by Pu Songling
Strange Tales from Liaozhai
Strange Tales from Liaozhai
Volume Three
Pu Songling
Translated and Annotated by
Sidney L. Sondergard
Illustrations by Alexandra Collins, Matt Howarth, Christopher Peterson, and Alexa Unser
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Fremont, California
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pu, Songling, 1640-1715.
聊斋志异 (Liaozhai zhi yi.)
Strange Tales from Liaozhai / Pu Songling ; translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard ; Illustrations by Alexandra Collins ... [et al.]
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Summary: “The subjects of Pu Songling’s short story collection include supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhism and Daoism, and Chinese folklore”--Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-89581-045-8 (vol. 3 : alk. paper)
I. Sondergard, Sidney L. II. Title.
PL2722.U2L513 2009
398.20951--dc22
2008020137
Cover art by Matt Howarth.
Copyright © 2009 by Sidney L. Sondergard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Collecting is Believing: Source Attributions and Aesthetics in Pu Songling’s Strange Tales
II. A Healthy Respect for Higher Powers: Venerated Entities in Pu Songling’s Tales
The Tales
167. The Drunkard
168. Marquis Yangwu
169. The Zhaocheng Tiger
170. A Mantis Catches the Snake
171. Martial Arts Skill
172. The Little Man
173. Scholar Qin
174. Yatou
175. The Wine Worm
176. The Wooden Beauty
177. Third Sister Feng
178. A Fox Dream
179. The Cloth Merchant
180. The Farmer
181. Zhang A-Duan
182. The Old Noodle Soup Woman
183. Jin Yongnian
184. Huaguzi
185. The Martial Graduate
186. The Princess of West Lake
187. The Filial Son
188. The Lion
189. The Hell King
190. The Clay Statue
191. The Woman from Changzhi
192. The Faithful Dog
193. The God of Poyang
194. Wu Qiuyue
195. Princess Lotus
196. The Girl in Green
197. The Li Clan
198. Third Lady Lotus
199. The Cursed Duck
200. A Son of the Liu Clan
201. The Respectful God
202. Jingshan the Monkey
203. The Flow of Money
204. Scholar Guo
205. Jin Shengse
206. Peng Haiqiu
207. Geomancy
208. The Dou Clan
209. Liang Yan
210. Dragon Meat
211. The Lucheng Magistrate
212. Ma Jiefu
213. Kuixing
214. General She
215. The Crimson Princess
216. The Scholar from Hejian
217. Yun Cuixian
218. The Witch’s Trance-Dance
219. The Iron Skin Method
220. The Mighty Generakl
221. The White Lotus Society
222. The Yan Clan
223. Old Man Du
224. Xiaoxie
225. The Hanging Ghost
226. The Painter from Wumen
227. The Lin Family
228. Elder Sister Hu
229. Xihou
230. Three Wolf Tales
231. The Beauty’s Head
232. Liu Liangcai
233. Huifang
234. The Mountain God
235. Seventh Sister Xiao
236. Two Separations by War
237. Living with Snakes
238. The Thunder God
239. Lingjiao
240. Hungry Ghost
241. The Bureau of Examination Frauds
242. Yama, the Hell King
243. The Giant
244. Xiang Gao
245. Minister Dong
246. Zhou the Third
247. A Strange Matter Concerning Pigeons
248. Nie Zheng
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
For all the many reasons that he wrote these tales, from reflecting his love of the otherworldly to providing a natural extension of his work as a teacher, Pu Songling composed them most importantly to be enjoyed by a broad audience, not just by literary scholars. For over three hundred years this has indeed been their legacy in China, and I have tried while preparing this translation to remain respectful of that popular tradition. Many of these stories are unapologetically earthy, but never crude; they are occasionally quite violent or disturbing, but never gratuitously so; and they are frequently sad, but never morose or maudlin. What makes them so compelling is a barely-contained exuberance of tone that celebrates their excursions into the world of ghosts, demons, foxes, and immortals.
In this first complete translation of Strange Tales from Liaozhai into English, I have attempted to follow Pu Songling’s syntax, punctuation, and phrasings faithfully, providing annotations for the reader when he makes allusions to personages or events unfamiliar to English readers, and I have profited enormously from the unabridged and newly-annotated edition of the liaozhai zhi yi edited by Zhu Qikai, published in Beijing (1995), my source text for the tales. In those cases where a long series of clauses has made it difficult or awkward for the reader to follow the flow of Pu’s images, I have subdivided them into discrete sentences. I have resisted idiomatizing Pu’s writing because I have found that translations which attempt to appeal to the slang and colloquialisms of the translator’s immediate contemporaries tend, like topical humor, not to age well.
I wish to thank the Freeman Foundation for the generous grant support that allowed me to pursue research in 2005 on Pu Songling’s life and work at Zibo and other sites in Shandong province. Every trip to China has been filled with serendipitous discoveries for me; I often share the astonishment there of Pu’s characters, who, walking the mundane world one moment, in an instant find themselves in the presence of wonders.
