A Deadly Secret - 连城诀 (my draft version)

[Huang Rong]

Hi guys, I'm reading A Deadly Secret (Lian Cheng Jue), a novel by Jin Yong, and slowly translating it into English, mostly to improve my Chinese and English reading and writing skills. This short novel consists of 12 chapters. The Chinese copy I'm using can be found on www.qiqi.com. I'm posting my translation in this thread so that some people who are interested in JY novels can read it.

Please keep in mind that this is just a draft version because in the book JY used many complicated sentences and words while I am not good at both Chinese and English, and don't have much free time. Anyway I'll try my best, but don't expect too much from me or else you'll terribly disappointed. And if you find mistakes, which are unavoidable in the translation, please give me some feedback, I'd highly appreciate that.

Thanks in advance

HR ^^

Chapter 1: A countryman going to a city

Clack! Clack clack clack! Clack! Clack clack!

Two wooden swords were being wielded in a competition. They clashed with one another causing rattling sounds. Sometimes the swords did not collide for a while hence no sound was heard, but sometimes the sounds of collision occurred very often.

That was Maqi (麻溪) village, located in the southern suburb of the city of Yuanling (沅陵) in western Hunan. In the drying ground in front of a three-compartment cottage, a young man and a young girl with wooden swords in their hands were competing with each other.

An old man was sitting on a stool in front of the cottage. He was biting a fairly short tobacco pipe while weaving straw sandals with his hands. Occasionally, the old man raised his head to glance at the pair of youths and smiled gently with the corners of his mouth, showing his approval of them. Pale smoke was being exhaled endlessly from his mouth. Through the smoke, the sun was casting its dull light over his hair, which was completely white, and his face, which was full of wrinkles. When the old man glanced at the two competing wooden swords which were being used to execute various extending and withdrawing moves, his eyes blazed with vitality, looking intensely majestic. It seemed that he was actually not too old and was less than fifty years of age.

The girl was about seventeen or eighteen years old. She had chubby cheeks and big round black eyes. By then she was so tired that her forehead broke into perspiration. A small stream of sweat on her left cheek poured down her neck. The girl wiped off the sweat with her left sleeve. Her cheeks flushed from exertion, looking like bunches of red peppers which were being hung underneath the eaves of the cottage. The young man was two or three years older than the girl. He was a typical young peasant man of the countryside in western Hunan with a dark complexion, high cheekbones, rough hands, and big feet. Nevertheless, the wooden sword in his hand was being handled very deftly.

Suddenly the young man slashed his wooden sword obliquely down from high on his left. Without turning around, he immediately followed up that move with a backward straight thrust of the sword. The girl avoided the attack by lowering her head but the wooden sword kept continuously thrusting at her with strong and rapid momentum. The young man took two retrograde steps, swung the wooden sword out in a large arc, and drew it back. He then uttered a loud cry and swept the sword horizontally three times. The girl had constantly withstood her opponent until then but all of a sudden she withdrew her sword and stood still, totally stopping defending herself. She said in a mildly sulky voice: “You’re really skillful. So you’re grown-up, huh? Just chop me to death!”

The young man did not expect that the girl would end her resistance with such an abrupt withdrawal of her sword so he was startled when he saw that his third sweep was about to hit her in the waist. He hastily retracted the attack but because the momentum of the sword was too powerful the sword hit the back of his own left hand with a smack. “Ayo!” he cried out. The girl applauded. She smiled and said: “How shameful! If you were wielding a real sword, could that hand of yours still be unbroken?”

[wandering]

thanks for translating this.
I just finished watching the series...so i am interested on how different the book is from the series.

[dallasjameswilliams]

A Deadly Secret rocks.

Thanks for the translation.