Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

IN THE SPRING OF 1877, sinologist Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935), then acting as British vice consul at Canton, began to translate Pu Songling's (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋志異 (hereafter Liaozhai)—a touchstone collection of nearly five hundred Chinese classical tales renowned for its vivid portrayal of ghosts and fox spirits.1 Three years later, Giles's annotated English translation of 146 Liaozhai tales, collected in two volumes, was published by Thos. de la Rue and Company in London under the title Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (hereafter Strange Stories).2 This translation came thirty-eight years after two Protestant missionaries in China, both associated with the Canton-based journal Chinese Repository, separately published the earliest known Western renditions of the Liaozhai in 1842.3 In the intervening four decades, only a very small number of Pu's tales were rendered into Western languages, with the most numerous group being the eighteen tales British diplomat Clement F. R. Allen published in the Hong Kong–based periodical China Review; or, Notes and Queries on the Far East between 1874 and 1875. This and all other "piecemeal" Liaozhai translations appeared mostly in treaty-port publications that catered primarily to readers pursuing mainly practical knowledge about the Middle Kingdom; as such, they appear to have attracted little attention from readers outside the circle of missionaries, merchants, diplomats, or scholars directly involved with China.Strange Stories is not only the first book-length translation of Pu Songling's masterpiece into a major European language, but also the earliest aimed specifically at a general audience. It is intended, according to the translator himself, to present the Liaozhai "before the English public in a pleasing and available form" (Giles, Strange 1: xxxii).4 Though not a complete translation, Strange Stories remained the most comprehensive English version of Pu's tales for more than a century after its initial publication, during which time it came to be seen, as the internationally renowned essayist Ku Hung-ming (1857–1928) once put it, as "a model of what translation from Chinese should be" (135). The ensuing success in publication enjoyed by this superb translation strengthened Giles's preexisting ties with "the insatiable metropolitan world of writing for mass (though not exactly popular) consumption" in his home country and simultaneously introduced Pu's classical tales to the realm of world literature (Barrett 128). It is through Giles's translation—whether directly or indirectly—that renowned writers of fantasy fiction such as Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Lafcadio Hearn, and Jorge Luis Borges became admirers of Pu Songling, the self-styled "historian of the strange" (yishi shi 異史氏).5But in addition to constituting a major milestone in the history of the Liaozhai's global circulation, Giles's Strange Stories should also be viewed as an important contribution to the increasing scholarly sophistication of late nineteenth-century British sinology. British literature on the study of China in the 1870s and 1880s was produced mainly by two groups of writers, none of whom were professional Orientalists (as the term was then understood). The first group consisted primarily of missionaries such as James Legge (1815–97), Alexander Wylie (1815–87), John Chalmers (1825–99), and Joseph Edkins (1823–1905), whereas the second included chiefly diplomats such as Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), William F. Myers (1831–78), and Robert K. Douglas (1838–1913). In spite of their technically amateur status, many of these scholars of China engaged in active intellectual exchanges with the academic community in Britain; many even collaborated with professional scholars in developing comparative studies of language, folklore, religion, ethnography, archaeology, anthropology, and so on, as counterparts to the natural sciences in the study of human culture (Girardot 144). Legge, for example, Victorian Britain's foremost sinologist, translated a number of Chinese classics for Friedrich Max Müller's (1823–1900) fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910), a colossal translation enterprise that single-handedly inaugurated the comparative science of religions. Similarly, Giles wrote a number of books and journal articles on Chinese religion and pointedly adopted the perspective of evolutionary anthropology in his interpretation of the Liaozhai tales. Upon their return from China, both men went on to careers in British academic institutions—Legge assuming the newly created chair of Chinese Language and Literature at Oxford in 1876, and Giles becoming the second professor of Chinese at Cambridge in 1897. Their appointments, together with the popularization of the term "sinologist" in the 1870s—in the fashion of "philologist, Egyptologist, ornithologist"—suggest that the British study of China in the late nineteenth century was gradually transforming into a "science of sinological Orientalism" (Childers 172; Girardot 157).The important connections between Giles and the new scientific fields of the late Victorian era have remained unexplored in existing studies on Strange Stories, which have thus far focused mainly on textual comparison between translation and original. This essay contextualizes Giles's translation within a diverse body of nineteenth-century writings on the "irrational and anomalous" aspects of culture, all of which, like Strange Stories, were written primarily for the so-called "English public."6 I argue that in contending with previous Liaozhai translators, Giles consciously drew on influential theories from within the Victorian comparative sciences to assert his authority as a superior anthropological observer. The essay's three sections divide as follows: in the first, I demonstrate that Giles's translation of the Liaozhai was heavily mediated by existing categories and sedimented reading habits prevalent in the Victorian translation of foreign folklore; next, I highlight Giles's concern with cultural interpretation and explore the intricate links between his translation and the Victorian human sciences; finally, I examine the influence of Victorian anthropological evolutionism on Giles's reading of a particular group of Liaozhai tales about a soul's journey to the underworld.In 1834, Stanislas A. Julien (1797–1873), a leading European sinologist and one of Pu Songling's first Western readers, described the Liaozhai as "un curieux Recueil de Contes de Fées" (xn1; a curious collection of fairy tales), which "doivent être lus en Chine avec autant d'avidité et d'intérêt que le sont chez nous les Mille et une Nuits" (x; should be read in China with as avid an interest as theThousand and One Nights are read here). According to him, the stories were "principalement destinées aux classes inférieures, et qui sont basées sur les croyances populaires, qu'elles ont pour but de propager ou d'entretenir par des récits merveilleux propres à frapper l'imagination" (viii; chiefly aimed at the lower classes, based on popular beliefs, and intended to disseminate amusing fantastic accounts apt to strike the imagination). Julien's description here is couched in terms commonly associated with the so-called "Popular Antiquities" or "Popular Literature," both later superseded by the neologism "Folk-Lore" coined by William John Thoms in 1846 (Thoms 862). At first, folklore was seen as preserving "the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, &c., of the olden time," extant only among the uneducated rural population in Europe with the onset of industrial modernity (Thoms 863). However, with the increasing output of translations resulting from imperialist expansions, this originally European notion of "folk-lore" also came to be applied to fantasy narratives from non-European cultures.The nineteenth-century translation of the Liaozhai thus began in the aftermath of the surging European interest in folklore and gained momentum with translators' eagerness to render Pu Songling's collection as a Chinese Arabian Nights. Viewing the Liaozhai exclusively through the prism of folklore, early translators wrongly assumed that the collection consisted of simple narratives reflecting merely the superstitions and speeches of the lower classes in China. In keeping with this misconception about the Liaozhai, several translators simplified both the original language and the plots of the stories in their translations.7 Most of them also avoided translating the longer romance tales—better known to Chinese readers—about love between a male protagonist and a phantom heroine. Instead, these translators favored shorter accounts of the anomaly featuring magic tricks, transformations, monsters, and Daoist/Buddhist magicians, all of which would easily recall for them the jinns, giants, fakirs, yogis, jugglers, and other miracle-mongers they had previously encountered in Arabic and Indian folklore.As it happened, Giles himself at one point counted among these piecemeal translators of the Liaozhai. In 1877, he published an article entitled "Chinese Fiction" in the Shanghai-based journal Celestial Empire that included his rendition of two Liaozhai tales. In this article, Giles describes the Liaozhai as a mere "book of fairy-stories, wanting the delicately-pointed morals which have immortalized a similar volume by the late HANS ANDERSEN" (370). In addition, he is of the opinion that many of the Liaozhai tales are "weak in plot, a fault common to all Chinese works of fiction, but one which attracts little attention in the native reading world" ("Chinese Fiction" 370). These remarks clearly echo statements made by his predecessors, suggesting that Giles's own view of the Liaozhai was initially tainted by preexisting