足本《金瓶梅》英译问世，详尽呈现明代世情

choi

Jennifer Schuessler, 足本《金瓶梅》英译问世，详尽呈现明代世情. 纽约时报中文网, Nov 21, 2013
cn.tmagazine.com/books/20131121/t21dirty/


, which is translated from

Jennifer Schuessler, An Old Chinese Novel Is Racy Reading Still. New York Times, Nov 19, 2013
(“But the ‘Chin P’ing Mei,’ as the novel is known in Chinese, is about far more than just sex, scholars hasten to add. It was the first long Chinese narrative to focus not on mythical heroes or military adventures, but on ordinary people and everyday life, chronicled down to the minutest details of food, clothing, household customs, medicine, games and funeral rites, with exact prices given for just about everything, including the favor of bribe-hungry officials up and down the hierarchy. ‘It’s an extraordinarily detailed description of a morally derelict and corrupt society,’ Mr Roy said”)

Excerpt in the windows of print:

Scholar’s new translation is encyclopaedia of Ming China.

Beyond its notorious sex scenes, a classic is revealed as a historians’ trove.

Note:
(a) “It also may take a certain stubbornness on the part of ordinary readers to make it all the way through this five-volume work, given its Proustian length (nearly 3,000 pages), DeMille-worthy cast (more than 800 named characters) and ‘Ulysses’-like level of quotidian detail — to say nothing of Mr Roy’s 4,400-plus endnotes, whose range and precision would give one of Nabokov’s obsessive fictional scholars a run for his money.”
(i) Marcel Proust
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust
(1871-1922; French)
(ii) Cecil B DeMille
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_B._DeMille
(1881-1959; American film director; The Ten Commandments (1956); While he is known as DeMille (his nom d'oeuvre), his family name was Dutch and is usually spelled "de Mil")
(iii) note
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/note
(Footnotes are notes at the foot of the page while endnotes are collected under a separate heading at the end of a chapter, volume, or entire work)

(b) “the use of impatiens blossoms and garlic juice to dye women’s fingernails”

impatiens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens
(a genus; “The scientific name Impatiens (Latin for "impatient") and the common name "touch-me-not" refer to the explosive dehiscence of the seed capsules. The mature capsules burst, sending seeds up to several meters away”)