Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.

Some books are so bad that the reviewer scarcely knows where to begin detailing their faults, or if there is even reason to bother. Most books, like most lives, are a mix of high intention and expedient compromise, of tempting promise and unfulfilled realization, offering scope both for measured plaudits and spirited dispute. And a few books, very few, are so good that one simply wants to enthuse over them. Stephen Durrant's book on Sima Qian is one of the latter.

Although this volume contains well-chosen and beautifully accomplished English renderings of numerous passages from the Chinese, it is not meant to be an addition to the already substantial list of Western-language translations from Sima Qian's (145-86? B.C.) magnificent history of China from the beginning to his own day, the Shi ji (as, e.g., the contributions of Chavannes, Bodde, Watson, the Yangs, Viatkin, Dawson, the Nienhauser group). Rather, it is "an essentially literary study" (p. xviii) which, through close reading and careful philology, illumines key sections of Sima Qian's writings as points of inescapable, potent complication for both the man and the historian: "the text that is his life and the text that is his history resonate with one another, contain parallel themes, and reflect similar tensions" (p. 1). Accordingly, Durrant begins with Sima Qian's verbal creation of himself, as presented in the autobiographical postface of Shi ji and in the famous "Letter in Response to Ren An." Much read as these two important documents have been, no previous examination of them is as sensitive as Durrant's in probing the social and psychological pressures that must have weighed on Sima Qian when, as he describes, he accepted at age thirty-five his father's deathbed injunction to continue and complete the historical project that the latter had left unfinished, and when he submitted at age forty-seven to the humiliating punishment of castration (instead of committing honorable suicide) for a court offense, so that he might live to fulfill the vow made to his father.

We are familiar with Sima Qian's view that great writing derives from great suffering. In the first of the six chapters that make up Durrant's book are evoked the human, as well as the literary, impulses leading to this view - a view that would later be assumed by centuries of Chinese literati. The motif of fa fen the need to express one's frustration, to release one's pent-up emotions, is critical to understanding...