Following is a web-publication of the 3rd edition of Herbert Giles’ translation of P’u
Sung-ling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, published in 1916. I read ghost
stories in the Halloween season every year, and last year decided I would read P’u
Sung-ling’s Strange Stories, and then, since it wasn’t available on the web (as far as I
could see), thought I would scan it as I read it, and put it on my website. I include
Giles’ notes, introduction and appendices. The notes for each story are found after the
story.
Giles was a great sinologist, but published the first edition of Strange Stories from a
Chinese Studio in 1880, during the Victorian era.1[1] Thus, he left out many stories
that were erotic or which were viewed as offensive, and he excised erotic or offensive
passages from the stories he did translate. Two fine modern translations of P’u Sung
Ling will give the reader a much more “complete” view of P’u: Denis C. & Victor H.
Mair’s Strange Tales from Make-do Studio (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989)
and John Minford’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Penguin Classics 2006).2[2]
For examples of passages excised from stories, see “The Painted Wall” and “The
Painted Skin” below, in which I have included some of the excised passages, as
translated by the Mairs and Minford, in footnotes.
Nevertheless, Giles, for all his Victorian reserve, is a great translator, and his notes are
superb, offering us an erudite, sometimes practical (as Giles lived for many years in
China), and always fascinating introduction to Chinese culture, literature, philosophy,
folklore and history.
Of course, the translator’s notes are secondary to the Strange Stories themselves.
These stories are almost all fantastic, but nevertheless offer a panoramic and almost
realistic view of Chinese culture, from government hierarchy to the examination
system to religion and ceremonial actions to favorite methods of relaxation (drinking
bouts through the night, often with supernatural visitants, are common) to typical
patterns of family life.
