Classical Chinese Novels

[Hung Lou Meng]





[Bao-yu & Dai-yu]





[Monkey]





[Journey to the West & The Scholars]





[The Canonisation of Deities]

An Illustrated Bibliography of My Collection:

NB: For more of my thoughts on these novels, see my essay "In Love with the Chinese Novel" on my Opinions website.

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1) The Three Kingdoms [San-kuo-chih-yen-i]
– c.1400

"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide." Set in the second century AD, at the end of the Han era, this celebrated historical novel contains far more fact than fiction. The precise proportions of each are difficult to estimate. What remains beyond question is the depth and complexity of this 14th-century masterwork:

a) Lo Kuan-Chung. San Kuo, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Trans. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor. 2 vols. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1925.


b) Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms. Trans. Moss Roberts. 1995. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2001.

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2) The Water Margin [Shui Hu Chuan]
– late 14th century

This story of a group of Chinese Robin Hoods has inspired films, TV series, vernacular novels and comics. Pearl Buck translated it in the 1930s, but the Beijing Foreign Languages Press edition is probably still the most entertaining to read. I have to admit that I haven't yet had a chance to examine John & Alex Dent-Young's complete new 5-volume translation (1994-2003), though:

a) Buck, Pearl, trans. All Men are Brothers [Shui Hu Chuan]. New York: The John Day Company, 1933.


b) Shih Nai-an. Water Margin. Trans. J. H. Jackson. 2 vols. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1963.


c) Shi Nai’an & Luo Guanzhong. Outlaws of the Marsh. Trans. Sidney Shapiro. 3 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980.


d) Weir, David. The Water Margin. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. [based on the BBC TV series]

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3) The Golden Lotus [Chin P’ing Mei]
– 1618

Reputed to be the most extensive and notorious work of pornography in world literature, the Chin P'ing Mei is actually far more than that: with its grasp of human psychology and mastery of complex narrative forms, its author probably created the world's first realist novel:

a) Egerton, Clement, trans. The Golden Lotus: A Translation, from the Chinese Original, of the Novel Chin P’ing Mei. 1939. 4 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.


b) Kuhn, Franz, ed. Chin P’ing Mei: The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and his Six Wives. Trans. Bernard Miall. 1939. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1952.


c) Kuhn, Franz, ed. The Love Pagoda: The Amorous Adventures of Hsi Men and his Six Wives. Trans. Bernard Miall. Abridged and introduced by Albert Ellis, Ph.D. Chatsworth, CA: Brandon Books, 1965.


d) Kuhn, Franz, ed. Ko Lien Hua Ying: Flower Shadows behind the Curtain: A Sequel to Chin P’ing Mei. Trans. Vladimir Kean. London: The Bodley Head, 1959.


e) Magnus. Les 110 pillules, d’après Jin Ping Mei. Trans. Luca Staletti. 1986. Paris: l’Echo des Savanes / Albin Michel, 1991.


f) Roy, David Tod, trans. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei. 5 vols. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1993-2013.

Vol. 1: The Gathering (1993)

Vol. 2: The Rivals (2001)

Vol. 3: The Aphrodisiac (2006)


Vol. 4: The Climax (2011)




Vol. 5: The Dissolution (2013)

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4) Journey to the West [Hsi-yu Chi]
– 1592

"The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!" Whether or not you remember that cult Japanese TV series of the late 70s, you're in for a treat if you decide to follow these four pilgrims, Tripitaka, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, on their Journey to the West:

a) Wu Ch’êng-Ên. Monkey. Trans. Arthur Waley. 1942. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.


b) Low, C. C. & Associates, trans. Pictorial Stories of Chinese Classics: The Adventures of the Monkey God. 1975. 4 vols. Singapore: Canfonian Pte Ltd., 1989.


c) The Journey to the West. Trans. Anthony C. Yu. 4 vols. 1977-1983. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 1982, 1980, 1984.


d) Tung Yueh, Hsi-yu pu. Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West. Trans. Shuen-fu Lin & Larry J. Schultz. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1978.


Wu Cheng’en. e) Journey to the West. Trans. W. J. F. Jenner. 1982. 3 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990.


f) Pisu, Silverio. The Ape. Illustrated by Milo Manara. New York: Catalan Communications, 1986.

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5) Creation of the Gods [Fêng-shên yen-i]
– 16th century

Combining the historical overview of the Three Kingdoms with the magic realism of Monkey, this bizarre novel deserves to be far better known. In its crazy eclecticism, it resembles Salman Rushdie more than the Socialist Realist fiction advocated by Mao:

a) Low, C. C. & Associates, trans. Pictorial Stories of Chinese Classics: Canonization of Deities. 3 vols. Singapore: Canfonian Pte Ltd., 1989.


b) Gu Zhizhong, trans. Creation of the Gods. 2 vols. 1992. Beijing: New World Press, 1996.

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6) The Carnal Prayer Mat [Jou Pu Tuan]
– 1657

I guess this novel owes its popularity to European fascination with the "Floating World" genre. It's really more comic than pornographic, but its author was certainly a complex character in his own right (as Patrick Hanan reveals in his 1988 biography The Invention of Li Yu):

a) Li Yu. Jou Pu Tuan: The Before Midnight Scholar, or The Prayer-mat of Flesh. Ed. Franz Kuhn. 1959. Trans. Richard Martin. 1963. London: Corgi Books, 1974.


b) Li Yu. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Trans. Patrick Hanan. 1990. Honolulu: University of Hawaí’i Press, 1996.


c) Li Yu. A Tower for the Summer Heat. Trans. Patrick Hanan. 1992. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.


d) Li Yu. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Wordsworth Erotic Classics: Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995.

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7) The Scholars [Ju-lin wai-shih]
– mid 18th century

Episodic rather than tightly-plotted, The Scholars is more a compendium of telling anecdotes and character studies than a conventional novel in the European sense. Invaluable as a guide to the baroque excesses of Confucian examination system, though:

a) Wu Ching-Tzu. The Scholars. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1957. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973.

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8) The Red Chamber Dream [Hung Lou Meng]
– late 18th century

The unquestioned masterpiece of the Chineses novel, and one of the great novels of world literature, the Hung Lou Meng had to wait till the 1970s for an adequate English translation to appear. It's ahrd to know what to compare it to: as perverse (in its way) as Lolita, it combines this with the nostalgic charm of Proust and the satirical realism of Gogol's Dead Souls:

a) Tsao Hsueh-Chin. Dream of the Red Chamber. Trans. Chi-chen Wang. 1929. Preface by Mark van Doren. London: Vision Press, 1959.


b) Kuhn, Franz, ed. Hung Lou Meng: The Dream of the Red Chamber – A Chinese Novel of the Early Ching Period. Trans. Isabel and Florence McHugh. 1958. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1968.


c) Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes. Trans. David Hawkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-80.

Vol. 1: The Golden Days (1973)
Vol. 2: The Crab-Flower Club (1977)
Vol. 3: The Warning Voice (1980)

Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone (Also Known as The Dream of the Red Chamber): A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes, edited by Gao E. Trans. John Minford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982-86.

Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears (1982)
Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (1986)

d) Tsao Hsueh-Chin & Kao Ngo. A Dream of Red Mansions. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 3 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978.


e) Wu Shih-Ch’Ang. On The Red Chamber Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the XVIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.

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9) Flowers in the Mirror [Ching hua yuan]
– 1828

A slight but amusing fantasy. In its analysis of dreams, it anticipates Lewis Carroll. In its somewhat ponderous allegorical machinery, it resembles Sylvie and Bruno rather more than Alice, however:

a) Li Ju-Chen. Flowers in the Mirror. Trans. Lin Tai-Yi. London: Peter Owen, 1965.


b) Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, trans. Excerpts from Three Classical Chinese Novels: The Three Kingdoms, Pilgrimage to the West & Flowers in the Mirror. Beijing: Panda Books, 1981.

