CHINESE LITERATURE THREAD

[Anonymous No.20742472]

I have a burning desire to stop learning Chinese and switch to Japanese.

I'm in love with so many Japanese authors, but I haven't even read a single book by a Chinese author, which is admittedly my fault for not seeking them out.

Anyways, post your favorite Chinese books, and your Chinese authors. Classic and contemporary are both fine, but I'm especially interested in seeing recent works.

[Anonymous No.20742574]

>>20742472
>quality Chinese literature
You're in for disappointment

[Anonymous No.20742629]

>>20742472
lol I'm learning Chinese too and can't think of a single thing about their culture that interests me all that much. Lu Xun is alright and so is Mo Yan, but they're both derivative of better European writers.

[Anonymous No.20743417]

>>20742574
go away chud
>>20742472
modern chinese literature suffered because of mao so if you're learning the language because of literature japanese or classical chinese would probably be better choices and for both of those you don't need mandarin

[Anonymous No.20743427]

>>20742472
Wu Zhi Ji Zong's "school of the military" from the Cao Kingdom, pre-imperial, is on my top 10 of all time. He's like the Chinese Cato, if Cato was a bandit captain.

[Anonymous No.20743434]

>>20742472
Can't go wrong with any of the great Chinese classics. A Dream of Red Mansions and Water Margin, in particular, are two of my favorite novels.

As for contemporary stuff, I have bad news for you. There's good Chinese lit being written, to be sure, but translations are very sparse and lag far behind. If you don't mind reading wuxia/martial arts stuff, Jin Yong's novels are pretty good. Legend of the Condor Heroes just got a recent translation that's pretty good, and it's one of the most popular (perhaps the most popular) modern Chinese novels.

[Anonymous No.20743459]

Contemporary I really liked Brothers by Yu Hua and Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

[Anonymous No.20744125]

>>20742472
Jesus, people like you are the worst. Riddled with yellow fever, but too incompetent to alleviate it kek. Nip lit isn't as great as it's made out to be. If anything chink lit is far more interesting for the historical context. Murakami, for example, really is as bland in Japanese as he is translated.

[Anonymous No.20745243]

>>20744125
Japanese still has poets like Chūya and Miyazawa to offer and Kawabata and the like also seem to lose much in translation
Name some more good works written in Mandarin

[Anonymous No.20745471]

>>20742472
Dream of the Red Chamber

[Anonymous No.20746799]

>>20742472
>Japanese
LMFAO this website is full of weaboo freaks

[Anonymous No.20746866]

i have often heard from anons about how beautiful classical chinese poetry is but how hard is it actually to read? would the average sinologist with a M.A. be able to decipher them?

>>20746799
>LMFAO this website is full of weaboo freaks
japanophiles? on 4chan? wtf?

[Anonymous No.20746886]

>>20746866
From what I understand, classical Chinese is difficult enough to where the number of people who can read it is measured in the hundreds

>If you want to experience a language learning task that is really and truly daunting, give Literary Sinitic (LS) / Classical Chinese (CC) a whirl. To me it is far more challenging than Sanskrit or Classical Greek or Latin. With their moods, tenses, gender, number, conjugations, declensions, paradigms, and whatnot, learning these languages is most assuredly tremendously demanding, but they cannot begin to compare with the humiliating experience of trying to make sense of a passage in LS when its subject is not explicit, the time when it happened is not clear, and all you know is a succession of uninflected morphemes interspersed with some often highly ambiguous particles that may indicate more or less pertinent relationships among the morphemes.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42963

[Anonymous No.20746893]

>>20742472
Sinking
anything from the May Fourth movement
the big four/five/six depending

[Anonymous No.20747326]

>>20742472
I just take a quick look at anime and it rekindles my hatred for japs. Hope this helps.

[Anonymous No.20747664]

>>20742472
What about something modern?

[Anonymous No.20747812]

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong

[Anonymous No.20747839]

>>20747664
This series fucked me up for months.

[Anonymous No.20748711]

>>20742472
Wu Zhi Ji Zong's "school of the military" from the Cao Kingdom, pre-imperial, is on my top 10 of all time. He's like the Chinese Cato, if Cato was a bandit captain.

[Anonymous No.20748768]

>>20748711
Haven't you posted the exact same thing before?

[Anonymous No.20748777]

i'm unable to commit asian or indian names to memory. as much as i'd love to learn more i unironically cannot separate yao bing wa song from shin ban tao from chan chu, maybe china filtered me

[Anonymous No.20749055]

>>20748777
it's easier when they're in characters or at least have diacritics. chinese characters actually make shit so much easier to read in the longterm. you will never remember words otherwise.

[Anonymous No.20749481]

>>20745243
Mandarin? None
Classical Chinese? 2000 years worth of literature to explore

Keep in mind modern chinese (simplified) is a rape baby made by communism and cluster fuck of historical events

[Anonymous No.20749495]

>>20742574
This is like saying French people don’t exist because of the WWII occupation of Paris.

[Anonymous No.20749500]

>>20745471
I picked this up recently, but I haven’t started it yet.

