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

14 JOHN MINFORD AND TONG MAN
A woman lay beside him,
-so it seem'd;
For on her marble shoulders,
like a mist
Irradiate with tawny moonrise,
gleam'd
Thick silken tre'ises;
her white woman's wrist,
Glittering with snaky gold
and amethyst,
Upheld a dainty chin;
and there beneath,
Her twin breasts shone like
pinks that lilies wreathe .
The young man in P'u Sung-ling's "Lien-hsiang,"
caught between the twin fires of a ghost-infatuation and
a fox-enchantment, is eventually cured of his sickness in
as novel and fascinating a manner as one could hope to
find. In the course of this bizarre triangular relationship
and its resolution, playfully traced through a number of
incarnations, we encounter powerful archetypes of the
Chinese consciousness, and taste some of the extra-
ShORT Key TO ReFeRences In Llen-hsIang CommenTaRY:
long he dallied with delusive
I know not; but thereafter never more
The peace of passionless slumber
soothed the boy;
For he was stricken to the very core
With sickness of desire exceeding sore
And through the radiance of his eyes
there shone
ordinaIY psychological and psychic subtleties of the
mental and emotional life of its cultured elite. Beyond P'u
Sung-ling and Herbert Giles, beyond text and translation,
we enter into a realm richly representative of the Chinese
heart and psyche. In the end, to the extent that we as
readers and translators can enable the powerful images of
P'u Sung-ling to live again, then these are surely our
strange stories too.
Auerbach Nina Auerbach, Our vampires, ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Barthes Roland Barthes hy Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard
(London: Macmillan, 1977)
Bettelheim Bruno Bettelheim, The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fa iry tales
(New York: Knopf, 1976)
Bredon Juliet Bredon and Igor Mitrophanow, The moon year, a record of Chinese customs and festivals
(Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1927)
Briggs Katharine Briggs, "The Demon Dancers," a Ross-shire tale, in A hook of fa iries
(Harmondsworth, Mddlx: Penguin, 1997)
Buber Martin Buber, Chinese tales, translated by Alex Page
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991)