'That be pig-blood-red mud-earth.'

certainly no brilliant line of poetry, but it matched the friend's original line word for word and made a good couplet. And the prescience of the planchette in knowing that they would find Old Man Dong south of the town and that he would give them the line that was something truly extraordinary!

103.

DUNG-BEETLE DUMPLINGS.

Du Xiaolei lived in the hills west of Yidu. His mother was totally blind, and he looked after her with great filial devotion. Though they were a poor family, he saw to it that she never lacked good things to eat.

One day, he had to go out, and he bought some meat and gave it to his wife, telling her to make some dumplings with it. His wife was an extremely wayward and undutiful daughter-in-law, and when she chopped up the meat she threw in some bits of dung-beetle. Du's mother found the smell of the food repulsive and refused to eat it, putting it aside to show her son on his return.

His first question when he came home was 'Did you like the dumplings?'

His mother shook her head and produced the evidence. Her son opened the dumplings, and when he saw the bits of dung-beetle, he flew into a mighty rage and stormed into the bedroom, intending to give his wife a good beating. But in the end, afraid that his mother might hear, he climbed into bed and lay there brooding. When his wife spoke to him he remained silent, whereupon she became apprehensive and began pacing up and down beside the bed. After a while, Du heard a sort of panting and snorting.

'Can't you go to sleep?' he cried out. 'What are you staying awake for? A good hiding?'

There was complete silence. He rose, lit a candle and there before him he beheld a pig. Looking closer, he saw that it had two human feet, and knew that it was his wife metamorphosed.

When the Magistrate came to hear of this, he ordered the pig Caption

There before him he beheld a pig.

to be bound and paraded through the streets, as a lesson to all and sundry.

Tan Weichen saw this with his own eyes.

104.

STIR-FRY.

A certain scholar was staying in the provincial capital for the examinations, and returned to his lodgings as night was falling. He had brought back with him some lotus seeds and pieces of lotus root, which he placed on the desk in his room. He also took out a dildo he had acquired, made of rattan, and put it to soak in a bowl of water.

At that very moment, his neighbours, hearing that he was back, came round with wine to spend the evening carousing with him, and he quickly hid the bowl underneath the bed and hurried out to greet them, instructing his wife to prepare some food. After the meal, he went back into his room and shone a lamp under the bed, only to discover that the bowl was empty. He asked his wife what had happened to the contents of the bowl, and she replied, 'Oh that I cooked it just now for our guests, to go with the lotus root. Why, were you keeping it for something?'

When she said this he recalled a dish that had been set before them on the table with something black all chopped up in it, which none of them had been able to recognize. He laughed.

'You foolish woman! How could you think of serving such a thing to our guests!'

'I was wondering why you never gave me a recipe for it,' replied his perplexed wife. 'It was such a nasty-looking thing! I had no idea what it was. All I could think of doing was chopping it up into little pieces and stir-frying it...'

He proceeded to tell her what the 'nasty-looking thing' really was, and the two of them had a good laugh about it.

This man went on to become a man of rank. His good friends still joke with him about this story.

Author's Preface

Translator's Note This is a dense and highly wrought text, a 'crazy quilt of disembodied images' (Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, 1993, p. 50)). Almost every phrase contains an allusion of one sort or another, and every allusion tells a tale. It is in a sense a miniature anthology in its own right, of writers, tales and poems, all of them hinted at obliquely. The standard modern edition (Zhu Qikai, 1989) devotes a single page to the main text, followed by five pages tightly crammed with thirty-two explicatory footnotes in small type, mostly based on the glosses of Lu Zhan'en (1825). I have consulted these annotations and those of others, including Herbert Giles, Andre Levy, Jacques Dars and Chan Hingho, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Chang and Chang. My purpose in translating this Preface has not been to parade the author's learning, but to bring into focus the lineage in which he saw himself, the Chinese pedigree of his tales. We see several things in this self-portrait: a fascination with the supernatural for its own sake, an almost obsessive love of the richness of the Chinese classical language, enlivened by a pervasive and subtle sense of humour, and tinged by an intensely lyrical melancholy, a mood of 'lonely anguish and spleen'. The literary figures the author evokes (sometimes in no more than a couple of words) are his friends and mentors across the ages. At the same time (and this is typical of his extraordinary versatility) in this Preface he is 'performing' in (parodying would too strong a term) the formal, parallelistic style fashionable in his own day. I have broken the prose into lines to indicate something of this formal quality.

