LOS ANGELES—It might just be the Great Chinese Novel, written by an anonymous author 500 years ago. But it's also perhaps the most pornographic novel ever written in the Chinese language, and now it is available in a new five-volume 3,000 page translation that was nearly half a century in the making. David Tod Roy, who first encountered a supposedly illegal copy of Jin Ping Mei—translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus—in a used book store in 1950 as a 16-year-old missionary in Nanjing, has published the final volume of his epic translation, titled The Dissolution.
According to a recent profile of Roy in The New York Times, the novel is "an infamously pornographic tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant, written by an anonymous author in the late 16th century."
The young missionary, according to the article, was already aware of the graphic classic novel, having "previously encountered... an incomplete English translation, which switched decorously into Latin when things got too raunchy. But there it was — an old Chinese edition of the whole thing — amid other morally and politically suspect items discarded by nervous owners after Mao Zedong’s takeover the previous year."
Now 80 and an emeritus professor of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago, Roy recounted to the Times, “As a teenage boy, I was excited by the prospect of reading something pornographic, but I found it fascinating in other ways as well.”
He is not alone. Writing for the South China Morning Post, Alex Lo observes of the novel, "It makes Fifty Shades of Grey a dull book for coffee tables. But scholars say the book is not just porn. Supposedly if you read the whole thing, you will know everything about daily life, customs, food, clothing, medicine, entertainment — in short, the mores and manners during the Ming dynasty, including the acceptable amounts and kinds of favors that could be gained by bribing court mandarins."
Lo refers to Roy's now-completed opus as a "Herculean labor of love," something with which the Times' Jennifer Schuessler concurs, citing its "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."
About the sex, she writes, "The level of raunch remains startling even to some Western literary scholars — particularly the infamous Chapter 27, in which the merchant, named Ximen Qing, puts his most depraved concubine to particularly prolonged and imaginative use."
Roy may not be able to fully bask in his momentous achievement. Just as he was finishing the final volume, writes Lo, "he received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which ruled out any prospect of preparing a condensed edition, as his Chicago colleague Anthony Yu did with his acclaimed translation of Journey to the West, another marathon-length Ming classic."
But the rest of us will surely benefit, in ways we may not even expect. Lo adds, "Scholars credit Mr. Roy (whose brother, J. Stapleton Roy, was United States ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995) with rescuing The Plum in the Golden Vase from its reputation in the West as merely exotic pornography and opening the door to a more political reading of the book.
"It’s one that already comes easily to commentators in China," she concludes, "where the novel is seen as holding up a mirror to the tales of political and social corruption that fill newspapers now."
Which leaves one wondering who will inevitably bring this historic and steamy tale to the screen?
Image: From Modern Sketch, a neo-traditional illustration accompanying an excerpt from the Ming dynasty erotic novel Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei). The artist, Cao Hanmei, republished the series in two volumes in 1936 and 1937.
