Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640 - East Asian History

6 JOHN MINFORD AND TONG MAN
Figure 9
Single page from the 1842 edition ofLiao-chai
laside, and hoped, believed indeed, that the
light would by and by dawn and that I
should one day get hold of a clue that would
guide me to a knowledge of the mysterious
classic. Before that day came, the translation
was soaked, in 1870, for more than a month
in the water of the Red Sea. By dint of careful
manipulation it was recovered so as to be
still legible; but it was not till 1874 that I
began to be able to give the book the prolonged
attention necessary to make it reveal
its secrets. Then for the first time I got hold,
as I believe, of the clue ... . The written
Icharacters of the Chinese are not representations
of words, but symbols of ideas, and the
combination of them in composition is not a
representation of what the writer would say,
but of what he thinks. It is vain therefore for
a translator to attempt a literal version .
There is not so much an interpretation of the
characters employed by the writer as a
participation of this thoughts;-there is the
seeing of mind to mind." James Legge, Preface
to The texts oJConJucianism, pt Il: the YiKing,
1882.
vivi-section attempts to recreate some of the features
of an unusual reading experience, to build a new
environment that approximates the richness of the
original. P'u Sung-ling wrote for his fellow literati in
a dense, lyrical style, choosing his words with infin­
ite care, aware of the resonance of evelY word and
phrase. He was speaking to readers steeped in a
culture made up of layer upon layer of associated
texts and memories, where a thousand assumptions,
attitudes and allusions could be taken for granted
and played upon, because they were shared. One
of the high places of this culture was the Studio, the
chai . , inner sanctum of traditional male leisure.
This new many-layered textual structure is a reinstallation,
a new space for reading that seeks in its
own way to emulate the environment of a Chinese
Studio.
In the central hall stands Giles' Strange Story,
with whatever emendations and additions have
seemed necessary to make Giles complete (suitably
marked by typographical or punctuation devices).
This central space has been divided into vertical
sections with lattice patterns taken from Daniel
Sheets Dye's Grammar of Chinese Lattice7
In the centre (of the double page), in the inner
chamber, are a variety of visual reminders of the
Studio environment: the desk is strewn with
inkstones, calligraphy brushes, strange scholarly
knick -knacks of one sort or another, Chinese characters
in variolls styles, and seals (especially seals
carved by or for P'u Sung-ling's contemporaries, the
sort of people who might have enjoyed the Stories
as he intended them). Screens and walls are hung
7 Harvard University Press, 1937. These
window structures seemed appropriate for
the job in hand. This "Iatticization" of the
translation (the use of see-through partitions,
rather than walls) is in fact closer to the
structure of the undivided, unpunctuated
Chinese original than Giles' long rambling
paragraphs. It also helps (together with its
section titles) to throw light on what is rather
a complicated plot, involving multiple identities
and incarnations. ("Translation it is that
letteth in the light," Translators' Preface to the
King James Bible.)