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)

  • y-c-c@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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.