Riddles in Jin Ping Mei

Jin Ping Mei cihua 金瓶梅詞話 (Plum in the Golden Vase) displays an unprecedented interest in breaking apart and reassembling the components of words. This essay asks where the Cihua edition's fascination with character manipulation (a procedure the author refers to as chaibai daozi 拆白道字) comes from and how it relates to literary riddles that precede and follow this landmark sixteenth-century novel. Jin Ping Mei cihua enlarges the presentation and associations of riddles in fiction through its engagement with contemporaneous theatrical literature and the entertainment culture of the brothel. Later commentators, notably Zhang Zhupo 張竹坡 (1670–1698), reorganize the game sequences within which bouts of character manipulation are embedded for the purposes of narrative prolepsis and character development, advocating an approach to reading enigmas as portents that influenced late imperial novelists. In doing so, however, they efface the Cihua's unruly celebration of contingency, the novel's seductive insinuation that it might be written otherwise.

Translating sexuality in the context of Anglo-American censorship

This article presents a descriptive study of the English translations of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei in the context of the Anglo-American literary censorship of obscenity in the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the strategies employed in the English translations of Jin Ping Mei, this article uncovers the dynamic interactions between literary translation activities and the evolving socio-historical contexts in the target culture. The resurrection of the archaic source text, particularly its erotic component, in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century was based on the (re)discovery of its value in the contemporary target context. In the case of Jin Ping Mei, equivalence at the linguistic and textual levels was simply not a concern of the translators and publishers, who had to decide how they would deal with the social reality of literary censorship, by submissively conforming to its demands, or by creatively confronting them.

Planteamiento del tema celestinesco chino y Jin Ping Mei

La posible existencia de los análogos chinos de Celestina y de su personaje central es un tema que apenas ha sido estudiado. Visto el interés que de cara al personaje español puede ofrecer la alcahueta china, se intentará desvelar lo esencial de las características de ésta, con el análisis de algunos nombres genéricos, y examinar sumariamente su función en Jin ping mei o Flor de ciruela en un vaso dorado. No se trata de plantear una relación genérica entre la alcahueta china y sus colegas hispanas, aunque sí de una ideología común. Es el posible paralelismo entre las dos el que ha sido el objeto de esta investigación y el que será el tema del presente artículo.