What these cards say about Tolkien
A new Chinese translation of the author's biography comes with an innovative idea involving a script rediscovered from ancient books and telling the reader how the writer himself was a Hobbit, Yang Yang reports.
Mu was assigned the task of writing Tolkien's profile. "I was thinking how to write it and it occurred to me that I had come across Tolkien's very famous self-introduction, where he says he was actually a Hobbit, and he liked English cuisine and non-mechanized farmland," he says.
Mu "translated" this self-introduction into ancient Chinese, by referring to Wuliu Xiansheng Zhuan (The Biography of Master Five Willows), a self-introduction by Tao Yuanming, a poet in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420), because he thinks "their spirit and temperament are somewhat similar".
Dai was able to find most of the characters of the ancient Chinese script in photographs of the best-preserved copy of Records of the Three Kingdoms, which was engraved and printed in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). But there are several characters that Dai couldn't find in the copy. To keep the style uniform, instead of trying to look for the characters in other versions, Dai took parts from different characters in the same copy of the book to create the ancient Chinese characters including yan (smoke or cigarette) in yandou (pipe), which did not exist during the Song Dynasty.
