On the receding shores of Central Asia's Aral Sea, a Chinese man known as "the King" lives alone in a tent, digging for shrimp eggs. By Liu Zichao, a bold new voice in travel writing, translated by
@dylanleviking.bsky.social
www.equator.org/articles/kin...

3. "Eastern Promises," @dylanleviking.bsky.social @thebafflermag.com

"Reading a delightful essay on clutter in Japan made me realize how I’d held a romanticized version of Tokyo in my head for 20 years. Dylan Levi King’s Baffler piece challenges me in a similar way."

thebaffler.com/salvos/easte...

Someone should at least turn Barthes to enka, if they haven't before. It's beyond me. I had never read this essay before today. I am too late. It must have been done before and more thoroughly.

I have watched this a hundred times. I have watched it a thousand. I wrote about it in an essay on Miyako Harumi. But language fails. Adjectives fail. That is what Barthes says. We are left with "the impossible account of an individual thrill."

I could never explain precisely what I love about the 1966 performance of the song. I appreciate that her growl is clearly not from rokyoku but borrowed through Hirota Mieko from American R&B records. I appreciate the adolescent flirtation in the performance, incongruous with a song of parting.

I think this is the right way to explain the situation: it will be published by Guizhou University Press but is a production of Yuefu Culture. I think an English translation is unlikely.

(I do not write like Jia Pingwa or Zhang Chengzhi, but from the process of translating their work, I have learned a certain amount about how to structure a novel, and how much dedication is required to write one.)

The author—Hu Lingyun—has translated J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. (I am not imagining that the novel resembles in any way their work. The work of translation is instructive, though, I hope. It is like tearing apart a clock or a camera—some mechanical thing—and putting it back together.)

November, 2022.

November, 2022.