In my annotations I have added fragments by some of the authors referred to, to make the implied literary community more real. Today's reader, unlike the scholar-gentlemen of the late seventeenth century, cannot be expected to understand, from Pu Songling's brief and highly allusive snippets, how this lineage of writers formed a spiritual continuum and how Strange Tales evolved out of it.

The second half of the Preface is largely autobiographical. It is worth remembering that in 1679, when it was written, Pu Songling was thirty-nine years old and had only completed a part of the Strange Tales collection. Modern scholars estimate that he went on adding tales for well over twenty years.

Ivy-cloak and mistletoe-girdle!

Thus was the Lord of the Three Wards Moved to Rhapsodize.

Ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits!

Thus was the Bard of the Long Nails Driven to Versify.

Each played his 10 Pipes of Heaven, Seeking not beauty of sound, But music that is what it is For reasons of its own.

My desolate autumn firefly Is eclipsed by goblins; My insatiable speck of dust Is mocked by trolls.

My talents pale beside Those of Gan Bao, 20 Whom I follow In his quest for weird spirits.

My mood mirrors That of Su Dongpo, Whom I resemble In his love of strange tales.

Of tales told I have made a book.

With time And my love of hoarding, The matter sent me by friends 30 From the four corners Has grown into a pile.

Here in the civilized world, Stranger events by far occur Than in the Country of Cropped Hair; Before our very eyes Weirder tales unfold Than in the Nation of Flying Heads.

My irrepressible transports Are an unfettered rapture 40 That cannot be gainsaid; My far-soaring ideas, An unbridled folly That cannot be denied.

Fastidious readers of my book May mock me, Just as the tale of Five-Fathers Crossroad May be baseless But who can tell?

The tale of Three-Lives Rock 50 May contain Food for enlightenment.

My wild words Should not be put aside Because of the man Who utters them.

My father, When I was born, And the bow hung at his door, Dreamed of a sickly Buddha, 60 Cassock bare at the right shoulder, Entering the room, On one breast A plaster round like a coin.

He woke from sleep, And saw on his own newborn child A black patch.

As a child I was thin and constantly ailing.

70 I grew to manhood Ill-equipped For the battle of life.

Our home was chill, Desolate as a monastery.

I earned a living with my pen, Poor as any priest with his alms-bowl.

Often, head in hand, I would exclaim, 'Could I once In a previous life 80 Have been He who sat with his face to the wall?'

My spiritual failure in this life Surely stems from obstacles and delusions; This is Karma from a previous life.

I have been blown By the wind, Driven Like a flower against a wall, 90 Falling in the cesspit.

The Six Modes of Transmigration, Though inscrutable, Have a reason of their own.

Midnight finds me Here in this desolate studio By the dim light Of my flickering lamp, Fashioning my tales At this ice-cold table, Vainly piecing together my sequel 100 To The Infernal Regions.

I drink to propel my pen, But succeed only in venting My spleen, My lonely anguish.

Is it not a sad thing, To find expression thus?

Alas! I am but A bird Trembling at the winter frost, 110 Vainly seeking shelter in the tree; An insect Crying at the autumn moon, Feebly hugging the door for warmth.

Those who know me Are in the green grove, They are At the dark frontier.

Written on a spring day,

in the eighteenth year of the Kangxi reign [1679].

NOTES.

Lines 14 Ivy-cloak... Rhapsodize: The opening line (the exact identity of the plants is unsure) comes from 'The Mountain Spirit', one of the rhapsodic Nine Songs in The Songs of the South, written by Qu Yuan and other poets from the southern cultural region of Chu in the fourth to third centuries BC (see David Hawkes (trans.), The Songs of the South (Harmondsworth, 1985); also extracts in John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (eds.), Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York and Hong Kong, 2000), I, pp. 23764). This shamanistic collection ushered in one of the two main traditions of Chinese poetry the personal, lyrical tradition, as opposed to the more folkloric tradition of the ancient anthology known as the Book of Songs, which became a Confucian classic. David Hawkes speculates that 'The Mountain Spirit' may have been addressed to the Lady of Gaotang, a fertility goddess whose physical union with the King of Chu on Mount Wu (Shaman Mountain) in 'the clouds of morning and the rain of evening' gave rise to the standard Chinese euphemism for sexual intercourse, 'the clouds and the rain'. The poem ends (in Hawkes's version, p. 116): The thunder rumbles; rain darkens the sky: The monkeys chatter; apes scream in the night: The wind soughs sadly and the trees rustle.

