The first episode of a Chinese TV series I’m subtitling is now up on my YouTube channel. I’m posting the transcript of my video introduction to the episode here in case anyone just wants to read it instead of watching me ramble. This TV show in particular delves deep into 20th century relations between Russia and China, a topic as relevant as ever in the wake of Xi Jinping’s recent meeting with Vladimir Putin. You can read more of my thoughts on the importance of subtitling Chinese TV shows into English at this link.
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Hello and thank you for watching The Wind Across Our World, episode one. This introduction will contain helpful background information, but if you want to skip ahead to the show, you can use the timestamp links in the description below.
While I'm continuing to record audiobooks, I took a brief hiatus to write English subtitles for a Chinese TV drama about the Sino-Soviet split. The average American might have some vague notion that China (“Sino”) and the USSR (“Soviet”), at one time the world's two largest communist states, completely severed diplomatic relations sometime in the decades after World War II. More devoted Cold War history nerds (like myself) can also read tons of scholarship about this event and its repercussions. What's been missing for English-speaking audiences, however, is a fictionalized account, dramatizing the events to show how they affected ordinary Russian and Chinese citizens caught on both sides of the divide.
Now, with the English subtitling of The Wind Across Our World, that absence will be remedied. The Wind Across Our World is the story of Shen Yan, a Chinese student studying abroad in Moscow prior to the split, and Valentina “Valia” Romanova, a graduate assistant for Shen Yan's class. As can be expected, they fall in love. The show goes on to span several emotional decades of Sino-Soviet relations as Yan and Valentina's love is strained and tested by tense international politics. No matter how much you've studied this fraught period of communist history, I can promise you've never seen it portrayed quite like this.
Next, I want to explain the show’s English title. If you know your Chinese characters, you may notice the original Chinese title says nothing about the wind or the world. It simply means “cranberries blossoming.” This is also the name of a Russian folk song that’s been translated into Chinese and performed many times by famous Chinese musicians. To Chinese audiences this title quite readily evokes cross-cultural exchange between the two countries. The lyrics themselves are also fittingly about unrequited love. However, rendered into English the name of this show simply isn’t very catchy. In the process of translating this show for Western audiences, I needed a more marketable name.
So what is the significance of the name The Wind Across Our World? It is a paraphrase of the first several lines of Soviet poet Alexander Blok’s poem “The Twelve”, written in 1918, one year after the October Revolution:
Black night.
White snow.
The wind, the wind!
Impossible to stay on your feet.
The wind, the wind!
Blowing across God’s world!
the wind here being a straightforward metaphor for sweeping change. Likewise, the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations causes a wind to sweep across the romance between Shen Yan and Valentina, throwing all they held dear into chaos.
Finally, I will explain the show’s footnote system. This is probably the first TV drama you’ve watched that has footnotes, but I promise they’re here for a good reason. Like I said, most Western audiences are only passingly familiar with the Sino-Soviet split, and likewise most know next to nothing about Chinese, Russian, and Soviet history. As can be expected, The Wind Across Our World contains many dense references to all three. So keep an eye out: whenever you see a yellow hammer and sickle symbol flashing next to subtitles, it means there will be a footnote at the end of the episode explaining whatever the character was talking about in more detail. References that most Westerners would easily understand will not have footnotes, for example when characters quote the famous Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments. If you appreciate the work of this channel and want to see more of it more frequently, as well as get access to exclusive and early-release content, become a Patreon supporter by following the link in the description below. Thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy this presentation of The Wind Across Our World.
Hello, I have a few photographs of Russians working in China in the summer of 1956 by New Zealand photojournalist Tom Hutchins if you are interested in seeing them? Please email johnbturner2009@gmail.com Thank you for your article on this important topic.
Love it, Chet. Great job.