Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel's A Couple of Soles: A Comic Play from Seventeenth-Century China is the first English translation of one of Li Yu's 李漁 (1611–1680) chuanqi plays. As one of the few Chinese writers whose work was translated into English as early as the nineteenth century, Li Yu is no stranger to readers of English, although most of his translated works have been in the genre of fiction. As early as 1815, John Francis Davis (1795–1890) translated Li's short story “Tower of Three Dedications” into English. After that, several more translations of Li's fiction were published in the nineteenth century. The late Prof. Patrick Hanan of Harvard made the most significant contribution to furthering Li Yu's reputation among Western readers by publishing his English version of The Carnal Prayer Mat (1990), an erotic novel attributed to Li Yu, as well as selections from Li's short story collections, including A Tower for the Summer Heat (1992; original title Twelve Towers, Ch. Shier lou 十二樓) and Silent Operas (1996; Ch. Wusheng xi 無聲戲). Although a late arrival, A Couple of Soles is a wonderful addition to the list as the first of Li's theatrical pieces to be made available to English readers.A Couple of Soles is one of Li Yu's ten extant chuanqi lays. Adapted from his short story “An Actress Scorns Wealth and Honor to Preserve Her Chastity,” this thirty-two-scene play revolves around the double theme of devoted love and reclusion. While the first half of the play mainly deals with the former, the second half focuses on the latter. The love story falls into the genre of chuanqi romance featuring the happy matrimony of a talented scholar (caizi 才子) and a beautiful woman (jiaren 佳人) and the caizi's success in the civil-service examination. This subject matter had already become clichéd with stereotypical ingredients, typed plot development, and expected finale in the works of many of Li Yu's contemporary playwrights. In writing his chuanqi plays, Li Yu intended to make the subject matter fresh and marvelous (qi 奇) by “being unconventional” (tuo kejiu 脫窠臼). His effort to break away from the genre's outmoded conventions can be found in several aspects.First, instead of featuring a young lady of the gentry as the jiaren as a chuanqi play usually does, this play portrays a young actress, Liu Miaogu 劉藐姑, from the “low” profession of entertaining. She can be considered as one of Li Yu's female characters who “are bold, resolute, calculating, and resourceful to a degree beyond the creations of other Chinese dramatists”1 and a master of her own fate. She is bold in her quest for love, calculating and resourceful in dealing with obstacles in the process, and resolute enough in her faith in love to take her own life. Even her suicide as a last resort in protest against being sold to a wealthy theatergoer is purposefully planned and used as a public condemnation of evil and a powerful declaration of her love. Indeed, one can find very few precursors of equal range or depth in traditional Chinese theater; the only female characters that come to mind are probably some of Guan Hanqing's female characters such as Zhao Pan'er 趙盼兒 from Jiufeng chen 救風塵 (Rescue a Harlot) and Dou E 竇娥 from Dou E yuan 竇娥冤 (The Injustice to Dou E).Second, the male protagonist, Tan Chuyu 譚楚玉, although he fits the stereotype of the talented scholar, acts quite unconventionally by taking up the theatrical profession for love and giving up officialdom twice. Unlike the typical lovesick but inept and helpless male lover in similar romances, Tan Chuyu not only is determined to win Miaogu's love by challenging social norms and joining her on stage as an actor, but he also does not hesitate to die with her when their love is denied and their wish for matrimony dashed. Capable of passing highly in the civil-service examination like other talented scholars but unusually sober and detached from Confucian careerism, Tan is willing to sacrifice everything for love and ends his successful government service by going into seclusion. It is not an overstatement that Tan dwarfs most of the talented scholars in chuanqi plays; even Zhang Gong 張珙 from Xixiang ji 西廂記 (Romance of the Western Bower) and Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅 from Mudan ting 牡丹亭 (The Peony Pavilion) pale in comparison.Third, this play gives equal weight to romance and hermitage and treats seclusion as the most satisfactory conclusion. Scholar-officials abandoning officialdom and adopting a life of reclusion is an often-used theme in chuanqi plays, and it appeared in many theatrical works such as Liang Chenyu's 梁辰魚 (ca. 1521–ca. 1594) Huansha ji 浣紗記 (Washing the Silken Gauze) before Li Yu and Kong Shangren's 孔尚任 (1648–1718) Taohua shan 桃花扇 (The Peach Blossom Fan) after him. However, the way Li Yu treated this subject is uncommon for two reasons. First, the significance that this subject is given (being the choice of both Tan Chuyu and his rescuer and mentor, Murong Jie 慕容介, and offering a thematic recurrence) is unmistakable. And second, the theme of hermitage was not included in the fictional version of the story but was intentionally added to the play by Li Yu. As a result the meaning of the play has been notably altered: the play no longer ends with the conventional “big happy reunion” described as “when the red candle is lit in the wedding chamber, the groom's name has also been posted on the golden list of examination passers.”2 Rather it raises serious doubts about worldly happiness and the glamour of Confucian careerism.Evidently, A Couple of Soles reflects Li Yu's thinking and his beliefs. To give theatrical art and its performers due respect by creating characters such as Liu Miaogu and Tan Chuyu is probably one of his motivations, although the depravity of some actors and actresses such as Miaogu's mother is also revealed and ridiculed in the play. As a playwright who lived through the Ming and Qing dynastic transition, Li Yu was also keen to reflect on contemporary political and military affairs; as Patrick Hanan noted, “nine of his ten plays contain rebellions or wars.”3A Couple of Soles critically deals with the themes of bandit violence and insurrection, the greed and deception of officials, and government incompetence and corruption, which have the effect of making upright and capable officials such as Murong Jie and Tan Chuyu weary of officialdom and turning them toward an alternative lifestyle of seclusion. In making his subject matter fresh and remarkable, Li Yu expounded on human feelings, and to him “the principles governing human emotions are infinite.”4 Thus in A Couple of Soles—a play that mirrors Li's own troubled times—the kind of love that upsets social practice and the status quo is much appreciated. As well, seclusion becomes a natural reaction to the high risk of being an official and a wise strategy of self-protection rather than preservation of one's dignity and holding steadfast to the moral or political beliefs of some famous Chinese recluses such as Tao Qian 陶潛 (365–427).In practice and in accordance with his ideas of bringing out fresh aspects or exploring new sensibilities for old subject matter, Li Yu employed two rhetorical strategies: fan'an wenzhang 翻案文章 (inversion or table-turning) and the scheme of self-reflexivity. At the narrative or textual level, he used the rhetoric of fan'an wenzhang, or inversion, while at the metatextual level, he utilized the mode of comment and generic convention in such a way that his narratives (dramatic or fictional) revealed a trait of self-consciousness and auto-communication. These rhetorical strategies can be clearly observed in A Couple of Soles.Life imitating art is a very effective strategy to create inversion and endow the play with self-reflexivity. In A Couple of Soles, two episodes use theatrical performances to act out the players' personal protest and emotions. While Liu Miaogu turns her performance of “Clasping a Rock and Plunging into the River” from Jingchai ji 荊釵記 (The Romance of a Hairpin) into a real act of suicide, Liu Jiangxian 劉絳仙 pours out her sorrow of losing her daughter when she impersonates the male protagonist, Wang Shipeng 王十朋, mourning his wife from the same play. Such an arrangement of a play-within-a play is ingenious as it lays bare a double-layered mirroring—that of Li Yu's play mirroring Jingchai ji and that of Liu Miaogu's act and temperament evoking Qian Yulian's 錢玉蓮 staunch moral integrity and her faithfulness to her love. If the former reveals Li Yu's strategy of playwriting at the metatextual level, the latter offers an indirect comment on and evaluation of Liu Miaogu's character and moral beliefs at the level of the story proper.Other more obvious table-turnings or upsetting of the chuanqi genre are also employed in the play. For instance, Tan Chuyu's seeking an official post turns into abandoning it, and in addition to an imposter being mistaken as the capable but disguised official-turned-recluse, the real official-turned-recluse is wrongly arrested as the imposter. In a reversal of the conventional divine protection employed in chuanqi plays, Murong Jie pretends to be a deity, “Pacifier-of-Waves,” to give military advice to Tan Chuyu; thus, the so-called divine protection is really assistance from a human. Moreover, the wedding of the talented scholar and his beauty is not held in a glamourous chamber with rich and powerful participants, as usually seen in chuanqi plays, but in a remote and simple village with woodcutters, farmers, gardeners, and shepherds as guests. And of course, the “big happy reunion” that promises wealth, status, and fame is inverted by the choice of a reclusive lifestyle that denies all of these worldly values. These table-turnings and generic subversions produce either ironic or parodic results that ridicule conventional and dated thinking or stereotypes in life as well as in art. They also bring out new perceptions and viewpoints in old subjects and themes and simultaneously create comic and dramatic effects.In translating this play from Chinese into English, the two translators seem to have adopted the approach of “thick translation” that has become popular in the field of literature translation since the 1990s. Kwame Anthony Appiah was the first person to introduce the concept of thick translation to the field of translation study. According to Appiah, there are two types of literary translation in dealing with written literature: one is “a translation that aims itself to be a literary work” and another is “a translation that aims to be of use in literary teaching . . . translation that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context.”5 The literary translation that Appiah had in mind is the latter, an “academic” as well as “productive” mode of translation; as for him, “what counts as a fine translation of a literary text” is that “it should preserve for us the features that make it worth teaching.”6 Jing Shen and Robert E. Hegel's rendition of A Couple of Soles falls into the category of Appiah's second definition of literary translation, or “thick translation,” as it locates the play in rich cultural, literary, and linguistic contexts. The translated play script is accompanied by several paratexts that include a note on the translation, an introduction, a preface to the original play text by the famous seventeenth-century female scholar Wang Duanshu 王端淑 (1621–after 1701), a list of dramatis personae and their role categories, and a research piece by Jing Shen titled “The Playwright and His Art.”The introduction, combined with Shen's more extensive essay, provides the reader with information about Li Yu's life and his time, an appraisal of his dramaturgy and playwriting, and a critical analysis of the play in question. Li Yu is introduced as a versatile but controversial playwright intentionally reaching out to a broader audience (including uneducated women and children) by popularizing his plays and striving “to be plain in the theme and wording” (248). Li is also recognized as a writer who had the ability to accommodate conflicting expectations and philosophies, and his efforts to cater to diverse tastes “stemmed from his fluid identity and his desire to achieve an elite lifestyle despite being a poor scholar-commoner” (248). These two pieces can serve as a good start to learn about Li Yu and his works and set the stage for further scholarly scrutiny. Although more Chinese than English scholarship is introduced, two important Li Yu scholars of English—Patrick Hanan and Eric Henry—are included in the introduction.The most impressive supplementary materials included in this translation are its annotations and notes, amounting to 395 items and attached at the end of the text of the play. The annotations and notes are thoroughly and meticulously done and provide all sorts of historical, cultural, literary, and linguistic information. It is also useful that they include both the Chinese characters and pinyin for the expressions in question, which not only can avoid misunderstandings but also provide a good aid for reading the original Chinese play script if the English reader is competent to do so.Other useful paratextual material included in the book is the list of “Dramatis Personae and Their Role Categories.” Chuanqi plays have multiple role types, including the young male lead (sheng 生), the young female lead (dan 旦), the supporting young male role (xiaosheng 小生) and the supporting young female role (xiaodan 小旦), the older male role (wai 外), the supporting male role (mo 末), the painted-face role (jing 淨), the clown role (chou 醜), and other minor roles such as the older female role (laodan 老旦) and the maid (tiedan 貼旦). Since chuanqi plays are rather lengthy, typically include many characters, and range from twenty to fifty scenes, more often than not one actor of a certain role type is assigned to more than one character to play in the performance. In addition chuanqi plays often involve cross-dressing playacting such as a man playing a woman or vice versa. To bring this aspect of generic convention to the audience's attention and avoid confusion, the translators provide a complete list of the characters with their names and role types clearly indicated. For example, from this list, one can see that while the xiaosheng role type plays six different roles (Murong Jie, one of Tan Chuyu's theatergoing friends, a member of the Dancing Rainbow Troupe, instructor of the Jade Sprout Theatrical Troupe, an almsgiver, and a yamen runner), the dan role type also plays three different characters (Liu Miaogu, a yamen runner, and a child).In general the English translation is well done: the text is readable and its language accurate, lucid, smooth, and concise. The only blemish, if one wants to be picky, is the translated names of Liu Miaogu and her mother, Liu Jiangxian. “Miao” means “beautiful” or “good-looking,” and “gu” means “girl” or “unmarried young lady” in Chinese. Putting together, “miaogu” literally means “beautiful girl.” Although the word “fairy” used as her name in the translation is workable, it easily gets confused with her mother's name that actually does include a word for “fairy” in it. In addition, in the mother's name, “Jiangxian,” “jiang” means “crimson” while “xian” can be translated as “fairy”; thus, the combination of the two words should be translated as “crimson fairy” rather than “fallen fairy” as given in the translated text in question. To avoid confusion, one could simply use pinyin for the characters' names as Patrick Hanan did in his translation of the fictional piece of the same story and explain the meaning of the names with a footnote or endnote. In fact, this would provide a consistency in the translated script, as some characters' names such as the male protagonist's and his mentor's names are only given in pinyin but not translated. Or, alternatively, use “angel” for the daughter's name and “fairy” for the mother's name, thereby more clearly distinguishing between their names. However, these problems are minor and cannot obscure the merits of the translation, which are ample.