The first time I picked up Kipling’s novel Kim was in sixth grade. There was a picture of Kim astride the great bronze gun Zam Zammah on the cover (or maybe it was the frontispiece), the kind of illustration guaranteed to attract twelve year old boys. The first pages of the book were just as good, with the other boys shouting at Kim to let them get up on the gun, the mysterious appearance of the Buddhist monk, and Kim’s visit to the market to beg for the monk, all of them like nothing I had ever read before.
Unfortunately, I was also baffled over long stretches, like the monk’s long conversation with the museum curator, the description of Kim’s mysterious parentage, and most of all, Kipling’s immense vocabulary. This was probably edited for kid consumption in the version I looked at, but even so it was way too much for me at the time. I gave up less than fifty pages into the book, and did not pick it up again until last year, when I got interested in the historical background of the Great Game. I’ll have some book reviews on this subject soon.
As for Kim, though, what a pity I waited until I was an old man to finally read it! It is by far the best of Kipling’s fiction. In fact, it is one of the great works of early 20th century fiction, close to modernist in its balancing of the two antithetical views of life, filled with incredible set pieces, and a passionate love for the land and peoples of India.
It is also a great Buddhist novel, with the lama the hidden hero of the story. The interplay between Kim and the lama is wonderful to read, as each in his turn passes through the stations of their search for understanding and enlightenment, alternating between action and contemplation.
Even after fifty more years of reading, I still needed annotation to avoid getting lost in the multifarious and complex societies, histories, geographies, and faiths of India woven into Kim. The edition I read was from the Oxford World Classics series, edited by Alan Sandison, with an excellent introduction and essential annotation.
Sandison wrote earlier on Kim and Kipling in his book The Wheel of Empire, and in his book Rudyard Kipling, s study of Kipling’s short stories that also discusses Kim. Both are probably worth a read, given the quality of Sandison’s introduction. The 16 pages of explanatory notes are condensed from the eight volume Reader’s Guide to Rudyard Kipling’s Work, with most of the annotation apparently coming from Brigadier Alec Mason, M.C. in volume one of the Guide. This is an amazing compilation of difficult to find and interpret material, a must have for anyone who takes on Kipling. I salute you, Brigadier Mason!
Given the overwhelming presence of Asian culture and society in Kim, and the powerful Buddhist strain of the book, I wondered whether there were any worthwhile Chinese translations. A very casual search turned up four translation: three from Taiwan, and one from mainland China. Over the past two decades, translations of Western literature in Mainland China have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain, but apparently Kipling has not been as popular an author as others, perhaps because of Kipling’s undeserved reputation as an unreconstructed champion of imperialism. If I have time, I’ll give one or two of these translations a look and post a note.