I have volume 1 of Kim Il Sung’s works in English - printed in North Korea in the 70’s. I don’t know if the Foreign Languages Publishing House survived long enough for a Volume 2. They did put out some of Jong’s thoughts on film, if I recall correctly.
This is probably the prize of my collection. I have a first American printing of Lolita, which unfortunately has a bit of cat vomit stain on it or might be in that spot.
the year was 2002 and I was hacking and slashing in Dynasty Warriors 3, one of the GOAT PS2 titles. my bro and I got intrigued by china breaking up and thought thought Lu Bu and Zhang Fei were badasses so we said hey jeeves what other Dynasty Warriors media is there? Soon I discovered a massive novel in four volumes - the romance of the three kingdoms - and thought damn that’s fat for a game tie-in novel this Moss Roberts guy must love the games like we do to translate this gigachonker
naturally I bought a copy. the covers and box sheath colored in an unsalable brown only a university press could sign off on, with nearly phonebook-thin paper and typesetting that wasnt always perfectly square on the page, but I ate it up. i got my Han Dissolution on and discovered gandalf, napoleon and macguyver in chinese form: the inestimable Zhuge Liang
I wish i knew where that set got to, but yeah an unabridged chinese epic attributed to some guy called Luo from the 16th cent. is mine
The only interesting copy of a 16th century Chinese classic I own is this one:
I love Arthur Waley - I debate on taking his Chinese name as my own (sign some art work with it even). Kind of narcissistic, but my ultimate fantasy is to be like him. To translate texts that haven’t been touched - or that have been badly mistranslated (don’t get me started on The Book of Changes/I Ching). I can kinda sorta make my way through passages of the Analects, so maybe when I’m in my 50’s I’ll be ready to bring the Records of the Three Kingdoms to English audiences. Zhuge Liang’s reputation has been a little pumped up; to be honest, I’m more a Cao Cao stan. (说曹操曹操到，lol)
I have an English unabridged (iirc) academic translation of Romance and an abridged version in Chinese rewritten to use the most common 300 characters.
I bought this when that was a financially reasonable decision for about $200. A treat that I’ve been saving, and I’ll hopefully tackle this summer. A master work, absolutely pivotal to understanding Chinese history and it hadn’t been fully translated until less than ten years ago!
originally i hated Cao Cao but i’m sure his nuances will emerge with a reread
What’s really interesting when reading is that you are looking at a retelling of events that happened more than a thousand years before the author wrote it. These were ultimately all real people, and there’s distant traces of politics in all of it.
Eg, Zhuge Liang probably didn’t do the Empty Fort. It was a real strategy that was attested to later in history, but by someone else. I thought Luo had come up with that story himself, but I think there were some earlier stories with that claim.
Just a fascinating piece of historical fan fiction, which we lack so much context for as Westerners.