Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu translated by Cyril Birch

[robot_mel]

This was an enjoyable translation. It seemed accurate enough that when I went to look up a translated passage in the original Chinese I found it immediately. It was nice to read the whole story and find out what happened in the scenecs that were missing from the production that I saw the week before. It turned out that my favorite night, in addition to being about ghosts and hell, also had the fewest missing scenes, and the night I found the weakest, the last night, had the most. I got this copy from the SOAS library, but will buy my own so I can use it to help me read the original, as it is such a poetic piece it really does need to be read in the original language.