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10) Short Stories

Pu Song-Ling's collection of sttrange tales is the real treasure trove here. Surely someone could afford to commission a complete English translation? There's already one available in French. Feng Meng-lung's compilation is also well worth a look:

a) Acton, Harold & Lee Yi-Hsieh, trans. Four Cautionary Tales. London: John Lehmann, 1947.


b) Bauer, Wolfgang & Herbert Fiske, eds. The Golden Casket: Chinese Novellas of Two Millennia. 1959. Trans. Christopher Levenson. 1964. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.


c) Ma, Y. W. & Joseph M. Lau, eds. Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.


d) P’u Sung-Ling. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Trans. Herbert A. Giles. 1916. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.


e) Pu Songling. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Trans. John Minford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006.


f) Van Gulik, Robert, trans. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. 1949. New York: Dover, 1976.


g) Van Over, Raymond, ed. Smearing the Ghost’s Face with Ink: A Chinese Anthology. 1973. London: Picador, 1982.


h) Yang, Shuhui & Yunqin, trans. Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection, compiled by Feng Menglong. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2000.


i) Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, trans. The Courtesan’s Jewel Box: Chinese Stories of the XIth-XVIIth Centuries. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981.


j) Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, trans. The Dragon King’s Daughter: Ten Tang Dynasty Stories. 1954. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980.

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11) History & Memoirs

Shen Fu's book is delightful, rivalling some of the great Heian Japanese memoirs and diaries. Ssu Ma Chien's historiography is indispensable for anyone interested in the evolution of the Chinese prose tradition:

a) Shen Fu. Six Records of a Floating Life. Trans. Leonard Pratt & Chiang Su-Hui. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.


b) Szuma Chien. Selections from Records of the Historian. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1979.

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12) General

C. T. Hsia's remains the classic, groundbreaking work in this field. Lu Hsun is also worth reading, however. No doubt it's a field which will grow and grow over time:

a) Birch, Cyril & Donald Keene, eds. Anthology of Chinese Literature. 1965. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.


b) Chai, Ch’u & Winberg Chai, eds. A Treasury of Chinese Literature: A New Prose Anthology including Fiction and Drama. 1965. New York: Thomas J. Cowell Company, 1974.


c) Hsia, C. T. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. 1968. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.


d) Lu Hsun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. 1923-24. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1959. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1982.

bad appendix

[cover image: LynneMaree Patterson, "Twice as Good" (detail)]

Well, a good time seems to have been had by all at the big Titus booklaunch in K Rd last night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends, and to meet some new ones, too.

My novel EMO was introduced eloquently and insightfully (in my humble opinion, at any rate) by Jen Crawford. Then it was my turn to introduce her book bad appendix. This is what I had to say about Jen's poetry:

I guess there might once have been a time when one could say that so-and-so was predominantly a “love poet” or a “landscape poet” – or , for that matter, a “metaphysical poet.” There's a lot of evocation of places (both in Australia and New Zealand) in Jen Crawford's poems, yet the more distinctly they're delineated, the more obvious it is that she's referencing the landscape of the soul.

Take, for example, “primary school, port kembla” [45]

I walked along electrolytic street
and beyond the shadow of the stack
found broken cricks and patchy light,
mottled-leaf roses
and the stumps of old walls.
I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.
beetles ran over my arms.

There’s a kind of directness about that which seems reminiscent of Blake’s “London”:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe

Or, perhaps more to the point, his “The Garden of Love”:

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love
That many so sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tomb-stones where flowers should be

That word “electrolytic” is particularly interesting – it sounds a bit like “epileptic” to me – as if it’s a very hot day and people are jittery, about to jump out of their skins. Here, though, it’s the street which is electrolytic, “capable of conducting an electric current” (as one dictionary definition has it), or, alternatively, conducive to electrolysis, that process of using electric currents to promote a chemical reaction. In this case (presumably), the electricity of human feeling and emotion transforming the solid landscape the poet sees: the stack, the cricks, the roses, the stumps of old walls, into the stuff of life.

