Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor

Editor Robert Hegel has assembled an erudite team of luminaries in late imperial translation and scholarship. . . . It is, in short, a valuable and comprehensive research tool for the original Doupeng xianhua in particular and for late imperial fiction in general. Being so many different things, the volume is accessible and useful to a number of audiences: casual readers looking to escape the heat of a summer afternoon reading; undergraduates familiarizing themselves with the breadth and depth of Chinese letters; and specialists in the field.

With ample paratextual material, a creative and skilled array of translators, and expert framing by the collection’s key editor and translator, Robert Hegel, Idle Talk in its English translation conveys both the complex contents and the multilayered pleasures of its early Qing original.Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Robert Hegel's rich and complex edition of Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor will be important not only for scholars of Chinese and comparative literature, but also for learning and teaching about Chinese culture at all levels.

Thisfirst complete English-language translation, edited by Hegel, gives Idle Talk the treatment it deserves...a vital addition to English-language translations of late imperial literature.

After publishing in three handsome volumes a complete translation of Feng Menglong’s celebrated Sanyan trilogy, the University of Washington Press has now performed a further service for students of Chinese literature by releasing a translation of another seventeenth-century story collection, Doupeng xianhua, or Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor... The twelve stories are linked with a nar-rative frame that imagines a series of storytelling sessions under the shade of a bean arbor that take place over a period of weeks from early summer to late autumn. There is much to commend in this English edition.

This first complete English translation of this collection will not only be warmly welcomed by teachers of Chinese literature, but should also be of interest to schol-ars of Chinese and comparative intellectual history...an extremely welcome addition to the corpus of available translations from premodern Chinese literature. It introduces the Anglophone world to a fascinating collection by a highly original mind. It is to be hoped that it will not only be widely used in undergraduate and graduate class-es, but also will find its way to a more general audience.

A landmark collection of short stories from the early Qing, Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor brings sophisticated innovations to the vernacular storytelling tradition. Refreshingly shorn of the formulaic didacticism of its late Ming predecessors, these stories’ pervasive irony, dark humor, subversive views of history and cynical exposure of moral bankruptcy are conveyed in a lively vernacular expertly rendered by the dedicated team of translators under Robert Hegel’s seasoned editorship. Highly recommended. 

Employment of separate translators was a brilliant move since the stories are all told in different voices.

This use of a frame story has elicited frequent comparisons to the Decameron. . . . [And since the collection] was written shortly after the fall of the Ming, the stories offer a complex range of attitudes toward the values of dynastic loyalty and martyrdom.