I think of my lady and stand alone in sadness.

In these very first lines of his Preface, Pu Songling is inscribing himself in the 'unorthodox' lineage of China's first shamanrhapsodist, Qu Yuan, the Lord of the Three Wards (this was supposed to have been his official title), whose poems were always considered 'strange'. At the same time he identifies himself with Qu Yuan's melancholy, and echoes his disenchantment with a corrupt society. According to venerable tradition, Qu Yuan, who had been a prominent minister of the southern state of Chu, was banished by his king and committed suicide by throwing himself into the river.

Lines 58 Ox-ghosts... Versify: The Bard of the Long Nails, Li He (790816), of the late-Tang period, is often referred to in Western studies of Chinese literature as the Chinese type of the poete maudit (which can be roughly paraphrased as a 'doomed poet with a vision so intense the world will destroy him if he does not destroy himself'). Andre Levy calls Li a Chinese Rimbaud, while of his English transla-ors, Angus Graham compares him to Baudelaire, and John Frodsham prefers to evoke John Keats. 'He [Li] is half in love at times with easeful death. He wrote in the shadow of the grave: and no philosophy, no religion, no consoling belief could quite keep out its ineluctable cold' (J. D. Frodsham, Goddesses, Ghosts and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (London, 1983), p. lviii). In his biography in the New Tang History (ed. Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi (1060)), Li is described as having been 'frail and thin, with eyebrows that met together and long fingernails'. He loved writing about weird and exotic subjects, and became known as the 'demon talent'. 'He felt himself already half way across the boundary between the living and the dead' (A. C. Graham (trans.), Poems of the Late T'ang (London, 1965), p. 90). But he was equally obsessed with the subtle sensuality and fragrance of the living. 'Fine food and wine, music, rich silks and brocades, jewels, and beautiful women figure prominently in his verse' (Frodsham, Goddesses, p. xxiv). His fellow poet Du Mu (80352), in his Preface to Li's Collected Verse, places him in the tradition of Qu Yuan and The Songs of the South, adding that 'whales yawning, turtles spurting, ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits cannot describe his wildness and extravagance.' The expression 'ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits' came to stand for the supernatural and the fantastic generally. (By an interesting twist, in modern 'revolutionary' times, it came to denote politically 'bad' and unregenerate elements, 'ugly' fellows such as landlords, rich peasants and counterrevolutionaries.) Among Li's best-known poems is 'Song of Magic Strings', which includes these memorable lines: Cassia leaves stripped by the wind, Cassia seeds fall, Blue racoons are weeping blood As shivering foxes die.

On the ancient wall, a painted dragon, Tail inlaid with gold, The Rain God is riding it away To an autumn tarn.

Owls that have lived a hundred years, Turned forest demons, Laugh wildly as an emerald fire Leaps from their nests.

(Frodsham, Goddesses, p. 166) Pu Songling was himself a prolific poet and wrote poems imitating Li's style. He shared Li He's obsessive (driven) interest in the supernatural.

Lines 910 Each played... Heaven: Another of Pu Songling's revered mentors, the early Taoist mystic and zany storyteller Zhuangzi (fourth century BC), describes the adept Ziqi of South Wall sitting leaning on a table, breathing slowly, clearly in some sort of a trance: he has heard the Music (literally, the Pipes) of Heaven (or Nature), and is in tune with it. When his disciple asks him what he means by this transcendental music, Ziqi replies, 'It blows on the Ten Thousand Things in a different way, so that each can be itself' (compare Graham's translation in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 21920). In other words, when we hear the Pipes of Heaven, everything sounds as it is by its very nature. It is an inner music that wells up of its own accord.