Qu You

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Qu You ( Chinese  瞿 佑 , Pinyin Qú Yòu , brush name Zōngjí宗 吉, also known as Cúnzhāi存 齋; * 1341 in Qiantang (錢塘; today: Hangzhou ); † 1427 or 1433 ) was a Chinese writer of the Ming Dynasty .

Live and act

Qu You worked as a school teacher in different places. During the reign of Emperor Yongle , reigning from 1402 to 1424, he fell from grace in 1415 and was exiled for ten years. After his return he worked as a private tutor for an influential nobleman. He died between 1427 and 1433.

His main work is the 40-volume collection of novels, published in 1378, New Conversations while Cleaning the Lamp or New Conversations while Cutting the Lamp Wick (剪 燈 新 話; Jiandeng Xinhua). The stories are all entertaining and often contain erotic elements. At the same time, however, they also do not lack moralizing tendencies. In Das Geisterland , for example, the protagonist Yuan Jishi , while he is pursuing all too justified plans for revenge, is accompanied in the eyes of the Taoist by ominous devils and spirits - and by lucky geniuses as soon as he has renounced vengeance. Often the novels contain supernatural and fantastic elements, such as in the peony lantern , where the young Qiao gets involved with a revenant who has emerged from the grave. Sometimes they also have poetic traits, such as the poetic The Pavilion of the Double Scent . Another work is the Conversations on Poetry after Retirement (Guitian shihua).

In addition, Qu You has a manual of the game of dominoes in the Xuanhe period 1119–1125. (Xuanhe paipu).

effect

The Jiandeng Xinhua was very well received by the audience and has been widely imitated. Immediate epigon was Li Changqi with his collection Further Conversations while Cleaning the Lamp (剪 燈 餘 話; Jiandeng Yuhua) from 1419/20. Both works were soon distributed in translations in Japan and Korea , where they were to have a lasting influence on upscale entertainment literature. In Vietnam , Qu You's work became popular in the 16th century through an adaptation of the Nguyễn Dữ . The collections of the late Ming poets Feng Menglong and Ling Mengchu , which are a good two hundred years younger than that, also seem difficult to imagine without Qu You's role model. Jiandeng Xinhua was made accessible to the German public in particular by Wolfgang Bauer and Herbert Franke .

Fonts (selection)

  • Jian deng xin hua. (“New Conversations in Cutting the Lamp Wick ”) Zhongguo wen shi chu ban she, Beijing 2001, ISBN 7-5034-1170-8 . (Chinese)
  • Sentō shinwa. Heibonsha, Tokyo 2003, ISBN 4-256-80048-4 . (Japanese)
  • Lutang shihua. Guitian shihua. (= Congshu jicheng. 2576.) Shangwu yinshuguan, Shanghai around 1936, OCLC 466037623 . (Chinese)

literature

  • Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer: History of Chinese literature. Scherz, Bern 1990, ISBN 3-406-45337-6 .
  • Wolfgang Bauer, Herbert Franke: The golden chest. Chinese short stories from two millennia. in: Collection of Chinese Classics. Volume 3. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-10-009648-7 (contains six stories by Qu You).
  • Coy Leon Harmon: Ch'ü Yu's Chien-Teng Hsin-Hua. the literary tale in transition. (= Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1985.) OCLC 693612775 .

Web links

  • Qu, you. on worldcat.org (list of publications)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Henriette Pleiger, Thomas Zimmer, Weiping Huang: History of Chinese Literature. Volume 9. Biographical Handbook of Chinese Writers. Life and works. Walter De Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 3-598-24550-5 .