十二楼（简体中文版）: 中华传世珍藏古典文库

by Li Yu, 李渔

《十二楼》是李渔所著的一部中华传世珍藏的国学经典佳作，在海内外广为阅读和流传，值得细细品味。 本书为简体中文版，全本30回，由艺雅出版社精心制作。艺雅出版社还分别提供其繁体中文版与简繁体对照版，欢迎大家下载阅读。 我们的出版社致力于出版经典名著的数字化版本，每一本电子书都经过精心编辑制作，以便用户可以在所有类型的电子阅读器和设备上尽情享受阅读。

Genres: Fiction, China

189 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2006

About the author

Li Yu (Chinese: 李漁; pinyin: Lǐ Yú, given name: 仙侣 Xiānlǚ; style name: 笠翁 Lìwēng) (1610—1680 AD), also known as Li Liweng was a Chinese playwright, novelist and publisher. Born in Rugao, in present day Jiangsu province, he lived in the late-Ming and early-Qing dynasties. Although he passed the first stage of the imperial examination, he did not succeed in passing the higher levels before the political turmoil of the new dynasty, but instead turned to writing for the market. Li was an actor, producer, and director as well as a playwright, who traveled with his own troupe. His biographers call him a "writer-entrepreneur" and the “most versatile and enterprising writer of his time”.

Li is the presumed author of Ròu pútuán (肉蒲團, The Carnal Prayer Mat), a well-crafted comedy and a classic of Chinese erotic literature. He also wrote a book of short stories called Shí'èr lóu (十二樓, "Twelve Towers"). In his time he was widely read, and appreciated for his daringly innovative subject matter. He addresses the topic of same-sex love in the tale Cuìyǎ lóu (萃雅樓, "House of Gathered Refinements"). This is a theme which he revisits in the collection Wúshēng xì (無聲戲, "Silent Operas" i.e. "novels") and his play The Fragrant Companion. The painting manual Jieziyuan Huazhuan was prefaced and published by Li in Jinling.

Li was also known for his informal essays, or xiaopin (小品), and for his gastronomy and gastronomical writings. Lin Yutang championed Li and translated a number of these essays. Li's whimsical, ironic "On Having a Stomach" proposes that the mouth and the stomach "cause all the worry and trouble of mankind throughout the ages." He continues that the "plants can live without a mouth and a stomach, and the rocks and the soil have their being without any nourishment. Why, then, must we be given a mouth and a stomach and endowed with these two extra organs?" Lin also translated Li's "How to be Happy Though Rich" and "How to be Happy Though Poor", and "The Arts of Sleeping, Walking, Sitting and Standing", which illustrate his satirical approach to serious topics

Reviews

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever since I read about freedom of navigation operations, the nine dash line, and island building in the South China Sea, I’ve been fascinated by Chinese culture specifically and Eastern culture generally, or perhaps more specifically how it differs and compares to Western culture.  While I realize that these are very broad brushstrokes to paint, the anthropological evolution of what is commonly called Western Civilization is substantially different from the course followed by Eastern Civilization.  Understanding the origins of, reasons for, and modern implications of those differences (and similarities, for that matter), is fascinating to me, and a large part of why I found Great State: China and the World to be such an interesting book.

It’s also why I picked up Twelve Towers.  If there is any truth to the postulate that a culture is reflected in its art, then I thought surely a collection of Chinese “fairy tales” would offer some fascinating insights into Chinese culture.  It’s true that I learned something from this collection of short stories, but I’m not sure what it is yet.

Written in the seventeenth century, Twelve Towers was introduced to me as, more or less, a collection of children’s stories, sort of like the Chinese equivalent of the Grimm fairy tales.  I was warned that the particular translation I found took liberties, and I ought to have taken those cautions more seriously.  The translators explicitly state that they left parts out that they deemed “irrelevant or uninteresting,” and that they simplified the language and made the text more straightforward, rather than attempting a more linear conversion from the original language.  Had I enjoyed the stories more, or derived more valuable insight from this translation, I would be interested in finding a more faithful translation.

