Six Records of a Life Adrift by Shen Fu (review)

A colleague recently asked for suggestions for a book to use in an introductory creative writing course in which students would meet for two hours a week during the semester and then spend two weeks in Taiwan visiting cultural sites and attending lectures about comparative cultural studies at the National University of Tainan. This was her first venture into teaching literature in translation, and she wanted a book that would give her students access to traditional or “ancient” Chinese literature. Ideally, she mused, the book would fit the travel writing theme of her course. I happened to have a copy of Graham Sanders’s translation of Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Life Adrift, which includes a chapter on the author’s pleasure trips, and I opened it to a passage where Shen Fu reflects on the death of Chen Yun, his wife and soul mate: “And Yun is now shattered jade and buried incense” (p. 46). With those words, my colleague had found her book.

Six Records of a Life Adrift is an intimate account of the personal life of a lower gentry poet, painter, and private secretary in late imperial China. Shen Fu led an “unremarkable, unfulfilled, and itinerate life” (p. ix), yet he left behind a portrait that has been described as the “essence of a Chinese way of life as really lived by two persons who happened to be husband and wife” (Lin, p. 965). The story of the book itself is told in Sanders’s long introduction (p. viii–xv). The six records are actually four in number, and at one point, the book was “set adrift on a sea of old books only to come to light” in a secondhand book stall in Suzhou “sixty years after it was written” (p. ix). The author and his work are vagabonds, both remarkable and rambling, by turns deep and appreciative, intriguing yet distant. The four records, “Delights of Marriage,” “Charms of Idleness,” “Sorrows of Hardship,” and “Pleasures of Roaming,” weave a complex tale that invites engagement on many levels. Six Records of a Life Adrift is not family centered, yet concerns with filial piety and other familial matters are always in play. The book is autobiographical but not chronological, as narrative episodes in the author’s life are told and retold in different sections. Yet the parallelism in the titles of the six records suggests a kind of unity based on emotion or sentiment. Shen Fu is the protagonist, but his wife is arguably the more developed character. At times, Shen Fu and Chen Yun live a life of privilege, but at many other times they are desperately poor. They never lose sight of life’s simple pleasures, and, as readers, we never lose sight of their commitment to each other. Even after Chen Yun suffers heartbreak when a courtesan she desired is taken away by a wealthy merchant, and thus Chen Yun is never given the opportunity to develop a relationship among the three of them, we never doubt the depth of Shen Fu and Chen Yun’s love for each other. We cannot be certain if Chen Yun desired the courtesan for herself or if she desired to please her husband. The emotional ambiguity adds romantic intimacy.

Sanders’s translation is the first to appear in almost thirty years, and it is the richest and most comprehensive of the three other English-language versions that are available. In comparing just the first paragraph of Sanders’s translation to earlier versions by Lin Yutang (“Six Chapters of a Floating Life”) and Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui’s (Six Records of a Floating Life), we can see the decisions translators must make in order to arrive at both a faithful and a satisfying version of the original story. We can also see that Sanders is well on his way to accomplishing his workmanlike goals of...