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The Cream of Chinese Classics I
5 Classics of Chinese literature: Dream of the Red Mansion, Outlaws of the March, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdom, and the Scholar, all in abbreviated bilingual editions.
2655 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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October 20, 2014
I've finished the first volume of this collection yesterday: The very first time I really read a whole novel in Chinese - well, a bilingual edition that was, for sure, otherwise it wouldn't have been possible. Anyway, I was starting right with the summit of Chinese fiction, 红楼梦 / The Dream of the Red Chamber (sometimes also published as The Story of the Stone). This edition here is a mixed bag: It is heavily abbreviated without disclosing this in any way. They should at least have summed up the parts that they omitted. So this edition is not to be chosen if you want to get the original work. On the other hand it's not without merit: It enables a foreigner like me to have a rather long glance at the work without being drowned and overwhelmed. I've read a German translation of it around ten years ago, I've read this abbreviated Chinese-English version now. I'll be ready to get at the full monty in another ten years.
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The second volume has the same flaws of abbreviation as the one mentioned above. Yet the story of the "Three Kingdoms" (三国演义) really surprised me in how captivating it was. As a pacifist something that sounds like "war literature" is not necessarily what would draw our attention easily. But on the other hand war has always been a companion of human history, and if you want to win over your enemies, you should know how they work.
While reading the Three Kingdoms, I often compared with Homer's Iliad. And I must say: The Iliad is much inferior to this great war epos of Chinese literature. Whereas in the ancient Greek saga the Gods are interfering all the time and preventing that ordinary humans deal autonomously, the Three Kingdoms are nearly free of this flaw. Besides a few shamanistic scenes where commanders are trying to influence the weather conditions, this book is not only down-to-earth, it is a large panorama of human behavior, thinking, scheming, tricking. And yes, more than those, it has wisdom - especially, but not exclusively, in the strategies of the famous character Zhuge Liang.
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The third volume then came rather as a disappointment: When hearing that "The Journey to the West" is the legendary story about the monk Tang Sanzang and how he went to India to fetch the Buddhist scriptures, one would expect a book that is talking about virtue, somehow. Well, it doesn't. Or at least not in a modern sense. The book tells you, whom the reader is supposed to consider to be a good person, and whom the reader is supposed to consider to be a bad person. But if the book didn't tell you, you could never distinguish them. There's nothing clearly good in the behavior of the good. They're just as bad or evil as anyone else.
I believe this edition here has suffered very severely from the abbreviations, but after this experience I'm not sure I would like to touch the complete one...
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The last volume, The Scholars (儒霖外史), is a novel which is only of historical interest, not of a literary one. We learn that scholars/officials were mainly interested in money and business - what a surprise! We hear nearly nothing about the content of those scholars' studies. This edition also suffers from the same problem of the others: It is randomly abbreviated. The original novel is probably already rather episodic - in this version it has no coherence at all.
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The second volume has the same flaws of abbreviation as the one mentioned above. Yet the story of the "Three Kingdoms" (三国演义) really surprised me in how captivating it was. As a pacifist something that sounds like "war literature" is not necessarily what would draw our attention easily. But on the other hand war has always been a companion of human history, and if you want to win over your enemies, you should know how they work.
While reading the Three Kingdoms, I often compared with Homer's Iliad. And I must say: The Iliad is much inferior to this great war epos of Chinese literature. Whereas in the ancient Greek saga the Gods are interfering all the time and preventing that ordinary humans deal autonomously, the Three Kingdoms are nearly free of this flaw. Besides a few shamanistic scenes where commanders are trying to influence the weather conditions, this book is not only down-to-earth, it is a large panorama of human behavior, thinking, scheming, tricking. And yes, more than those, it has wisdom - especially, but not exclusively, in the strategies of the famous character Zhuge Liang.
-----
The third volume then came rather as a disappointment: When hearing that "The Journey to the West" is the legendary story about the monk Tang Sanzang and how he went to India to fetch the Buddhist scriptures, one would expect a book that is talking about virtue, somehow. Well, it doesn't. Or at least not in a modern sense. The book tells you, whom the reader is supposed to consider to be a good person, and whom the reader is supposed to consider to be a bad person. But if the book didn't tell you, you could never distinguish them. There's nothing clearly good in the behavior of the good. They're just as bad or evil as anyone else.
I believe this edition here has suffered very severely from the abbreviations, but after this experience I'm not sure I would like to touch the complete one...
-----
The last volume, The Scholars (儒霖外史), is a novel which is only of historical interest, not of a literary one. We learn that scholars/officials were mainly interested in money and business - what a surprise! We hear nearly nothing about the content of those scholars' studies. This edition also suffers from the same problem of the others: It is randomly abbreviated. The original novel is probably already rather episodic - in this version it has no coherence at all.
Displaying 1 of 1 review