Repository path: workshop/translations/cuzhi/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

蒲松齡〈促織〉 — single-pass draft (R06)

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. R06 — lead single pass, source only, no revision. Frozen here as its own artifact before the R04 self-revision begins (R04 v1.0 §Procedure 2a).

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

Contamination: suspected, and the basis is specific and is the lead's own fault. While locating a free comparator, a grep for CRICKET over Giles's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Gutenberg #43628) printed seven partial lines of his rendering of ¶1–¶2 and the first sentence of ¶3 to the transcript before any translation was written. What was seen, verbatim: "During the reign of Hsüan Tê," · "cricket fighting was very much in / vogue at court, levies of crickets being exacted from the people as a" · "friends with the Governor, presented him with a cricket which, on" · "district to provide him with crickets; and then it became a practice" · "purpose. Thus the price of crickets rose very high; and when the" · "call for crickets, and Ch'êng, not daring to make a like call upon his". Census sites 01, 03, 05 and 06 are therefore primed, and site 03 (上官) is primed toward a specific solution — Giles's "the Governor" — which this draft did not take (it has "his superiors"), but that is a fact about the outcome and does not undo the exposure. Nothing else of Giles was opened; ¶3–¶9 were translated from the Chinese alone. The measurement against Giles is run after this file is frozen, not before, and the four primed sites are named so the measurement can be read with and without them.

The Cricket

In the Xuande years the palace took to cricket-fighting, and levied crickets yearly on the countryside. The creature is not a thing the west produces. There was a magistrate of Huayin who, wanting to make himself agreeable to 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 assess the registered adults, 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, blood and matter 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 seeing a cricket in it touched her secretly where her mind was, so she folded it away and took it home to show Cheng. Cheng turned it over and over: "Can it 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 chased 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 barely lifted his hand when 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 each other, rising and beating and making a shrill noise. 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 figured silks. 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 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 — draft (R06), frozen

Written at translation time, before any evaluation of this text was designed, and before Giles was opened past the seven lines declared above. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

1. Register floor. The source is 文言 with a plain narrative surface and sudden four-character compressions. The draft sets a mid-Victorian-plain floor — short clauses, few subordinators, and doing most of the joining — and lets the four-character sites rise above it. The alternative was a uniform contemporary plain style, which would have flattened the sites the census is about.
2. Tense and aspect. Classical Chinese marks neither; English forces both. Simple past throughout, with the historian's coda in the present. No option was live here — the decision is recorded because it is the largest thing English adds that the source does not have.
3. 售 at site 07 (composite). 操童子業，久不售 — the verb is to sell, dead as a metaphor in Chinese and used of passing an examination. Options: (a) had long failed the examinations (referent kept, figure lost); (b) had long gone unsold (figure kept, referent opaque); (c) split the two — gloss the institution, keep the commerce. Chose (c): "kept up his studies for the first degree and had long found no buyer for them." The census declared this site composite before the draft existed and the draft did in fact make two separable moves.
4. 追比 at site 10 (composite). A named procedure — periodic flogging until arrears are discharged — with no English name. Options: name it and footnote; render the process; render only the flogging. Chose the process, unfootnoted: "set a strict term and had him flogged at each default." What is lost is that this was routine and legal, not a magistrate's cruelty.
5. 連城拱璧 at site 19 (composite). The jade of He, priced at fifteen cities. Options: a priceless jade (referent dissolved); the jade of He (opaque); the middle route taken — "the jade that was worth fifteen cities" — which keeps the number, the reason the number is famous, and drops the name. 不啻 became "would have been no more to them", a separate decision from the allusion, which is what the census predicted.
6. 業根 at site 22 (composite). Buddhist karma-root as a mother's curse. "Seed of ruin" keeps the botanical figure and the moral weight and drops the doctrine. "You karmic root" was live and rejected as unspeakable in a shout.
7. 翁 at site 23 (both). The mother says 翁歸 — your father, but the word is an address-term from an older stratum. English has no word that is at once the kinship term and the register. Rendered "your father" and the register carried instead by the syntax of the threat ("he will settle this account with you himself"). The census called this both — not separable — and the draft could not separate it, which is the same observation from the inside.
8. 東曦既駕 at site 28 (composite). Xihe driving the sun. "When the Charioteer of the East had taken the reins" keeps the myth visible without naming a god the reader cannot place. The alternative — "at sunrise" — was the one the rest of the paragraph's plainness argued for and was rejected because the source raises its diction here and nowhere near here.
9. 蠢若木雞 at site 34 (composite). Zhuangzi's trained gamecock, so perfect it looks wooden; Pu Songling uses it for stupidity, inverting the original. "Stupid as the wooden gamecock" keeps the definite article's implication that there is a particular wooden gamecock, which is the only signal available that an allusion is passing.
10. The four office-words: 令 / 宰 / 撫軍 / 撫臣 / 令尹. The source names the same two men five ways. Held to two English terms — magistrate and Governor — with 撫臣 becoming "Governor-in-attendance" at site 36 only, where the edict's viewpoint makes the change of name the point. What is lost: 令尹 in the coda is deliberately archaic and reads as a Warring States word for a Chu minister, and magistrate does not archaise.
11. 卓異 at site 37. A real merit grade in the triennial evaluation of officials. Capitalised as Outstanding to mark it as a term of art rather than a compliment; 聞 taken as the causative "was reported to the throne", which is a separate decision and is made separately.
12. 異史氏曰 at site 39. "The Historian of the Strange remarks" — the persona is a deliberate echo of 太史公曰. "The Chronicler of Marvels says" was live. The tag's position and its colon-plus-quotation shape are kept because the genre signal is the shape.
13. 恩蔭 at site 40. The privilege by which a high official's descendants enter office without examination. "Hereditary bounty" keeps the inheritance and loses the office; the irony — that a cricket has conferred it — survives either way, and that is why the term was not naturalised further.
14. Measures kept, not converted. 尺有咫, 百頃, 萬椽, 千計 are rendered as measures (a foot and a span, a hundred qing, ten thousand rafters, counted by the thousand). qing is the one bare transliteration in the text.
15. 牛羊蹄躈各千計. 躈 is the anus; the pair 蹄躈 is a stock way of counting livestock by ends. "By the thousand hoof and thousand vent" keeps the oddity. "A thousand head" was the safe option and would have deleted the joke.
16. One thing left undecided in the draft, flagged here so the revision has it: 青麻頭, 油利撻, 青絲額 are cricket-varietal names. The first is rendered word-for-word (green-hemp-head), the second and third as invented-sounding English names (Oily Slick, Green Silk Brow). That is an inconsistency and the draft did not resolve it.