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

〈王六郎〉 — Pu Songling, "Wang Liulang" (R04)

Source. 蒲松齡 Pu Songling (1640–1715), 《聊齋志異》 卷一 〈王六郎〉, c. 1680. Public domain. 1,533 characters, four paragraphs. Text established from two witnesses with two emendations: ../provenance.md.

Regime R04 v1.0 — lead close translation, source only. Draft frozen first as T-wang-liulang-R06-v1 (../R06-v1/translation.md, commit 548d73f); this is the self-revision of that draft against the source.

Language pair. Classical Chinese → English. The project's second translation from Chinese (after T-yingyi-jiejixing-R04-v1, S044, which was Lu Xun's modern polemical prose) and its first from classical Chinese.

Contamination: none — MEASURED, not asserted. contamination.md carries the gate. Summary: against Herbert Giles's "The Fisherman and his Friend" (1880), freely reachable and therefore usable as a real comparator, the selection gate on paragraph 1 — run before paragraphs 2–4 were drafted — returned a longest shared run of 6 tokens and 0 shared 7-grams, against a floor of 7 for the same translator against himself on other tales in the same volume. The whole-work figure is in contamination.md §4. One priming exposure is declared there: Giles's English of a different tale in the same collection was read while surveying candidates, which is why that tale was not the one used.

Paragraphing follows the source: four paragraphs, no splitting, no merging.

Translation

A man named Xu lived in the northern outskirts of Zi and made his living by fishing. Every night he carried wine down to the river and drank while he fished. Before drinking he would pour a libation on the ground and pray over it, "Let the drowned ghosts of this river drink." He made a regular practice of it. Other men fished and got nothing at all; Xu alone filled his basket. One evening, while he was drinking by himself, a young man came up and lingered at his side. Xu pressed a drink on him, and he fell to willingly and drank along with him. But the whole night passed and not one fish was taken, and Xu was much cast down. The young man got up and said, "Let me go down below and drive them up for you." And off he went, light as a leaf. In a little while he was back. "A great run of fish is coming," he said. And sure enough there was a sound of smacking and gulping. Xu lifted his net and took several, all of them over a foot. Overjoyed, he thanked him. As he was about to go home he offered him some of the fish. He would not take them, and said, "I have presumed on your good wine again and again, and such a trifle as mine is hardly worth calling repayment. If you do not disdain me, we should make a lasting thing of it." Xu said, "We have shared a single evening. How can you say again and again? If you are willing to come always, that is what I should most wish; but I am ashamed to have nothing to make a friendship of." He asked his surname and style-name. The man said, "My surname is Wang. I have no style-name. When we meet you may call me Wang Liulang." And they parted. The next day Xu sold his fish and laid in more wine than usual. Toward evening he came to the riverbank, and the young man was there before him, and they drank together in good spirits. After a few cups he would always go and drive the fish for Xu.

