Dramatic Moments on the Go Board, by Abe Yoshiteru. Yutopian Y10; 1996.

This book is a collection of dramatic moments in professional go games, where a 'dramatic moment' means a place where one of the players screws up, or almost screws up. I'm not really sure what the point of the book is. It certainly won't help your go game. And as entertainment, I'd far prefer a novel; if I'm going to read something go-related that isn't didactic, I'd prefer something with more narrative to it, like Nakayama's stories. (If anybody published a volume full of Nakayama's essays, I'd be the first to buy it.) This isn't a bad book - it's good enough for what it is - but I don't expect many people to be looking for what it is.

This book is probably also the single most annoyingly-translated go book in English. The book is full of sentences like "With these moves, the race to capture [semeai] between the two groups was resolved in seki." I don't understand what the point is of including "[semeai]" in the above sentence; the meaning is perfectly clear without it, a knowledgeable reader would guess that "race to capture" is a translation of "semeai", and I don't see why you would care anyways. And they do this over and over again, with the same words. I really want to scream when I see "skillful finesse [tesuji]" repeated for the umpteenth time. I mean, skillful finesse isn't even all that nice a translation of "tesuji" (is the word "skillful" really necessary? Would we otherwise think that it's a skilless finnesse?), and sticking "[tesuji]" after it just emphasizes how graceless the phrase is.

Click here to see Yutopian's blurb about the book.

david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:59:03 PDT 2003