I remain indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editor, Li Lin, of the Department of College English Studies, Anhui University, P.R.C., who has painstakingly reviewed my pinyin transliterations and offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text, however, must fall solely to me.
It has been my great pleasure and privilege to benefit as well from the expertise of my colleague, Zhang Zhenj
un, who has joined the St. Lawrence University faculty and brings his love of Chinese classical literature to every discussion we share.
If you would like to receive copies of the pinyin transliterations of any of the particular stories in this volume, please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected], and I will gladly send electronic copies to you.
I am pleased once again to present the work of illustrators who have responded to Pu Songling’s stories with their own beautifully strange visions. I admire and treasure the results of their efforts.
For raising the kinds of questions that are always useful for me to ponder, and for listening with genuine interest as I read each new translation aloud, I am indebted to Ran Rongming/Ramona Ralston, 太太学者和 朋友。
Introduction
I. Collecting is Believing: Source Attributions and Aesthetics in Pu Songling’s Strange Tales
While I was preparing this volume, I was contacted by Li Haijun, a teacher and doctoral candidate at the Hunan University of Arts and Sciences, who’s writing his dissertation on English translations of Pu Songling’s liaozhai zhi yi. In our ensuing exchanges, I asked Li laoshi (Teacher Li) why, in his opinion, there have been no previous translations into English of the entire collection of Pu Songling’s stories. Examining the question from the perspective of Chinese scholars who might have translated the work into English, he proposed four contributing reasons:
• Translations are not treated equally in the Chinese academic community with articles or monographs. For the purpose of securing professional promotion, published articles or monographs that reflect a scholar’s knowledge and interpretive acumen are more respected than translations as indicators of intellectual prowess.
• Most translators prefer converting English-to-Chinese rather than Chinese-to-English. Li laoshi indicates that translators view English-to-Chinese as the easier of the two, although he personally suspects that the profit motive drives this preference, since English-to-Chinese translation will reach a significantly wider audience in China and hence produce a larger profit for publishers.
• Most translators prefer translating best-sellers rather than classical texts. This, he notes, is due to linguistic, as well as economic, factors. The popular interest in classical texts is waning in China, and those scholars who are masters of both English and classical Chinese are, in his words, on the “margin of extinction.” Surveys that Li has conducted suggest that it is mostly senior translators, with a facility in classical Chinese and a love of traditional Chinese culture, who have worked on translating Pu’s strange tales.
• The project is too large for scholars to undertake without funding support. This comes down to two essential risks implicit in such an undertaking: that the translation might not actually be completed, and that the eventual professional reward might not justify the necessary investment of time at the expense of other research and writing.
I shared my impression with Li laoshi that these perspectives certainly have their analogues for scholars in the West. But I also recognized parallels in them to the experience of Pu Songling. In assembling his weird narratives without any anticipation of publication or remuneration, Pu was driven by a combination of a genuine fondness for his subject matter from the perspectives of reader and writer, and a scholarly dedication both to preserve the stories and to employ them as moral exempla.
There are many potential explanations for the author’s assertion that he is merely serving as collator of other individuals’ strange stories (his preface modestly insists that “I have written down what I heard, and this collection is the result” [1:2]);1 and in his willing forfeiture of personal ownership/authorship of the narratives, he sometimes even refers to himself as Liaozhai, the name he adopted for the study, or writing studio, where he crafted the narratives. Pu Songling (1640-1715) wrote the stories contained in the liaozhai zhi yi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai) between 1671 and 1711, but died without any of them ever having been published.2 Whatever motivated the extraordinarily large literary output of an individual who felt he’d been denied the opportunity to serve his country as a public servant (1:xv-xvii; Barr 88-91), and who spent the majority of his life working as a teacher, there can be little doubt of the utterly sincere love that Pu has for zhiguai, or accounts of the strange that were conventionally “more concerned with presenting the supernatural realm than with illustrating truths in the human world” (Chan 197).
The precursors of the zhiguai were examples of the “cosmographic genre,” which Robert Ford Campany has identified as lists of unusual or inexplicable phenomena that eventually evolved into short narratives (21), developing during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) and flourishing until the beginning of the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). Take, for example, the summary of an entry in the Records of the Hidden and the Visible Worlds (you ming lu) written by Liu Yiqing (403-44 C.E.):
The bandit Ding Ling, “perverse by nature and lacking a faithful heart,” shot the face of a large, bronze Buddha image with an arrow. The statue ran blood, which remained visible despite people’s efforts to wipe it off. Ding ordered five hundred of his strongest men to topple the statue so that it could be melted down for weapons. But a noise like a peal of thunder issued from the statue’s mouth, and the men all fell terrified to the ground. Many afterwards converted to Buddhism. As for Ding Ling, he later grew ill, then was executed.
(Campany 332; see Zhang 1ff.)
