Tang Studies

Tang Studies 8-9 (1990-91) Another Go at the Mao Ying chuan ELLING O. EIDE I recently had occasion to fish out and freshen up a translation of Han Yu's Mao Ying chuan ^ ^ ^ that I had laid aside some twenty years ago. I offer it here in the thought that others might find it useful (or at least amusing) to see my attempt at making the effect of the puns and wordplay in that comic pseudo-biography accessible to the general reader. The piece is, of course, particularly awkward to translate because the wordplay involves personal and proper names. To make matters worse, even the classical Chinese only just barely lets Han Yu get away with treating rabbits and rabbit fur as if the two categories were identical. As will be obvious, I have cheerfully bent my rule that "a translator should not get in the way/' and have shamelessly intruded to create new names and ersatz literary allusions . I feel better about this than might otherwise be the case because there now exist at least two excellent, scholarly translations of the piece: one by James R. Hightower in "Han Yu as Humorist/' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44.1 (1984), 5-27, and the other by William H . Nienhauser, Jr., "An Allegorical Reading of Han Yu's 'Mao-Ying Chuan' (Biography of Fur Point)/' Oriens Extremus 23.2 (1976), 153-174. M y notes here below are only those that might be wanted for the general and rather casual reader. I have followed the text established by Kao Pu-ying i ^ i i in his Tang-Sung wen chii-yao JSsfc £ Bm, vol. 1 (Peking: Chung-hua, 1963), 260-269, preferring two or three minor variants from the Wen-yuan ying-hua, 793.9b-lla. 107 Eide: Mao Ying chuan The Biography ofTipp O'Hair by Han Yii (768-824) Tipp O'Hair was a native of Chung-shan. His ancestor, Perspicacity D. Cottontail, assisted Emperor Yii in governing the East2 and was conspicuous for his role in providing sustenance to the tenthousand creatures. In recognition of this he was enfeoffed with the House of Coney, and, at his death, he became one of the Twelve Calendrical Divinities.3 Perspicacity once said, "My children and grandchildren, as the descendants of a divinity, should not be like common creatures; let them therefore be born from the mouth/'4 And it was so. Eight generations removed from Perspicacity was a descendant named Leveret. Tradition holds that he lived at Chung-shan during the Shang dynasty and acquired the arts of the spirits and immortals so that he could obscure the light and have a mysterious effect on things. To spy on the moon princess, Ever Beautiful,5 he rode away to the moon on the back of the Lunar Toad. Thereafter his descendants lived in retirement and did not serve. Some say, however, that there was a Wylie Hare living at Eastside, a clever fellow and an excellent runner, who once had a contest with the greyhound Lu This biography of the first writing brush is written in imitation of the biographies in the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien (died about 85 B.C.), China's first great historian, who bore the title of Lord High Astrologer. In Chinese cosmology the East is governed by the cyclical sign mao W, the sign of the rabbit. The "House of Coney" in the next sentence translates what is literally "the land of inao." The Chinese calendrical system uses twelve cyclical signs ("terrestrial branches") associated with animals, among which the rabbit is the fourth in the sequence. There was a Chinese tradition that the rabbit conceived by sucking its fur and gave birth by spitting its young out of its mouth. One guesses that this belief had its origin in a combination of folk etymology and observation: the word for "rabbit" & is homonymous with the verb "to spit" tt, and a doe rabbit will pull out some of her belly fur to line her nest. The Chinese may also have misconstrued their observation of a frightened doe eating her newborn young. In Chinese myth the moon is inhabited by Ever Beautiful...