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.

In his Foreword, Duncan Campbell writes: ‘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.’ 

The British sinologist and literary translator, John Minford, is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, and has taught at various universities in Australia, China, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. He is the translator of several Chinese classics such as The Story of the Stone, The Art of War, The Book of Change, and The Tao Te Ching. He has also translated Louis Cha’s martial arts novel The Deer and the Cauldron and a selection of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.