"I was looking for the breath of life / a little touch of heavenly light"

[larryhammer]

In John Minford's translation of Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Penguin Classics), in the story "Grace and Pine," a character encounters a book titled Jottings from a Distant Realm, which is glossed in the endnotes with:

An echo of an actual work of the Mongol dynasty, recounting expeditions into fairy realms. Here it is a condensed and elegant way of indicating that Kong has entered an otherworldly (fox-spirit) dimension. (p.512)

Does anyone have ANYTHING elucidating this? What's the original title, and is it available in English?

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'd like to know, too! And I want to know what's meant by "fairy realms"--in what I've read, fairies are often in/from what's translated into English as "heaven."

(The only Yuan-era thing I know, and glancingly, is this (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~asia/24ParagonsFilialPiety.html), which seems unlikely to be your elucidation target--though it is intriguing that one of the paragons meets a fairy in this hard to follow post (http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?/topic/19982-story-of-dong-yong-%26-33891%3B%26-27704%3B-and-7th-fairy-%26-19971%3B%26-20185%3B%26-22899%3B/). In the first link, said fairy is called an immortal. Is this translator's license or a different word in the Chinese-lang versions? Zhuge Liang is an immortal, at times.)

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the original sentence is:

案頭書一冊，簽雲：《琅嬛瑣記》。

And then at this site:

http://yizitong.com/common/content.php?poetry_id=1639&content_id=22&o=%E4%BD%A9%E5%88%80&l=3

... I found this note on that title:

琅璫瑣記：虛擬的書名。古有筆記小說《琅璫記》三捲，舊題元伊世珍作。書首載西晉張華遊神仙洞府“琅璫福地”的傳說，因用“琅璫”為書名。書中所記多為神怪故事，所引書名也前所未見。這裏以“琅璫瑣記”代指奇書秘籍。

So the claim here is that the real book was "琅璫記" by 伊世珍, but poking around on the Googles also yields spellings such as "琅環記", "琅嬛記", "琅邪記" (unless these are all different books by the same dude). For what it's worth, "琅環記" seems to be the preferred spelling in Japanese sources. Didn't see anything about a translation into any other language. --Matt

[larryhammer]

Whee -- that's interesting. Pity about the apparent lack of translations.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

My earlier comment doesn't appear--LJ marked it as spam, I think. (Not that it's actually helpful anyway.)

[larryhammer]

!!

Stupid LJ.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, I left a comment too, and I answered the first half of the question! (Couldn't find anything approaching a translation, though.) --Matt

[larryhammer]

LJ is being wonky, clearly. No spam notice showed up for you either, until just now.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

The non-link redaction of my earlier comment: is there a distinction in the texts between "fairy" and "immortal," or is the distinction merely translator's license? Fairy realms would seem otherwise to be what's sometimes called heaven in English translation, no?

A Yuan-era thing is The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, which I linked and flagged as probably unhelpful; I don't know it well. There's a chinahistoryforum post that I'm also not allowed by LJ to link which gives a version of Dong Yong's tale with a fairy weaver. But that's where I wondered in the original comment about translator's license.

Do you see comments flagged as spam? I can see my own on the post page, but the page doesn't count it in the comment tally.

brief response on way out the door

[larryhammer]

Usually, yeah, I do see comments flagged as spam -- nothing's showed up for this one, though. ETA: spam notice just showed up.

I am very vague on just when "fairy" is or is not an appropriate translation, and for that matter of what. I'll look for that title.

---L.