European notions of folklore.But three years later, Giles—while continuing to categorize the Liaozhai as a "folk-lore of China," voiced an entirely different opinion (Strange 1: xxxii). In his introduction to the book-length Strange Stories, he argues that "in addition to the advantages of style and plot," many Liaozhai tales contain "a very excellent moral" (xxxii). By "moral," Giles specifically means the Confucian code of ethics; quoting Tang Menglai (1627–98), a Confucian scholar and one of the earliest commentators of the Liaozhai, verbatim, Giles notes that, with his tales, Pu Songling intended to "'glorify virtue and to censure vice'" (xxxii). Accordingly, many of the story titles in Strange Stories are not straightforward translations; instead, they deliberately highlight Confucian values such as filial piety, righteousness, honesty, reciprocity, and so on. In this aspect, Giles's interpretation also differs significantly from previous translators, who argued that the Liaozhai mainly reflected its low-class readers' Daoist and Buddhist superstitions.Indeed, Giles strongly disagrees with the view that the Liaozhai is a popular book aimed at the lower classes. He points out that, written as it is in classical Chinese rather than the vernacular language, it is a difficult book intended only for educated readers: Terseness is pushed to its extreme limits; each particle that can be safely dispensed with is scrupulously eliminated; and every here and there some new and original combination invests perhaps a single word with a force it could never have possessed except under the hands of a perfect master of his art. Add to the above, copious allusions and adaptations from a course of reading which would seem to have been co-extensive with the whole range of Chinese literature, a wealth of metaphor and an artistic use of figures generally to which only the chef-d'œuvres of Carlyle form an adequate parallel; and the result is a work which for purity and beauty of style is universally accepted in China as the best and most perfect model. Sometimes the story runs along plainly and smoothly enough; but the next moment we may be plunged into pages of abstruse text, the meaning of which is so involved in quotations from and allusions to the poetry or history of the past three thousand years as to be recoverable only after diligent perusal of the commentary and much searching in other works of reference. (Strange 1: xxx–xxxi)In thus praising Pu Songling's writing style and comparing it to that of Thomas Carlyle, Giles aims to show through his translation that the Liaozhai is a true masterpiece of Chinese literature. Moreover, though Giles is often criticized for purging passages depicting sex and violence in the original, no evidence suggests that he did so for the purpose of "sanitizing" the tales for female or juvenile readers.8 Instead, as demonstrated by the following passage from his translation of Pu's "Author's Own Record," Giles deliberately favored high-register language and content to highlight the belles lettres aspect of the Liaozhai for the English public: "Clad in wisteria, girdled with ivy"; thus sang San-lü in his Dissipation of Grief. Of ox-headed devils and serpent Gods, he of the long-nails never wearied to tell. Each interprets in his own way the music of heaven; and whether it be discord or not, depends upon antecedent causes. As for me, I cannot, with my poor autumn fire-fly's light, match myself against the hobgoblins of the age. I am but the dust in the sun beam, a fit laughing-stock for devils. (Strange 1: xviii–xix)The entire passage cited here is annotated by Giles in minute detail, with nothing left unexplained; it is worth noting no other translator of Giles's generation took such pains to preserve the figurative aspect of the Liaozhai's language, nor to elucidate the multiple culturally determined references.Giles is indeed determined to provide a literary translation of Pu Songling's tales, an intention particularly obvious in his renditions of passages in verse. Not that Giles is the first person to translate the poems within the Liaozhai (though most of his predecessors did omit them); before Giles, Allen had already made the first attempt to render the Liaozhai poetry into English. But the superiority of Giles's translation is obvious when compared with Allen's. Take for instance the tale entitled "Xihu zhu" 西湖主 ("The Lord of the West Lake"), in which the protagonist finds a lost lady's handkerchief and writes on it a heptasyllabic quatrain (qiyan jueju 七言絕句): "雅戲何人擬半仙/分明瓊女散金蓮/廣寒隊裏應相妒/莫信淩波便上天" (Pu juan 8. 