ABSTRACT
Shen Congwen’s short novel Bian cheng, composed in 1933–1934, The Frontier City, Une bourgade a l’ecart, Le passeur de Chadong, Die Grenzstadt, and Gransland, has for more than seven decades been acclaimed as Shen’s masterwork. In China, biographical dictionaries from the 1930s to 1949 commonly called the novel Shen’s daibiao zuo, his “representative” work, pointing evidently to its preeminence in establishing his literary reputation. Translation of Chinese literature into English remains important if it is to reach a wider public, but the importance of these translations to literary critical and comparative literary opinion seems, at least temporarily, to have diminished. The most dramatic and surprising change from the original Chinese is the rendering of the title as “Green Jade and Green Jade.” The uniquely peaceful and “normal” condition of Shen’s isolated frontier society might also seem artificial for a novel vaguely set in a warlord era, perhaps, though some critics might take that to be a polemical observation.
