Alex Fang in Discussion with Virginie Actis and John Knych of Printim Editions

Six Records of a Floating Life (1877) is an intimate exploration of love, memory, and late imperial Chinese society. Translated from Classical Chinese into English by Alex Fang (2025), this nonlinear autobiography recounts the travels of Shen Fu through Qing China and his married life with Yun, the woman and fellow aesthete he fell in love with as a child.
The records, each self-contained and chronological therein, refract upon each other and together tell of a life of pleasure and pain, of freedom and frustration, and of surfaces and depths. Virginie and John will be discussing with Alex the memoir’s enduring appeal and the relevance in an age where our inner lives are becoming increasingly commoditized.

Alex Fang is a lawyer, poet, and former journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born and raised in Hangzhou—a city often twinned with Shen Fu’s native Suzhou and described fondly by the Qing memoirist in the fourth chapter of Six Records of a Floating Life—she brings to this translation a lived familiarity with the landscape and literary sensibilities that shaped the book, as well as a commitment to preserving the texture of the original language.
Her bylines and poems can be found in The Black Warrior Review, Nikkei Asia, The Financial Times, Action Spectacle, Shanghai Daily, Thimble Literary Magazine and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Harvard Law School, and currently practices law at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. Six Records of a Floating Life is her first book-length literary translation.

Virginie Actis is a founder of Printim Editions, an independent publishing house specializing in foreign translation. She is a French Literature Professor (agrégée) at La Sorbonne University, a doctoral student in American literature, and a member of the VALE UR 4085 laboratory. Her research focuses on the comparative study of the writing of melancholy in Gustave Flaubert and Herman Melville and is part of the theoretical field of Trauma Studies.
A lecturer at INSPE, Paris Sorbonne University, Virginie has published several articles on the reception of Flaubert in school textbooks and on the relationship between scientific discourse and fiction in Flaubert and Melville’s works. She recently co-translated into English the memoir, Music From Another World, by Simon Laks and René Coudy, and Greek Shadows, by Marc Amfreville, both works published by Printim Editions.

John Knych is a founder of Printim Editions, an independent publishing house specializing in foreign translation. He is a Master's graduate of both Columbia University and SciencesPo Journalism Schools and formerly worked as a journalist for Agence France-Presse. His day job is teaching business at IÉSEG School of Management in Paris.
His bylines include stories, poems, and articles published in Air Mail, amNewYork, Bewildering Stories, and the journal Unbroken. He recently translated into English Through the Fire by Jean-Philippe Blondel, co-translated into English, Music From Another World, by Simon Laks and René Coudy, and Greek Shadows, by Marc Amfreville, all works published by Printim Editions.