So it went for half a year. Then all at once he said to Xu, "Since I was favoured with the sight of your face, our feeling has gone beyond flesh and blood. But the day of our parting is at hand." His voice was full of grief. Xu asked in alarm what he meant. Twice he began and stopped, and then he said, "With a friendship such as ours between us two, perhaps you will not be startled to hear it. Since we must part, there is no harm in telling you plainly: I am in fact a ghost. I always had a weakness for wine; I fell in dead drunk and was drowned, and I have been here some years now. Those fish you took, when you alone did better than other men — I drove them to you in secret, to repay the wine you poured out. Tomorrow my term is up, a substitute is due, and I go to be born again. We have only tonight together, and I cannot help being moved." Xu was very frightened at first; but they had been close so long that his fear did not last. He sighed too, and poured out wine, and said, "Drink this, Liulang, and do not grieve. To meet and be parted so soon is grief enough; but your term is full and your bondage is over, and that is properly a thing to be congratulated on. Grief is out of place." So they drank their fill. Then Xu asked, "Who is the substitute?" He said, "Watch from the bank, elder brother. At high noon a woman will cross the river and drown, and she is the one." When they heard the village cocks crow, they parted in tears. Next day he kept a careful watch by the river to see the marvel. Sure enough a woman came carrying a baby, and at the water's edge she fell in. The child was flung up onto the bank and lay waving its hands and kicking its feet and wailing. The woman went under and came up again and again — and then all at once, streaming wet, she pulled herself out up the bank, lay on the ground a little to rest, took up the child and went straight off. While she was drowning Xu's heart could not bear it and he thought of running to save her, but it came to him that she was the one who was to take Liulang's place, and so he checked himself and did not save her. When she came out by herself he wondered whether the words had not come true. Toward dusk he fished at the old place. The young man came again and said, "We are together once more, and there will be no more talk of parting." Xu asked why. He said, "The woman was already my substitute; but I pitied the child in her arms — for her to stand in for your younger brother, a single man, would have cost two lives, and so I let her go. When there will be another substitute I cannot say. Or perhaps the tie between us two is not yet used up?" Xu said with feeling, "This is the heart of a man of humanity. It may reach the Lord on High." And they were together as before. Some days later he came again to take his leave. Xu supposed a substitute had been found after all. He said, "No. That one thought of pity did in the end reach Heaven. I am appointed Earth God of Wu Town in Zhaoyuan County, and I take up the post tomorrow. If you do not forget an old friend, come once and see me, and do not shrink from the length of the road." Xu congratulated him: "That an upright man like you should become a god is a great comfort to the heart. But the road of men and the road of gods lie apart; and even if I did not shrink from the length of it, what could come of it?" The young man said, "Only come. Do not trouble about that." He said it again and again, and went.

When Xu got home he wanted to pack at once and go east. His wife laughed at him: "It is several hundred li from here; and supposing the place exists, I am afraid a clay image will not be able to hold a conversation with you." Xu would not listen, and got all the way to Zhaoyuan. He asked the people who lived there, and there was indeed a Wu Town. He found the place, set down his load at an inn, and asked where the shrine was. His host started and said, "Might the guest's surname be Xu?" Xu said, "It is. How did you know?" And the host said, "And might the guest's town be Zi?" "It is. How did you know?" The host did not answer, but hurried out. Presently men came carrying children, and young wives and girls peeped from the doorways, and they came crowding in until they stood about him like a wall. Then they told him: "Some nights ago the god said to us in a dream, 'My friend Xu of Zichuan will be here shortly; you may help him with his travelling money.' We have been waiting for you this long while." Xu thought this strange too. So he went and made offering at the shrine and prayed: "Since I parted from you, sir, you have not left my mind waking or sleeping, and I have come this distance to keep the old promise. And you have been so good as to show me to the people here in a dream; the gratitude of it is graven on my heart. I am ashamed to have nothing handsome to bring, and have only a cup of wine; if you do not disdain it, let us drink as we drank on the river." When the prayer was done he burned paper money. Presently a wind got up behind the seat, whirled about for a while, and then dispersed. That night he dreamed the young man came to him, dressed in cap and gown, trim and fine and quite unlike his old self, and thanked him: "You have taken the trouble to come so far to ask after me, and my joy and my tears come together. But I hold a petty office and it is not convenient to meet face to face; we are a foot apart and there are rivers and mountains between us, and it grieves me. The people here have a small gift for you, a poor return for our old friendship. When you fix a day to go home, I shall come and see you off." He stayed several days. The people pressed him warmly to stay, asking him in the morning and inviting him at evening, several hosts in a day. Xu firmly declined and made to go. Then they folded up notes and brought out bundles, vying with one another to give him parting presents, and before the morning was out his bag was full of them. Old servants and small children all gathered, and they made the road-offering and saw him out of the village. Suddenly a ram's-horn wind got up and went along with him for ten li and more. Xu bowed twice and said, "Take care of yourself, Liulang! Do not trouble to come so far. Your heart is a kind one, and you will bring blessing to your district without an old friend telling you so." The wind circled a long while and then went. The villagers too turned back sighing and wondering. Xu went home. His household grew somewhat easier and he fished no more. Afterwards he would ask people from Zhaoyuan about him, and they said the god answered prayer as an echo answers. Some say it is Shikeng village in Zhangqiu. Which is right is not known.