[Anonymous No.20749519]

>>20749481
>Classical Chinese? 2000 years worth of literature to explore
Such as...?

[Anonymous No.20749696]

>>20749519

[Anonymous No.20750062]

>>20748777
with chinese its probably because its a tonal language and youre reading it in transcription

[Anonymous No.20750139]

I am confused, everyone is saying mandarin is mostly worthless and classical chinese is where it's at, but aren't the 4 great novels written in baihua ie proto-mandarin?

[Anonymous No.20751643]

>>20742472

[Anonymous No.20751656]

>>20749696
brilliant, thank you very much

[Anonymous No.20752465]

I am flower
I am car
the Pink Springtime Lotus steers the way

[Anonymous No.20752792]

>>20747664
Based

[Anonymous No.20752801]

>>20742472
Read the poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

[Anonymous No.20753627]

>>20749696
One semester I took Chinese and the professor had us all pronounce this. Apparently when you mispronounce the different shis it says something hilarious.

[Anonymous No.20753677]

Serious question: why does eastern literature feel so mediocre compared to western literature? Is it cultural difference that prevents me from enjoying it to its fullest?

[Anonymous No.20753683]

>>20753677
Any examples? What have you read?

[Anonymous No.20753689]

>>20753677
The old "classics" are primitive, there's no psychological depth to them. People like to say it on here about Homer, but these novels really are the soap operas and capeshits of their time. As for the modern stuff, it's simply derivative, why read a translation of something that's ripping off better European writers.

[Anonymous No.20753692]

>>20745471

I always wonder what that book was meant to be. Because the ending it has where the wise and benevolent Emperor makes everything right doesn't line up with most of what has been set up. The first two books are just an endless litany of how the family is going bankrupt, foreshadowing that bad things are going to happen, endless examples of how the family has degenerated to the point that the upright but incompetent Jia Zhen is the best of the lot, and it just kind of turns on a dime.

Also, I've only read the translation, but I kind of wonder what makes it such a classic. I have the same questions about the Three Kingdoms, which is a serviceable fantasy epic, if hamstrung by constantly having to invent reasons why the wise, virtuous, Liu Bei with his invincible wizard-mastermind Prime Minister Zhuge Lang and 8 and 9 feet tall invincible sworn brother generals, couldn't take more than a minor chunk of territory from Cao Cao.

Maybe it just doesn't translate in a non-tonal language.

[Anonymous No.20753702]

>>20753692
>Maybe it just doesn't translate in a non-tonal language.
What a ridiculously stupid thing to say. Do you think a crappy story told with tones!!! suddenly becomes a masterpiece.

[Anonymous No.20753707]

>>20753692
Dream of the Red Chamber has an insane amount of depth to it, which is why it has an entire field of scholarly study devoted to it. You're right that you lose a lot in translation. Also, the ending being weird and it feeling inconsistent is because the last 20 or so chapters were unfinished when the author died.

If you want a more straightforward classic, I recommend Water Margin. There's nothing too confusing about a bunch of bandits rebelling against a corrupt government.

[Anonymous No.20753743]

>>20753702

No, but since it seems like every 2 or 3 pages they're composing poems, or riddles, or are making sophisticated jokes to each other, I suspect a lot of the beauty that a native reader finds in the work is in the use of language and wordplay. That's not going to translate well across any language, but the more distant the languages are, the harder it is to bring across.

>>20753707

That's sort of my issue; it seems more like a soap opera sometimes. "And then the women did horrible things to each other, interrupted by a man doing something even worse to one of them. Then Bao-Yu was effeminate in a way I'm sure western scholars have filled reams of paper discussing. Then Dai-Yu was fragile and let a misunderstanding work her emotions up to the point they made her relapse into her non-specific but definitely terminal illness. Then various household staff were corrupt. Then they wrote poetry for a bit. And the Emperor was wonderful please don't have me killed."

I mean I am oversimplifying, I get that it's a meditation on the suffering of life from a man who had crawled out of the wreckage of a great family and into a bottle. And I've read through the translated version twice now, so there's something there that keeps me going for all five volumes. It just seems like I must be missing something very fundamental if out of 4000 years of culture this is considered top 4.

[Anonymous No.20753753]

>>20742472
Chinese probably has the greatest tradition of poetry in the world. Even Ezra Pound's bootlegged translations are some of my favourite poems in English.

>>20746866
>i have often heard from anons about how beautiful classical chinese poetry is but how hard is it actually to read? would the average sinologist with a M.A. be able to decipher them?
Yes. 8 year old schoolkids in China memorise Mencius and Li Bai.

[Anonymous No.20753809]

Chinese is the ugliest, least poetic-sounding language on the planet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YABl-Enm-Zo
Pound is infinitely better than the stuff he "translated". And Copland's setting of an Arthur Waley translation alone is infinitely more beautiful than the total cultural output of China combined
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYYjnrMEuwQ

[Anonymous No.20754470]

>>20742472
Chinese and Japanese cultures are vastly alien to one another. Chinese and Japanese are more different from each other than Japanese and American.