Vernacular Fiction Research Articles

From Jātaka to Vernacular Fiction: Adaptation of the Buddhist Plot of the Two Brothers (Journey beyond the Sea) in Classical Korean Literature

From Jātaka to Vernacular Fiction: Adaptation of the Buddhist Plot of the Two Brothers (Journey beyond the Sea) in Classical Korean Literature

'Hard translation' in Stories to Enlighten the World

An illustrious figure of Ming-Qing fiction, Feng Menglong (1574-1646), compiled and edited a thought-provoking trilogy of short story anthologies towards the demise of the Ming (1368-1644) dynasty, which contributes to the thriving development of vernacular fiction. The first fascicle of the trilogy is an anthology entitled Stories Old and New (and subsequently Stories to Enlighten the World) that was published in 1620 and translated by Cyril Birch in 1958. In this research, I explore Birch’s rendering that has not attained enough academic attention. I propound that the translation abounds with literal translations and transliterations, which is consistent with the approach of ‘hard translation’ advocated by a renowned writer and translator Lu Xun, aka Zhou Shuren (1881-1936). The ‘hard translation’ strategies can be embodied by Birch’s translation of expressions pertaining to historical personages, religious and literary allusions, as well as sayings and idioms. Furthermore, Birch enriches literal translation and transliteration with illuminating notes and adopts the strategy of adaptation, so as to strike a balance between faithfulness and fluency.

Translating Heteroglossia

According to James I. Crump, Chinese vernacular fiction is characterized by extensive use of “pastiche,” which includes both verbatim incorporation of other identifiable texts and generic parodies. This penchant finds its supreme manifestation in A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng 紅樓夢). The vast variety of discourses and voices in Dream can be read as a manifestation of heteroglossia, and are intended to function dialogically, in the Bakhtinian senses of these terms. This essay examines the exact circumstances in which the two widely-read full English translations of Dream were produced and compares them in terms of their recognition and treatment of heteroglossia. I argue that although the Yangs’ may be characterized as “literal” in the sense of rendering “word for word,” what Hawkes achieves in his translation should be considered a higher level of literalness in the sense of “text for text.” While Hawkes consistently strives to retain the linguistic hybridity and subtle contrasts in the original, the Yangs often smooth out the checkered texture of the text by adopting a plain “international” English and resorting to copious footnotes.

Snake, Spell, Spirit, and Soteriology: The Birth of an Indian God Jiedi 揭諦 in Middle-Period China (618–1279)

I introduce a Buddhist god named Jiedi, believed to be a personification of the renowned gate mantra in the Heart Sūtra. I argue for a complex genesis story where the transference of the nāga-taming function and aquatic setting from the rainmaking spell in the Great Cloud Sūtra to the Heart Sūtra Mantra, coupled with its exegetical tradition emphasizing the soteriological metaphor of crossing, created an independent cult of the Jiedi Mantra. In battling chthonic snake spirits demanding virgin sacrifice in Sichuan, a regional variation of a cosmopolitan alchemical theme, the mantra was personified into a god associated with water and warfare. The exorcistic function of the mantra was the motor behind its apotheosis in Middle-period China. While he was elevated from a mere spirit to a vidyārāja (“wisdom king”) in tantric Buddhism, his cult was also disseminated in the Song, witnessing him provide broad deliverance in diverse areas such as industry, agriculture, infrastructure, military, and civil service. In late imperial China, he further imprinted himself on sacred geography, became a special class of warrior god, made inroads into Daoism and local religion, and proliferated in vernacular fiction and drama. An exotic Indian god was born on Chinese soil.

