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The Story of the Western Wing, one of China's most famous love operas, tells the story of Student Zhang and a teenage girl named Oriole who begin a passionate relationship in a Chinese monastery. The couple are promised to each other but only if Student Zhang passes the highest level of civil examinations. However, while he is away, another suitor, a boorish cad, manages to elicit a marriage promise for Oriole based on familial relations, and Student Zhang is turned away by Oriole's mother upon his return. The pair of lovers run away to elope but are followed by the new suitor, who throws himself down stone stairs to commit suicide upon being rebuffed. The story is a powerful account of young love.
Stephen H. West's translation draws upon an earlier version of the story by Dong Jieyuan, a talented writer who had a wit to match Oscar Wilde. Dong's is the only fully extant text of this musical ballad from the heyday of its performance in the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries, and until now, has only existed in Ming editions.
The Story of the Western Wing is critical to understanding Chinese vernacular and performative literature, and this translation--accompanied by explanatory notes from a distinguished scholar of Chinese drama--offers a unique perspective on literary and social values in China's early modern period.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Dynasties
- Introduction
- Editions Used
- Conventions
- Laureate Dong's Story of the Western Wing
- Preface to the Jade Camellia Hall edition of Laureate Dong's Western Wing
- Introductory Words to Laureate Dong's Story of the Western Wing
- Book I
- Book II
- Book III
- Book IV
- Appendices
- 1. Zhao Lingzhi's Drum-song Version of "The Tale of Oriole" With Inserted Song Lyrics
- 2. Excerpt from A Record of the Splendors of the Metrocapital
- 3. Excerpt from The Expanded Record of a Forest of Affairs, A Categorization of Important
- Information from Collected Texts, Newly Compiled, Complete with Pictures, and with Added Categories
- 4. Top Graduate Zhang Xie, All-Modes Excerpt
- 5. List of Songs by Chinese and English Titles
- Editions of Laureate Dong's All Keys and Modes of the Western Wing
- Bibliography
- Endnotes
About the author
Stephen H. West is Professor of Chinese Emeritus at Arizona State University. His previous translations include (all with Wilt Idema)
Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays; Battles, Betrayals, and Brotherhood: Early Chinese Plays on the Three Kingdoms; The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays; and
The Record of the Three Kingdoms in Plain Language. He was also a co-translator of
Daoist Master Changchun's Journey to the West: To the Court of Chinggis Qan and Back.
