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Comment by rKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

It's about a multi-decade civil war almost 2 thousand years ago & is the oldest of their classic novels and the characters are all household names.

And many similar character types ... Diaochan <> Hellen, Lu Bu <> Achilles, Zhuge Liang <> Odysseus etc.

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It's worth noting that while Romance of the Three Kingdoms is set 2000 years ago, it was written in the 14th century, so the context is quite different to the Iliad.

There is some surviving poetry from the Zhou Dynasty, which is contemporary with classical Greece, but I don't think any of it is epics.

I think there's a Total War (video game) series based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I can't say how accurately it sticks to the story, as I've never read the Romance nor played the games [1], but it might be worth looking into if you're into video games.

[1] I simply watched an avid Three Kingdoms fan playing the campaign on YouTube a few years ago as some background noise.

There is but it's just the setting/characters it doesn't attempt to tell the story. In the same way a game of Diplomacy isn't a retelling of WW1.

> almost 2 thousand years ago & is the oldest of their classic novels

Nah, it was written in 14th century. It's one of the earlist novels in "vernacular Mandarin" though.

It's set after the fall of the Han Dynasty almost 2k years ago. It wasn't written until the 14th century & but is the oldest of the "classic Chinese novels" (Journey to the west, Water Margin, Red Chamber) [1]. There are many older classical works like the I Ching or Analects but they aren't "novels"

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels

Best translation?

Moss Roberts' unabridged version is the one you want.

Moss Roberts, and it's not even a question.

It's very dense though and there's like a billion names to keep track of, I only made it through the first ~1/3 of the first volume (out of 4) before I had to give up. I want to revisit one day but I would need some sort of reading guide to follow along with that lets me look up all the character names and who is on which side etc.

I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of all the names in a science fiction book when they're in some invented language (wads Acenta the good one, or Arinca?). It's easy when they have English or English-ish names.

The same happens when reading a book with Chinese names.

An ebook that coloured the names according to their side might help.

It also doesn't help that each character has two names, like Liu Bei is both Liu Bei & Xuande, and the two names are used nearly interchangeably for most characters. And the text doesn't handhold you with dialogue & other continuity clues to remind you of relationships (e.g. "Good morning," said Alice. Bob looked up as his daughter entered the room. - without breaking the flow of the text this reminds you of the relationship between Alice & Bob).

The anime version of Journey to the West is decent (but it takes great liberties with the plot and is heavily abridged)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball

How accurate is it to frame Dragonball this way. Im not that knowledgeable about either Dragonball nor journey to the West but it seems like a massive stretch.

It grew into it's own thing but...

"Toriyama loosely modeled the plot and characters of Dragon Ball on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West,[16][15] with Goku being Sun Wukong ("Son Goku" in Japanese), Bulma as Tang Sanzang, Oolong as Zhu Bajie, and Yamcha being Sha Wujing" [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball

Read both. I belive they're totally different.

Chinese here, I would highly recommend the TV series made by CCTV in 1994[1]. There's an unofficial English translated subtitle out there[2]. Cried every time I watched it.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdom... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nzg2uzV03s

Did you like it better than the 2010 version? That's the one I'm familiar with.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms_(TV_series)

I think the 1994 version is WAY MUCH better, it's an epic. On Douban (Chinese IMDb), the 2010 version got 7.9, but the 1994 version got 9.6 out of 10.

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