Translating the Ping Yao Zhuan raised some predictable pitfalls and interesting problems and choices. The basic guidelines have been Yan Fu's priorites: wen, da, ya. Text, readability, elegance. From the beginning I wished to grip the reader's attention in the same way that the original, out of an oral storytelling and apocryphal literary tradition, affects the Chinese. I wanted to account for everything and to create a study guide for students who wish to try reading the original, and to set down a transparant account of my work as a guide to others.

First off, to the reader let me state that some knowledge of modern "standard" Chinese and its transliteration by the official Chinese system would be helpful. I have modified the system to omit the unlauted "u" for which a "yu" has been substituted, to eliminate the font problem. I originally used Lin Yutang's simplified version of the Guoyu Luomazi, (Lin Yutang's Chinese English Dictionary of Modern Usage, Hong Kong, 1972) but have converted the work to Hanyu Pinyin for the convenience of my readers around the world. Some knowledge of Chinese will help but I have restricted the Chinese transliterations to words that will be familiar to all with a little Chinese background, such as "Qi", "Yin", "Yang", and "li" for distance, and a few others. Other Chinese words are explained either in the textual context or in hyperlinked notes in the internet version. This solves a basic problem of Professor Ota's translation, in which too much Chinese is rendered in Kanji on the blissful assumption of "same writing same race", while in fact many if not most modern Japanese educated people cannot read that book very easily. My book might be a good starting point for a novice seeking a starting point with Chinese traditional literature and culture. It is not a book or even a genre that certain Chinese idealize or wish foreigners to read, but that does not matter. As critics as diverse as Patrick Hanan, Lu Xun and Hu Shi have written, the 40 chapter version of the Ping Yao Zhuan was a succesful (and I would say brilliant) literary adventure on Feng Menglong's part that greatly enhanced the literary value of the classic tale.

My translation is in my native dialect of the modern English language. As a guide in many of the stylistic choices I have had to make, I have relied in part on "Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature," Mick Short Ed, Longman Inc, New York 1989, esp "Speech Presentations in Fiction" by Tom Bates. This is as good a concise study as I have seen. I have avoided stilted pseudo archaic dialogues and all of those other pitfalls, and have rendered the work in all of its coarseness and detail for better or worse. Over literal? Not to students of Chinese culture, history, society or language I should think. The translation is modern without stretching the reader's credibility, avoiding idioms too linked to modern life such as railways, aircraft, driving and telecommunications!

I have stuck to a very traditional orthography and narrative structure throughout, with the omniscient Chinese storyteller oddly shifting at times to first person witness, revealing himself in an awkward way perhaps, but I've made it work. It did take a while to "find" the storyteller's voice. I can say the same about the poetry. It is a Chinese novel after all.

Dickens' use of a slightly lower than usual narrative) register, most notably in his satirical "Bleak House" (a work that I have studied and greatly admire) was most understandable if we consider his closeness to Wordsworth and the romantics and their idyllic muse of the child's pure and natural speech. This clashes, however, on a pragmatic level, with readers' expectations, shaped as they have been by a pargely pedantic immersion in conventional "high" language in literary use since Johnson's time. Dreiser, whose admiration for his muse Dickens is clear, raised quite a few eyebrows in "Sister Carrie" with a lower-then-expected narrative register although he did not so extensively attempt to transcribe idiomatic natural speech. I feel that the Anglo/Afro/American storytelling tradition is ample to accommodate the North China racounteur's devices. In terms of orthography though, I reject the approaches of Harris (Uncle Remus) and Ring Lardner. Contractions are pretty much limited to the conventional ones (n't, 'd and the like). Most other contractions, morphemic/allophonic changes changes, elisions etc are left up to the native speaking reader's natural linguistic imagination according to their own dialect. (Everybody's speech is just a dialect.) The standard orthography will come to life in its phonetic environment as the context interacts with the reader's imagination. And this gives non-native speaking readers something to hold onto as well to enjoy the story as written. This in my opinion is superior to Lardner's choice of nonstandard orthography to relate local speech and there is much criticism to back this up. Thus the American editor's "gonna" and "wanna" will be rendered in printed as "going to" and "want to" and changed to the contracted spoken form in the reader's imagination in the appropriate phonetic environment. Empirically, this seems to work, as is most friendly to the reader who is not a native speaker of English. As for syntax, in particular tense and 'precise', pragmatics (the relations between people, communicative area) are balanced against mere syntax (word relations) so that living language is served by the grammar instead of being subordinated to it.

I've tried to do justice to the amazingly believable discourses of the original. Feng Menglong's interest in language and inner life/motivation result in a very modern, believable depiction of the speech of his time. That is one reason why students of Chinese will be interested in seeing the original text. Here is a pioneering work in the depiction of the real speech of real people (and some ghosts!) of every station of life. The translation is basically American but vacillates for artistic reasons and just at random. It's amazing how little agreement there is in the US and Britain, even among books from the same publishers, as to which participles/styles are "standard". This extends to pronounciation as well, where differences between region in each country is greater than the differences between the "standard" forms of each. In the US/British case it is all prejudice and tradition, as there are no national language laws or commissions in either state. I have little respect for such official political correctness and/or language cops/reformers. My use of a largely conventional orthography is strictly utilitarian; it works. I sometimes take the license to use British participles that are "nonstandard" or "substandard" in the US" for effect; there is a very old tradition behind this (got, learnt, burnt, tortoise etc) and they look natural to the greatest number of readers. I'm sorry about inconsistancies in punctuation and font size; I will rationalize this all later. I am only one person, working on my one time and at my own expense. It has eventually got to be formatted in US and British English both, anyway.

Underlying all of this is the assumption that "language is fun, language is chaos", and that it thrives on the "fuzziness" of the human mind. The "exceptions" and frustrating imperfections of language are what drive it in through the fields of the mind and memory. Yes , there is a deep precision to it all, but on the molecular level, not the behavioral, at least not on any level that I am concerned with here. And there is no "master write" for THAT program, ultimately!" "There are some things, doctor, that your wissenschaft cannot know!" said the young wife in "Nosferatu Vampirusmus", paraphrasing Shakespeare.

"The hawk soars in the sky, while the fish plunges in the deep."

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