Reading a Shanghainese Novel

[dakonglong]

Hi All!

 

I often use the Publishing Perspectives China Bestseller list to find new books to read (https://publishingperspectives.com/2024/02/china-bestsellers-in-january-fond-memories-drive-sales/) and this month I was super excited to come across a book I hadn't heard of before that looked really interesting, "Blossoms Shanghai". I was about to choose this as my next book until I came across this Wikipedia article which states that it's written in Shanghainese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Yucheng. That leads me to a couple of questions: (1) does anyone know if this book is really written 100% in Shanghainese? This Publishing Perspectives list says it's currently #14 on the China bestsellers list, but that seems hard to imagine if it's written in a language that (based on some quick math I found online) only about 1% China's population actively speaks. (2) Per #1, if the standard version really is written in Shanghainese, does anyone know if there a Mandarin version? Amazon just shows the languages for the two versions they carry as "Chinese" so I have been unable to differentiate myself. Finally (3) If the standard version really is 100% Shanghainese, how hard would it be for me to read that version, given that I can read Mandarin novels pretty fluently at this point? Based on my initial research, my guess is really, really hard (one article I found said that Mandarin and Shanghainese words only overlap like 25%) which would mean 75%+ unknown works and I know from experience that even 10%+ can be a major struggle.

 

If, by some chance, this book is only partially in Shanghainese, I'm actually super excited to learn a few new phrases, but I don't think I'm up to the challenge of trying to learn a whole new dialect just to read one book.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[Jim]

The Baidu article suggests it's got a lot of dialect colour rather than actually being written in a full attempt at Wu Chinese:

对方言的化用也是《繁花》的亮点。在《繁花》中，作者采用了诸多方言，如“霞气好”“霞气漂亮”“汏浴”“适意”“膘劲”“老卵”等词；小说中说“事体”，不说“事情”，说“是吧”、“好吧”，不说“是吗”、“好吗”，说“立起”，不说“站起”；小说还用了“橄榄屁股”“拾到皮夹子”“叫花子吃死蟹”等一系列熟语。这些带着沪腔沪调的用语带着浓浓的沪式风味，而金宇澄用这些词汇又有讲究，他能够让文本有着沪式腔调，而不让人产生隔阂，这些用语是上海的口语，但是又能一眼看出它们的词义，完全没有阅读上的障碍，虽是一种陌生化的形态，但又是熟悉的内涵。将方言融入得这般巧妙，离不开作者对于语言的斟酌，“很多沪语句子，不易书面表达，只能反复舍弃，反复拿捏，用心良苦，因此语言上，实际过渡到了所谓‘蓝青官话’程度。

 

From 繁花（金宇澄创作的长篇小说）_百度百科 (baidu.com)

[cncorrect]

Here are some snippets from the book. You can try reading by yourself: https://book.douban.com/subject/22714154/blockquotes?sort=page_num&start=0