The translational liberties left me with a question at the end of the collection: how much was my confusion, and impression of poor storytelling, a result of the translation, versus my alien perspective on seventeenth century Chinese literature, versus these just being poorly constructed stories in the original form?  While the Grimm fairy tales, if we wish to use those as our Western analogue, are dark, and in some places morally questionable, they are good storytelling, a sense I did not have about any of the stories in Twelve Towers.  To me, the resolutions fell flat and improbable on my senses.

To illustrate what I mean, I will provide an example.  Most of the stories in the collection revolve around love, or at least matchmaking.  In one story, a boy buys a telescope, and uses it to spy on all of the girls in town to find the one he wants to marry.  When he finds her, he uses the telescope to spy on her, so that he knows the contents of her private writings, and convinces her that he is actually an immortal.  With this in mind, she convinces her parents, with the help of more “divine” espionage, that she must marry this supposed immortal.  Of course, on her wedding night, she finds that telescope-boy does not behave at all like an immortal ought to behave, and he confesses that he is just a disturbed voyeur with a telescope.  All of this would be fine storytelling, except for how it ends.  Instead of calling the boy out for deceiving her, and being a disturbed voyeur, the girl loves him all the more, and they decide that they should worship the telescope, and they live happily ever after.

That’s representative of the way most of these stories ended, with a resolution that seems counterintuitive to what I understand of human nature, and conveniently makes everything wrap up neatly and concisely.  The latter is not so much a problem for this style of storytelling, but the former is a problem for me.  It led me to wonder whether this was a result of my Western viewpoint, and the resolutions would not seem so counterintuitive to a Chinese reader, or if perhaps these “classics” are just not as good as they are purported to be.

The latter would not surprise me, given the biography of the author included at the beginning of the translation I read.  For all the intervening time and the difference in culture, Li Yu seemed the picture of a modern Hollywood diva.  Despite having a wife and several concubines, he claims that he has never seen a beautiful woman, or even an ordinary one.  He wrote an essay claiming that the stomach is the most useless human organ, that the Creator must have made a terrible mistake in including it, and that it is only laziness that has prevented the Creator from fixing this grievous error in judgement.  He lived lavishly on the generosity of his patrons, and frequently complained about his financial straits – he would refuse to budget, because after all it wasn’t his money, and he would then complain about how the arts were terribly underappreciated whenever he needed more money (probably to finance his ugly concubines).

While these stories provided a fair amount of amusement, mostly because of the outlandish premises and conclusions of most of the stories, I did not feel that I gained any new or interesting insights on Eastern culture or the Chinese psyche.  Whatever I may have learned from the questionable stories was undermined by the liberties taken in translation, but I did not enjoy the stories sufficiently to seek out a more reliable and honest version.  If you decide to read these, I hope that you will at least find a better translation than I did, and perhaps you will derive some insight that I did not.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compositionally speaking, these are very refined short stories. Each features a poem, a word of introduction, a story in several chapters that includes as a motif some tower/house/lodge/upper room, and a critique explaining the moral of the story. They’re pretty down to earth—in fact, they frequently show astrologers and people claiming to be immortals to be charlatans. Generally, they focus on trickery/deceit, arranged marriages, or trickery/deceit in the service of arranging a marriage. And quite a few offer puzzles for the reader to figure out before going forward in the story—one is explictly didactic in that it explains several kinds of lenses/mirrors lately available in China at the time and reveals as the solution to what happened in the story that a character had used a telescope to trick his bride-to-be into thinking he was a semi-omniscient immortal.

Incidentally, I read six of these stories in the translation by Patrick Hanan, Tower for the Summer Heat, but then sought out this edition for its completeness and was delighted to find it was so cheap on Kindle (bonus star!).