Jin Ping Mei English Translations

Texts, Paratexts and Contexts

Lintao Qi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138481152
• eBook ISBN: 9781351060813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates the English translations and adaptations of the sixteenth century classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. Acclaimed the 'No.1 Marvellous Book' of the Ming dynasty, Jin Ping Mei was banned soon after its appearance, due to the inclusion of graphically explicit sexual descriptions. So far there have been more than a dozen English adaptations and translations of the novel.

Working within the framework of descriptive translation studies, this book provides a translational history of the English versions of Jin Ping Mei, supported by various paratexts, including book covers, reviews, and archival materials. It also conducts textual comparisons to uncover the translation norms at work in the only two complete renditions, namely The Golden Lotus by Clement Egerton and The Plum in the Golden Vase by David Roy, respectively. The notions of agency, habitus and capital are introduced for the examination of the transference of linguistic, literary and cultural aspects of the two translations.

The book represents the first systematic research effort on the English Translations of Jin Ping Mei. Given its pioneering status and interdisciplinary nature, the data, structure and findings of this book will potentially enrich the fields of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Chinese Studies, Cultural Studies and Book History.

Part I

Contextualisation of texts

1 Jin Ping Mei

Texts, genre and research

The Ming Dynasty in China (1368–1644), approximately contemporaneous with the Renaissance, witnessed the appearance of the so-called si da qishu 四大奇書 (Four Great Marvellous Works¹) in feudal China. As the youngest one, Jin Ping Mei² distinguishes itself from the other three classic novels by shifting its attention from legendary heroes to the everyday life of ordinary people. Centring around the everyday domestic life in the household of Ximen Qing, a typical social climber who actively interacts with people from all walks of life, the book furnishes an encyclopaedic picture of sixteenth-century Chinese society in naturalistic detail, although the author sets the story between 1112 and 1127 in the final years of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127).

Jin Ping Mei and its literary significance

This section provides a very simplistic sketch of the story in JPM, covering only some of the key plots, as it would be too ambitious to give a proper recount of the storyline of a million-word masterpiece in a mere section. The novel starts with a scene borrowed from an earlier classic novel Shuihu Zhuan 水滸傳³ about the adulterous encounter between Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian, the wife of Wu Da. When the news of their illicit love affair was circulated in the neighbourhood, the two lovers plotted the murder of Wu Da, whose younger brother, Wu Song, was a herculean hero who had slain a tiger barehanded. Soon after her husband’s death, Pan promptly married into Ximen’s household as his fifth wife. The attempted revenge by Wu Song of his brother’s murder was thwarted by Ximen Qing’s bribery of the local magistrate, who connived at the exile of Wu Song to a remote area.

It is hard, though, to believe that Ximen married Pan for the sake of love. The readers do not have to wait long to witness in the novel another immoral affair between Ximen and Li Ping’er, then wife of one of his sworn brothers, who later became Ximen’s sixth concubine. However, Ximen did not stop at that; he seemed to have an aberrant desire to carry out his romantic adventures with any woman pleasing his eyes, be she another’s wife, a servant of his household or a prostitute from a bawdy house. Husband of six women and lover of many others, Ximen found his home a battlefield of vicious competition for his favours and wealth, sometimes at the cost of life. Pan, for instance, was directly responsible for the premature death of Li Ping’er’s son, which in turn caused the tragic demise of Li Ping’er, the arch rival of Pan in the harem of Ximen.

On top of his usually immoral pursuit of beautiful women and physical pleasure, Ximen dishonestly established himself as an affluent businessman, building up a highly sophisticated social network. Relying on a sumptuous birthday present to the Prime Minister Cai Jing, Ximen secured himself an official title and plenty of privileges as Cai’s ‘adopted son’. He was thereafter often looked up to with open admiration, if not dread or secret aversion, by the local officials and civilians. Consequently, by exerting his position and influence, Ximen illegally assisted many criminals who bribed him to get away with their wrongdoings. Under his bureaucratic umbrella, his wealth increased exponentially from his never-failing business enterprise.

Finally, when his political and commercial careers were reaching their peak, he collapsed due to his excessive indulgence in physical pleasure; an overdose of an aphrodisiac given to him by the insatiable Pan Jinlian came as the last straw, among others, and eventually claimed his life. The same hand that caused Wu Da’s death by arsenic at the beginning of the novel was again responsible for Ximen’s destruction, by a different poison. Upon his death, his beloved concubines spared no time finding their next shelter, and his cronies turned their back soon enough on his family like strangers. Pan was sold because of the revelation of her amorous relationship with Ximen’s son-in-law, which germinated prior to Ximen’s death and was consummated shortly after it. She was finally revenged by Wu Song for the murder of his brother. Ximen’s posthumous son became a monk at the end of the novel to atone for the sins committed by his father.

