Golden Age: First Chapters - Brendan
I suppose everybody hears the author's voice slightly differently when they're reading a novel. The translations in Wang in Love and Bondage didn't speak with the voice I'd heard when I read Wang's writing, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to organize a group effort to re-translate 黄金时代, the novella that Wang was fondest of. Wang's widow 李银河 Li Yinhe kindly gave her permission, and so we were off.
Truth be told, she even admired whores a bit. It wasn’t a question of whether whores were good or bad; it was that she simply wasn’t one, the same way a cat isn’t a dog. If everyone goes around calling a cat a dog, the cat’s bound to start feeling out of sorts, and now that everyone was calling Chen Qingyang a whore, she was completely unnerved, as if she didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Download this as a PDF. [No longer downloadable, sorry]
By Brendan O'Kane, July 28, 8:56a.m.