[Simon Wickhamsmith]

Hi Benson – thanks so much for this insightful and fascinating comparison. “Yellow” is used for people (westerners) with fair hair, but I doubt that we should imagine Tsamba like this. It could also be a reference to Buddhism, as you say, and perhaps in his youth we imagine him to have been a monk. But I don’t know…and I too would welcome input from Mongolian readers.

My translation is deliberately faithful to the original, both in style/language and in structure. The translations which Schwarz chose, I feel, were in places more “versions” than faithful translations, which could have been the source of some of the differences, especially in the placement of particular sections.

I definitely think of the narrator as looking back on his life. It’s supposed, as I said, to be autobiographical, and so Erdene – writing at the age of 31 in 1960 – was already looking back 14 years to when he was 17, probably with more maturity and self-awareness, and perhaps a little embarrassed at his behavior. By the time he wrote “Thirty Years Later” in 1990, he was 61, and a mature writer with a great deal of literary and personal success. As for the psychological aspect, I’m glad you saw this: I very much feel that Erdene is one of the most psychologically gifted writers in Mongolian letters. He studied medicine at the national University, and eventually focused on psychiatry, but was also keenly interested in psychology. I think this gives his work a really powerful and deep quality, and is one of the reasons for the continuing popularity of his work.

Thanks so much for writing this analysis!

Simon

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