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

蒲松齡〈種梨〉 — lead single-pass draft (R06)

Source. 蒲松齡《聊齋志異》卷一〈種梨〉, 575 characters entire, from zh.wikisource.org (聊齋志異/第01卷), saved verbatim at workshop/experiments/E-20260816g-device-function/materials/zhongli-zh.txt, with the Wikisource editor's Chinese glosses retained separately at …/zhongli-zh-glossed.txt. The glosses are non-translational apparatus (commentary on the source language) and R04 §Procedure 1 permits them.

Regime. R06 v1.0 — lead single pass, source only, no revision. This file is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure 2a; the revision is T-zhongli-R04-v1, written after this file was committed.

Contamination: suspected, unmeasured at the time of writing. Giles's 1880 rendering of this tale ("Planting a Pear-tree") exists and is freely readable; it was downloaded to a scratch file without being displayed before translation began and was not read. The tale is famous and a remembered rendering cannot be ruled out. The measurement against Giles is reported on T-zhongli-R04-v1 and was run after both files were committed.

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

Planting Pears

A countryman was selling pears in the market. They were sweet and fragrant, and the price had gone up. A Taoist in a torn kerchief and a wadded gown was begging in front of the barrow. The countryman snapped at him and he would not go; the countryman lost his temper and began to curse him. The Taoist said: "There are several hundred on this barrow. This old monk begs one only. It is no great loss to your worship. What is there to be angry about?" The bystanders urged him to set out a poor one and let the man go, but the countryman held out and would not.

A hired man from one of the stalls, who could not bear the squabbling, brought out money, bought one, and handed it to the Taoist. The Taoist bowed his thanks and said to the crowd: "One who has left the household does not know how to be grudging. I have fine pears. Let me bring them out and serve the company." Someone said: "If you have them, why not eat your own?" He said: "I only needed this pip for seed." With that he took the pear in both hands and ate it in great mouthfuls, and when it was nearly gone he held the pip in his hand, unslung the mattock from his shoulder, dug a hole in the ground a few inches deep, put it in, and covered it with earth. He asked the market people for hot water to water it. A busybody got boiling water from a shop on the road, and the Taoist took it and soaked the hole. Ten thousand eyes were fixed on the place. A crooked shoot came up; it grew; in a moment it was a tree, branch and leaf spreading; in a flash, flowers; in a flash, fruit — huge and fragrant, hanging thick over the whole tree. The Taoist then went up to the crown and picked and bestowed them on the onlookers, and in a moment they were gone. That done, he took the mattock to the tree; chock, chock — it was a long while before it came down; and with the leaves still on it he shouldered it and walked off at his ease.

When the Taoist first set to work, the countryman had been among the crowd too, craning his neck and staring, and had clean forgotten his own trade. Once the Taoist had gone he looked at last at his barrow, and the pears were gone. Only then did he understand that what had just been handed round was all his own. Looking closer, one of the barrow's handles was missing, freshly hacked off, and his heart filled with rage. He went quickly after him; and turning the corner of a wall, there was the broken handle thrown down at the foot of it, and he knew then that the pear-trunk that had been felled was this very thing. Of the Taoist there was no sign. The whole market was one laugh.

The Historian of the Strange says: The countryman was muddle-headed; his foolishness you could have scooped up in your hands; that the market laughed at him — there was reason in it. I have often seen men in the villages who are called well-off: a good friend begs a little rice and they go sour in the face and reckon it up — "That is several days' keep." Or they are urged to help someone in danger, to give a meal to some solitary creature, and again they reckon it angrily — "That is food for ten men, or five." It goes so far that fathers and sons, brothers and brothers, weigh out the last grain against each other. But let gambling and lust turn their heads and they empty the purse without grudging; let knife and saw come to the neck and there is no delay in buying life back. Cases of this kind are past telling. That the countryman was a fool — what is there in that to wonder at?

Translator's log

Written at translation time, before the revision, and frozen. Decisions and alternatives, not quality claims.

• E1 老衲. The beggar is a 道士, a Taoist, and calls himself 老衲 — a Buddhist monk's self-designation, from the patched robe. Options: silently regularise ("this poor Taoist"), keep the mismatch ("this old monk"), or gloss. Kept as this old monk, unregularised; a reader of the Chinese meets the same oddity.
• E2 居士. A respectful address to a lay person. Your worship was chosen over sir to keep the deference audible; sir is the flatter option and remains live.
• E3 咄之. 咄 is a sharp monosyllabic cry of dismissal. Rendered as snapped at him; shouted him away and told him to be off were both live and both add an object the Chinese does not have.
• E4 萬目攢視. 攢 is to cluster, to converge. Drafted flat as were fixed on the place, which loses the converging and keeps the ten thousand.
• E5 倏而花，倏而實. Two three-character clauses, identical frame, verb-final. Kept as an English parallel with the noun in the verb's place — in a flash, flowers; in a flash, fruit — which is the one place in the draft where the Chinese figure survives whole.
• E6 丁丁. Onomatopoeia for an axe. Chock, chock. English has no idiomatic axe-noise that is also a word; thud and chop were rejected as naming the act rather than the sound.
• E7 從容徐步. Two disyllables, unhurried + slow-paced. Drafted as the single idiom at his ease, collapsing both.
• E8 一市粲然. The whole market was one laugh. 粲然 is the broad smile; the Chinese predicates it of the market itself, and the English keeps the market as subject rather than saying the people laughed.
• E9 憨狀可掬. Literally the foolish look could be scooped up in the hands — a fossil idiom for a quality so palpable you could take it in your palms. Kept literal.
• E10 異史氏曰. The Historian of the Strange says. Pu Songling's signature coda formula, modelled on 太史公曰 in the Shiji. Rendered as a title, not a name.
• E11 The coda's register. The last paragraph is a different kind of Chinese from the tale — argumentative, parallel, quoting imagined speech. The draft lets the English go correspondingly periodic without marking the change any other way.