This 100-chapter magnum opus is, by its nature, a masterpiece of satire of the then declining and decaying Ming society, providing a vivid depiction of life across all social strata, from its top officials to the lowly underdogs. The author was believed to have written a great realistic novel; he ‘set out, coldly and objectively, to relate the rise to fortune and the later ruin of a typical household at a time when Chinese officialdom was exceedingly corrupt. He omitted no detail of this corruption, whether in public or in private life’ (Xiaoxiaosheng & Egerton, 1957, p. vii).

Even before the printed version was available, the name of the novel was widespread and manuscripts of it were circulating among literati like Yuan Hongdao袁宏道(1568–1610) and Shen Defu 沈德符(1578–1642) (Lévy & Nienhauser, 2000, p. 139). Interest in it never faded afterwards because ‘the world was unwilling to exist without it’(Waley, 1959, p. viii). It was listed as one of the ‘Four Great Marvellous Works’ by the famous Ming critic and author Feng Menglong 馮夢龍⁴ (Q. Wang, 2004, p. 7). Decades later, this proposal found a strong supporter in the Qing critic Zhang Zhupo 張竹坡(1670–1698) who, among the four classics, favoured JPM as diyi qishu 第一奇書 (the Number One Marvellous Book⁵) (Yang, 1998, p. 368).

In the early twentieth century, this realistic novel was claimed to be ‘the most famous of the novels of manners’ by the leading literary figure Lu Xun 魯迅(1881–1936) (2009, p. 232). Not surprisingly, this idea was shared by many other influential Chinese men of letters such as Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸(1898–1958) (1982, pp. 919–920), who contends that JPM is greater than all its other contemporaries. Zhou Xuanlong (2008, pp. 23–24) summarises JPM’s literary achievements in his preface to a bilingual edition of Clement Egerton’s English version of the novel, The Golden Lotus:

The arising of The Golden Lotus marks the maturity of classical Chinese novels, both in content and in form. From the angle of creation, it affects a breakthrough in four respects. First of all, the source material of the novel comes from the contemporary life […]. Secondly, the plots of the novel are no longer legendary […]. Thirdly, there are no heroes among the characters portrayed in the novel […]. In the fourth place, the characters in the novel are rich in disposition, closer to the true human nature, giving up the previous ethic mode of good and evil in absolute opposition. For all this, Jin Ping Mei finds its un-replaceable position in the history of Chinese literature. Its way of writing directly influenced the creation of The Dream of the Red Chamber.⁶

As can be learnt from all the citations above, the literary significance of JPM in Chinese history can hardly be overestimated. Similar comments are not uncommon in western authors’ publications. Chang and Owen (2010, p. 104) refer to the book as ‘the Ming dynasty’s greatest novel’ in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. In his Geschichte der chinesischen Literatur, Grube also says that ‘the author of this book […] displays a power of observation and description so far above the average that all the remaining novel literature of China put together has nothing to compare with it’(quoted in Xiaoxiaosheng & Egerton, 1957, p. ix).

Regarding the novel’s position in the context of world literature, Hightower (1953, p. 120) points out that ‘in the Chin P’ing Mei and Hung Lou Meng Chinese literature has novels which, for scope, subtle delineation of character, and elaborate plot, will rank with the greatest novels of the West’. An equally powerful, but more comprehensive observation of the literary merits of JPM is made in the introduction to its latest English translation:

The Chin P’ing Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) is an enormous, complex, and sophisticated novel, surprisingly modern in its design […]. The work is a landmark in the development of narrative art, not only from a specifically Chinese perspective, but in a world-historical context. With the possible exceptions of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), neither of which it resembles, but with both of which it can bear comparison, there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature.

(Xiaoxiaosheng & Roy, 1993, p. xvii)

Given its literary significance and contribution, one would expect to find its canonical position unchallenged. Nonetheless, it is excluded from the list of si da gudian mingzhu 四大古典名著(the four greatest classic novels) of the present day in P. R. China, where its name is replaced by the Qing classic Honglou Meng. The consideration behind the relegation is more ideological than literary. As the novel contains 105 references to sexual intercourse, of which seventy-two are graphically explicit (X. Zhu, 1980), it has long been deemed pornographic in China, notwithstanding the fact that the total number of words of these passages account for less than 3 percent of the one-million-word novel (Ruan & Matsumura, 1991, p. 101).

