 10s of different factions in a fantasy world… amazingly creative stuff, most interesting fantasy story I’ve read in years. Problem is the english translation is really crude/rough. Probably far easier to get into if you can read the original chinese. Don’t get me wrong fans of web ficiton will put up with crappy prose to get to the brilliance of the underlying world/story but you’ll probably have a better time in the original language.
Too bad it’s one hell of a self insert where all the women are written in a way to serve the authors own fantasy
Yeah. His novels are some of the most popular Chinese novels in modern Chinese literature and have left a very strong mark in Chinese culture and yet is virtually unknown outside of Chinese-speaking world. You probably find more westerners who have read translated versions of Three Body Problem (also a good book though) than Jin Yong stuff.
The issue with wuxia is just that I think they are very hard to translate, plus the stories are all deeply tied with Chinese history and culture. Even if you get past the problem of translating the literal meanings to English, there are other historical and cultural contexts that could be hard to translate across. It’s not like a sci-fi book like Three Body Problem where the fundamental concepts are much more interesting to a western reader.