Hock’s Comments (group member since Jul 08, 2011)

Hock’s comments from the Hock G. Tjoa hosts a Q & A group.

The Battle of Chibi is a re-telling of 23 chapters in "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" that are about the personalities and events related to the major battle in that Romance. The Romance is considered one of the Four Great Classic Novels in Chinese literature. The other three are (1) "The Journey to the West," based on a historical character, a 7th century Chinese monk who made a pilgrimage to India in search of Buddhist scripture and teaching (best translation and selection is Monkey by A. Waley); (2) "The Water Margin" (or "All Men are Brothers," the title of a translation by Pearl Buck) about a group of outlaws and allegedly based on the actual banishment of a noted 11th century general from imperial service, and (3) "The Dream of the Red Chamber" (sometimes called the "Story of the Stone"), the only true work of fiction. Red Chamber is about the social and sexual activities of a privileged class, the trust fund babies of their time; it contains soft porn and replaced "Jing Ping Mei," sometimes called "The Plum (blossom) in the (golden) Vase." Jing Ping Mei are actually the names of three women in the novel which is considered by many to be frankly pornographic.

I chose to work with the Romance because its subject matter is more in keeping with my interests. It is based on the "Chronicles of the the Three Kingdoms" which date from the 4th century A.D. and record the bare outlines of what happened at the decline and fall of the Han dynasty around 190 onwards although the Han Dynasty did not end "officially" until 220 A.D.

In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the major conflict is between the Loyalists (Han, Liu Bei) and the Usurper (Cao Cao). The Battle of Chibi narrows the field of action to this tipping point battle and especially the preparations of the strategists for the allies, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, against Cao Cao.

Just translating it took four years, giving myself a target of so many pages a week. I spent four months tidying up the language (this can take an infinite amount of time) and four more months to get it through the Createspace process.

About ten years ago, I read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, all 120 chapters of it, and was underwhelmed. A couple years later, as I was studying Mandarin for unrelated reasons, I found myself bored to tears with the usual text book exercises and decided to translate some "real stuff." Then I was struck by how flat the translations I had read were compared to the original and resolved to try to produce something accessible to a wider audience. This is it and I hope for ideas on how to improve on it for some future revised edition.

The main characters are Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang, Zhou Yu, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Sun Quan. Much of the Battle of Chibi deals with the actions of Zhuge Liang, advisor to the Loyalists and Zhou Yu, commander in chief of the Wu kingdom. Does any character emerge as your favorite?

This was a battle of great consequence in Chinese history. As a result of this battle, the Chinese empire was NOT reconstituted and China experienced four hundred years of political fragmentation--until the Sui and Tang dynasties restored imperial unity. I thought, what if Sherman had failed to take Atlanta ... ?