The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng

Taking a year is at least worth thinking about. So the arrival of a full translation of the Chin Ping Mei is a bit of good news-bad news situation: There’s a masterpiece out there finally, but it might take you a year to read it. The Roy translation is well over 3,000 pages long, if you include the index and notes. But the biggest barrier to entry is probably the book’s sheer size. Due, at least in part, to these poor translations, the novel has remained relatively concealed from Western audiences. The Golden Lotus by Clement Egerton, published in 1939, was a heavily expurgated version, putting the dirty bits into Latin for the sake of the censors, and the 1947 Bernard Miall edition was translated from German. There have been other translations but all of them with significant problems. It’s a masterpiece an epic scholarly achievement. So it is genuinely bizarre that the first complete English translation of the Chin Ping Mei, one of the world’s great novels, if not simply the greatest, was released only last month.ĭavid Tod Roy, after more 20 years of work, completed the fifth volume of his translation of the Chin Ping Mei, entitled The Plum in the Golden Vase. This translation and its annotation aim to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.WE LIVE IN A TIME of globalization, and a time of a cosmopolitan, global literature. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens of Bleak House, the Joyce of Ulysses, or the Nabokov of Lolita than anything in the earlier Chinese fiction tradition, has not yet received adequate recognition.

With the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature.

This work, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of narrative art-not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context. In this second of a planned five-volume series, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of His-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines.

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng