G45.50 Something from the Liáozhài

Like much of the rest of the world, I’m stuck inside because of COVID-19, so I decided to use some of that time to skim through Grebenshchikov 45 and see what interesting bits I could spot.

Today I spotted the following passage:

giogiyan bethei weihuken-i toksifi besergen de nikeme uculerengge,	This is what she sang as she leaned against the bed, softly tapping with her bound feet:
moo-i ninggude bisire u gio gasha mimbe  hoššome dobori dulin de fakcabumbi,	“The black drongo bird atop the tree tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
siolehe sabu usihibuhe seme gasara ba akū, damu agu de simen ararangge akū ayoo sembi,	I have no reason to cry about having gotten my embroidered shoes wet, but I regret there will be no one to cavort with you.”
seme mudan jilgan narhūn ohongge sirgei gese arkan ilgame faksalaci ojoro adali, cibseme donjici šurdeme forgošoro getuken tomorhon-i šan jakade dosifi ele mujilen ašša[m]bi sehebi.	As she sang, her singing voice became as thin as a thread, so that he could barely pick it out, but when he listened quietly it fell on his ears, encircling and surrounding, distinct and clear, and his heart was all the more moved.

This passage, it turns out, is from the Liáozhāi zhìyì, from a story called “The Girl in Green” (綠衣女). The Chinese runs as follows:

遂以蓮鉤輕點足牀， 歌云：	Then she tapped the bed with her feet, with her lotus crescents, and sang:
「樹上烏臼鳥，賺奴中夜散。	“The black drongo bird atop the tree / tricks me into leaving in the middle of the night.
不怨繡鞋溼，祗恐郎無伴。」	I don’t complain that my embroidered shoes are wet / but respectfully fear my lord will have no partner.”
聲細如蠅，裁可辨認。	Her voice was thin, like that of a fly, scarcely recognizable.
而靜聽之， 宛轉滑烈， 動耳搖心。	But he quietly listened to it, and it moved about sinuously, slippery and ardent, touching his ears and moving his heart.

When we see “Manchu” and “Liáozhài” in the same sentence, we immediately think of Jakdan, but I can’t find this particular story in my copy of Jakdan’s translation of the Liáozhài.

More Handwriting

This morning I looked through 20 manuscripts that are part of the Staatsbibliothek digital Mandschurica collection, with the hopes of finding another manuscript in the same hand as SB 34981.

In my last post, I noted that the syllable be in SB 34981 usually has a small right-pointing tooth, and I believe that is a fairly distinctive feature. In all of the manuscripts I looked at this morning, I found that the left-pointing tooth is by far the most common way to write the syllables be and ba, as can be seen in these examples:

I only found one other manuscript in which the writer generally used the right-pointing tooth. The manuscript is titled Bithe hūlara doro, “The Way of Reading,” and the writer often (though not always) produces a be that is similar to the ones in SB 34981.

The similarity here is very striking, but there are other ways in which the script in “The Way of Reading” differs from that in SB 34981, so I don’t think they are by the same hand. A distinctive and consistent difference is the appearance of the syllable he in the word bithe:

In “The Way of Reading” there is a little right-pointing tooth that starts the left tail in the syllable he, but that tooth is entirely missing in SB 34981.

There are many more digitized manuscripts available through the Staatsbibliothek site, and perhaps one of them will match the SB 34981 handwriting and give us a fragment more of information about the author of that text.

Manchu Handwriting

The Staatsbibliothek manuscript is written in at least three distinctive but related styles. By comparing these with the handwriting of known authors, perhaps we could eventually make a guess at who the author(s) of the Staatsbibliothek manuscript might have been.

But what features can we reliably compare between different writers?

One that leaps out when looking at a page of Manchu text is the shape of the left and right tails in words like be and de. These can be written in quite different ways, as can be seen in these examples drawn from Jakdan and Mucihiyan:

Jakdan’s left tail usually goes out in a long, relatively straight line with a small hook at the end. His right tail is usually shaped like a fishhook. Mucihiyan, in contrast, makes his left and right tails quite short, and his right tail is consistently thick while his left tail is consistently thin.

In both Jakdan and Mucihiyan’s handwriting, the be has a small left-pointing tooth before the tail. Contrast that with the handwriting in the Staatsbibliothek, where there is usually a small right-pointing tooth before the tail in be:

Based on these examples, as well as my general feeling from spending many hours reading these texts, it seems unlikely that the Staatsbibliothek manuscript was written by either Jakdan or Mucihiyan. It is unclear, though, whether the SB was written by one hand or by three. Is the thick right tail of SB-B a stylistic flourish, or the work of a different writer? Is the flatter right tail of SB-C just a way to conserve space on the page?