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 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.