Discussion Why does old chinese wuxia novels is far harder to read than modern xianxia novel?

See question in title. I read the translation of many old wuxia novels and compared it to newer novels. From what I can see, old wuxia novels uses poetry style a lot, thus making the reader has to digest it's content. While modern xianxia novels seems more straightforward, making it easier to read.

 

Everyone is jumping on the xianxia bandwagon of course, who the hell want to translate a wuxia novel that no teenager want to read, and wuxia will generate less viewer than that of xianxia...

And yes, i agree with you with the use of poetry, the best example to see is The Grandmaster Strategist

 

I think its because we dont understands their tid bid

 

Because modern xanxia authors knows i dont like to think

 

cuz it different hmm value~

 

One thing that comes to mind is the reader can't accept or agree with the moral or values of the world. And the style.

 

Xianxia novels are like reading young adult fiction, easily digested and passes through the system quickly.

 

Xian Xia vocabulary usage is widespread and frequent nowadays. As long as you keep pasting the words cultivation, heavenly, peerless, profound, dao, laws, red eyes, chilly gaze, medicinal pill, formation array, some really old herb, intense sense of danger and many others you can form a Xian Xia novel.

 

Because the values society uphold right now is different from the old days....

Besides, what you are reading are made not by serious writer, but writers that are pandering to the general audience.
Can you imagine something like shakespeare coming out of qidian? I imagine it would have like hundreds of readers top...

 

The main difference is education. Two of the most prominent wuxia writers were Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng, and both of these men had a deep love of culture, history, and poetry. Their writings reflected this so it ends up being fairly dense. Lesser writers of that period aren't widely read, so we don't think of them when it comes to older wuxia.

Modern writers generally don't have that level of education or that interest in poetry, so we see less of it. Huang Yi is a good example here; he was outright told by his editor that he wasn't as good a writer as Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, and Gu Long so he shouldn't try to emulate them. He went on to do his own thing, and thrived as a result. And it's not as if there aren't modern writers who use those poetic styles; Tong Hua being a good example here.

Qidian has good writers though. Yue Guan is great, and he had tons of readers. Just because the absolute most popular works aim for greater mass appeal doesn't mean that works of quality can't be produced. Also, remember that even writers like Jin Yong wrote under similar conditions as the modern web novelists.

 

Because Xianxia web novel authors got paid by word count, so they won't be able to pump out poetry that much.

 

But we're comparing them to old wuxia writers, and those guys were also paid by the word, so it can't be much of a reason.

 

I still remember my old man saying that Jin Yong used to write daily chapters of his novels in newspapers.

 

All of the early modern wuxia writers wrote in newspapers. Modern wuxia was born in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong's publishing industry didn't exist until the '50s. At that time, a new writer couldn't simply submit a whole novel to a publisher because nobody was even publishing books like that. So the main venues for any nascent writers were newspapers and periodicals.

There a couple of neat things about Jin Yong particularly. He was probably the only writer who wasn't primarily paid by the word. Most of his books were first serialized in the newspaper Ming Pao where he was both the editor-in-chief and the majority owner. Jin Yong's writing was the newspaper's primary draw in the early days so his main financial incentive was just selling more newspapers!

The other thing is that Jin Yong never wrote in chapters when his books were serialized. If you look at the Hong Kong editions of his books, you'd notice that every volume has exactly 10 chapters, regardless of how long these chapters are. The reason is that the novels weren't broken up into chapters until they were broken up for printing. Also, the newspaper editions were quite a bit different from the second and third edition books that we're familiar with.

 

Probably because cultural language values of Chinese differs a lot from english making it harder to translate to english. XianXia is more modernized for a wider audience and translates much simpler.