THE FOUNDER OF THE MONSTROUS PATH
title: 魔道祖师 | mó dào zǔ shī
author: 墨香铜臭 | mò xiāng tóng xiù
TRANSLATOR’S STATEMENT
this is, first and foremost, a personal project to improve my chinese using a story that I love. I consider myself proficient, but not an expert in chinese, and I will certainly be making mistakes! my chinese consultant is my mom (lmao), and my english consultants are a handful of my friends who will mitigate my worst writing habits.
I favor foreignizing over localizing translation styles, so I will be attempting to preserve sentence structure and idiomatic expression as much as I am able without damaging emotional impact and comprehension. if anyone is reading along with their own original texts, I hope that this can also help them as a learning tool! I will be making footnotes on points that I have difficulty translating, or points that I simply find interesting/culturally specific. I plan to preserve original chinese honorifics in direct address, though I may translate those honorifics in the narration. (we’ll see. subject to change.)
I am translating out of the Taiwan special edition, which I purchased with my Real Money TTATT;; but I am splitting the chapters along the original breaks as best as I can figure using various online editions and references. I will also be trying to preserve some of what I believe is the original online punctuation that was edited for the print version, and translating the subtitles of the chapters as given on luoxia.
it will not be updated regularly or quickly, and there is absolutely no guarantee that I will ever complete the project. my track record indicates that I probably will not, in all likelihood! RIP whatever I finish will be whatever I finish, and I hope it can bring someone some joy!
ON THE TITLE:
I struggled for a long time with the title.
魔 | mó : [evil] magic, evil spirit, monster, devil, demon
道 | dào : path, way, Tao, doctrine, cult
祖师 | zǔ shī : founder [of a sect or school of thought], founding master
I’d like to move away from the usual fandom translation of “demonic cultivation” for a few reasons. english is a very christian language when it comes to spiritual descriptions of good and evil; however, the spiritual/cultural framework of MDZS is not based in christian thought, so I find that using “demonic” for 魔 evokes a sentiment that doesn’t quite work for me.
I debated between using “cursed” or “monstrous” for a while, but ultimately settled on “monstrous” because 1, it’s secular, so even if it’s not culturally “accurate”, it at least doesn’t ascribe religious connotations that aren’t there; 2, I think there’s a little more freedom in the word “monster” when it comes to value judgments. while a demon or a curse is malefic by nature, I think there’s quite a bit of cultural exploration on the subject of what defines or makes a monster (Frankenstein, to cite an obvious example). is a monster evil by nature, or relative to perception? taken together with some of the greater themes of MDZS, I felt like “monstrous” was the most interesting translation to choose; also 3, mo and monstrous, just to get a bit of fun sonic play in there as well. :3
I think using “demonic cultivation” implies that “demonic cultivation” is a type of “cultivation”, when that’s not really the case. the standard cultivators we meet are all trying to 修仙 | xiū xiān: to cultivate towards becoming a celestial immortal, but Wei Wuxian’s 魔道 (or 鬼道 | guǐ dào: the ghostly path, as he calls it sometimes) doesn’t serve the same function. he cannot become 仙. it’s more like a different path to power, for lack of a better description. 修 by itself is a generic verb that can mean to study/practice/cultivate (among other things), which I think is where a lot of the confusion sets in. they are all “cultivating” in the sense that they are all cultivating/practicing their skills, but they are entirely different DND classes, if that metaphor helps at all ahaha. everybody is 修ing, but they are 修ing on different paths, towards different things.
anyways, I’m sure this will come back to bite me later when I’m tearing my hair out over the text, but for now! that’s where I got my title.
CHAPTERS
you should be able to hover over the footnotes to get them to pop up, but you can also click on them to jump directly to the bottom of the page. there will be a link to take you back to the text.
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BEHIND THE SCENES
Chapter 1: [Line Evolution] 对这种人，还讲什么同门同修青梅竹马的情面?