The late-imperial legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, the Butterfly Lovers--a story as central to Chinese culture as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is to Western culture--also relates a tale of two lovers help apart by social strictures. To audiences of the many Chinese ballads, plays, and films based on the story, the tragic ending offers proof that equality and happiness can only be achieved in a China freed from the traditional family system.
This volume offers translations of the earliest versions of the popular ballad along with later literary reinventions of the tale; a variety of related documents reveal the historical and cultural origins of the legend. In his Introduction, Wilt L. Idema provides essential contextual information and discusses how the story of the Butterfly Lovers fits into modern Chinese concepts of gender roles and sexual freedom. The Butterfly Lovers: The Legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: Four Versions with Related Texts
The gender of it all Paperback The Butterfly Lovers, one of the great stories in Chinese tradition, is often compared to Romeo and Juliet, which this story predates by at least 700 years. The tale of Zhu Yingtai, who disguises herself as a young man in order to study, and Liang Shanbo, her sworn brother until he learns the truth too late, is one of the world's great tragic love stories, kept alive through the centuries in the most popular forms of Chinese traditional storytelling: ballads and operas.
This scholarly/literary study of the narrative begins with a fascinating survey of the various forms the story has taken, followed by four complete translations of different versions from the 13th Century onwards, followed by another five brief or incomplete versions. It's fascinating to see how many elements remain in common through the various retellings, as well as to compare embellishments. While in every version Shanbo doesn't learn the truth of Yingtai's identity until too late, the circumstances of his arrival in her village and his subsequent death from a broken heart vary from version to version. Later, when Yingtai throws herself into Shanbo's open grave, some tales have shred from her garments transform into butterflies, while in others, the butterflies emerge from the crypt. The most interesting embellishment appears in The Account of the Peony in Appendix 4, in which a lengthy epilogue follows the lovers through purgatory and resurrection.
This book is recommended for scholars and those like me, fascinated by the story after having seen full-length opera versions many times. The translations are clear and readable, poetic and occasionally humorous. The main disappointment for me is that all the featured versions are short, around 30 pages each, while the version with the most literary appeal, The Account of the Peony is a translation of only the final act. I'm still wishing for a proper translation of a full-length libretto of one of the many Chinese opera versions. Paperback
Wilt L. Idema ñ 0 review
