Amidaworld has a post called “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Classic Asian Literature” that moves from the discovery of Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases (provided for many books) to the insight that they can serve as a handy thumbnail sketch of the book itself:
But let’s use this to save some time and read some massive works in, say, 10 seconds or so. I love this one: The Tale of Genji‘s SIPs: saffron flower. Yep, that’s it. “Evocative,” no?
How about those massive Chinese novels? Journey to the West (vol. 2—1 was unavailable): hooped rod, two little fiends, auspicious luminosity, poled the luggage, travel rescript certified, vast magic powers, his muckrake, brazen ape, white jade steps, cloudy luminosity, subdue the fiend, his iron rod, great snow fall, ginseng fruits, bronze mallet, various fiends, iguana dragon, preparatory mass, steel crop, immaculate vase, our rescript, treasure staff, gloomy complexion, testimonial poem, reverted cinnabar. Could you give a better summary in 4 lines or so?…
Sum up Confucian thought as portrayed in the Analects in 10 words: accordance with the rites, ceremonial cap, benevolent man, loving learning. Thanks, Amazon!
I was going to try it on The Man Without Qualities, but alas, no SIPs were provided.
And apparently Statistically Improbable Phrases have bitten the dust…
As it happens, my wife and I are now reading Monkey, the good old Waley version of Journey to the West (it’s a great read, and frankly, I don’t mind that he omitted most of the poetry), so I enjoyed that list of SIPs much more than when I made this post.
The examples of SIPs don’t, for the most part, seem improbable to me. What is the idea anyway – that improbable phrases are a measure of innovative prose, and that what’s innovative must be not merely interesting but worthwhile to read ? I remember that frame of mind from adolescence. Is it a grown-up thing now ?
No, it just means they occur more often than you’d expect for the average book.
Overly Sarcastic Productions summarizes Journey to the West — Part 1, The Monkey King.
Having been raised on the Waley version, I am now going through the complete Yu translation. At first having approached it with trepidation, I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Skipping the poems is like skipping the background descriptions in, say, Gogol. It doesn’t affect the plot, but you’re really missing something. There are also a lot of tangent stories that Waley took out. According to Yu, Waley’s greatest reduction, inspired by the scholar Hu Shi, was to cleanse the book of religious allegory. Yu felt very strongly that religious allegory was central to the conception of the book.
Yu himself produced an abridged version, The Monkey and the Monk.
According to Yu, Waley’s greatest reduction, inspired by the scholar Hu Shi, was to cleanse the book of religious allegory. Yu felt very strongly that religious allegory was central to the conception of the book.
I’m sure it was, but I have very limited tolerance for allegory of any kind. I may well give the Yu translation a try sometime (especially since you, a fan of the Waley, recommend it), but I’m enjoying this one tremendously.
Most of the allegory passes me by anyway, along with who knows how many cultural and religious references, but it’s a good read. As Yu says (and I judge from his preface that he was a very thoughtful and kind person), in his preface to The Monkey and the Monk:
I’ll add that I don’t (yet) see in what way this is an allegory. It certainly is not a pervasive one, like Piers Plowman or the like.
Ah, that’s good to know. You’ve moved it up on the potential reading list.
Thus Tolkien in 1965: “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” And yet this is the same fellow who wrote “The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936, expressing his view of the “Beowulf industry” of his day thus: