Chinese Courtship: The Huajian Ji 花箋記 in English Translation

CHINESE COURTSHIP: THE HUAJIAN JI· 1E~~c IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION K.C. Leung San Jose State University Though enjoying the distinction of being designated as the "Eighth Work of Genius" (Di ba caizi shu fflJ\7J-rW),l the Huajianji is relatively unknown to students of Chinese literature. The few modem scholars who have written about it invariably point to the influence this Cantonese muyu shu *mil (lit., "wooden-fish book") exerted on Goethe in his Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahresund Tageszeiten (1827), a group of fourteen short poems evoking the serenity of flowers and Nature. Strictly speaking, the alleged source of Goethe's inspiration should be Peter Perring Thoms' English translation, which he entitled Chinese Courtship, in Verse (London: Parhury, Allen, and Kingsbury, 1824), rather than the Chinese original. Surprisingly, no modem scholar has critically examined Thoms' translation in depth. This paper does so in light of fidelity, artistic merit, as well as Sinological scholarhsip. Thoms' Chinese Courtship should interest us for several reasons. First, it provides a rare glimpse into the early history of Chinese verse translation. Indeed, it was the first piece of rhymed Chinese literature of major length to be translated directly into English. Second, it sheds light-glaringly distorted at times-on English views of Chinese poetry and culture in the nineteenth century. The discussion of poetry in Thoms' "Preface", however inadequate 1 The practice of designating certain books as caizi shu, or "works of genius", allegedly began with Jin Shengtan ~~~ (1610?-1661), who designated the "Li sao" ~lM, Shiji 5t:~c Shuihu zhuan 7.Kmit,Xixiangji g§Jf§~c, Zhuangzi frr, and Du Fu's tlm poetry as the "Liu caizi shu" /\7Jr. "Six Works of Genius". Later critcs and editors arbitrarily extended the list of works to about ten while differing in their choice of titles. Mao Zonggang :::§*1mJ (fl. 1661), for example, considered the Pipaji R~~c, which he edited, such an excellent masterpiece that he called it the "Seventh Work of Genius". When commentator Zhong Daicang ~l'tif (see text below), an admirer of Jin Shengtan, found the Huajianji on a par with Jin's "works of genius" and felt that it should have been designated as a caizi shu long ago, he called it Di ba caizi shu ~J\7Jr., "to be placed after the previous seven". Zhong's commentary is originally appended to the Jing jing zhai ij¥{¥~ edition of the Huajian ji. Thus, for the fITst time, a critic bestowed the prestigious label caizi shu on a work of balladry. ClllNOPERL Papers No. 20-22 (1997-99)© 1999 by the Conference on Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 20-22 and misleading, represents a bridge between the fragmentary remarks on the subject found in the accounts of the Macartney embassy (1793) and the relatively comprehensive description of Chinese poetry and poetics by John Francis Davis in "On the Poetry of the Chinese" (1829)? Third, the Chinese text that accompanies Thoms' translation provides a valuable reference for a textual study of the Huajianji. The muyu shu refers to the text of the muyu songs, which are a kind of balladry popular in the Pearl River Delta, the Xijiang Basin, and parts of southwestern Guangdong until the 1950s.3 As entertainment, the muyu is generally regarded as a regional style of tanci ~¥~~ ("strumming rhymes"), which is a prosimetric form of storytelling popular in southeastern China, involving sung verses alternating with spoken prose and accompanied by a string instrument. However, unlike the tanci, muyu songs were written in the Cantonese dialect. Instrumental accompaniment in a muyu performance is minimal; if it exists at all, it is usually in the form of the erhu =itA (a two-string bowed lute), or simply two bamboo strips struck for rhythmic effect.4 Though largely written in rhyme, the language of the muyu texts ranges from the highly colloquial-even vulgar-Cantonese of, say, the modem Qige lian hua *~~~1t (Qige Is Enamored of Flowers, n.p., n.d.) to the fusion of elegant classical verse and colloquial Cantonese in the Huajian ji (hereafter abbreviated to HJJ). A typical muyu shu is divisible into topical sections, each consisting of scores of seven-character lines with...