The Water Margin
Aug. 28th, 2006 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranAs the old saying goes: "Without coincidence there would be no story."
Lately, I've been reading Outlaws of the Marsh, better known as the Water Margin, the famous Yuan dynasty novel set in the time of the Song.
It's actually quite interesting how similarly it reads to Dumas, at least in translation. If you could imagine Dumas writing about Robin Hood and his merry men, only with a good deal more puns, profanity and murder, and magic, and set in China, then you might be close.
Like with Dumas, the stories and characters all have an engrossing quality to them. They're real stories. Not "real" as in realistic, but as in the type of stories that get passed by word of mouth from one person to the other. Did you hear about Lu Da and the time he pulled up the willow tree? How about the time that rogue Ximen hired Mistress Wang to help him seduce the Elder Wu's wife? They're unashamed crowd-pleasers, deliberately over-the-top, and they have the feeling of stories honed by oral tradition.
These stories are rarely weak enough to be harmed by knowing the endings - in fact the chapter titles often giveaway the plot, and the Chinese version had poems at the front of each which basically spoilered the whole chapter. The fun is not just in finding out what happens, but in seeing it happen. There are also some examples here of the characters discussing a plan in elaborate detail, then executing said plan, without any sense of anticlimax.
It's also interesting to compare the level of description given with that used in modern fantasies. There are far fewer descriptions of settings and places, and yet there is a very strong sense of place. Even though the intended Yuan dynasty audience was a lot closer than we are, it's still possible to get a good sense of what things looked and felt like. This is aided somewhat by the use of detached omni - the intrusive narrator can fill his streets with characters and stories, where a camera-eye pov would still be trying to describe a streetscape and come up for a way the viewpoint character can learns the names of the next three people they're going to meet.
The use of a somewhat distant omni also fits well with the exaggerated nature of the storytelling. There are lots of cases where plausibility has been sacrificed for the sake of a good story and where it doesn't pay to look to close. In this regard, the whole affair is something like a puppet show. The suspension of belief is there because the lure to believe is so strong, not because the puppets are realistic.
Lately, I've been reading Outlaws of the Marsh, better known as the Water Margin, the famous Yuan dynasty novel set in the time of the Song.
It's actually quite interesting how similarly it reads to Dumas, at least in translation. If you could imagine Dumas writing about Robin Hood and his merry men, only with a good deal more puns, profanity and murder, and magic, and set in China, then you might be close.
Like with Dumas, the stories and characters all have an engrossing quality to them. They're real stories. Not "real" as in realistic, but as in the type of stories that get passed by word of mouth from one person to the other. Did you hear about Lu Da and the time he pulled up the willow tree? How about the time that rogue Ximen hired Mistress Wang to help him seduce the Elder Wu's wife? They're unashamed crowd-pleasers, deliberately over-the-top, and they have the feeling of stories honed by oral tradition.
These stories are rarely weak enough to be harmed by knowing the endings - in fact the chapter titles often giveaway the plot, and the Chinese version had poems at the front of each which basically spoilered the whole chapter. The fun is not just in finding out what happens, but in seeing it happen. There are also some examples here of the characters discussing a plan in elaborate detail, then executing said plan, without any sense of anticlimax.
It's also interesting to compare the level of description given with that used in modern fantasies. There are far fewer descriptions of settings and places, and yet there is a very strong sense of place. Even though the intended Yuan dynasty audience was a lot closer than we are, it's still possible to get a good sense of what things looked and felt like. This is aided somewhat by the use of detached omni - the intrusive narrator can fill his streets with characters and stories, where a camera-eye pov would still be trying to describe a streetscape and come up for a way the viewpoint character can learns the names of the next three people they're going to meet.
The use of a somewhat distant omni also fits well with the exaggerated nature of the storytelling. There are lots of cases where plausibility has been sacrificed for the sake of a good story and where it doesn't pay to look to close. In this regard, the whole affair is something like a puppet show. The suspension of belief is there because the lure to believe is so strong, not because the puppets are realistic.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-28 11:17 am (UTC)I have the Weir translation, but I'd really like a better one.
I adore those stories.
I imprinted on the old Japanese TV series The Water Margin at an impressionable age.
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Date: 2006-08-28 08:17 pm (UTC)To quote from the Preface:
"One is struck, in reading the novel, by the "modernity" of the dialogue. It isthe concepts, the life-style, that are archaic and strange. A fairly straightforward English, therefore, not too sharp or slangy, was adopted -- balanced by the knowledge that we are dealing with twelfth century Chinese individuals, each of different temperament, degreee of education and station in life."