Repository path: workshop/translations/cuzhi/R04-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

蒲松齡〈促織〉 — lead close translation (R04)

Source. 蒲松齡《聊齋志異》卷四〈促織〉, 1,828 characters entire, from zh.wikisource.org (聊齋志異/第04卷), saved verbatim at workshop/experiments/E-20260731b-figure-audit/materials/cuzhi-zh.txt.

Regime. R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only, draft then self-revision. The draft is frozen separately as T-cuzhi-R06-v1 (commit bb7cc1d), written and committed before this revision began, per R04 §Procedure 2a.

Lineage. T-cuzhi-R06-v1 → this. Fifteen substitutions, applied mechanically from a written list so the diff is auditable rather than described; 2,268 → 2,280 words.

Cost. $0. Lead translation is free and is never ledgered (charter §3, A4).

Contamination: suspected. The basis is stated in full on the draft and is not softened here: seven partial lines of Giles's rendering of ¶1–¶2 and the opening of ¶3 were printed to the transcript by a grep while the comparator was being located, before anything was written. Census sites 01, 03, 05 and 06 are primed. ¶3–¶9 were translated from the Chinese alone. The longest-common-run measurement against Giles is reported at wiki/findings/results/RS-20260731b-figure-audit.md §5 and was run after this file was frozen.

The Cricket

In the Xuande years the palace took to cricket-fighting, and levied crickets yearly on the countryside. The insect is not native to these western parts. There was a magistrate of Huayin who, wanting to curry favour with his superiors, sent one up; it was set to fight and proved able, and on that account a regular supply was required of him. The magistrate passed the requirement down to the village heads.

The idle sporting fellows of the market, when they got a good one, caged and fed it, raised its price, and hoarded it as rare merchandise. The village clerks, who were sly, used the business as a pretext to lay assessments on the adult males on the rolls, and every single cricket demanded would drain the property of several households.

In the county there was a man called Cheng Ming, who kept up his studies for the first degree and had long found no buyer for them. Being a stiff, tongue-tied sort, he was reported by the crafty clerks to fill the office of village head, and though he schemed a hundred ways he could not get free of it. Before the year was out his slender property was eaten away. When the cricket levy came round, Cheng did not dare assess the households, and having nothing to make the shortfall good with, he was so sick with worry that he wanted to die. His wife said: "What good is dying? Better go and hunt one yourself — there is a chance in ten thousand." Cheng thought her right. Out at dawn and back at dusk, carrying a bamboo tube and a brass-wire cage, he probed under stones and opened up holes in broken walling and thick grass; there was no method he did not try, and nothing came of it. Even when he caught two or three they were poor weak things and did not meet the specification. The magistrate set a strict term and had him flogged at each default; in a little over ten days he had taken a hundred strokes, pus and blood ran between his thighs, and he could not so much as walk out to catch a cricket. Turning from side to side on his bed, he thought only of making an end of himself.

Just then a hunchbacked medium came to the village who could divine by the spirits. Cheng's wife got the fee together and went to consult her, and found girls in red and white-haired women packing the doorway. Going in, she found an inner room with a curtain hung across it and an incense table set outside the curtain. Those who came to ask lit incense in the tripod and bowed twice. The medium, at the side, gazed into the air and prayed on their behalf, her lips parting and closing on words nobody could make out, while they all stood stiff and listened. After a little a paper was thrown out from behind the curtain, and it told the asker's own inward business without a hair's breadth of error. Cheng's wife laid her money on the table, burned incense and bowed. In the time it takes to eat a meal the curtain stirred and a scrap of paper fell. She picked it up and looked: not writing but a picture. In the middle was drawn a hall and pavilion like a temple; behind it, under a little hill, strange rocks lay scattered, and a thicket of thorns stood needle upon needle, with a Green Hemp-Head crouching there; beside it a toad, as though about to leap and dance. She turned it over and could make nothing of it. But the cricket in it went straight to where her mind already was, so she folded it away and took it home to show Cheng. Cheng turned it over and over in his mind: "Can this be telling me where to hunt the creature?" He studied the scene closely — it was strikingly like the Great Buddha Hall east of the village. So he forced himself up, leaned on a stick, and took the picture round behind the temple, where an old tumulus rose thick with growth. Walking along the mound he saw squatting stones lying scale upon scale, exactly as in the picture. He went slowly through the weeds with his head turned to listen, like a man looking for a needle or a mustard seed; and heart, eye and ear all gave out, with no trace or sound at all. He was still groping blindly when a warty toad suddenly hopped away. Cheng, more startled still, went after it fast. The toad went into the grass; following the track and parting the stems he searched, and saw a cricket crouching at the root of a thorn. He pounced at once, and it went into a hole in the rock. Tickling with a pointed grass would not bring it out; he flooded the hole from his bamboo tube, and out it came. It looked splendidly strong. He ran it down and had it. Examined: a great body, a long tail, a blue neck, gold wings. Overjoyed, he caged it and went home, and the whole household kept holiday: the jade that was worth fifteen cities would have been no more to them. He put earth in a bowl and reared it there on crab-white and chestnut-yellow, guarding and cherishing it to the last degree, keeping it against the appointed day to stop the mouth of the office.

