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Shen Fu, Six Records of a Life Adrift, by Graham Sanders. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Pp. xv + 176. $14.00 (paper), $44.00 (cloth).
Shen Fu's ... (1763---1825) Fusheng liuji ..., an autobiographical record of his private life, was found on a Suzhou book stall in 1847 and first published 30 years later in Shanghai. Since then it has been republished more than 30 times in China and attracted numerous fans. This book has also become popular abroad through translations into many foreign languages including English, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian, Korean, and Japanese. Three English translations have preceded this new version by Graham Sanders. However, Sanders's translation is beyond doubt an important addition to the reading and study of Shen Fu's book.
The first English translation, titled Six Chapters of a Floating Life (Shanghai, 1935), was by none other than Lin Yutang (1895---1976), a major figure in modern Chinese culture with a masters' degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D in philosophy from Leipzig. Since Lin liked this book very much, he revised his translation ten times before its publication. In 1960 Shirley M. Black's translation, Chapters from a Floating Life: The Autobiography of a Chinese Artist, was published by Oxford University Press. But it was not a complete translation: it omitted many episodes concerned with visits to temples and scenic places as well as some sections on literary criticism, gardening, and botany. Moreover, Black rearranged the remaining episodes into what she called a "less confusing chronological order." In 1983 the second complete translation, by Leonard Pratt and Su---Hui Chiang and entitled Six Records of a Floating Life, was published by Viking Press in New York, then reissued by Penguin Classics. Compared with the two previous complete translations, Sanders's new translation is distinguished by the following characteristics.
First, Sanders's is a new translation for twenty---first---century readers. Besides its fluent and lively English, in rendering Chinese names and places Sanders uses pinyin, the most widely used Romanization system for Chinese today, instead of the Wade--- Giles transcription which was used in all the three previous translations. He also translates names of hills, bridges, temples, gardens, and streets to convey their local character, instead of simply transcribing them. To...