ROCKWELL KENT'S "WILDERNESS" IN CHINESE TRANSLATION

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NEW CHINESE EDITION OF ROCKWELL KENT'S


 WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALAKSA



Today (Aug. 17, 2020) at about 3:30 p.m. a UPS truck drove up to my house and dropped off a box of books that had traveled all the way from Beijing, China. The box held several copies of a new Chinese edition of Rockwell Kent's "Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska." This Chinese edition has two forewords I've written: the first back in 1995 for the Wesleyan University Press edition of which this is a reprint, and a second foreword I wrote for this new edition.

 

Back in the summer of 2019 I received some emails from a professor at a university in Beijing who was translating “Wilderness” into Chinese. He had many questions about slang, idioms and other cultural issues that are difficult to transfer from one language to another. I provided some answers and I was asked to write a new foreword to accompany my earlier one.

 

It took me a while to find my forewords in this edition because everything is in Chinese except for a few words in the footnotes. At the end of a foreword it is customary for the writer to put his name, where the piece was written, and the date. Since I knew I wrote the first foreword in 1995 and the second in 2019, I found those dates at the end of my forewords and also learned how to my name and Seward, Alaska looks in Chinese script.  



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