Cheng had a son of nine, who watched till his father was out and stole the bowl open. The cricket sprang and bounded straight out, too quick to catch; by the time he had it in his hands its leg was off and its belly split, and in a moment it was dead. The boy was frightened and went crying to his mother. Hearing it, her face went the colour of dead ash, and she cried out at him: "Seed of ruin! Your day has come! When your father is home he will settle this account with you himself." The boy went out in tears. Before long Cheng came in, and his wife's words fell on him like ice and snow. He raged and demanded the boy; the boy was nowhere, and no one knew where he had gone. Presently they found his body in the well. At that his rage turned to grief, and he beat the ground and cried till he was past crying. Husband and wife each turned to a corner; no smoke rose from the thatched house; they faced each other in silence, with nothing left to lean on.

As the day was closing they took the boy up for a straw burial, and touching him found his breath faintly coming and going. Delighted, they laid him on the couch, and at midnight he came round, and their hearts were a little eased. But the boy was blank and wooden in his wits and lay breathing shallowly, wanting only to sleep. And Cheng, looking at the empty cricket cage, found his breath cut and his voice swallowed; he no longer gave a thought even to the boy, and from dark to dawn his lids never met. When the Charioteer of the East had taken the reins, he lay rigid in a long misery. Suddenly he heard a cricket chirping outside the door. He started up and peered, and there the creature was, plain as life. He went for it gladly. It chirped and then hopped off, and it went fast. He clapped his palm over it: empty, as though nothing were there. He had no sooner lifted his hand than it vaulted away again. He chased hard, turned the corner of the wall, and lost it. Casting about, he saw a cricket squatting on the wall. He looked at it carefully: short and small and a blackish red — not at all the other. Cheng, because it was small, thought poorly of it, and only wandered and stared about looking for the one he had been chasing. The little cricket on the wall suddenly leapt down into his sleeve. Looking at it: shaped like a mole-cricket, plum-blossom wings, a square head and long shanks — it had the look of a good one. He was pleased and took it in. Meaning to present it at the magistrate's hall, he was uneasy and afraid it would not do, and thought to try it in a fight and see.

A young man in the village with a taste for the sport had trained up a cricket he called Crabshell Green, which fought the other lads' crickets daily and never lost. He wanted to hold it for profit and set his price high, and nobody would buy. He came straight to the cottage to call on Cheng. Seeing what Cheng was keeping, he covered his mouth and went off in a stifled chuckle. Then he brought out his own and put it into the comparing cage. Cheng looked at it — huge, long and grand — and grew the more ashamed of himself, and dared not match them. The young man pressed him hard. Cheng considered: keeping a poor thing would come to nothing in the end; better stake it for a laugh. So they put the two together into the fighting bowl. The little cricket crouched and did not move, stupid as the wooden gamecock. The young man laughed again, loudly. He tried teasing its antennae with a hog's bristle: still it did not move. The young man laughed again. Teased again and again, the cricket flew into a rage, ran straight in, and the two closed and struck at one another, rising and beating their wings and making a din. In a moment the little one sprang up, spread its tail, stretched its antennae, and bit clean into its enemy's neck. The young man, badly frightened, separated them and called a halt. The cricket lifted itself and chirped in triumph, as if reporting to its master. Cheng was overjoyed.

They were still admiring it together when a chicken came by at a glance and went straight in with a peck. Cheng stood aghast and cried out. By luck the peck missed and the cricket hopped off a foot and a span. The chicken came on strongly and pressed after it, and the cricket was under its claw. Cheng, taken all at once, had no idea how to save it, and stamped and went white. Then he saw the chicken stretch its neck and thrash about; going up to look, he found the cricket fastened on its comb, biting hard and not letting go. Cheng, more astonished and pleased than ever, picked it up and put it in the cage.

The next day he presented it to the magistrate. The magistrate, seeing how small it was, scolded him angrily. Cheng told him what it could do; the magistrate did not believe him. It was tried against the other crickets, and every one of them went down; tried against a chicken too, and it was just as Cheng had said. So he rewarded Cheng and sent the cricket up to the Governor. The Governor was delighted, presented it to the throne in a gold cage, and set out its powers in a detailed memorial. Once it was inside the palace, every tribute creature in the empire — butterfly, mantis, Oily Slick, Green Silk Brow, all the strange sorts — was tried against it, and none came out above it. Whenever it heard the sound of zithers it would dance in time, which made them wonder at it the more. His Majesty was greatly pleased, and by edict bestowed on the Governor-in-attendance famous horses and robes of satin. The Governor did not forget where it had come from, and before long the magistrate was reported to the throne as Outstanding. The magistrate, pleased, released Cheng from his office, and further put a word to the Education Commissioner that he be entered in the county school. A year and more later Cheng's son came back to his senses and said of himself: "I was turned into a cricket, light and quick and good at fighting; only now have I woken." The Governor too rewarded Cheng handsomely. Within a few years he had a hundred qing of land, ten thousand rafters of halls and towers, and cattle and sheep counted by the thousand hoof and thousand vent. When he went out, his furs and horses outdid the old established houses.

