The Drunken Man's Talk: Tales from Medieval China.

• Author: Rao, Xiao
• Position: Book review

The Drunken Man's Talk: Tales from Medieval China. By Luo YE. Translated by ALISTER D. INGLIS. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2015. Pp. xxiii + 214. $50 (cloth); $30 (paper).

Since its discovery in Japan in the 1940s, Luo Ye's The Drunken Man's Talk (Zuiweng tanlu) has remained mostly unknown among English readers of Chinese literature. As acknowledged in the "Translator's Introduction," this eclectic collection of short stories compiled during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) provides a rare chance to take a closer look at the medieval Chinese storytelling tradition (pp. xvi-xvii). Although there have been studies and translations of medieval Chinese stories, most of them are selective. Inglis's translation of a complete collection gives readers a taste of medieval Chinese stories in their original "package."

Pieces of evidence point to the hypothesis that The Drunken Man's Talk is a sourcebook for storytellers. One of these is the division of the slim collection (about 146 entries in total) into twenty thematic categories, a characteristic that sets it apart from the genre of biji (miscellaneous writings, "notebooks") popular during that time. While a scholar-official's biji were commonly compiled for reading, the categories of Luo Ye's collection might have enabled storytellers to quickly locate a source story for their performance. Most of the themes are related to romantic affairs, but a significant number of them are jokes. Another characteristic that suggests this collection is a sourcebook for storytellers is that its language facilitates storytelling. For example, whenever Luo Ye made modifications when copying a story from the earlier Tang dynasty anecdotal collection. Record of the Northern Ward (Beili zhi), the language of the story was adjusted toward being more suitable for oral storytelling.

Regarding the translation, the idiomatic and "old-fashioned" English contributes to an immersive reading experience. The gem of Inglis's fine renditions is decidedly his translations of poems, which constitute almost a third of all the entries in the collection. Inglis's polished poetic renditions not only capture the meanings of the poems and their literary tone, but also subtly convey their rhymes. This is best demonstrated in chapter 10 (pp. 65-70), which entirely consists of poems. However, a minor incongruity remains when reading the translation side by side with the original. Although...