Customer Reviews

The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Classic of the Mountains and Seas is a geographical gazetteer of ancient China and a catalogue of the natural and supernatural fauna and flora allegedly dating back to the 8th century BCE and spanning a period of perhaps a millennium. It is also a repository of strange spirits, curious folkways, medical beliefs, and other related oral and written traditions of earlier origins.

In many ways, this Chinese classic bears some similarity in content and theme to the Hippocratic treatise "Airs, Waters, Places," although it is not commonly associated with being a part of the Chinese medical corpus as the latter is in Greek medicine. For, like this ancient Greek treatise, The Classic of the Mountains and Seas is based upon a philosophical and scientific premise of nature--the Chinese "Weltanschauung." The Chinese quest for a harmonious union between themselves and their biophysical and socioanthropological environment gave rise to such a "world concept" in which people and their way of reasoning were conceived of as being an integral part of the cosmos and intrinsically interjoined with the spiritual, physical, and moral "influences."

Dr. Birrell's translation makes for an interesting read, with her scholarship enhancing our appreciation and understanding of this fascinating work. Her detailed Introduction is most helpful in acquainting the reader with the historical background of The Classic of the Mountains and Seas. Its shortcomings lie in its lack of numeric footnotes, a more specialized bibliography, a concordance with Romanization and Chinese equivalents, and her rendering of the place-names and denizens found in this zoomorphic setting.

One can never be too careful when it comes to the translation of ancient Chinese words, for it is not uncommon to find that many of them have been vitiated by the bland assumption that they meant then what they mean in later dynastic periods; accordingly, such assumptions can be distorted or entirely false. One of the pleasures found in ancient languages lies in their implicitness, whereas, modern languages revel in their explicitness. Fortunately, the rich resources of English are capable of coping reasonably well with the varigated shades of the implicity found in the former. Dr. Birrell has attempted to avoid this pitfall, although I question some of her renderings as being too much of an effort to appeal to a more popular readership.

For those readers wanting to further explore the many ethnographic features of this setting, the following works are recommended:

(In Russian) E.M. Ianshina entitled, Katalog gor i morei (Shan Hai Tszin), or "A Catalogue of Mountains and Sea: The Classic of the Mountains and Seas."

(In Chinese) Yuan Ke's Shan hai jing jiao zhu, or "A Critical Commentary on The Classic of the Mountains and Seas."

(In French) Rémi Mathieu's two-volume Étude sur la Mythologie et L'ethnologie de la Chine Ancienne.

(In English) Richard E. Strassberg's A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas.

Although I agree with the earlier reviewer's complaints about the absence of helpful apparatus -- to which I would add the difficulty of converting references using traditional Chinese section titles into parts of Birrell's translations -- I rate the book considerably higher. Descriptions and quotations tended to make it sound like Pliny's "Natural History," only dull. Birrell has made it read like an appendix to a Chinese Ovid, but more entertaining. Earlier attempts at translation that I have seen (mainly, it is true, of passages, often discontinuous) have been, at least from my point of view, almost unreadable. The self-imposed burden of trying to identify places and tribes can reduce even a few pages of what is reputed to be a fascinating, and sometimes whimsical, work to something more like an ordeal to read. To say nothing of the careful reproduction of Chinese names, which mean nothing to a reader who needs an English version!

Birrell has chosen to treat the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" as a somewhat eccentric work of literature, which can be read for pleasure, like "Mandeville's Travels," or, to use other medieval European examples, Bestiaries and Lapidaries (accounts of strange beasts and the miraculous properties of precious stones). Although some sections are more consistently interesting than others, most pages hold something to keep the reader's attention. Since I can't judge the plausibility of Birrell's translations of Chinese names, I will say that I found her versions amusing. (I also noted the apparent ultimate source of the "Pokemon" convention that strange animals are named for the sounds they make, which happen to have meanings.)

As a long-time reader of myths and legends, fantasy, and science fiction, I have fairly high standards for the entertainment level of a book about strange lands, peoples, and creatures. Taken as a whole, I found Birrell's translation entertaining and intriguing. Its major defects (lack of aides to the reader) could be, and I hope will be, repaired in some expanded edition in the future. For now, I am grateful to have it. The ethnographic, religious, geographical, and historical implications are fascinating -- and more properly the subject of a full commentary than a literary work for the Penguin Classics.

I'm a student of Chinese religion and was excited to see that Penguin had brought out this translation. However, I have to say that the book is a bit off in several regards.
First, I have to agree with the reviewer who said that this is not a major source of Chinese mythology. There are no stories here; it is a list of odd places and odd creatures. Some of these place names became established in traditional and even modern Chinese culture, such as Kunlun as the name of a mythic mountain range. (Now a hotel in Beijing....) And if you're really into obscuranta, there is a mini-industry in China of people who try to figure out the modern locations of these places--impossible, of course, but a lot of fun.
So in a way, this book is a bit marginal but still I was glad to find that it was translated--until I noticed a few strange decisions by the translator and publisher. One, is that Professor Birrell translates literally every single place and animal name. So there is no Kunlun to be found in the book but some odd-sounding English rendition. Fair enough, I guess: as the Germans say wenn schon, denn schon; if you do something, then do everything, but in this case this absoluteness makes it hard to pick up the allusions. Where are the Kunlun Mountains in her translation? We have no way to know.
The difficulties of this decision is compounded by the publisher's decision (I guess based on being cheap) not to include a glossary of the place and animal names, so we could at least figure out the famous names.
All in all the decisions are strange because this is not a book for general readers (hence, I'm not even sure why Penguin Classics brought it out) because it is basically a long list of strange places and names. So it should have enough academic apparatus (i.e. a glossary) to make it useful to specialists. But it doesn't.
Instead, I'd strongly recommend Richard E. Strassberg's "A Chinese Bestiary," which is beautifully illustrated and useful to the general and specialist reader.
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Bestiary-Creatures-Guideways-Mountains/dp/0520218442/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284857749&sr=8-3
Finally, I gave this a very generous four stars because I think the translator put a lot of work into it and deserves commendation. I also hope to encourage Penguin to add a glossary. But overall I was quite disappointed.

Dr. Anne Birrell does not understand the Chinese text called "Shan Hai Jing". She was misled by the Chinese scholars, both ancient and modern and made wrong interpretations of the records in the text. She merely scratched the surface of it and immediately rushed into her own conclusion as stated in the Introduction. The translations of the names of places are wrong and unacceptable. She cannot make use of the figures regarding the distances of the mountains to do calculations, and says that the lands are all imaginery. In fact the landscape described in "Shan Hai Jing" is that of Asia during the Cretaceous Period which is 67million years ago but Dr Birrell does not know about it. This translation has no value at all and it will mislead the western readers who cannot read Chinese.

Written by C. C. Teng (cryogenic physicist)
December 7, 2010, in Kuala Lumpur.

The reviews I read here for this book bamboozled me into buying it. I can only assume they are full time academics: no other explanation can be offered for their myopia.

The book is admirably done, and the freeish rendering of Chinese mythological names is fine. The difficulty is that this is nothing but an extended catalogue, without stories or plot. It's a list. The descriptions are so unbelievably wierd that it's much fun to read for a page or two, but it's all so much the same, that after two paragraphs you've read it all. To call this a major source for Chinese mythology is simply untrue. Those interested in that subject should get a copy of The Journey to the West, or Chuang Tzu, or the stories of Pu Song Ling. To offer this to the reader as any sort of a narrative is an outright lie.

The academic twits who have reviewed this so far do not seem to appreciate that just because a book's content is fictional doesn't make it fiction.