(no subject)

So, I'm working on a project -- sadly not fiction, where I seem to be on some kind of plateau -- that I will discuss more as I get closer to discerning whether execution is possible, but it's taking me to some hilarious places.

One of them is an investigation of early Chinese novels, which led me to The Plum In The Golden Vase, the "fifth great novel" of Chinese literature, which has spent most of its five-hundred-plus-year existence banned due to graphic sex. Apparently the first really good English translation has just appeared on the scene; according to the article I'm reading, the first English translation in the 1940s had all the sex, but translated it into Latin instead of English, to get around some censorship law or other.

I assume Latin was chosen because Classicists all have dirty minds anyway.