Censors past and present

As mentioned earlier, before the official publication of JPM, its manuscript was already in circulation among the literati, who often took rather ambivalent, or even hypocritical attitude towards the novel. They marvelled at the literary craftsmanship of the author on the one hand and objected to its publication due to its pornographic content on the other; they enjoyed the privilege of accessing the manuscript, while proposed its worthiness of being burned (Y. Zhu, 2002). For example, Dong Qichang 董其昌(1555–1636) thought very high of JPM, introducing it to other intellectuals as ‘recently, there is an excellent novel called Jin Ping Mei’, albeit with the warning that ‘the book must be burned’⁷(Hou & Wang, 1985, pp. 220–221). By the same token, Shen Defu repudiated without hesitation Feng Menglong’s proposal to give the manuscript to a publisher on the grounds that if the novel was published, its popularity would be out of question, but its salacious content was destined to deprave its readers (Y. Zhu, 2002, p. 80). In this case, the elite displayed a conspicuous intention to keep the pleasure of reading the novel to themselves while endeavouring to deprive the ordinary readers of the right to access it, apparently on the assumption that ordinary readers were more susceptible to the decadent tendency revealed in JPM. This way of thinking turned the elite into self-styled literary censors. Interestingly, in the dissemination of JPM in the English world in the early twentieth century, which will be delineated in Part II of this book, similar censorial attitude would again take centre stage.

Other than these spontaneous censorial intellectuals, there was no record of JPM’s being officially banned in the Ming dynasty, which was relatively open-minded; this I will elucidate in more detail in the next section. It is worth pointing out that although the Chinese history of censorship on books started with Qin Shihuang 秦始皇(the first emperor) over 2,000 years ago, for the ensuing millennium until the early Ming Dynasty, the official censorial proscription of fictional works in China was practically unheard of. The extant record of censorship on novels really commenced in the late Ming Dynasty, but the victims at that time were mainly those with overly explicit political innuendos, where the ruling class perceived acute threats to its regime by their wide circulation (Ouyang, 2001a). For example, Shuihu Zhuan, one of JPM’s (inter-)textual sources, was rigorously suppressed due to the supposed subversive power of its content.

However, with the establishment of Qing Dynasty came more stringent censorial regulations. Especially in the early years of the dynasty, when the legitimacy of the Manchu government was still subject to constant challenges from the majority Han people, the authorities high-handedly suppressed the publication of many fictional works (ibid.). From the Kangxi 康熙 Emperor’s reign (1662–1722) in the Qing Dynasty onwards, JPM has always been indexed as a banned book. Ironically, it was also Kangxi’s rule that witnessed the birth of the most popular commentated edition of JPM by Zhang Zhupo in 1695 and the novel’s translation into Manchu by one of his courtiers He-su 和素⁸ in 1707. He-su’s translation, which was considered ‘one of the Manchu literary masterpieces’ due to its ‘flowing unaffected style and true to life interpretation’ (Fuchs, quoted in Gimm, 2013, p. 103), was also the ST for some translators who had no access to Chinese but were Manchu-literate.⁹

In the face of the ban on the book which has not been lifted in China ever since the Qing Dynasty, JPM continues to circulate in various forms, betraying the vitality and popularity of the novel. Between the downfall of the Qing in 1911 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, many so-called jieben 潔本(literally clean versions, or rather, bowdlerised versions, i.e. versions with the graphically erotic details expurgated) were openly published. After 1949, more reprints of the novel were made in Hong Kong and Taiwan (where the novel had also been banned for a time) either in the form of full version or bowdlerised version. In mainland China, dozens of reprints were published, most of which expurgated editions. At least four were full length, but they were available to only a limited audience – senior officials, academic researchers, for example – ordinary readers were not eligible to purchase a copy. A photostatic reprint was made in 1957, when Mao Zedong instructed that JPM was a good novel for revealing the dark sides of the Ming society and was worth reading by the provincial Party secretaries (Jixing Liu, 2011). This reprint was thus open for purchase to the central government ministers and provincial Party secretaries. Each of the 2,000 copies was individually numbered and every owner of the book was carefully filed (ibid.).

In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Conversion of major proper names
• Introduction
• Part I Contextualisation of texts
• Part II Paratextual reconstruction of contexts
• Part III Textual comparisons
• Index