Poetic Allusions and Erotic Content: Investigating the Translation of The Peony Pavilion from Cultural and Linguistic Perspectives

The Peony Pavilion is considered one of the best-known and most successful works of Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), the great late Ming Chinese dramatist and a contemporary of William Shakespeare. It enjoys a high standing due to its skilful combination of Chinese aesthetic aspirations, the poetic drama form and traditional operatic performance with music and dance. The play has been translated into English by various scholars. Given the abundance of convoluted poetic allusions conveying erotic content in The Peony Pavilion, the translation of this Chinese classic has attracted critique and interest from cultural and linguistic perspectives, thereby drawing attention to the differences between China and the Western world in the perception of eroticism and sexuality.
Scene 17 of The Peony Pavilion, where Tang parodies the classical Confucian catechism Qianziwen to pejoratively characterise a vulgar Taoist nun, is especially difficult to translate. In Tang’s time, Qianziwen was used to teach young children Chinese characters. In addition to its use as introductory Chinese language teaching material, it provided information on concepts related to the universe, nature, history, general education, virtues, values and morals. Therefore, it was highly regarded in traditional Chinese society. Along with two other classics, The Hundred Surnames (also mentioned in Scene 17 of The Peony Pavilion) and Three Character Classic, it was considered essential to the shaping of individuals’ (especially children’s) values, morals and virtues. Tang twisted the text into its polar opposite: from embodying the pureness of education for innocent children to conveying eroticism, and from instructing readers on respectable morals to portraying despicable obscenity. Such twisting demonstrates Tang’s talent for wordplay. While his audience might have been shocked by this twisting of the solemn and educational nature of Qianziwen into something considered offensive and in bad taste, they might also have found it highly amusing. In addition, Tang’s work stands out as a coded challenge to the orthodox moralistic doctrine of his time. Due to this cultural and semiotic context, the twisted Qianziwen phrases are extremely difficult to translate, if not untranslatable.
This study compares and contrasts the approaches adopted by renowned Western sinologist Cyril Birch and distinguished Chinese scholar Wang Rongpei in their translations of the source text, taking into consideration that it has been deemed both taboo and untranslatable. Two main conclusions are drawn from the analysis. First, it would be inappropriate to decide which translation is better, as both have their merits and unique characteristics. Pertinent to our discussion are views about translating into and out of the translator’s mother tongue. Translation involves comprehension of the source language and expression of the source text in the target language. While translators who are native speakers of the source language may be better at understanding the source text, they do not necessarily enjoy an advantage when expressing the material in the target language compared with a native speaker of the target language. Second, while it is generally believed that Chinese translators handle sex-related materials by deploying subtle insinuations, in contrast to Westerners who use more explicit expressions, our comparative study suggests that this assumption is overgeneralised. Every translator has their own way of conveying the poetic sensitivity of erotic allusions, and the translation of sexually taboo words can be seen as a testing ground for translators to demonstrate their skilfulness in balancing eroticism, vulgarity and aesthetics.