the body as a weapon or a tool

I'm not dead, just busy. Happy new year. 

So part of my new year's resolutions is rather than getting deeper in the danmei rabbit hole like most people (there's a long list of sins Seven Seas has been alleged to have committed which I will be avoiding), I'm going to delve deeper into Chinese literature as far as I can get my hands on it.  

I tried the Taylor-Brewitt translation of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and I was half tempted to write to Tuttle asking if anyone had line edited it since 1925. I will forgive him for using Wade-Giles for transliteration purposes, but I cannot forgive him messing up the main character's name! By all accounts, Lui Bei's courtesy name 玄德 should be Hsüan-te, yet it is consistently written as Yuan-te all throughout the first chapter! The typist has also dropped umlauts in all instances, which are an integral part of Wade-Giles romanization. I asked my local library to acquire the unabridged Robert Moss translation instead. 

https://www.medievalists.net/2024/10/translation-romance-three-kingdoms/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms#Unabridged

With that on back burner, I now turn to The Legend of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong, Trans. Anna Holmwood et al.
It's been... interesting alright. I need to ask an actual British or Canadian person why publishers still obsessed with Anglicizing everyone's names in 2025. I thought we grew out of this in 2006. 
Calling the protagonist "Guo Jing" and his love interest "Lotus Huang" in the same sentence is extremely jarring. It looks sloppy and unprofessional. "Count Seven Hong" is even more ludicrous--he's not even peerage titled. Hong Qigong just happens to be his name, and he's a homeless guy. This isn't Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, where every single character's name is a joke of some form. 

I also found this translation by a Malaysian-Chinese person.
https://wuxiasociety.com/legend-of-the-condor-heroes-translation

I haven't read the second one yet but it at least has the dignity of keeping people's names intact. 

Overall I am having a lot of fun. If you like kung fu movies, this book is just candy. Its original run was in a newspaper, so every chapter is a new entry with a new twist and a new entanglement of allegiances. The protagonist isn't born until Chapter 3 and the other two aren't introduced for another hundred pages after that. We have training arcs, and trickery, life debts and vengeance schemes, and overall, it's just dumb fun.