English Translations of Shen Congwen’s Masterwork, Bian Cheng (Border Town)

Shen Congwen’s short novel Bian cheng, composed in 1933–34, first published serially in Chinese in 1934 ¹ and translated under titles including Border Town (my own translation, which I shall privilege in this chapter), The Frontier City, Une bourgade a l’écart (Fr.: An outlying town), Le passeur de Chadong (Fr.: The ferryman of Chadong), Die Grenzstadt (Ger.: The frontier city), and Gränsland (Swed.: Border country), has for more than seven decades been acclaimed as Shen Congwen’s masterwork. That is the view in China and globally. ² In China, biographical dictionaries from the 1930s to 1949 commonly (though not always independently, since some dictionaries appear to have copied previous dictionaries) called the novel Shen’s daibiao zuo, his “representative” work, pointing evidently to its preeminence in establishing his literary reputation.