Raise the Red Lantern

Raise the Red Lantern, originally known as Wives and Concubines, is a 1990 novella by Su Tong, published by (遠流出版公司), that describes a female former university student whose mind is broken by the concubine system in 1930s China. It was adapted into the 1991 film, Raise the Red Lantern, by Zhang Yimou. Title and translations The first edition of the novella, published in Taiwan, had the name Wives and Concubines. However the name used in the second edition in Taiwan and in the Hong Kong edition became Raise the Red Lantern. Krist wrote that the use of Raise the Red Lantern by other editions was "presumably to ride on the movie's popularity". The novel was translated into English by Michael S. Duke, and this translation was published as a collection of stories by Su Tong, named Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas, published by William Morrow & Company in 1993. Duke used Hanyu Pinyin in his translation. He stated that he chose to romanize the names of male characters as such characters did not have important themes in their names. He chose to translate names of female characters as their names were "thematically important references to nature and the cycles of nature" as well as having the function to "delineate" said characters. Duke used frequent semicolons to try to keep Su Tong's practice of, in Duke's words, "very long multiple sentences marked with commas only", something uncommon in current Chinese literature. The other two included works in the compilation are Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, and Opium Family. The French version, under the title Épouses et concubines, was translated by Annie Au Yeung and Françoise Lemoine, and published by Groupe Flammarion in 1992. The film had not yet been released in Europe when the French version was released. Later editions in French are a part of the imprint Le Livre de Poche of the publisher Hachette. The novella was published in German as Rote Lanterne ("Red Lantern"), by Goldmann, in 1992. The German translation was done from the French version, with assistance from Sinologists, instead of directly from the Chinese version. Ulrike Kloepfner, the editor, stated that there was not enough time to obtain the manuscrupt of the Chinese version as the publishers wished to release it when the film was released.