The Historian of the Strange remarks: "The Son of Heaven happens to use a thing once, and likely enough has forgotten it before the moment is past; but those who carry out his word make it a standing rule. Add to that the greed of officials and the cruelty of clerks, and the people pawn their wives and sell their children day after day with no end to it. So every half-step the Son of Heaven takes bears on the lives of the people, and is not to be treated lightly. Only, this man Cheng was made poor by the yamen vermin and rich by a cricket, and goes about in furs and horses with his head high. When he was village head and taking his floggings, could he have thought it would come to this? Heaven, meaning to repay a man of long-suffering honesty, went so far as to let the Governor and the magistrate both come in for the cricket's hereditary bounty. It is said: when one man ascends, his very fowls and dogs go immortal with him. It is true indeed!"

Translator's log — revision (R04), frozen

The draft's log at T-cuzhi-R06-v1 is the record of the first pass and is not repeated. This records only what the revision changed and why, written before any evaluation of this text was designed. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

The revision was small and that is a finding about the regime rather than about the text. Fifteen substitutions over 2,268 words — 0.7% of the words moved. Every earlier R04 in this project revised more. What follows is the whole list, grouped.

1. The inconsistency the draft flagged and did not resolve (draft log item 16). 青麻頭, 蟹殼青, 油利撻, 青絲額 are cricket-varietal names and the draft rendered the first in lower case as a description (green-hemp-head) and the others as capitalised names. Resolved toward names: Green Hemp-Head, Crabshell Green, Oily Slick, Green Silk Brow. The rule chosen is that a fancier's varietal is a proper name in English even where it is transparent in Chinese, because the transparency is what makes it look like a description and an English reader will not otherwise know that a class of insect is being pointed at rather than a colour. What this costs: in ¶3 the name now arrives inside a picture drawn by a spirit, where the reader has no way to know it is a variety at all, and capitalisation is doing work the source does not do.
2. Four accuracy corrections against the source, made on re-reading, not on style. - 此物故非西產 — the draft's "not a thing the west produces" reads as a claim about manufacture. 產 here is native to, and 西 is Shaanxi specifically. → "The insect is not native to these western parts." - 欲媚上官 — 媚 is to flatter or fawn, not to be agreeable. → "curry favour with." - 假此科斂丁口 — the draft's "assess the registered adults" lost the fact that 丁口 is a fiscal category, not a group of people. → "lay assessments on the adult males on the rolls." - 詔賜撫臣名馬衣緞 — 衣緞 is garments and satin; "figured silks" invented a texture the source does not specify. → "robes of satin."
3. 膿血流離 → pus and blood. The draft had "blood and matter", a nineteenth-century euphemism that came from the register floor rather than from the source. The source is not euphemistic here and the revision stops being so.
4. Three rhythm changes and one aspect change, all in the direction of a shorter unit: "seeing a cricket in it touched her secretly where her mind was" → "the cricket in it went straight to where her mind already was"; "He chased it down" → "He ran it down"; "rising and beating and making a shrill noise" → "rising and beating their wings and making a din" (振奮 is wing-work, and the draft had generalised it away); "He had barely lifted his hand when" → "He had no sooner lifted his hand than".
5. One comma and one pronoun: a comma after the Charioteer clause, and each other → one another for two combatants.

What the revision did not touch, and the reason is the same in every case. None of the twelve census sites declared composite was changed. The draft's decisions at 售, 追比, 連城拱璧, 業根, 東曦, 木雞, 卓異, 異史氏, 恩蔭 and the varietal list all stood on re-reading — except where item 1 above changed the presentation of the varietals without changing the rendering. That is the opposite of what the drafter expected while drafting: the sites that took the longest to decide were the sites the revision found nothing to do at, and the changes came from plain misreadings of common words (產, 媚, 衣緞) that had not felt like decisions at all. internal-judgment-only.

One thing the revision noticed and deliberately left. 令尹 in the coda is an archaism — a Warring States word for a Chu chief minister, used here of a county magistrate — and both the draft and the revision render it the magistrate, flattening it into the same word used for 宰 and 令. An archaising English equivalent was live (the prefect, the county lord) and was rejected because it would have introduced a third office where the source has two men. The loss is recorded rather than repaired.