(Untitled)

[paleaswater]

Even if Google is evil, I still adore it, and this is why:

搜神记，(In Search of the supernatural), the encyclopaedia compilation of legends, short stories and hearsay concerning spirits, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena dating from 4th century, has been translated and is available on Google Books. flemmings, this is the source of the story about the

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[flemmings]

Google is still evil. Page views are limited. But there are a couple of webpages that let you read almost all of it-- links are on the trojan'd computer, of course-- and you can get a xeroxed copy of the original for about $20 from the original publishers. The weird resonant bits are offset by an awful lot of 'and then she dreamed the west wind blew over her and a diviner told her it meant she was pregnant with a son who would shake empires' stuff. Which is almost mundane, in context.

[paleaswater]

Oh, I didn't realize you found it already. I thought you were just asking about it last time you were here. Yes, you need patient to wade through this stuff -- in Chinese it goes down easier because even when the story is blah, it's fun to decipher the archaic Chinese, which is an education all in its own. But in English it would be quite deadly. Have you ran across anything interesting?

I imagine that the missing pages are required by the publisher, not Google. It seems fairly complete even if it's called a preview -- a handful of pages missing toward the end, and that's about it. But I was really kind of surprised that no second hand copy of this could be found anywhere, given that it was published in 1996. But I didn't realize you can actually get a xeroxed copy.

[flemmings]

Everything goes down better in Chinese. The terra cotta warriors had excerpts from ohh what was it-- probably the histories, and maybe proclamations, in re Qin Shi Huang. Two lines of Chinese, ten lines of English, and comparing them in Rosetta Stone fashion I was kerblonxed at the expansion of a single hanzi into a whole phrase.

Haven't found anything yet, but haven't looked too hard. Reading online in pdf is one of my irks.

I know, it's odd no one has second hand copies. Maybe it was bought by universities and no one else and that's why it went out of print. Yes, doubtless Stanford Press is holding on to the copyright, which is irksome, because it *is* out of print and hard to get hold of. The Japanese translation of course is very much in print and available in bunko.

ETA: though of course, 'we'll scan a copy for you' is doubtless their notion of 'still in print.'