Tales Across The Sea

Here we begin our new translation of Luo Guanzhong’s classic historic novel Story of Three Kingdoms. Our intention is to make a more casual version, in the spirit of those told by the teahouse storytellers.

Here is a little background for friends not yet familiar with the Three Kingdoms story: In the chaos at the Chinese imperial court in the waning days of the Han Dynasty, the great but unscrupulous strategist Cao Cao has arrogated almost all power to himself, but claims to be working in the name of the emperor. Warlords and rebels are all over the country, burning, pillaging and staking their own claims to power with their own armies of followers. Liu Bei, one of the protagonists of Three Kingdoms, is a distant relation of the imperial family, although he earns his living as a weaver and seller of straw mats and sandals. Yearning to help the emperor and restore peace and order to China, he becomes sworn brothers with two other men of martial ability, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, and they swear to live and die together while working to restore the Han dynasty. But without much in the way of money, power or official recognition, it takes them a long time to establish themselves as serious opposition to Cao Cao.
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“Has Little Mighty picked up his lunch yet?” (小强领便当了吗?)

This was a question posted on a Baidu forum on The Ravages of Time, a Chinese comics series marginally based on the events in Three Kingdoms. Twenty years ago this question would have been incomprehensible. Then Stephen Chow movies happened, and these words now make perfect sense to many young (and some old) Chinese speakers.
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OK, so we’ve got the Five Tigers of Hong Kong cinema (Michael Miu, Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Ken Tong, Felix Wong) plus Steven Chow, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. And there are Michelle Yeo, Chow Yun Fat, and Zhang Ziyi as well as a host of others. So let’s say I want to create a film festival introducing my American friends to the best kung fu movies. What would you recommend as must-see movies and why? In what order would you like to view them, and why?

In Chapter 8 of the novel of Three Kingdoms the bad guy Dong Zhuo makes a habit of throwing banquets with sinister intent – either to threaten ministers into compying with his plans to usurp the throne, or to intimidate anyone who disagrees with him. In one open-air banquet in this chapter, he eats happily while having various horrible things done to prisoners of war in front of him and his guests – eye-gouging, cutting off of hands, feets, tongues, etc. The other ministers lose their appetites, but his is undisturbed.

This reminds me of one of the stories about Vlad the Impaler, a Transylvanian nobleman whose exploits were so nasty he became known to history as Dracula. Vlad enjoyed impaling his enemies on stakes through their rear ends, then hoisting them off the ground and watching while they struggled to get their feet on solid earth, which of course only drove the stakes further into their vitals. Vlad is particularly notorious for an outdoor feast he held, surrounded by hundreds of his struggling, groaning bleeding victims on their stakes.

Vlad lived in the fifteenth century, so too late to be an influence on the composition of Three Kingdoms, but perhaps some version of the Chinese tale had filtered down to him? Or do ghastly evil cruel tyrants tend to think alike?

We’re just about ready to start creating a podcast of Three Kingdoms material that we’re going to post here. We were thinking of starting with the buildup to the Battle of the Red Cliffs, since there’s a big movie coming out on that subject this summer. What would you like to listen to?

We’re going to do a fairly free translation of Luo’s work, rather than just reading the Moss Roberts or Brewitt-Taylor translations. We may veer a bit into the work’s original teahouse-storytelling style, just because it’ll be easier for listeners to keep track of what’s going on in the plot. But we’ll stay very faithful to Luo’s content.

Check this site in the near future to see what we come up with, and let us know your preferences!

UPDATE: The podcast is up. Hope you enjoy it!

The appeal of Luo’s Three Kingdoms, to me, is its insistence on telling the story as an outsider. Battles, ploys, and occasional moments of sincerity, are all “seemingly so”. The book keeps us mere observers, shut out of the intimate thoughts and emotions of all characters, much like our daily encounters with colleagues at a workplace. We are provided with efficient paragraphs of vivid details and quick evolution of events, yet denied explanations of motivations and intentions that our curiosities so crave for. As in real life, we cope with such abundance of evidence and shortage of confessions with that ever-useful life skill: gossiping. Generations of Three Kingdoms readers get together to debate the people and events in it, to offer our own speculation of why and our own imagination of what-ifs. The book is similar to life itself in so many ways — each time we re-visit the pages, we see a bit more, perceive it a bit differently, love it all the same, and cannot suppress the urge to grab the first available friend and gossip about it. Read the rest of this entry »

In Dream of the Red Chamber, Phoenix makes her husband’s concubine’s life so miserable that the poor girl decides to kill herself, by swallowing a piece of gold. She’s found the next morning, lying peacefully deceased in her bed, and everyone knows exactly how she killed herself. So how much gold would an average person need to swallow to die? And what are the symptoms? Does it have to be coated in arsenic to be effective? Or is this just a mildly poetic method of suicide, preferable in the literary context to jumping off bridges or using a knife?

I think American ones are still exposed to Moby Dick, some Shakespeare and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, if nothing else. Do Chinese students read the classics? Mao’s Little Red Book and Outlaws of the Marsh? What literature are all Chinese high school students compelled to study? Is the curriculum standardized across the country, or across provinces, or at all?

I’ve been bumping into stories about cricket-fighting and famous champion crickets in the stories about the monk Ji Gong, and in one of Pu Songling’s Strange Stories. It seems that there was a wild China-wide fad for cricket fighting, that people submitted their crickets to regional and national contests, and that some places experienced an extortionate cricket-collection tax system. Did the emperor really run a cricket-fighting den? (And if so, didn’t he have anything better to do, like training the troops?) Does anyone know if this fad really happened? Could you explain, please?

My first attempt at Dream of the Red Chamber was via the 1996 abridged translation by Hsien-yi Yang and Gladys Yang. I believe their approach is one in which they left out chunks of the actual text, but translated the rest very accurately. This resulted in my being really drawn in by dramatic events, like the way Hsi-feng deals with that over-lusty Chia Jui, or the big fight over Chia Lien’s adultery with Pao-erh’s wife. But sometimes starting new chapters would leave me feeling as if I’d just stepped off a cliff, since years seemed to have passed since the previous chapters’ events. And I was much more interested in Hsi-feng than in either Pao-yu or Tai-yu, who seemed tediously willful and relentlessly morose, respectively. The details of action were wonderful, in other words, but I missed the point overall.

But I know that this is the most popular book in Chinese history, and figure that 1.6 billion people can’t be wrong. So I’m determined to find out what’s so great about it. Read the rest of this entry »