The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei, Volume Two: The Rivals

(Paperback)

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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. 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. 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. 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. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. 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.

Reviews

Praise for Volume 1: "Roy has made a major contribution to our overall understanding of the novel by so structuring every page of his translation that the numerous levels of the narration are clearly differentiated. In addition, [he] has annotated the text with a precision, thoroughness, and passion for detail that makes even a veteran reader of monographs smile with a kind of quiet disbelief."--Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books Praise for Volume 1: "Racy, colloquial, and robustly scatalogical, [this translation] could only have been done now, when our literary language has finally shed its Victorian values. David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of the original, quite surpassing ... earlier versions."--Paul St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review Praise for Volume 1: "Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."--Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books

Author Bio

David Tod Roy is Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature at the University of Chicago, where he has studied the "Chin P'ing Mei" and taught it in his classics for the last three decades.