MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Chris Song’s review of Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu, translated with commentary by Frederik H. Green. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chris-song/. My thanks to Michael Hill, MCLC translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu:
Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic
By Xu Xu
Translated with commentary by Frederik H. Green
Reviewed by Chris Song
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2023)

Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu. Translated with commentary by Frederik H. Green. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN: 9781611720556 (paper).
Despite immense popularity in Republican Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong, Xu Xu 徐訏 (1908–1980) remains an under-studied modern Chinese writer. Frederik H. Green’s research endeavor over the past two decades, however, has reminded the field of Xu Xu’s fiction, poetry, essays, and other literary activities. Green’s unrelenting efforts have been brought to fruition with the publication of Bird Talk and Other Stories. The book opens with Green’s introduction, which details Xu Xu’s life and works; collects five stories that Green selected and translated into English; and concludes with Green’s commentary on Xu Xu’s postwar fiction. The selection of stories reflects Green’s emphasis on the transformative (neo-)romantic sensibility that spanned Xu Xu’s entire literary career. The book not only reintroduces an ingenious author to the forgetful readership of modern Chinese literature but also makes an insightful contribution to the study of Hong Kong literature and other cultural productions during the Cold War. I shall refrain here from translation criticism and from reiterating Green’s able summary of each story. Instead, I discuss Green’s study of Xu Xu’s stories in the context of what he calls “transnational romanticism” (200), a concept that drove his selection and translation, and consider how Green’s illustration of this idea with Xu Xu’s stories might inspire new understandings of postwar Hong Kong literature. Continue reading