Mixed4Columns\"... stark and lyrical ... In its directness (I would even say a kind of imagist plainspeak), economy, and phrasal cadences, Deborah Smith’s translation has captured much ... A qualm or two, though: the rendering of a young mother’s desperate and feeble plea—and a refrain/mantra throughout—as “For God’s sake don’t die,” seems an unnecessary Anglicization ... To add \'the book\' feels imprecise, redundant. It’s possible that Han herself is trying to bend grammar, as she does genre... Still, the sense of an unfixed adjective as attributive and modifying, denoting the quality of the thing and not the thing itself, is lost, as they say, in translation.\
