Wilt L. Idema, Passion, Poverty and Travel : Traditional Hakka Songs and Ballads

Professor Wilt L. Idema is a well-established sinologist who excels at integrating the translation of Chinese vernacular literature with cultural-historical contextualization.Such academic style is on display in this book, Passion, Poverty and Travel-a translation of traditional Hakka folklore that both introduces and illustrates related historical and cultural contexts.From the selection, translation and interpretation of these stories of Hakka folklore, the author presents his unique sense of the vernacular genre, its ethnicity, historicity, emotions and humanity.Overall, this book can be considered not only as a valuable resource in its extensive English translation of Hakka folklore, but also as a demonstration of how the poetic and vernacular genre carries a way of understating Hakka cultures and Hakka-ness.The Introduction provides important background information that sets the stage for readers to delve deeply into the other chapters of the book.In addition to familiarizing readers with the complicated relationship between orality and literacy in Hakka folklore, the introduction demonstrates how the authorship of stories has been made by selecting, translating, and even editing or remodeling the lines of songs.The first part of the book explores Hakka Mountain Songs.The author exhibits the vivid lyrics of mountain songs collected throughout the Kuangdong area between the early and mid-twentieth century.At the same time, the author presents the biographies of four distinguished Hakka elites-Huang Zunxian, Zhong Jingwen, Luo Xianglin and Li Jinfa-and describes how their personal experiences related to their collection, transcription, and translations of traditional Hakka mountain songs.From this, we find that all four of these elites lived in urban cities, earned college educations, and studied or worked abroad, making them pioneers of collecting, transcribing, and translating mountain songs from rural areas in Kuangdong.To read the first part is not just to read the translations of many pieces of mountain songs but is also to understand these scholar's viewpoints on them.In this, the author shows us that the