Humble Studio Eerie Annals

Notes on the translation

Stylistically, I attempted a translation from the standpoint of few proper names left untranslated, unless commonly understood to a non-Chinese reader. This artifice begs the translator's inability to translate the secondary meanings of words while inviting misunderstandings due to English secondary definitions. As a further example, the word Liao refers to a county in ShanDong Province where the author's studio lay; but given this is not common knowledge beyond China, the translator selected the root meaning of 'humble'.

Another stylistic shot is heroic terseness, or trying to convey the same. In order to achieve the requisite compression, I sometimes dispense with punctuation; articles definite and indefinite that so interlard Romance languages but Chinese manages to do without. Example, in translating couplets: "with flowers with wine spring forever here, no candle no lamp the night illuminates itself". This reads like Pidgin, but conveys the image painting without fuss over relations between the words. Ok, at least limiting the definite article to one per sentence?

The original work by Pu SongLing is justly famous and several times translated into English, notably by Giles. The present translation is my attempt to implement the aforementioned stylistic rendering of Chinese. And for my personal amusement.

I should note that Pu was a collector of legends, rumors, myths and anecdotes from the ancient cradle of Dawenkou and Yueshi cultures. His sympathetic portrayal of fox spirits has drawn the attention of studies in the west. He sometimes stoops to scandal sheet content involving prurient subjects such as teenage pregnancy and nudity, although these are treated with brevity compared with his fictive chapters.