Essay
From a Cottager's Sketchbook
雅舍小品
Liang Shiqiu · 1949
Synopsis
Thirty-four short essays, written during the war at Beibei, near Chongqing, where the author had withdrawn. The first describes the house that gives the collection its name: built of bamboo and mortar on a hillside, between a paddy field and a bare slope, it has partitions so thin that the neighbours can be heard; at night rats wander through it, and in summer mosquitoes abound. The other pieces, written for amusement and as ideas came, take as their subjects the small things of everyday life.
Context
The texts first appeared from 1940, once a week, in a column of the journal Xingqi pinglun, under the name Zijia; the journal having disappeared, the author gave others to periodicals of Chongqing and Nanjing. The house, bought in 1939 with his friends Wu Jingchao and Gong Yeya, took the given name of the latter, who wrote the preface to the volume according to HK01. The collection appeared in 1949, the year the author reached Taiwan; three sequels extended it until 1986.
Who it is for
Essays of a few pages, with a restrained humour, to be read one at a time; translated into English, with no known French edition.
Prizes and reception
Reissued more than fifty times according to Britannica, it appeared in English in Hong Kong in 2005 and 2006, in a bilingual edition.
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The pages consulted to check this page.