The Chronicler of the Strange says: To have got up among the blue clouds and not to forget the poor and the low — that is why he is a god. Do the great personages in their carriages nowadays still recognise the man in the bamboo hat? In my own district there was a man living retired whose household was very poor. He had a friend from childhood who held a fat post, and reckoned that if he went to him he would surely be looked after. He strained every nerve to fit himself out and travelled a thousand li — and was utterly disappointed; he emptied his purse and sold his mount before he could get home again. A cousin of his, a great joker, wrote a Monthly Ordinance to mock him: "In this month the elder brother arrives; the sable cap comes off, the canopy is not raised, the horse turns into a donkey, and the boots fall silent." The thought of it is worth a laugh.

Translator's log

Frozen 2026-07-28, before E-20260728f-nonlead-items dispatched any call and before any site in this text had been extracted or classified. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims. Any evaluative sentence here is internal-judgment-only, and the front matter carries that flag for the page.

Numbering is continuous. D01–D09 are decisions taken in the draft; D10–D22 are decisions taken or changed in the self-revision; D23–D31 are standing policies that govern many sites at once.

The one structural fact about this pair, stated first because most of the log is a consequence of it

Classical Chinese marks social relation entirely in the lexicon. It has no politeness morphology whatever — no honorific verb forms, no addressee-raising affixes, no T/V inflection. Where Japanese would raise a verb and Russian would switch a pronoun paradigm, this text switches a word: 僕 for I, 君 or 兄 for you, 弟 for me again, 客 for you-in-the-third-person. Every one of those is a content word doing deictic work.

That has a consequence for the target which is the reverse of the usual one: English is not short of the words; it is short of the convention. "Your servant" and "your younger brother" exist in English and are dead. So the loss here is not that the target lacks a form — it is that the target's equivalents are period-marked in a way the source's are not. The source's 僕 is neutral, unremarkable, what a polite man says. Any English rendering of it is either invisible ("I") or costumed ("your servant").

Draft decisions

D01. 淄 vs 淄川. The source uses the clipped 淄 twice (「家淄之北郭」, 「得勿客邑為淄」) and the full 淄川 once, in the god's dream-speech (「淄川許友」). Kept as "Zi" and "Zichuan", preserving the source's own alternation, on the reading that the god uses the full official name and the neighbours use the short one. Alternative considered and rejected: "Zichuan" everywhere, which reads better in English and flattens the register difference.

D02. 字 (style-name). 「詢其姓字」 / 「姓王，無字」 rendered as "surname and style-name" / "I have no style-name". The institution is retained bare. What it costs: a reader who does not know what a 字 is gets a word and not the fact — that a man with no style-name is a man with no standing, which is the information the exchange actually delivers, and which is why Wang offers a birth-order name instead. This is the cultural-mediation outcome the typology calls preserved-inert: the form retained, the function lost. Glossing it in-text was considered and rejected as too heavy for a two-clause exchange.

D03. 六郎 → "Liulang". Transliterated, not calqued. Alternative: "Wang the Sixth", which carries the function (a birth-order designation, i.e. still not a name) at the cost of the sound and of the vocative in 「六郎珍重」. Transliteration was chosen for consistency with 淄, 招遠, 鄔鎮, 章丘 — the same policy for all proper nouns — and the cost is recorded here rather than argued away. It is the same preserved-inert outcome as D02, arrived at by a different route.

D04. 土地 → "Earth God". Calqued, with the office kept in its full administrative form: "Earth God of Wu Town in Zhaoyuan County". Alternatives: "tutelary god" (accurate, generic, loses the earth), "Tudi" (copy-opaque), "local god" (loses the office). The calque was chosen because the joke of the tale is bureaucratic — a drowned drunk is given a post — and the post has to read like a post.

D05. 土偶 → "a clay image". The wife's word for the god. Calqued flat; the contempt is carried by "will not be able to hold a conversation with you" rather than by the noun.

D06. 羊角風 → "a ram's-horn wind". Transparent calque, unglossed. Alternative: "whirlwind", which is what it is. The calque was kept because the source scaffolds it itself four lines later — 「風盤旋久之」, the wind circles a long while — so the reader is told what kind of wind it is without the translator saying so.