Regional Literary Tradition in Modern World Literature: The Allegorization of Democracy in Yano Ryūkei’s Beautiful Story of Statesmanship and Its Chinese and Korean Translations

ABSTRACT Yano Ryūkei’s popular political novel Keikoku bidan (The Beautiful Story of Statesmanship, 1883-84) is a fictionalization of the dramatic victory of the democrats over the oligarchs in ancient Thebes, and is among the first modern Japanese literary works to be translated into Chinese and Korean. As such, this work may be construed as a typical case of the translation of modern ideas from the European center into an East Asian periphery. But in playing that function, it notably makes an anachronistic use of a style of classical Japanese fiction that, along with its Korean counterpart, had developed in tight relationship to late-imperial Chinese vernacular fiction. The adoption of the classical narrative form of regional provenance allowed Ryūkei to create a political allegorization of democracy whose legitimacy is not just ideologically imposed but indigenously grounded on history, and facilitated its translation into Chinese and Korean. By examining these texts, this article considers an interperipheral structure of literary exchanges that helped enable a transposition of democracy into the region. It thus illuminates a palimpsestic construct of textual circulation in turn-of-the-century East Asia where the modern center-periphery relationship is intersected with the interperipheral dynamics activated by the afterlives of a classical transnational cultural tradition.

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Paratextual Framing for Translating and Disseminating the Ming novel Jinpingmei in the Anglophone world

This paper examines the paratextual framing of the English translations of Jinpingmei (JPM). The primary focus is on the ways in which two remarkable translations are (re)packaged for the intended audience in the Anglophone world. Drawing upon Genette’s paratextuality theory and contemporary translation theories, the paper attempts to investigate whether and how paratextual elements can (re)shape the two translations and foster the representation of alterity. After presenting the theoretical framework, the paper focuses on the peritexts surrounding the core texts. It argues that peritextual manipulation not merely serves marketing ends but highlights translators’ visibility and ideological intervention in producing translations of premodern Chinese texts in different historical settings in the receiving context. It concludes that translational peritexts can be an effective means to enact cross-cultural construction and that the latest translation demonstrates a higher level of peritextual visibility in sustaining the genre of Chinese vernacular fiction and in promoting images of Chinese culture in the receiving context.

Translation of Narrative Voice and Reproduction of a Simulated Storytelling Mode

Chinese vernacular fiction is characterized by a simulated storytelling mode through which the narrator manipulates narration and facilitates interaction with the reader. There is little research on the representation of this distinctive Chinese narrative mode across languages and cultures. Recently scholars in translation studies have begun to focus on how different types and levels of voice are represented in translated texts. The present article investigates how the overt voice of the simulated storyteller characterizing the Chinese vernacular narrative style is represented in three complete English translations of a Chinese classic entitled Shuihu Zhuan. The article includes a comparative study of how the storyteller-narrator manifests his narrative voice through storytelling formulae and rhetorical narratorial questions and more importantly, on how the storyteller-narrator’s voice has been rendered by different translators. Besides, by relating the reproduction of narrative voice to translatorship, it shows that the professional role and status of each translator influence their strategy-making as to whether, and to what extent, the narrative voice of the source text should be reconstructed.

Adoption in Hindi Fiction: Contesting Normative Understandings of Parenting and Parenthood in Late Colonial India

This article examines gendered lives in vernacular fiction by focusing on the topic of child adoption as fictionalised in Hindi literature in late colonial India (1920s). It argues that non-conformance and non-normativity dominated the short stories selected for this article. The feature of non-conformance towards normative assumptions in middle-class Hindu society also concerned Hindi literary realism of the time more generally, especially when presenting a diversity of intergenerational relationships between women, men, children and youth within the family setting, as well as beyond. The narratives discussed here show how social norms set by caste, class, gender, religion and biology were surpassed when it came to imagined family constellations in the late colonial period.

Ming Vernacular Fiction Studies: A View of the Field from the Inside by Robert Hegel

I wanted to begin by asking you about the early days of your career, which seems to me to be a very foundational period in the study of Ming-Qing fiction. Your The Novel in Seventeenth Century Chin...

