Wilt L. Idema has been doing yeoman work in recent years with his translations of Chinese literature. The two books reviewed here are part of his effort to bring the classic texts of Chinese popular literature to an English-speaking audience.
The White Snake and Her Son is a popular story of an “admirable demon [who is a snake] who loves her victim” that has been “continuously rewritten as a vernacular story, a novel, a string ballad, a precious scroll, and many other genres of balladry” (xi). The genre of the precious scroll, which provides the source text for the core translation in the book, is probably the least well-known outside of Chinese studies. Precious scrolls are vernacular religious scriptures that lay outside of the canonical Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist scriptures; the closest analogue in Western religious literature would be the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the Bible. Idema translates versions of the story from eleven different sources, including The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak, as well as vernacular versions of the legend.
The Butterfly Lovers is a well-known story about two lovers who, though destined for each other, cannot have each other in this life. The story tells the tale “of a smart young girl in a traditional society who wants to pursue a higher education. Dressed as a young man she achieves that aim...[though] she falls in love with a fellow student who also falls in love with her.” On returning home, the young woman finds that she has been engaged to another man. Her fellow student/lover then dies of longing for her (xi). The versions end in various ways, in one the woman leaps into her lover’s grave, and thousands of butterflies then emerge from the grave. As with The White Snake and Her Son, this story appears in many genres in Chinese popular literature, including drama and ballad. Idema translates nine of these versions in the book.
Both books have very useful introductions that give a careful background survey of the stories and their variants in Chinese literature and folklore. Both books end with a good bibliography concerning their respective stories in both Chinese and Western languages.
These are very readable translations, and either book would serve well as a textbook in Chinese folklore or religion classes as well as a sourcebook for the comparativist (like the reviewer) who knows little or no Chinese.
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[Review length: 395 words • Review posted on March 2, 2011]