22b). Allen translates these verses as: "Who was that at play here. I think she was half a spirit, or a fairy flashing golden lilies about. All the fairies living in Kuang Han would be jealous of her. Think not that such feet can get to heaven" (Allen, "Tales" 212). Accurate though this translation is for the most part, as literary English it is no more than serviceable; in places it is patent that Allen is translating word-for-word, with the result that he renders Pu's superior poetry into mediocre prose. By contrast, Giles specifically sought to recast Chinese poetry into English verse. He translates the same passage: "What form of divine was just now sporting nigh? / 'Twas she, I trow of 'golden lily' fame; / Her charms the moon's fair denizens might shame, / Her fairy footsteps bear her to the sky" (Giles, Strange 2: 48).9 While certainly less literal than Allen, his translation nonetheless affords the reader a clearer sense of the lyrical qualities in Pu's quatrain—Giles uses an envelope stanza (a b b a) in iambic pentameter and archaic phrases such as "sporting nigh" and "I trow" to emulate the original composition.In his memoirs, Giles happily reports that the first edition of Strange Stories in 1880 "was very generously reviewed in all the leading English and several Continental and American newspapers" (Aylmer 20). Soon after its publication, Legge wrote a review in 1880 in which he remarks that the "boon is not small which [Giles] has conferred by his labour on the general public" (185; emphasis added). He goes on to praise Strange Stories for displaying "a fine acquaintance with the structure of Chinese composition, and, what Mr. Giles specifically claims for himself, 'an extensive insight into the manners, customs, superstitions, and general social life of the Chinese'" (185). In Legge's opinion apparently, Strange Stories offers the English public not only the pleasure of reading entertainment but the edification of cultural insight. This remark echoes Giles's claim that the chief objective of Strange Stories is to provide an "aperçu of the manners, customs, and social life of that vast [Chinese] Empire" (Strange 1: xxxii).Folklorists in Britain also welcomed Strange Stories with enthusiasm. The educational value of Strange Stories to the general reader is reaffirmed in an 1881 review in the Folk-Lore Record—the journal of the Folk-Lore Society of Great Britain, founded three years earlier. While praising Giles's translation for its usefulness as a "companion of leisure hour" and its "good insight into life and customs as witnessed in the Celestial Empire," the reviewer insists that "it is not to the text alone that the student will look for aid in his folk-lore studies. The notes of the translator are of more than passing value. . . . Yet the learning of the translator carries weight" ("Books" 191–92). The comment underlines the usefulness of annotation, a tool that Giles used skillfully to lend a scholarly burnish to his translation.The noted folklorist Andrew Lang (1844–1912), who later became president of the Folk-Lore Society, also found Giles's translation relevant to his theorization of ghosts. In an 1885 essay entitled "Some Japanese Bogies," published in the illustrated Magazine of Art, Lang, quoting passages from Strange Stories, comments that "ghosts do not live a hole-and-corner life in China, but boldly come out and take their part in the pleasures and business of life" (16). This observation is reminiscent of Lang's description of a class of free-willed ghosts "which are independent of the invocation of the sorcerer" (as opposed to those "'professional' spirits that come and go at the sorcerer's command") in his 1885 essay "The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories" (626–27). In proposing "a new branch of the science of Man" in the study of ghost tales, this essay draws mainly from stories told to European travelers and missionaries living abroad by "savages" (623). By contrast, "Some Japanese Bogies" appears to rely mostly on works of authored fiction in comparing representations of ghosts and the afterlife in different cultures; included among the writers Lang mentions here are Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu—all well known to Victorian readers for their intricate supernatural stories. A year later, "Some Japanese Bogies" was reprinted in Lang's book Books and Bookmen; its inclusion in a book with a title signaling distance from rural culture and "savage" beliefs further indicates that Lang accepted Giles's view of the Liaozhai as a true masterpiece of literature rather than a popular book for the lower classes.Within the Victorian translation of Oriental folklore, Giles was not without precedent in scanning the Liaozhai for cultural insights. An 1880 review in Trübner's American, European, and Oriental Literary Record, which states that the Liaozhai tales "are to the Chinese what the 'Arabian Nights' are to the Arabians," provides an illuminating example of the parallels Victorians were inclined to draw between the tales they translated from the East ("Literary" 6). In fact, the practice of attributing ethnographic value to fantasy narratives was pioneered by Edward W. Lane's (1801–76) annotated and illustrated translation of The Thousand and One Nights, "the standard English version for general