SERIA LUDENS

SERIA LUDENS: Playing with Serious Things; Essays in Sinology, Translations from the Chinese, Memoirs, and Dreams, is a comprehensive collection of John Minford’s literary, academic, and informal writings and scattered shorter translations from over the past five decades. The book’s title is taken from the motto of the pleasure-loving eighteenth-century Society of Dilettanti. The author’s underlying aesthetic can be seen in his frequent references to the convivial gatherings of fourth-century Chinese aesthetes at the Orchid Pavilion, and to their near contemporaries, those passionate individualists, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. But above all the book resonates with recurring echoes of the inspired novel The Story of the Stone, whose last chapters Minford translated many years ago.

‘SERIA LUDENS includes a number of personal memoirs and informal autobiographical sketches relating to cultural encounters both in China and in Hong Kong, Minford’s beloved city, that symbolizes his lifelong commitment to communication across and between languages and cultures. Its diversity of subject matter is bound together by one single thread running through it, the translator’s labours in the alchemical workshop of equivalences, whereby with love and humility texts may enter the Realm of Transformation. It offers a unique glimpse into the practice of a master of a craft so central to all humanistic endeavour, sharing with us his open-eyed and generous embrace of life, and the evident fun that he has had with his work as a translator.’ 

— Duncan Campbell, from the Foreword

The British sinologist and literary translator, John Minford, is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Exeter University. He has taught at various universities in Australia, China, Hong Kong SAR, and New Zealand. He is the translator of several Chinese classics including The Story of the Stone (the last forty chapters), The Art of War, the I Ching (the Book of Change), and the Tao Te Ching. He has also translated Louis Cha’s three-volume martial arts novel The Deer and the Cauldron and a selection of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. His most recent publication, with Reaktion Books, is Ch’ing: A Chinese Book of Love.

‘John Minford is as close as any gweilo can come to being a Chinese literatus, a gentleman who has fostered his virtue by mastering the classics, refining his learning in rural seclusion. He has followed in the footsteps of one of his professors, the late Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys). He is the best kind of Western wenren. In his life and career as a scholar of Chinese, he has become a man of great learning (wen) as well as humanity (ren). There are few people like that left. Which is why we must honour and cherish him.’

– Ian Buruma, author of Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001) and Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013), and former editor of The New York Review of Books

‘Today, British sinologists are rare. Minford belongs to this illustrious company. One suspects that there will be few if any successors, and that this group is becoming rarer. His work is scrupulous, nuanced, and ranks as a literary achievement in its own right. His patient, sympathetic, often deeply humorous and playful work, always underpinned by profound and extensive scholarship, belongs to a humane world and a humane outlook. I believe his body of work will continue as a testament to the ways in which European, British, and Chinese worlds have learned to speak to each other and have learned about each other. These ways of learning and speaking will go on being crucially important in the years ahead. And it is in that area that John Minford has made the most powerful and important contribution.’

– Kerry Brown, King’s College, London

‘For almost half a century now, ever since his translation of Miao Yüeh’s “The Chinese Lyric” appeared in Stephen Soong’s edited volume Song Without Music: Chinese Tz’u Poetry (1980), John has brought immense pleasure to a vast number of readers through his translations of both prose and poetry, his occasional essays, and his edited volumes. With his friendship and encouragement, those of us fortunate enough to have worked (and occasionally played) with him have all had the trajectories of our lives altered by the encounter and have been granted a wealth of abiding memories.’

– Duncan Campbell, Victoria University of Wellington

‘For Professor Minford the true aim of translation does not lie in achievement, but in the friendships of kindred spirits that makes the very act of translation itself possible. “Hong Kong translation” will not vanish so long as there are still people willing to carry on friendship and the writing of literature. This, in essence, is the image of Hong Kong that Minford leaves us with in his tender prose, a humanistic city comprised of friendship, fate, and memory. His contributions to Hong Kong translation have taught me that translation is not just a skill, nor is it simply a transfer between languages; it is a way of conversing with a place, with others, and even with the past.’ 

– Chris Song, University of Toronto