What novels are Matilda reading? … and writing

Despite having learnt the word only a week before, it took me far longer than I care to admit to connect 荒原 (huangyuan, literally ‘wilderness’) with what Matilda was trying to tell me: that she was a fan of T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem ‘The Wasteland’. (In Chinese translation, that is – and here was me thinking Eliot couldn’t possibly be any more difficult). Matilda is an applied linguistics postgrad and a literature bookworm. Out of interest, I asked her to write down for me a quick list of foreign books she likes. Here it is:

• The Old Man and the Sea (in Chinese, like all the below – although this particular one is surely as easy English as it gets)
• The Count of Monte Cristo (especially the bit where he escapes from prison – which is where I got to myself before giving up)
• Gone with the Wind (the heroine can “eat bitterness” – I’ve heard elsewhere this book is a particular favourite across China)
• Wuthering Heights (especially the vivid nature descriptions – Matilda is also one of the most unabashed romantics I know)
• The Ugly Duckling (as in the children’s story – surely a step down from Bronté?)

At the bottom, she scribbles a Chinese idiom: 读万卷书不如行万里路. “Better walk ten thousand li than read ten thousand books.” Matilda couldn’t disagree more, she tells me: she’d take the books over the exercise anyday. What’s more, she’s not only a reader but an aspiring writer, working – slowly – on her first novel. It’s set in wartime Kunming, where Beida and Tsinghua were relocated to while the Japanese held Beijing, and is a romance between a literature student and her professor.

With her permission, here are the narrator’s opening words in this first draft, along with my English translation (which I found rather tricky, comments welcome):

夏果说在秋
Summer Fruit in Autumn

我不准备写诗，也不准备写小说。可是，我善使文字，那我总得写些什么。我写的，没有中心，没有开始亦没有结束，我只知道是和你有关。为此，我回到了五十年前，然后，遇上了你。我的记忆不好使，你告诉我，那是个夏果成熟日。我因而有了名字，我叫夏果。

I’m not preparing to write a poem, nor a novel. But I’m apt to use the written word, so I’m always having to write something. What I’m writing doesn’t have a middle, nor a beginning or an end, I only know it’s about you. Therefore, I return to fifty years ago, when I met you. My memory isn’t so good, you tell me – that’s the day when summer fruit ripened. And so I got my name. I’m called ‘Summer Fruit’.

And so the story begins (“我已不记得那时的昆明天气如何…”; “I already can’t remember what the weather was like in Kunming at that time…”), but there I’ll leave you all in tantalising suspense until publication day. Instead, here’s a late merry Christmas picture from the author, doubly merry for its tardiness: