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    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures
    Ebook135 pages1 hour

    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

    By G. (Georges) Soulié de Morant and Pu Songling

    4.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1969
    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

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    Reviews for Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

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    • 5/5
      Pu Songling (1640 - 1715) collected these tales of the supernatural and uncanny and left them to his sons in the form of 110 handwritten, loose-leaf sheets. They have since been published many times, with additions and deletions, and been drawn upon by other authors (and playwrights, and television script-writers) for plots and plot elements. This edition uses Herbert Giles' translation of the late 1800s, complete with his extensive footnotes offering commentary, but updates spellings to reflect the currently-favored Pinyin system. Giles' notes are themselves an artifact now, half illuminating, half hopelessly chauvinist. The tales are wonderful, involving fox people, dreams, trips back and forth to the afterlife/underworld, just deserts, rewards for long-suffering love or virtue, and inexplicable tragedies. These are not ghost stories in a western, gothic sense; just tales of the fantastic, with the implicit promise that, for better or worse, bizarre events may unfold anywhere, at any time. Most of the stories are not long, but altogether, the collection is dense, and reading a few at a time, it took me over a year to work my way through. What the collection reveals about Chinese culture, I have no idea; but a Chinese American acquaintance, on seeing me reading the book and hearing my description of it, told me that fox people in particular are still widely believed to exist, and to be a source of great potential mischief (although in more of these stories, they are instead a source of welcome assistance and friendship, at least when treated kindly), much like faeries or gnomes in some parts of Europe.
    • 4/5
      Pu Songling (1640 - 1715) collected folk tales and published 491 of them under the title Strange Tales of Liaozhai (aka Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). This book contains 50 tales of human contact with supernatural creatures, including gods, ghosts, fox fairies, flower nymphs, crocodile princesses and bee spirits. There are stories about the iniquity of the feudal system, others about the corruption involved in the imperial examination system, and lots of love stories. Unfortunately it's a rather clumsy translation, but the stories are still fascinating and there are some good illustrations, with my favourite being the picture of the fox fairy facing page 50.I thought the introduction was rather strange until I realised that although this book was printed in Hong Kong, the translators were all academics working at universities in the People's Republic of China, hence the apologetic tone and insistence that although Pu Songling was from a landowning family, he had great sympathy for the hardship suffered by the peasants.
    • 4/5
      The book contains a collection of a little over 100 tales from Pu Songling's original 500 , which is rather unfortunate, as I would love to read all of them. I was hooked from the very first tale and took every opportunity to read more. Granted, some tales are mere curiosities that I don't find particularly appealing (for example, an account of a man with a dozen frogs that were trained to croak on cue and in "perfect pitch"), but most were enthralling. The tales have a broad range of subjects, although most were dealing with either fox-spirits or ghost, yet every one was different and unique.The translator's preface was good as well and helped to put things in the proper perspective. The notes and a glossary at the back also are great for those, like myself, not familiar with the broader Chinese literature. The only complaint I have -- and even that is more my fault than the editor's -- is that I didn't realize there were notes until I was practically done with the book. It would have been helpful to have footnote-style annotation in the text of the tales to give some indication that this particular line/word is explained in the notes. As things stand, if you run across something that you don't understand, you just have to flip to the back and hope there is a note about it. That said, the notes are thorough and provide a lot of added content.

    Book preview

    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures - G. (Georges) Soulié de Morant

    Project Gutenberg's Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures, by Unknown

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

    Author: Unknown

    Translator: George Soulié

    Release Date: October 16, 2011 [EBook #37766]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORIES FROM THE ***

    Produced by David Starner, Matthew Wheaton and the Online

    Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This

    book was produced from scanned images of public domain

    material from the Google Print project.)

    STRANGE STORIES FROM THE LODGE OF LEISURES

    TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE BY

    GEORGE SOULIÉ

    OF THE FRENCH CONSULAR SERVICE IN CHINA

    BOSTON AND NEW YORK

    HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

    1913

    PRINTED BY

    HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,

    LONDON AND AYLESBURY,

    ENGLAND.

    PREFACE

    The first European students who undertook to give the Western world an idea of Chinese literature were misled by the outward and profound respect affected by the Chinese towards their ancient classics. They have worked from generation to generation in order to translate more and more accurately the thirteen classics, Confucius, Mengtsz, and the others. They did not notice that, once out of school, the Chinese did not pay more attention to their classics than we do to ours: if you see a book in their hands, it will never be the Great Study or the Analects, but much more likely a novel like the History of the Three Kingdoms, or a selection of ghost-stories. These works that everybody, young or old, reads and reads again, have on the Chinese mind an influence much greater than the whole bulk of the classics. Notwithstanding their great importance for those who study Chinese thought, they have been completely left aside. In fact, the whole of real Chinese literature is still unknown to the Westerners.

    It is a pity that it should be so. The novels and stories throw an extraordinary light on Chinese everyday life that foreigners have been very seldom, and now will never be, able to witness, and they illustrate in a striking way the idea the Chinese have formed of the other world. One is able at last to understand what is the meaning of the huen or superior soul, which leaves the body after death or during sleep, but keeps its outward appearance and ordinary clothes; the p'aï or inferior soul which remains in the decaying body, and sometimes is strong enough to prevent it from decaying, and to give it all the appearances of life. The magicians of the Tao religion, or Taoist priests, play a great part in these stories, and the Buddhist ideas of metempsychosis give the opportunity of more complicated situations than we dream of.

    Among the most celebrated works, I have chosen the Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures, Leao chai Chi yi. It was written in the second half of the eighteenth century by P'ou Song-lin (P'ou Lieou-hsien), of Tsy-cheou, in the Chantong province.

    The whole work is composed of more than three hundred stories. I have selected twenty-five among the most characteristic.

    This being a literary work, and having nothing scientific to boast of, I have tried to give my English readers the same literary impression that the Chinese has. Tradutore traditore, say the Italians; I hope I have not been too much of a traitor.

    A translation is always a most difficult work; if it is materially exact, word for word and sentence by sentence, the so-called scientific men are satisfied, but all the charm, beauty, and interest of the original are lost. Very often, too, such translation is obscure and unintelligible. Each nation has an heirloom of traditions, customs, or religion to which its literature constantly refers. If the reader is not acquainted with that literature, these references will convey no meaning to his mind, or they may even convey a false one. In Chinese, this difficulty is greater than in any other language; the Far Eastern civilisation has had a development of its own, and its legends and superstitions have nothing in common with the Western folklore. The Chinese mind is radically different from ours, and has grown, in every generation, more different by reason of a different training and a different ideal in life. The Chinese writing, moreover, has strengthened those differences; it represents the ideas themselves, instead of representing the words; each Chinese sign may be rightly translated by either of the three or more words by which our language analytically describes every aspect of one same idea. The sign which is read Tao, for instance, must be, according to the sentence, translated by any of the words: direction, rule, doctrine, religion, way, road, word, verb; all of them being the different forms of the same idea of direction, moral or physical.

    Some French sinologists, aware of this difficulty, now translate the texts literally, and try to explain the meaning by a number of notes, which sometimes leave only one or two lines of text in a page. This method seems at first more scientific; it explains everything in the most careful way, and is very useful for the translation of inscriptions or of certain obscure passages in historical books. But for real literature, it is the greatest possible error, leaving out, as it does, all the impression and illusion the author intended to convey. Besides, the necessity of going, at every word, down the page in order to find the meaning in a note, tires the reader and takes away all the pleasure he should derive from the book.

    One may even say that a materially exact translation is, in reality, a false one; the words we use in writing and speaking being mere technical signs by which we represent our ideas. For instance, the word cathedral will certainly not convey the same idea to two men, one of whom has only seen St. Paul's, and the other only Notre-Dame de Paris; for the first, cathedral means a dome; for the other it means two towers and a long ogival nave. Below the outward appearance of the words there lie so many different images that it is absolutely necessary to know the mentality of a nation in order to master its language. In fact, a true translation will be the one that, though sometimes materially inexact, will give the reader the same impression he would have if he were reading the original text.

    Since I first went to China, in 1901, I have had many opportunities of acquainting myself with all the superstitions of the lower classes, with all the splendid mental and intellectual training of the learned. My experience has helped me to perceive what was hidden beneath the words; and in my translation I have sometimes supplied what the author only thought necessary to imply. In many places the translation is literal; in other places it is literary, it being impossible for a Western writer to retain all the long and useless talking, all the repetitions that Chinese writing and Chinese taste are equally fond of.

    George Soulié.

    CONTENTS

    Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures

    THE GHOST IN LOVE

    On the 15th day of the First Moon, in the second year of the period of Renewed Principles, the streets of the town of the Eastern Lake were thronged with people who were strolling about.

    At the setting of the sun every shop was

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