Pu Songling’s Short-Story “Pupils’ Talk”

Abstract

The article covers the plot and translation peculiarities of the short-story by Pu Songling (蒲松齡, 1640-1715) “Pupils’ Talk”. The connection between Pu Songling’s ideas and tradition of Chinese popular medicine and Taoist concepts of soles and spirits of a human body is thoroughly analyzed; along with that the tradition of the story’s interpretation in Russian is also studied. The issue of special spirits inhabiting all organs and anatomical areas of a human has been thoroughly worked out in both parts of “Huang Di’s Inner Classic” as well as in “Huang ting Classic” and was a part of a common knowledge in traditional Chinese routine. Special medical treatises known as “Suishu” gave their own recipes of traditional medication combined with exorcism, and Pu Songling happened to be an author of such a treatise in two parts. Thus one has to admit that Pu Songling must be quite well acquainted with the tradition of Chinese folksy medicine based on the stated integrity of human physical organization with controlling spirits of each and every body-part. Therefore with the undeniable influence of Ming fiction on “Pupils’ Talk” one can’t help acknowledging that the descriptive means of expression as well as the chief idea of the story are authentic and independent. Taoist ideas about human anatomy and physiology can be met not only in this story, but in other pieces of the “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” (Liao Zhai zhi yi). Artistic peculiarities of the text as well as fundamentals of the translation are divisively demonstrated. A new variant of translation of the whole text is provided.