The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read Online Free PDF

p. 185.
    19. The details are taken from Susan Naquin,
Shantung Rebellion: the Wang Lun Uprising of 1774
(Yale University Press, 1981). Döblin’s source was de Groot, pp. 296 ff.
    20. Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks”, in “Aufsätze zur Literatur”, pp. 123–25.
    21. It was first published as a short story in the magazine
Genius
in 1921.
    22. Dscheng, op. cit., p. 144.
    23. Reported in Kreutzer, op. cit., p. 179.
    24. Schuster, op. cit., p. 216, notes that the tricks by which T’o Chin catches Wang were adopted by Brecht in his play
Man is Man
.
    25. What follows draws on Keller, op. cit., pp. 59–140.
    26. This misreading is found in Ernst Ribbat,
Die Wahrheit des Lebens im frühen Werk A Döblins
(Truth to life in AD’s early work), Münster, 1970, pp. 126–27; and in Francis Lide, “The Episode of the Three Leaps in Alfred Döblin’s
Wang Lun
”, in
Studies in German
(Rice University, 1969), p. 144.
    27. Günter Grass, “Uber meinen Lehrer Alfred Döblin” (My teacher AD), in
Akzente
14 (1967), No. 4.
    28. Mistranscriptions dogged Döblin to the end. His last book,
Hamlet
, for example, refers to a “Wilahwie Boulevard” in Los Angeles—clearly enough a misreading of a handwritten “Wilshire”. The recent French translation does not bother to correct it.
    29. Alfred Döblin,
Schicksalsreise
, p. 113.
    30. English translation by Eugene Jolas, 1931.
    31. English translation by John E. Woods,
A People Betrayed and Kart
and
Rosa
(London: Angel Books, 1983 and 1988).
    32. Walter Muschg, “Alfred Döblin Heute”, in
Text + Kritik 13/14
(Munich: Richard Boorberg Verlag, 1972).
    33. The sad and sometimes comical story of Germany’s Hollywood émigrés (a cross-cultural enterprise almost as notable as
Wang Lun
) is told in John Russell Taylor’s
Strangers in Paradise
(London, 1983). Döblin worked on
Mrs Miniver
and
Random Harvest
, but it is unlikely that any of his work saw the screen.
    34. Grass, op. cit.
Postscript: How I Came to Translate Wang Lun
    I came upon a slim volume of stories titled
Der Uberfall auf Chao-Lao-Hsu
at a railway bookstall in Austria in the late 1980s. At that time the author’s name was known to me only for
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, and that only from Fassbinder’s 1980 TV adaptation. The Chinoiserie of the title intrigued me, and I started reading as we travelled through the mountains. At the next opportunity I prospected for more Döblin, and at once found his other Chinese title:
Die drei Sprünge des Wang Lun
.
    At that time my days were spent drafting government policy documents in Hong Kong. To shape an argument and distill conflicting views is a craft not without satisfactions, but who would read what I wrote ten years, five years, even one year down the line? The vigour and imagination of Döblin’s prose prompted the thought: since no one has translated this work into English in the six decades since it was published, why should a British bureaucrat who knows both German and Chinese not try his hand?
    To set the project going I acquired my first computer, a secondhand Apple II with no hard drive, and a dot matrix printer. For the next two years many evenings and weekends juggled child-minding with Döblin. As I became familiar with his prose style and the often enigmatic Chinese references (enigmatic, until I twigged that mistranscription was often the culprit), I explored Hong Kong University library’s sparse but useful holdings relating to Döblin, his critical reception, and the historical and geographical background to
Wang Lun
. At some point it dawned on me that the Chao-Lao-Hsu episode was integral to the novel, though excised by Döblin for obscure reasons and never reprinted with it in Germany. I thought that a mere translator would be amply justified in restoring it.
    Twenty years on, I still see
Wang Lun
as a neglected classic of European literature: an almost miraculous invocation of a vanished world by a German who never visited China and never