D07. 上帝 and 帝天 kept distinct. "the Lord on High" and "Heaven". The source uses two names four lines apart and I kept two. "God" was rejected outright: it imports a monotheism the tale does not have.

D08. 異史氏曰 → "The Chronicler of the Strange says". Pu Songling's own signature, modelled on 太史公曰 in the Shiji. Alternatives: "The Historian of the Strange" (the usual English), "The Recorder of Marvels". "Chronicler" was chosen over "Historian" because 異史 is a book of the strange, not the discipline of history.

D09. 月令 → "a Monthly Ordinance". Calqued on the Yueling chapter of the Liji, and the parody's opening formula 「是月也」 rendered "In this month" to match. The reader who does not know the Yueling gets a mock-solemn calendar entry, which is most of the joke; the reader who does gets the parody.

Revision decisions

D10. 拜識清揚. Draft: "Since I came to know your bright face". Revised: "Since I was favoured with the sight of your face". 清揚 is a deferential term for the addressee's countenance; "bright face" retains the image and loses the deference, and the deference is the point of the phrase in a farewell speech. The revision buys the register with an English periphrastic ("was favoured with") and keeps the face.

D11. 兄 → "elder brother", kept literal. 「兄于河畔視之」 — the ghost addressing Xu. English "elder brother" reads as literal kinship and is therefore mildly odd. Kept anyway, and this is the one decision in the text where I chose oddness deliberately, because of D12.

D12. 弟, and the reason D11 came out as it did. Draft: 「代弟一人，遂殘二命」 → "to take one life in my place would have destroyed two". That rendering deleted 弟. Revised: "for her to stand in for your younger brother, a single man, would have cost two lives". 兄 and 弟 are one device used twice, three pages apart: the ghost calls Xu elder brother and then calls himself your younger brother, and the second only works if the first is there. Rendering 兄 idiomatically ("my dear fellow") and 弟 as "me" would have cost nothing locally and destroyed the pair.

D13. 僕 lost twice, and not compensated. 「皆仆之暗驅」 and 「僕憐其抱中兒」 both come out as plain "I". This is inconsistent with D12 in principle and the inconsistency was deliberate. 兄/弟 is a paired device across two speeches and survives translation as a pair; 僕 is a single-word register marker with no English slot, and the available renderings — "your servant", "this humble person" — are costume. So one honorific is kept and another is dropped inside one text, which is exactly the non-uniform handling of a coherent class that consistency's S013/S017/S018 note records in seven published translators and now in this one. (Evaluative: I think the pair was worth more than the marker. internal-judgment-only.)

D14. 君 comes out five ways and only one of them is marked. 君 occurs at 「為君驅之」, 「前君之獲魚」, 「別君後」, 「君正直為神」, 「君心仁愛」 and is rendered "you", "you", "you, sir", "an upright man like you", "your". The one marked rendering is in the prayer at the shrine, where the register is highest. This is the S013 finding happening again in a fifth pair: meaning carried by a systematic device becomes lexis, and what applied at every occurrence becomes intermittent. Recorded rather than repaired; repairing it would mean "sir" five times, which is a different and worse text.

D15. 客 → "the guest", kept. Draft: "Would the gentleman's surname be Xu?" Revised: "Might the guest's surname be Xu?" The innkeeper addresses his lodger in the third person as 客, which is both a deference and a role. "The gentleman" is an English substitution that keeps the deference and loses the role; "the guest" is odd English and keeps both. Chosen for the same reason as D11.

D16. 區區 disambiguated. Draft: "Such a trifle as this — how is it worth calling repayment?", which could be read as referring to the fish Xu is offering. It refers to Wang's own small service. Revised: "such a trifle as mine is hardly worth calling repayment".

D17. 祗候已久 → "We have been waiting for you this long while". 祗 (reverently) dropped. The villagers are being reverent toward a man they have never met because a god told them to; the reverence is in the situation and does not survive as an adverb.

D18. 敬伺河邊 → "kept a careful watch". Same shape as D17: 敬 dropped. "Reverent watch" was tried and reads as devotion where the source has care.