역사 공간의 서사적 재현: 󰡔隋煬帝艶史󰡕 읽기

In this article, I analyzed the narrative features of Sui Yangdi Yanshi, one of the historical romance(历史演义) published in late Ming, focusing on the aspect of representations of the historic space. This is because the literary features of Sui Yangdi Yanshi, which are distinct from the historical narratives of the previous period, and similar to other types of feature-length vernacular fiction, are believed to be closely related to the representation of historic space. Sui Yangdi Yanshi made up a long narrative by modifying, supplementing and rearranging numerous historical events recorded in the previous historical narratives. The most powerful key driver of this work is the representations of historic space. In this work, 长安is represented as a space that reveals the imbalance of power, 西苑 of 洛阳 as a space of pleasure full of luxury and entertainment, 大运河as a space of pleasure and crisis at the same time. And 迷楼 of 江都 is represented as a space created for pleasure but cannot satisfy desires unlike 西苑. Sui Yangdi Yanshi constructs the narrative in a mutual-subjective way that represents space through characters and events and shapes characters and events through the representations of space. As a result Sui Yangdi Yanshi becomes a more self-complete text and produces various meanings.

Java in Discord

In the late sixteenth century, thriving private maritime trade brought forth maritime trouble to the late Ming state. In times of rampant “Japanese” piracy and Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, Chinese literati composed unofficial histories and vernacular fiction on China’s foreign relations. Among them, Yan Congjian 嚴從簡 wrote Shuyu zhouzi lu 殊域周咨錄 (Records of Surrounding Strange Realms) (1574), He Qiaoyuan 何喬遠 compiled Wang Xiangji 王享記 (Records of the Emperors’ Tributes) (1597–1620), Luo Yuejiong 羅曰褧 penned Xianbin lu 咸賓錄 (Records of Tributary Guests) (1597), and Luo Maodeng 羅懋登 composed a vernacular novel Sanbao taijian xiyangji tongsu yanyi 三寶太監西洋記通俗演義 (Vernacular Romance of Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyages on the Indian Ocean) (1598). This article examines how the imminent maritime realities reminded the late Ming authors of one cross-border war and two genocides in Java and Sanfoqi during Yuan and early and mid-Ming times. These transgressions that violated Chinese official tributary order became memorable and made Sino-Java relations a definite point of comparison for the late Ming maritime piracy problems. This article argues that the cultural memory of Sino-Java military and diplomatic exchange enabled the authors to lament and condemn the executed pirates Wang Zhi and Chen Zuyi. The four authors imbue their narratives with personal anxieties and nationalistic sentiments. While the historical narratives tend to moralize and idealize China’s tributary world order, the vernacular fiction paints a more realistic picture of the late Ming state by involving heterogeneous voices of the “other.” Collectively, the four narratives represent various images of the Ming Empire, revealing the authors’ deep apprehension of the Mings’ identity, their political criticism of the state, and their divergent and even self-conflicted views toward maritime commerce, immigrants, and people of different races.

Taste, Without Distinction

The phenomenon of the unprecedented sales success of Latin American and South Asian authors from García Márquez and Allende to Rushdie and Roy has had a disproportionate impact on models of the circulation of the literatures from the periphery in core markets. Yet what if these models err in extrapolating from the Latin American and South Asian booms the assumption of a single world market, perhaps even a single international literary field? This essay questions the evenness and general applicability of Bourdieu’s theory of taste to international publishing. Casanova, Moretti and Walkowitz describe a global publishing market, but how even is it? What is the impact of more national and local dynamics? Can publishers of foreign fiction really translate symbolic capital into commercial capital in the form of sales? The archival collection of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, registering the lack of demand for vernacular fiction from Latin America and South Asia well into the 1950s and 1960s, provides a counterfactual history. In postwar American foreign lists, the pressure to domesticate was not to an international literary field, but to the very specific fissures and pressures of an American market. An author did not write for translation per se, but for translation into American English and the New York market, or into Parisian French with its attendant editorial practices. Each literary field requires its own description. We need counterintuitive literary histories where it is not the unprecedented success of García Márquez or Rushdie that needs to be explained, but rather, how they and their precursors came to be published at all. We need accounts of the production, not merely the reception, of these works. Scholars must ask which foreign market an “international” author and supporting coterie of agents, translators and publishers is writing for.

