Derb here. No, I haven’t read WAR AND PEACE in Chinese (though I know the
title and author: ZHANZHENG YU HEPING by Liefu Tuoersitai). I have read
ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS all the way through in Chinese… but only in
the “lian-huan-hua” picture-strip version. Hey, it’s ten volumes, two
frames to a page, around **seven thousand** frames. The action of the book
spans 81 years. Moss Roberts has done an English translation of the
original, 2339 pages of text in four volumes. When the Chinese write a
novel, they don’t hold back.
The **great** classic Chinese novel is DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER. (In Chinese
HONG LOU MENG. The 5-volume Penguin translation is titled STORY OF THE
STONE.) I have made several attempts to read this in translation, but never
got more than a third of the way into it. I couldn’t even finish the
picture-strip version (3 vols). If anyone wants my opinion, based on these
very incomplete experiences, it’s strictly a woman’s book. The Chinese go
nuts for it, though, and even people who haven’t read it know the main
thread by osmosis. In Chinese literary-academic circles there is even a
type of specialist known as a “red-ologist” (hongxuejia), a person who has
made this book his lifetime study. Chinese TV did a dramatization of the
whole thing; my wife has it on VCD. It’s kind of fun to sit with Chinese
people watching it. Everyone’s an expert, and you get a running commentary
of nit-picking: “That’s not the way it is in the book…,” “They didn’t use
cups like that in the Qing dynasty…,” “This servant-girl looks way too
old…,” etc., etc.
All this talk of ponderous tomes reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s remark about
PARADISE LOST: “No man ever wished it longer.”