reading" of the Arabian Nights during the Victorian era (Lane-Poole 4). As Jennifer Schacker has pointed out, "Lane's voice joined those of many of his contemporaries who believed that the Nights offered English readers 'admirable pictures of the manners and customs of the Arabs'" (116). Viewing his translation in the same light as his own 1836 ethnographic work entitled Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Lane proclaims in the translator's preface that the true value of the Nights resides in "its minute accuracy with respect to those peculiarities which distinguish the Arabs from every other nation, not only of the West, but also of the East" (viii). For him, the otherworldliness depicted in the fantasy narratives is useful in explaining the essential "otherness" of the Arabs.Much as Giles demonstrates the same interest in reading folklore as a potentially valuable source of cultural knowledge, his stance toward the "otherness" of Eastern cultures differs fundamentally from that of Lane. On the one hand, Giles espouses the psychological unity of all humanity, favoring the notion of a universal human culture over "cultures" in the plural; on the other hand, he sees himself as a highly distinct—one might say, more qualified—interpreter of culture compared to Lane. Both viewpoints show the influence of Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917), esteemed by many Victorian scholars as "the greatest of English anthropologists" (Rivers and Marett).In his introduction to the Strange Stories, Giles specifically states that his translation is primarily intended to correct the "distorted image" of "China and the Chinese" prevalent in existing literature by European missionaries and travel writers (xv). He mocks the lack of qualification among these "old China hands" by quoting Tylor in a footnote: "'How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a savage tribe, be treated as evidence, where it depends on the testimony of some traveller or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted talk, a man prejudiced or wilfully deceitful?'" (qtd. in Giles, Strange 1: xv n1; emphasis added). This statement comes from Tylor's monumental book Primitive Culture, which provides the first definition of "culture" in its modern anthropological sense, as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (1:1).10 In this book, Tylor distances himself from travelers and missionaries, arguing that qualified interpreters of culture should account for "moral as for natural things" and study human life as "a branch of natural science" (1: 2). This new branch is what Tylor calls the "science of culture," which seeks to explain the cultural differences between the "barbarous hordes" and the "civilized nations" as consequences of an uneven evolution of human culture from "primitive" conditions (1: 1, 6).Giles, for his part, clearly identified with Tylor's prescription for the "science of culture." In his introduction to Strange Stories, he describes himself as "one qualified observer who can have no possible motive in deviating ever so slightly from what his own experience has taught him to regard as the truth" (Strange 1: xvi; emphasis added). Furthermore, Giles also envisions Strange Stories as filling a significant lacuna in Tylor's scholarship—he laments that "in an accurately-compiled work such as Tylor's Primitive Culture, allusions to the religious rites and ceremonies of nearly one-third of the human race are condensed within the limits of barely a dozen short passages" (Strange 1: xv). It therefore falls to him to supply "much of what the Chinese do actually believe and practise in their religious and social life . . . in the ipsissima verba of a highly-educated scholar writing about his fellow-countrymen and his native land" (Strange 1: xv). For him, Strange Stories is, first of all, a serious work of translation dedicated to enriching the public's knowledge of the Chinese culture.This is possibly the reason Giles finds previous renditions of the Liaozhai's title—like Mayers's The Record of Marvels; or, The Tales of Genii—unsatisfactory "in the light of a translation": they give an impression of Pu Songling's collection as an entertaining book of Oriental fantasy (Strange 1: xxviii). In contrast, Giles's title avoids using terms such as "supernatural" or "marvelous" that were frequently used by Victorian translators to emphasize the otherworldliness of Oriental folklore. Instead, he uses "strange," a term that had not appeared in the title of any previous translation, to render the last character yi in Liaozhai zhiyi, while substituting the first character liao with the word "Chinese."11Giles's particular way of translating the title Liaozhai zhiyi bears heavily on his attempt to turn Pu Songling's fantasy narratives into objects of scientific study. The English word "strange" comes from the Old French word estrange (foreign, unrelated to kin; or marvelous, unusual), of which