Liu includes this entry because it records supernatural phenomena (the bleeding statue; the thunderous response to attempts to topple it), yet it is elaborated with certain details that move it in a specifically didactic direction. To establish his essential wickedness and to justify his later suffering, Ding is portrayed as “perverse by nature and lacking in a faithful heart”; the bleeding of the Buddha effigy humanizes it, eliciting sympathy for its wounding and antipathy for Ding’s cruelty; and description of an entity sufficiently powerful to cause five hundred strong men to collapse in terror persuades many of those men to convert to Buddhist belief. In terms of rhetorical objectives, the entry has a dual function—it warns implicitly against treating sacred effigies irreverently, while also testifying to the corporeal tangibility of Buddhist manifestation and hence to the prudence of investing one’s faith in the Buddha.
Drawing upon a structure embedded in the traditions of the cosmographic lists and the zhiguai, Pu Songling frequently sets up a direct correspondence between the personal characteristics of his characters and the fates they experience. Characters identified as negative in their opening descriptions are most often the subjects of retribution by the conclusions of the tales. Described as a “worthless fellow” who is “completely immoral,” Xie Zhongtiao, (“The Li Clan” [li shi]), commits a virtual rape of a woman who subsequently proves to be a shapeshifter and brings disaster down on Xie that destroys his family. Liu Xichuan (“A Son of the Liu Clan” [liu shi zi]), who spoils the son on whom he dotes, unintentionally encourages him “to lead an extravagantly dissolute life,” and consequently suffers from the son’s tantrums—even after the young man dies. “The Lucheng Magistrate” (lu ling), described by Pu as “heartlessly greedy and cruel,” notorious for the fatally harsh punishments he metes out, is himself eventually condemned by an invisible representative from the underworld judiciary.
Yet the relation between personal traits and consequent destiny can be a constructive one as well, as Pu’s homiletic design also recognizes the potential influence of positive reinforcement. An artist (“The Painter from Wumen” [wumen huagong]) who is devoted to making portraits of Patriarch Lü, one of the legendary Eight Immortals of Daoism, always wishes he could meet the immortal he admires so greatly; his devotion is rewarded with a dream that inspires a special painting, one that grants him instant success, though of an extremely temporary nature.
The moral lessons implicit in the precursors of Strange Tales from Liaozhai are made explicit by Pu Songling in the postscripts that he appends to many of the tales. Regarding them, Pu
concedes in his preface to the collection that “My enthusiasm gets away from me and sometimes my comments are out of control— basically, I just can’t restrain these remarks; I always express my feelings, since I feel no need to hide them” (1:2-3). This confession of being “out of control” isn’t so much a disclaimer as a signifier of his genuine passion for the work, as Judith T. Zeitlin has noted: “folly, madness, and obsession are exalted values in the late Ming cult of feeling (qing), whose influence permeates the Liaozhai” (47). Thus while Pu sympathizes with the ire of the title hero of “Xiang Gao” (xiang gao), who’s ready to sacrifice his life in order to achieve revenge for the brutal murder of his brother, Xiang Sheng (“Indeed, the world’s injustices are more than enough to make one boil with anger”), he unrestrainedly cheers the fact that Xiang Gao receives aid from a deity disguised as a Daoist priest: “the Daoist immortal’s magic was godlike!”
Jaroslav Průšek believes that the “strongly personal note” in Pu’s preface and in his commentaries on the stories “shows that the author has embodied personal feelings and experiences in his work” (129). Thinking, perhaps, of the tales comprising his liaozhai zhi yi, Pu notes in “A Strange Matter Concerning Pigeons” (ge yi) that objects of fascination “are usually attracted to the individuals who favor and collect them.” As he so often does in his commentaries, however, here he transforms the kind of rationale any collector or hobbyist might propose, to defend a particular enthusiasm, into social criticism: regarding “money, it’s significant that there are more people who love it than who collect it—which may explain why the spirits and gods are angered by greediness, not by obsession.” In his commentaries on the strange tales, Pu Songling openly asserts a love of narratives that recount the inexplicable and the extraordinary, his emotional honesty signifying unambiguously the benevolent motive—a collector’s obsession—driving his work.
Besides featuring allusions to other literary works, and to individuals known to Chinese literary-cultural history, Pu demonstrates his dedication both to scholarly precision and to the aesthetics of the archivist/collector by explicitly acknowledging many of his sources for the tales. Just as the structure preceding his postscripts identifies him as the “collector of these strange tales” (yi shi shi, modeled on famed historiographer Sima Qian’s preface to the personal remarks he appends to segments of his narrative history), Pu Songling’s preface tells us that “men from all four corners of China who share my enthusiasm for the unusual have sent me stories by post” (1:2). The Willow Spring (liu quan) site near Zibo, where Pu set up a thatched shed so travelers might stop and swap stories for tea, continues to be venerated even today. Charles E. Hammond has argued that the variant versions of the stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai that appear in subsequent collections by other authors are not simply a reflection of intertextuality or of homage, but rather proof that many of the stories “circulated among the scholars” who recorded them: this suggests that “the authors did not invent all their material,” and hence readers can take Pu Songling’s word when he names sources for particular narratives (209).3
