The book was for a long time banned in Taiwan. Not only had its author been accorded classic status by the communists, but the tale also mocked many traditional Chinese assumptions. Taiwan's KMT, in its early days at least, was desperate to preserve and venerate everything of the old China that was disappearing so fast on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
The story, then, though a classic, is unfortunately unlikely to appeal to foreigners, and probably has little interest to most modern Taiwanese either. If someone were to pen a sequel set among contemporary teenagers featuring piercings, crazy haircuts and outlandishly small mobile phones, that would be a different matter.
Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang were responsible for translating Lu Xun's Selected Works in four volumes 40 years ago. The selection was published in Beijing between 1959 and 1960, and The True Story of Ah Q was certain to have been included. Whether the English text of this new edition is merely a reprint of that version or a new rendering by the same authors is open to question.
There is no answer provided in the various credits printed following the book's title page. All we have is a publisher's note that states that in preparing their Bilingual Series on Modern Chinese Literature the committee responsible has either "to identify the best existing translations, or to commission experts who can do the job well." Which alternative they have opted for here isn't revealed.
This new publication by Hong Kong's Chinese University Press is a bilingual edition, with the traditional characters of the original Chinese version retained. A similar bilingual edition, but using simplified Chinese characters, was published in Beijing two years ago.
The whole issue of the romanization of the Chinese script was a very important topic among China's would-be modernizers in the pre-World War II period. The difficulty of the traditional script, they argued, was a major obstacle to the spread of education in a country where most of the people were illiterate. Lu Xun backed the most radical of the various schemes for romanization, but in the event the more moderate argument, for a simplification of the old Chinese script, prevailed. This is what the post-1949 government in Beijing adopted.
A wit might like to point out that the KMT, on regrouping on Taiwan, opted for none of these changes, but instead for the 12-hour school day to make sure their long-suffering offspring mastered the traditional system. And it is of course to everyone's credit that they have.
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