I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.

That’s a somewhat childish pose, perhaps – appropriate for the site of a primary school, that arena where emotions can run truly unrestrained. We can imagine the bitter tears, or (possibly) the ache of their absence, without their even having to be mentioned.

“Beetles ran over my arms” is, again, in this context, appropriate to the pettifogging, mind-numbing rituals of a primary school” “binding with briars my joys and desires.”

The poem continues with description of what is really no more than a walk through a landscape:

from here roads lead
out to the station, to the dunes,
the ankle-deep pool,
the mild veneer lake

But even that simple list of destinations sounds somehow ominous – as if each choice of direction were an existential decision. “The station:” getting the hell out of here, perhaps; “the mild veneer lake:” a more complete solution.

The journey actually culminates, though, in:

… the doorway of a pub
where in the beery cool a sparrow hunches,
watching not moving,
& when I step too close
doesn’t fly

It would sound cheesy, Wordsworthian, to talk about this as the “poet receiving comfort from natural phenomena” – the little bird which doesn’t fly away from her – but isn’t that what it is? Isn’t that what really happens sometimes? Maybe the pathetic fallacy isn’t such a fallacy after all? If, that is, one is honest about what it actually means – not that nature really does “sorrow for the son [or daughter] she bore,” (as A. E. Housman put it) but that our minds are naturally geared to interpret things that way.

There’s nothing cheesy about the expression of this poem, that’s the point. and one has to work pretty hard to get much detail from it. What is apparent at once (I’d say) to any reader is the mood of the poem – I doubt that anyone could follow Jen Crawford through this “electrolytic” landscape without getting a sense of anticipation, almost of dread.

The tone of Jen Crawford’s poetry is not polite and detached, not wryly observant and full of witty instances – nor is it loose and sloppy, unrestrained and “emotional” (in the worst sense). She’s not a beat, but neither is she a LANGUAGE poet. She has a lot to say about the substance and texture of experience, and she expresses herself with deftness and restraint.

The more I read her poems, the more I see in them. I don’t think it’s any accident that she quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (so-called) “Terrible Sonnets” in her own poem called “terrible sonnet” [59]:

oh put me out of my fucken misery.

It’s a note which hasn’t been heard in our poetry for far too long.

I'd like to repeat a few thank yous here, at the end of this post:

• to Brett Cross, for licking the three books into shape, and putting this whole launch party together. Titus Books has now issued 16 titles, I hear - a pretty amazing achievement off the back of a few enthusiasts with no grants funding whatsoever;
• to Bronwyn Lloyd, my lovely wife, for agreeing to collaborate with me on possible the oddest reading heard at a booklaunch so far this year;
• to Jen Crawford, for her kind and perceptive words about my book;
• to Emma Smith, for the most kick-ass cover image I think I've ever seen in my life (she's now admitted that the picture does indeed have a title: "have I been / pardoned / yet?");
• to Scott Hamilton, for his expert MC'ing of the event;
• to Cerian Wagstaff, for looking after the booktable and the wine, and also for taking so many excellent photos (a selection can be seen over at Reading the Maps) of the event;
• to Bill Direen, for his beautiful music and reading, and for so generously agreeing to share this launch with Jen and myself;
• to Peter at Alleluya cafe, for lending us his wonderful venue, high above Auckland city;
• and finally to all the people who came along to support us and to buy a book: for a while there it almost seemed to me as if everyone I'd ever met was moving in and out of the flickering lamplight.

[cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)]

[Additional: 3/7/08]:

Check out Scott Hamilton's write-up of the occasion at Scoop Review of Books.