D19. 感篆中懷 → "the gratitude of it is graven on my heart". 篆 is seal-script; the metaphor is engraving. Kept, because English has the same dead metaphor alive enough to carry it.

D20. 傘蓋 → "the canopy", not "the umbrella". Draft had "umbrella". 傘蓋 in the mock-almanac is a rank marker — the ceremonial canopy that goes with office — and "umbrella" makes it weather.

D21. 靴始收聲 → "the boots fall silent". Draft: "the boots begin to make no sound", which is a literal reading of 始…收聲 and is not English. The line means his swagger stops.

D22. 戴笠人 → "the man in the bamboo hat", unglossed. The allusion is to the Yue proverb 「君乘車，我戴笠，他日相逢下車揖」 — you in your carriage, I in my bamboo hat; when we meet again you will get down and bow. A target reader gets the image and the contrast with 車中貴介 in the same sentence, and does not get the proverb. Glossing it was rejected because the sentence is already doing the proverb's work by putting carriage and hat side by side, which is presumably why Pu Songling could use the tag bare.

Standing policies

D23. Proper nouns are transliterated (pinyin, no diacritics): Xu, Wang Liulang, Zi, Zichuan, Zhaoyuan, Wu Town, Zhangqiu, Shikeng. 鄔鎮 is half-calqued as "Wu Town" because 鎮 is a settlement grade and reads as one.

D24. 里 kept as "li", unconverted. The one place a distance matters (「隨行十餘里」, 「奔涉千里」) it matters as an exaggeration, not as a quantity. Contrast A-garnett-vanka's measure-conversion (пудового → "forty-pound"), which the typology names as the most thoroughly domesticating move available; not taken here.

D25. Ritual vocabulary is calqued, not substituted: 酹 "pour a libation", 祝 "pray", 焚錢紙 "burned paper money", 祖送 "made the road-offering", 祠 "shrine", 再拜 "bowed twice". None is glossed. 祖送 is the one that will read as opaque; the alternative, "saw him off with a farewell sacrifice", explains and lengthens.

D26. Kinship-specific nouns are generalised once and kept once. 媳女 → "young wives and girls" generalises 媳 (daughters-in-law) to relation-neutral; 族弟 → "a cousin" generalises the clan relation. Against that, 兄/弟 (D11–D12) is kept exact. The line I drew: kinship terms used referentially are generalised, kinship terms used as address or self-designation are kept.

D27. 蒼頭稚子 → "Old servants and small children". 蒼頭 fuses grey-headedness and servitude in one word; English splits it and I took both halves. The alternative, "greybeards and children", loses the servitude and makes them villagers rather than household staff.

D28. Speech is not marked as archaic. No "thee", no inversions, no "'tis". The source's classical register is the ordinary written register of its time and place, not an archaism, and the Beowulf cell's finding that archaism buys inheritability back (A-beowulf-ingeld, S018) does not apply here, because there is no reflex vocabulary to be bought back.

D29. Sentence shape. Classical Chinese runs short parallel clauses without connectives. I have kept the clause order and supplied English connectives ("and", "but", "then") rather than splitting into more sentences, so the paragraph shapes match the source's four. The one place I did not is 「婦沉浮者屢矣，忽淋淋攀岸以出」, where an em-dash carries the 忽.

D30. 雲 at 「其靈應如響雲」 is the quotative 云, not a cloud; rendered by attributing the sentence ("they said the god answered prayer as an echo answers") rather than by a tag.

D31. Nothing is footnoted. The artifact carries no apparatus, so every mediation decision above had to be taken inside the sentence or not taken.

What I did not resolve

• Whether "Liulang" or "Wang the Sixth" is right (D03) — this is a real fork and I took one side on a consistency argument, not on a reading of the tale.
• Whether D13's inconsistency is defensible — one honorific kept, another dropped, in one text, by one translator, in one sitting. I have a reason for it and the reason is local to each site, which is precisely the pattern consistency §S017 records a translator reporting while committing it. That is now two translators reporting it, which is not evidence of anything except that the report reproduces.