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The Peach Blossom Fan, by K'ung Shang-jen
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The Peach Blossom Fan is a poetic drama about national cataclysm. More than 300 years ago, the last native Chinese imperial house fell before rebel onslaughts, made a short-lived attempt at restoration in the south, then yielded finally to the invading Manchus. Writing in the 1690s, K'ung Shang-jen gathered the recollections of survivors. Out of these and a multitude of documentary accounts, he constructed a great historical play in the elegant Southern Chinese style. With compelling vividness he recreates confrontations between loyalists and those who would sell out to the newest master; nostalgic scenes of dalliance in riverside pavilions, with wine and poetry and beautiful girls; desperate stands on battlements of beleaguered cities; and more. Prefatory materials and notes provide both historical and dramaturgical background for the reader's full enjoyment of this masterpiece.
- Sales Rank: #1222067 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cheng n Tsui
- Published on: 2000-12-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.75" h x 5.75" w x .75" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“The Peach Blossom Fan is replete with romance, conflicts between loyalty and treachery, a healthy measure of bawdy humor, punning, elegant poetry, moral issues, and popular philosophical currents....This is a lively, readable, and faithful translation of a major work of Chinese literature.” —Howard Goldblatt
“Many popular Chinese plays fail to qualify as literature, being no more than plain scripts for brilliant actors to display their virtuosity. The Peach Blossom Fan appears to be a luminous exception, for it is a highly poetic chronicle play composed by a distinguished scholar, K’ung Shang-jen, who was born soon after the events he portrayed. As a vivid evocation of the downfall of the Ming dynasty, it deserves to be better known to students of Chinese literature and history.” —Harold Acton
About the Author
K'ung Shang-jen (1646–1718) was a sixty-fourth generation descendant of Confucius and was raised in his ancestor’s hometown of Qufu in Shandong province. A noted expert in music and Confucian rites, he was chosen in 1684 to lecture to the visiting emperor Kangxi, who later appointed him to the Imperial Academy in Beijing. The Peach Blossom Fan was completed in 1699 and was performed to great acclaim in 1700. It was not published, however, until 1708, a few years after K’ung had left his post and returned home to Qufu.
Judith T. Zeitlin is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature.
Chen Shih-Hsiang (1912–1971) was a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are The Genesis of Poetic Time and, with Harold Acton, Modern Chinese Poetry.
Harold Acton (1904–1994) was a prolific Anglo-Italian writer, poet, novelist, and translator. He lived in China from 1932 to ’39, teaching English literature at the University of Peking.
Cyril Birch is a translator and the Agassiz Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Classic in Chinese literature. It's very poetic, so ...
By EST College Girl
Classic in Chinese literature. It's very poetic, so you have to really focus to grasp the meaning, but it's a MUST READ if you study Asian history/literature/philosophy.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
classic chinese drama
By laolaohu
First of all, I should point out that I did not read this edition, but rather the original University of California Press edition. But since it is the same translation, only with a different introduction, I feel it is acceptable to review it here.
Actually, I have two reviews, one for those familiar with Chinese literature and one for those who are not. For those what are familiar with Chinese literature, I don't have to say much other than that this is probably one of the best works of classic Chinese drama ever produced, (the only contender I can think of being perhaps The Peony Pavilion), and incredible well translated at that. Although it is in English, it actually reads with a Chinese flavor, and you know how difficult that is to accomplish. And although ordinarily I do not favor the use of Wade-Giles in naming, in this case it actually enhances the effect of being grounded in the past. Well worth reading, because as you no doubt know, for all the pages the Chinese have put to print through the millennia, when it comes to classic Chinese literature the pickings are sadly few.
For those not familiar with Chinese literature, let me point out that, yes, it is really not much of a stretch to compare this work to one of the second tier (which is still an extremely high level indeed) works of Shakespeare. Bearing in mind that Chinese drama has some pronounced differences with Western drama. The most noticeable being that Western drama is intended to be viewed all in one sitting. Not so for Chinese drama. It is generally very lengthy, and if performed in its entirety would have to extend over several days and perhaps up to a week. In fact, much classic Chinese drama up until modern times has likely never been performed in its entirety, most acting companies performing only segments tailored to particular audiences. The reason I mention this is that in reading this you will find much repetition, especially at the beginning of scenes when one of the principle characters in that scene will give a lengthy introduction detailing his past activity in the drama up to the present point, and to a Western reader these repetitions might seem overdrawn and boring. Just bear in mind that for the way these dramas were actually performed, such introductions were necessary. And in fact, once you get the hang of it, you actually find these introductions helpful, as classic Chinese drama tends to contain many more characters than your average Western drama. So just bear with it. (And actually this translator has done a magnificent job of paring these introductions down to a manageable size). As for the rest, like any other work of well crafted literature, you can just sit back and enjoy. In spite of what I just said, it does read fast. I highly recommend it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
This translation is obviously better than nothing if you cannot read Chinese
By Holly Chen
This translation is obviously better than nothing if you cannot read Chinese, but it is far from perfect.
There is an exchange in Scene 11, for instance, in which Tso (no relation to the chicken) tries to excuse himself of responsibility for the poor behavior of the soldiers under his command. In response, Liu throws his cup to the ground and tries to shift the blame for the action from himself to his hands in order to humorously point out that, in the same way that it is ridiculous for someone to claim they have no control over their own hands, it is ridiculous for a general to claim he has no control over his men.
Here it is in Birch's translation:
[Liu dashes his teacup on the floor]
Tso [angrily]: Your manners are extraordinarily offensive. Why did you break that cup?
Liu [laughing]: I had no intention to break it, but in the heat of the moment it fell from my hand.
Tso: Do you mean that your mind cannot control your movements?
Liu: If the mind were a good general, the hand could not have made a mistake.
And here is the original:
(摔茶锺于地下介)(小生怒介)呵呀！这等无礼，竟把茶杯掷地。(丑笑介)晚生怎敢无礼，一时说的高兴，顺手摔去了。(小生)顺手摔去，难道你的心做不得主么。(丑)心若做得主呵，也不叫手下乱动了。
Tso's reaction to Liu breaking his cup in the original is "这等无礼，竟把茶杯掷地", which (idiomatically) would be something like, "What manner of discourtesy is this, that you would go so far as to toss your cup to the ground?" This is the sort of decorous language that is very characteristic of classical Chinese. So I have absolutely no idea why Birch translates this line as, "Your manners are extraordinarily offensive. Why did you break that cup?" These are extremely plain sentences that would be at home in a children's book but which do not convey the tone of a 17th century kunqu play. Then, Birch translates Liu's response, "怎敢无礼, 一时说的高兴，顺手摔去了" as "I had no intention to break it, but in the heat of the moment it fell from my hand," when it is really more like, "How could I dare be discourteous? A moment of excited speech and the cup followed a toss of my hand." "Heat of the moment" is just too vernacular. I can only speculate as to why Birch decided to strip away most of Kong Shangren's style and leave only the bare bones of each line.
What I find most annoying in this scene, though, is Birch's translation of the line, "心若做得主呵，也不叫手下乱动了" as merely "If the mind were a good general, the hand could not have made a mistake." In the original Chinese, Liu uses the word "手下", to refer to the cup he has just thrown. Taken literally, "手下" means "hand-beneath", so it is as though Liu is calling the cup "the thing that was beneath [or held in] my hand". But taken figuratively (as it usually is), "手下" is the Chinese word for "subordinates" (as in, the people beneath your hand, or the people under your charge). The whole point of Liu throwing his teacup, then, is to draw a pun between his "hand", which should be subordinate to his mind, and Tso's "hand-beneaths" which should be subordinate to Tso, the general. This pun is perhaps untranslatable, but you would think Birch could have at least put in a note pointing it out.
In Chinese, these lines (and the ones that follow) are meant to be quite comical (Liu is a 丑, or a "clown" character), but it does not fully come across in Birch's translation. It's almost as bad as if you translated, say, Falstaff's "let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty" into Chinese as, "Don't say that we people who work at night are stealing daylight".
More charitably speaking, I would say that this translation is useful for at least allowing English speakers to see the form and structure of this famous work, even if its content has not been perfectly preserved, so that from a literary perspective it is still possible to see how Kong Shangren develops his plot and characters and how he divides acts and scenes.
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