Tales From a Forest Studio

Translator's note:

I’m excited to present this translation of  Ma Gu, another story from the 女仙 nüxian, Women Transcendents, section of the Taiping Guangji (太平廣記).  I wanted to present a translation of this because it's full of fun stuff: dragons, fantastical clothing, a traveling kitchen and more!  I once again translated with help from my tutor Glynis Jones. We used the text from ctext which can be found here.

Once I decided to translate this story I started digging into it more. I wanted to find more context and see if anyone else had translated the story. While I did not find another translation of Ma Gu, I learned that To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents by Robert F. Campany contains a translation of a related text, Wang Yuan (王遠). This is an academic translation with a lot of introductory material, many footnotes, and comments after each story.  

The Wang Yuan section of the TPGJ which Campany used as the basis for his translation is longer than Ma Gu, but contains a section that significantly overlaps the Ma Gu section of the TPGJ that is the basis for this translation. We were able to use Campany’s translation to help clear up some things that were confusing, and further understand the Daoist content of this story.  

We also looked at some other versions of the Ma Gu story, including this rubbing, for additional context.  

Thanks to Rae, and Anne for providing feedback on this translation in progress. And thanks to daemuth the coder of AOYeet which I used to format this into HTML.( Read more... )