Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection

Stories to Awaken the World, the first complete translation ofXingshi hengyan, completes the publication of the famous three-volume set of Feng Menglong's popular stories in vernacular Chinese. These tales, which come from a variety of sources (some dating back centuries), were assembled and circulated by Feng, who not only saved them from oblivion but raised the status of vernacular literature and provided material for authors of the Ming (13681644) and Qing (16441911) novels to draw upon. This trilogy has been compared to Boccaccio'sDecameronand the stories ofA Thousand and One Nights. Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters the stories in this collection provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming dynasty. The longest volume in the trilogy,Stories to Awaken the Worldis presented in full here, including sexually explicit elements often omitted from Chinese editions. Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang have provided a rare treat for English readers: an unparalleled view of the art of short fiction from seventeenth-century China. As with the first two collections in the trilogy,Stories Old and New(2000) andStories to Caution the World(2005), their excellent renditions of the forty stories in this collection are eminently readable, accurate, and lively. They have included all of the poetry that is scattered throughout the stories, as well as Feng's interlinear and marginal comments, which convey the values shared among the Chinese cultural elite, point out what original readers of the collection were being asked to appreciate in the writer's art, and reveal Feng's moral engagement with the social problems of his day. Unquestionably, the Yangs's translations rank among the very finest English versions of Chinese fiction from any period. Feng Menglong (15741646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of Chinese popular literature of his time, is best known for his three collections of vernacular stories, now commonly known as theSanyan. Shuhui Yang is professor of Chinese at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Yunqin Yang is a simultaneous interpreter in the United Nations Secretariat. Together, they translated Feng'sStories Old and New (Gujin xiaoshuo)andStories to Caution the World (Jingshi tongyan).