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William Dolby

Classical Chinese Translations and Research

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Review of William Dolby's Translation of Mr Ma and Son by Lao She

Lao She in the 1920s

I have noticed that Amazon do not appear to list William Dolby as the translator of Mr Ma and Son which certainly needs to be remedied. Indeed Ms. Julia Lovell gets a mention as introducing the work but Bill's name does not receive equal status.

However, to do justice to his work I found this snippet:

"Lao She is one of the most important Chinese writers of the last century, perhaps best known to English readers for his great proletarian classic Rickshaw Boy (1937). Now an earlier and little known novel, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London  (Er Ma 1929) has been published by Penguin Classics in an excellent translation by William Dolby that at last does justice to Lao She’s unsung comic masterpiece. Mr Ma and Son gives us a unique account of what life was like for Chinese people in 1920s London. The novel draws largely on the writer’s own experiences, since his arrival in 1924 to take up a post teaching Mandarin classes at the School of Oriental Studies, then at Finsbury Circus. "

This small but direct and pointed mention can be found at London Fiction

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