A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu

Reviewed by: A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China by Li Yu Lenore Szekely (bio) Li Yu. A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China. Translated by Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xxv, 330 pp. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-02-31-19354-2. Paperback $25.00, isbn 978-02-31-19355-9. E-book $24.99, isbn 978-02-31-55036-9. The first of Li Yu’s (1611–1680) ten extant chuanqi plays to be translated into English, A Couple of Soles, makes a unique and significant contribution to Ming–Qing literature accessible to students and scholars. A play about acting, it continuously asks where the stage ends and reality begins. Tan Chuyu, a resolute scholar, condescends to become an actor to court an actress, the understated young beauty Fairy Liu. Tan’s intentions are frustrated by the unexpectedly strict rules against fraternizing among troupe members. As professionals, they can only play at romance for a profit. Doing it for free would betray the troupe’s code of conduct. The pair are able to realize their true roles as husband and wife onstage, until Fairy’s mother trades her for one-thousand taels to a corrupt local landowner to become his concubine. In its sensational play-within-a-play climax, Fairy publicly accuses her malefactors while performing her own revision of the Thorn Hairpin on a stage perched over the river before plunging to her death, with Tan racing to join her. The pair are transformed by divine intervention into a pair of sole fish, which gives the play its name, and are guided to the safety of retired official-turned-recluse Fisherman Mo’s net. Without revealing his former position for fear of being recalled to service, Fisherman Mo becomes Tan’s benefactor. The couple are married in a rustic wedding before Tan leaves to take the examinations, and earns the same official [End Page 299] post from which Fisherman Mo (formerly Murong Jie) has recently retired. Before escaping to reclusion, Murong defeated a bandit invasion. As Tan takes up his former post, Fisherman Mo pens him a guide to local governance, disguised as divine assistance to keep his former identity concealed. The half-human, half-beast bandit relaunches his attack and nearly succeeds by hiring an imposter to play the retired Murong. When he is recalled to government service to put down the bandit invasion, the imposter makes a treasonous retreat, deserting his troops and fleeing into reclusion. In the end, Tan is forced to try the real Murong Jie for the crime of his imposter, but Murong is finally saved from a sentence of death by Tan’s incorruptible pursuit of the truth. Having narrowly escaped this tragic conclusion, Tan Chuyu and Fairy Liu commit to joining Fisherman Mo and his wife to live out their days in a streamside retreat, free from the cares of the world. While Li Yu is known for his orientation toward performance, in English his vernacular fiction is better represented by Patrick Hanan’s delightful translations of Silent Operas (1990), A Tower for the Summer Heat (1998), and The Carnal Prayer Mat (1996). Despite chuanqi being an immensely popular form of entertainment in his day, and him being a widely known playwright, Li Yu’s contribution to the genre underlines the reasons why this translation of A Couple of Soles is so long awaited. Until now, in terms of full-length plays, chuanqi has been primarily represented in English by Chen Shih-hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch’s 1976 translation of Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan, and Cyril Birch’s 1994 translation of Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion. While these two are undeniably masterpieces, they reflect trends that Li Yu worked against in his dramatic oeuvre. Peony Pavilion is fifty-five scenes and was immediately criticized for being difficult to set to music, lending itself to being performed in extract, and to being a desktop play. It also typifies late-Ming indulgence in sentimentality and emotion. Peach Blossom Fan is the prime example of the trend in early-Qing chuanqi to stage the...

Gendered lives in vernacular fiction: Redefining family in Hindi short stories of the early 1940s

