BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, Hidden Camera, The Poems of Catullus and Proust's English)(Book Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, by Han Bangqing, translated from the Mandarin and the Wu by Eileen Chang and revised and edited by Eva Hung (Columbia; $29.50). This huge novel about life in the brothels of fin-de-siecle Shanghai, published in 1894, is considered one of the great works of Chinese literature, although few Chinese, it seems, have actually read it. (It may be China's "Ulysses.") This is partly because much of the book was written in the regional Wu dialect rather than in the dominant Mandarin;...

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