Translating the opening paragraphs of SPL (the legendary danmei novel《杀破狼》by Priest, known as Stars of Chaos in English) for fun today because 1) why not, 2) I’ve been trying to figure out how to toggle between narratives native to either one of the languages I speak.
Without further ado… Here we go.
Chapter 1. The Borderlands
In the border town of Yanhui, there is a “General’s Mount”. Imposing as the name sounds, it was in reality no more than a little hill, its stature such that someone with a long neck could peek at what was on the other side.
The General’s Mount hadn’t always been there. As legend has it, it was a little mound formed fourteen years ago, when the three Darksteel Brigades, chief among the Great Liang Dynasty’s iron cavalry units, had shed their unserviceable armor enroute back to the country’s seat of power, after they’d subdued the barbarian tribes. Later, with the wearing of sand, wind and rain, that mound gradually turned into the hill it is today.
The General’s Mount was an arid hill; nothing would take to its soil. It was a place where even wildgrasses refused to grow, where sneaky lovers had no place to hide. Who knew what good it was for, sitting there all bald and bare. The elders all liked to insist that this sorry state of affairs was owed to the Darksteel Brigades having slaughtered too many, bringing about foul and evil airs. As time went on, some bored good-for-nothings ran with the story and made up a series of stories about hauntings in the borderlands, and after that, nobody really went in the vicinity anymore.
This took me a surprising amount of time to complete. In particular, the following phrases posed unusual difficulty: “脖子长的一眼能望过坡顶”，“大梁第一铁骑玄铁三大营”，“杀孽太重，戾气逼人”. The first one was difficult because it has a humorous undertone in the original Chinese that I couldn’t quite put a finger on in translation — obviously, no one can actually see past the peak of a mountain or hill just by virtue of the length of one’s neck, no matter how tiny said mountain or hill is, and no one believes anyone else can either, for that matter. Chinese readers understand the humor in the exaggeration; the same tickle doesn’t quite translate to an English-speaking audience, I think.
The difficulty of the second phrase was purely technical. I ended up looking up the organizational structure of medieval Western armies to figure out how to translate “营”, and, to be quite honest, I’m not entirely sure I have it correct. So, apparently, whether a unit is a “squad”, a “platoon”, a “company”, a “battalion”, a “brigade” or “regiment”, a “division”, or a “corps” has to do with the number of troops involved, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. A squad consists of 7-14 troops, a platoon is 3-4 squads, a company is 2-4 platoons, and so and so forth, like layers to an onion. “Brigade” sounded nice and seemed like the correct number so that’s what I went with, but to be certain of the right wording I’d have to go through later parts of the book and figure out how many Darksteel soldiers are under Gu Yun’s command. If I remember correctly, they number in the hundreds or thousands at most, being elite troops equipped with incredibly expensive and rare armor.
There was also the issue of “铁骑”, which I’m not sure whether it’s a me or an author problem… That word (as far as I know) implies rider units, thus “cavalry”, but then the description “第一铁骑” here describes “玄铁三大营”, the three Darksteel units, which you later learn consist of the “玄甲”，“玄鹰”，and “玄骑”, which are mech units, aerial units, and rider units, respectively. So, with this understanding, “cavalry” doesn’t quite seem to be the right word, since we have infantry and aerial units included among the 玄铁营. I couldn’t think of another word on the spot to cover that description, so I just left it as “cavalry”. Also, I compared my exercise with the official translation later and saw that they also used “cavalry”, so….
And then, for that last phrase, the original text involves a description that references Buddhist metaphysics and folk superstition, and is common enough that any native Chinese reader would understand the sentiment, but which I found incredibly difficult to translate concisely without either invoking one too many esoteric concepts or making the narrative sound puerile. I ended up ejecting the religious undertone of “孽” (my two choices otherwise being translating it as “sin” and inappropriately smuggling in Christian connotations of the word, or getting into the karmic implications and losing the reader), and leaning heavily on the sensory connotations in 戾气.
One insight I found particularly noteworthy from this little exercise was that there are differences in the perspective that reads most naturally in Chinese vs. in English. Whether it’s a matter of aesthetic conditioning, or a natural consequence of the syntax, stories told in English seem more engaging and lively when the perspective centers a subject — one recalls the cliché advice, “show, don’t tell”and “use active voice”. In contrast, the best narratives in Chinese excel in conjuring up scenes with rich atmosphere, and tend to employ a considerably greater amount of scene-setting “long shots” (if one conceives of the reader’s perspective as the camera’s gaze in visual media). These tend to be difficult to translate properly, since they really only make sense as a sort of “passive voice telling”, which come across as dull and awkward in English.
The difference in the opening lines of the Chinese version of Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking, as compared to the English original, is a perfect example of this problem. In the original, the second sentence begins: “A party of mule carts were lined up at the western entrance of Matajen Hutung, a street in the East City of Peking, [… ]“ The translation instead conveys the location first: “北京东城马大胡同西口儿，横停着好些骡子车[…]”. In the former, the reader’s attention is drawn first to the subjects in the scene: the mule carts. In contrast, in the latter, we visualize the context — the intersection of the street — first, and only afterward are we told the entities that we find within the setting.
The necessity of “perspective adaptation” crops up with the second paragraph of 《杀破狼》, as well. The origins of the hill is told in one long, breathless sentence in the original Chinese, creating an effect which I found was not so easily replicated in English. The official translation chose to open with “General’s Slope hadn’t always existed” — fair enough, and then broke the rest of the information across three sentences. First, the reader is told that the 玄铁营 went on an northern expedition fourteen years ago; then, the reader is informed of the local stories about how the army’s actions brought the hill into being in its initial form; and then, lastly, the reader is told that, according to the stories, years of weathering turned a pile of abandoned armor into the hill that is now called “General’s Slope”.
I notice that my attempt actually neglected to mention the detail about 玄铁营 going on a northern expedition — I’d entirely missed that two-word detail, lol — and, worse, incorrectly called them the Darksteel Brigade instead of Dark Iron, when 铁 is (obviously) iron, not steel! (Though you have to admit, Darksteel just sounds so much better than Dark Iron, and especially Black Iron, which is what the official translation calls them.)
That being said, I still stand by how I handled the flow of the narrative. I still had to break the one sentence in Chinese into three, but I think I was fairly successful in keeping the reader’s sights focused on the hill, which is what the paragraph is really about, technically. Part of the reason why Priest’s writing is so legendary is because she’ll subtly slip in a million details that animate the world of the story, all while purporting to be telling you about some random hill on the outskirts of some random town where, it turns out, we’ll eventually find the kid who’s going to be our protagonist. That highly immersive storytelling effect is lost when you have the reader’s attention bouncing from the hill, to what the cavalry were up to fourteen years prior, and then back to the hill.
If there’s anything I learned today, it’s that attempting to translate a piece of writing you enjoy is actually really helpful for understanding what makes it tick and why you like it, in the first place. Well, assuming you’re trying to translate it well and do justice to the original work. Syntax conventions seem to force storytellers to optimize their delivery along different dimensions, and the exercise of translating really forces you to sort through both the logical flow of the story and the semantic content of the text so you can eventually go about striking a sensible balance between preserving the original feel of the narrative and constructing something that hopefully reads well (and is at least intelligible) to a foreign audience.
12.02.2025
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