This article is embedded in discourses surrounding the new mobility of people as well as scientific, technological and socio-cultural changes in a late-colonial setting. It investigates how a number of prominent and less-known male authors from the centre and margins of the twentieth-century Hindi literary canon, including Rishabhcharan Jain, Shriyut ‘Arun’ and Durgadas Bhaskar, depict unconventional family constellations and human relationships that challenge normative conceptions of family, fatherhood, conjugality and blood bonds as well as gender roles and responsibilities. The short stories under investigation suggest that human relationships require constant negotiation and investigation of the meaning of kinship, caste, class and the human. In the process, we encounter adulterous husbands, strong wives and nurturing fathers’ life struggles and tribulations. These short stories centre on husband–wife, man–mistress, wife–mistress and father–son relationships. Their male protagonists are authoritative towards their wives, caring towards their mistresses and nurturing towards children. At times, their self-sacrifice goes as far as to complete self-annihilation for the sake of the offspring, and, at other times, they lead double lives. Mothers are absent in these short stories. Instead, male protagonists claim parenthood and are ready to go as far as to abduct infants in order to perform fatherhood. I argue that parenting constellations and conjugality became negotiable for a number of factors that are addressed in my selection of Hindi short stories: (a) parenthood was not contingent upon biology (as stories on adoption and abduction suggest), (b) contraception was readily available to women and men (as promoted in periodicals of the time) and in the process also changing attitudes towards sexuality and conjugality, (c) abortion emerged as a medical option to undo a pregnancy emerging from an illicit love affair and (d) the new mobility enabled people to get around easily and frequently and even lead double lives. In addressing these factors, fiction published and circulated in periodicals offered novel imaginative and innovative spaces for the negotiation of family models once projected as normative in social reformist and nationalist discourses.

The Dark Emperor’s law: a Daoist temple and its codification of rituals in Hunan

ABSTRACTThis article investigates different types of rituals that constitute the Daoist repertoire of Yangyuan Village in Hunan (PRC). I first show that the ‘indigenous’ Meishan rituals represent an older – possibly non–Han – stratum of the Yangyuan repertoire. Revolving around mountains, grottoes and other landmarks of the local sacred geography, it nonetheless bears the traces of inter-regional exchange between Hunan, Jiangxi, and Fujian – an exchange that can be situated in a historical context. Secondly, I show that the local liturgies of Yangyuan are permeated with references to the codifying authority of the regional Daoist institution called Yuxu Gong, and that its rituals were synthesized under the judicial aegis of this temple’s main divinity, the Dark Emperor. It is this exorcist god to whom the divine offices of the law enforcers of Tianxin report. Finally, I make a case for reconsidering the role commonly attributed to Ming dynasty ‘vernacular fiction.’ Instead of serving solely as a source of narrative entertainment, it provided knowledge about ritual traditions and the authoritative institutions associated with them, such as the Yuxu Gong.

Introduction

Introduction

『三俠五義』 삽입식 서사구조의 특징과 설정된 원인 : 說唱本 石派書 『龍圖公案』과의 비교를 중심으로

The purpose of this study is to consider the established cultural causes and the process in which the ‘insert-type narrative structure’, which is the typical narrative method of Vernacular Fiction, was transformed from the ‘cover-type structure’, which is a descriptive feature of the Rap text. The reason why this study wants to find the background that the ‘insert-type narrative structure’ is formed in the ‘cover-type structure’ of the Rap text is because the structural original form came from the Rap text, the original text of Vernacular Fiction novels. In this narrative structure which has come from the Song and Yuan script to the Vernacular novels of Ming and Qing Dynasties, the narrative feature is most evident in the Chivalry and Crime Fiction novel prevalent in the Mid-Qing Period. Therefore, this study aimed at 『三侠五义』, which is the most famous among the Chivalry and Crime Fiction novels representing 『三侠五义』·『施公案』, and 『彭公案』 as an object of study, and has a purpose of discussing its structural features through a comparative study with the Rap text 石派书『龙图公案』 which is considered to have been preserved in the most complete form among the existing original texts of the Vernacular novels. This paper will be proceeded based on comparions between the Rap

‘The Wuding Editions’: Printing, Power, and Vernacular Fiction in the Ming Dynasty

The vernacular fiction ‘novel’ is a genre typically associated with the explosion of commercial printing activity that occurred in the late sixteenth century. However, by that time, representative works such as theShuihu zhuanandSanguo yanyihad already been in print for several decades. Moreover, those early print editions were printed not by commercial entities but rather the elite of the Jiajing court. In order to better understand the genre as a print phenomenon, this paper explores the publishing output of one of those elites: Guo Xun (1475-1542), Marquis of Wuding. In addition to vernacular fiction, Guo printed a number of other types of books as well. This paper examines the entirety of his publishing activities in order to better contextualize the vernacular novel at this early stage in its life in print.