COVER N. 267 - CHINA

Postmark: ? - 03.06.2023

Posted on the 3rd June; Received on the 16th June 2023

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Thanks, Ruinan, for another cover with an interesting set of stamps.

Literature is an essential part of our development. 

It's main benefit is that it allows us to travel when physical means to do so aren't available as only by travelling, or should I say, discovering, can we start to realise that the world extends much further away that our own backdoor, and that the way I see it, might not be the way someone else does. 

Literature can even allow us to travel through time, without the need to invest in a DeLorean. 

Of all the things I have been grateful for throughout my life, the day my father introduced me to the joys of a public library in Faro, when I was just going to primary school, has to rank amongst the top handful. Since then I've lost count of the many, many hours of absolute pleasure I have spent indulging in the almost sacred ritual of pushing my right index over a sheet of printed paper to flip  page after page...

Heroes, villains, places, habits, thoughts, doubts, certainties, discoveries, disquiets, interrogations, solutions.. all this and a huge lot more have i found in Literature, in its many guises. 

The social importance of Literature is acknowledged in many forms all over the world, mainly though the contests as prizes awarded to writers. but to me, the most relevant proof of the attention that is given to literature lies in the work of that most times unsung hero, the Translator, for if the writer is to be blamed for the act of creation, the translator is the one that makes the writer's work travel past the boundaries of idiom, 

A good translation is a comfort to a good book, a bad one is a bed of nails....

And we now face a terrible danger, I feel, not only in the form of automated creation but also of automated translation. 

Some time ago (I think I have mentioned this before, here on the blog) I've bought a copule of Emilio Salgari's Sandokan books in a new Portuguese edition (I had  to read them. It was a personal thing that had been with me since my early teens...). and the translation sucked... I strongly suspect that AI translation was involved and that there was no human revision of the results.... cheap to produce, the more so since the original texts are already in Public Domain, but decidedly cheap in the results...

If this is a sign of things to come, it discomforts me, since I really think a good translation is almost as important as the original text in order to ensure the wok's "travelability" trough the libraries of non speakers of the original language in which it was written.

If not, how on hell would I read a Chinese novel?

The four stamps (3x1,20 + 1 x1,50 Yuan) on the cover are a stamp set issued on 17APR2023. Further to the 4 stamps, a souvenir sheet with a 6 Yuan stamp was also issued.

The stamps and sheet set are the 5th, and probably final issue on the subject "Journey to the West" in a series dedicated to Chinese Classic Literature.

"Journey to the west" or Xi Yóu Ji,  is a classic novel, written in the 16th century, in the Ming Dinnasty,  probably by Wu Cheng'en.

Quoting directly from Wikipedia, on the subject of the 100 chapter novel: "(it) is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travelled to the "Western Regions" (Central Asia and India) to obtain Buddhist sūtras (sacred texts) and returned after many trials and much suffering."