The Three Leaps of Wang Lun is the only one of Döblin’s four pre-Alexanderplatz epics to have appeared in English (NY Review Books/Chinese University Press Hong Kong Calligrams series of books from and on China, 2015. ISBN 978-962-996-564-8).
Here we publish the ‘outtakes’ that never made it to the German published text, and describe the process of (not) securing publishers for the translations.
We shall also highlight the biographical and historical contexts and the creative processes that led to the most sustained evocation, in any European language, of a China untouched by the West.