We are delighted to invite you to a roundtable marking a triple celebration:
- Celebrating the greatest historical play in Chinese history, Kong Shangren’s Peach Blossom Fan
- Celebrating the poignant new translator by Wai-Yee Li (Harvard University)!
- Celebrating its publication in the recently launched Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford University Press)
CELEBRATE: China’s Greatest Historical Drama: come celebrate with Prof. Wiebke Denecke the recent launch of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford University Press) at a panel at Harvard University featuring Wai-Yee Li’s translation of China’s Greatest Historical Drama, The Peach Blossom Fan
Location: Harvard-Yenching Library
2 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Roundtable: December 5th 4:00-5:30pm
PROGRAM: Welcome and introduction: Tom Kelly (Assistant Professor in EALC, Harvard University)
Introductory remarks on the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature from Wiebke Denecke (S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, MIT and founding editor in chief)
Responses:
- Catherine Yeh (Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Boston University)
- Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Associate Professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)
- Ariel Fox (Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)
- Canaan Morse (Postdoc Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia)
- Ellen Widmer (Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies & Professor of East Asian Studies, Wellesley College) (?)
Final comments: Wai-yee Li (1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University)
Audience Q&A moderated by Tom Kelly
Reception 5:30–7:00 (upstairs at 2 Divinity)
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The Peach Blossom Fan:
Theater, Trauma, and Translation
A roundtable and reception in celebration of Wai-yee Li’s new translation of China’s greatest historical drama
Funded by a project award from the Geiss-Hsu Foundation
The Peach Blossom Fan is one of the most important plays in Chinese history. It is also a masterpiece of world literature, acclaimed for the sophisticated ways it uses the tools of the theater to reflect on historical trauma and memory. Wai-yee Li’s annotated translation renders this vital work newly accessible for students of Chinese history, comparative literature, and theater studies. The first complete English translation of the drama and its paratexts, Professor Li’s new edition builds upon, and synthesizes, her groundbreaking research on gender and trauma, the rhetoric of historiography in the Chinese tradition, and literary responses to the Ming-Qing dynastic transition. The play’s central themes—the relationship between art and violence, the perils of political extremism, and the tensions between historical judgment and memory—still speak to our contemporary moment in urgent and profound ways. This roundtable and reception will celebrate the publication of Professor Li’s new translation, reflecting on the enduring significance of The Peach Blossom Fan, the challenges involved in translating this monumental work, and how the play still resonates with readers around the world today. Panelists will share their thoughts on both the drama and the craft of literary translation in general.
Format:
Welcome and introduction: Tom Kelly (Assistant Professor in EALC, Harvard University)
Introductory remarks on the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature from Wiebke Denecke (S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, MIT and founding editor in chief)
Responses:
-
Catherine Yeh (Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Boston University)
- Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Associate Professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University)
- Ariel Fox (Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)
- Canaan Morse (Postdoc Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia)
-
Ellen Widmer (Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies & Professor of East Asian Studies, Wellesley College)
Final comments: Wai-yee Li (1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University)
Audience Q&A moderated by Tom Kelly
Reception 5:30–7:00 (upstairs at 2 Divinity)
About the translation (from Oxford University Press): Interweaving a star-crossed romance with the decline and fall of the Ming dynasty in mid seventeenth-century China, The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren (1648-1718) is a masterpiece of world literature. This sweeping musical play and historical drama encompasses the pleasures and passions of courtesan culture, the allure and pitfalls of political idealism, court intrigues, and the horrors of war. While the play recounts the death of the Ming dynasty through the love story of its two main characters–Hou Fangyu, a young scholar, and a courtesan named Li Xiangjun (or, “Fragrant Princess”)–its cast of characters also includes various military commanders; a villain who is also a playwright; an ambiguous mediator who is also a painter, a storyteller, and a singing teacher; an officer who becomes a Daoist; and a ritual master who is both onstage and a member of the audience.
As the play takes the readers inside the choices, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil of its diverse characters, it asks probing questions: How and why did the Ming dynasty, almost three hundred years old, come to an end? In the last decades of the Ming dynasty, China was struck by a series of plagues, famines, and natural disasters. What is the scope of human agency during historical cataclysms? The play is filled with performances of songs, poems, and scenes from other dramas that warn against the impending fall of the dynasty; however, all of their messages went unheeded. What forces shape memory and political judgment? This compelling, readable, and faithful translation of the play includes an introduction on interpretive perspectives and the life and times of the playwright Kong Shangren as well as explanatory notes and a preface for each scene that serve as guides for the reader.
About the Author:
Kong Shangren (1648-1718) was a Qing dynasty dramatist and poet. He was a 64th-generation descendant of Confucius and had a distinguished career as a scholar-official. His fame rested largely on his authorship of The Peach Blossom Fan.
Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her previous books include The Promise and Peril of Things, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature, and, as co-editor with Wiebke Denecke and Xiaofei Tian, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE-900 CE).