the verbal form estranger is the etymological root of the English word "estrange." Since the term can be applied to many situations that do not necessarily involve the supernatural, Giles's choice can be seen as according with his reading of many of the Liaozhai tales as narratives estranged from the situations that gave them their original significance. For him, it is this "estrangement" that turns what was originally ordinary and mundane into the strange and supernatural—a process science alone has the power to reverse; this view therefore concurs with Victorian anthropologists' pursuit of a rational explanation for so-called "superstitions."Strange Stories is actually not the only instance in which Giles tackled a Chinese strange narrative. Cambridge University Library preserves an unpublished manuscript entitled Records of Strange Nations (hereafter Strange Nations), which is Giles's annotated translation of the Ming dynasty illustrated album Yiyu tuzhi 異域圖志 (Illustrated Records of the Realms of Difference). Featuring the same character yi 異 in its title, the Yiyu tuzhi depicts in pictorial form a wide variety of mythological creatures and peoples that collectively represent a homogenized yiyu (realm of difference).12 Giles, however, in translating the title as Strange Nations, re-envisions the yiyu as the approximately 150 nationalities known to the Chinese in premodern times. He thus places new emphasis on the diversity of the various foreign lands, not their collective identity as a spatialized Other, contrasted with the civilized center of li 禮 (ritual propriety, the most important Confucian principle).Strange Nations proved of great interest to a group of ethnological and archaeological experts at Cambridge University, including Alfred C. Haddon (1855–1940), Cambridge's first university lecturer in ethnology.13 Haddon wrote the foreword to Strange Nations, where he argues that the "marvellous" arises from those moments of cross-cultural encounters, during which miscommunication and misunderstanding are prone to occur: As might be expected, there is a naive mixture of the matter-of-fact and the marvellous, but this can be matched in European books of the same period, not to mention those of Classical authors. The occurrence of one does not discredit the other, and even many instances of the marvellous might be explained rationally if further information were available; doubtless in some cases these may be attributed to difficulties in hearing the sounds of words in alien tongues and of recording them in Chinese script, even assuming that errors in later transcription have not arisen. (1)Haddon articulates here a position typical of Victorian anthropologists, namely that belief in the supernatural arises from the distortion of ordinary events in human life. To reverse these distortions, the anthropologist must either reconstruct the original context from which the real events became estranged, or look for an analogous context. The second approach was summarized as the "method of folklore" by Lang in his 1884 book Custom and Myth, which stresses the rationality of a "science of Folklore": when encountering anything that is "apparently irrational and anomalous," the folklorist will "look for a country where a similar practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people among whom it prevails" (12, 21).Giles's own description of Strange Nations echoes Haddon's hypothesis concerning the origin of the marvelous: The existence of many of these nations is duly recorded by Pliny in his Natural History, in words curiously identical with those we find in the Chinese records.Some birds and animals are given at the end of this book, the most interesting of all being an accurate picture of the zebra, here called the Fu-lu, which means "Deer of Happiness," but which is undoubtedly a rough attempt at fara, an old Arabic term for the wild ass. (China and the Chinese 59)Apparently, when attempting an explanation of the various strange creatures depicted in Strange Nations, Giles wants to leave little room for pure imagination. Instead, he sees the strange records as rooted in historical events and actual experiences of travel, a position that forms the basis of his attribution of ethnographical and folkloristic values to Pu Songling's collection.One of the two Liaozhai tales Giles initially translated and published in 1877 displays remarkable similarity to the narratives in Strange Nations. Entitled "The Lo-ch'a Country and the Sea Market" (羅剎海市), this tale relates the extraordinary overseas travels of its protagonist Ma Chun, a merchant known for his remarkable handsomeness. In one episode, Ma, following a shipwreck, is blown ashore to the Lo-ch'a country, a strange land where the monster-like indigenous inhabitants find his normally handsome features ugly, repulsive, and frightening. Giles praises this episode for its "novel character" and argues that it is "a clever amplification of Robert Burn