【Preface】

‘Cherish one’s own beauty, respect other’s beauty, and when both beauties are respected and cherished, the world will become one”（各美其美，美人之美，美美与共，天下大同——费孝通）, said Fei Xiaotong, a famous Chinese sociologist at a cerebration party in honor of his eightieth birthday about thirty years ago. In a time of growing interest in intercultural communication today, these words sound especially wise and far sighted. Translation, as one of the most important means for cultural communication, is usually done into one’s mother tongue from other languages by native translators. This largely guarantees the quality of translated text, so far as the linguistic readability is concerned. However, this method implies a one-sidedness in correspondence, as only the translator’s ‘respect for other’s beauty” is concerned, regardless, though not completely, of how the local people look upon and cherish their own beauty. It should be compensated by translations on the other way, that is, works selected, interpreted, and translated by the local people themselves into languages other than their own. This approach may go directly against the prevalent views in modern translation theories but, in my opinion, is worthy of practicing. It is perhaps an even more effective way to bring about successful communication in cultures, and the beauties of the world can really be shared by the world’s people. It is with such understanding that the Shanghai Foreign Languages Education Press is organizing a new series of books, entitled Readings of Chinese Culture, to introduce Chinese culture, past and present, to the world, with works selected and translated by the Chinese scholars and translators. 

The series will cover a wide range of writings including but not restricted to works of different literary genres. For the first batch, we are glad to provide three books of essays and two books of short stories, all written by authors of the 20th century. They will be continued by a batch of serious academic writings on premodern Chinese classics in philosophy, literature, and historiography, written by influential scholars of our time. Later, we will offer more books on classical Chinese drama, classical Chinese poetry, etc. 

Some of the books in the series have been published before, but they have been revised and rearranged for the new purpose to meet the current needs of broader readers. We are looking forward to hear comments and suggestions on the series for future improvement.

【译者简介/About the translator】

李洁，苏州大学英语语言文学专业博士毕业，现为东北大学外国语学院教师。主要研究方向为典籍英译，出版专著《琴声何处不悠扬中国古典艺术散文英译的审美沟通研究》，发表相关论文十余篇。热爱文学翻译，尤其喜爱中国文学作品的英译，近年出版《世界华文微型小说精选·海外卷》《商之江南》等译著。

Li Jie works at the College of Foreign Studies of Northeaster University after she graduated from Suzhou University with a doctoral degree in English Language and Literature, and her research interest is the translation study of Chinese classical works. She has developed a fondness for literary translation, the English translation of Chinese literary works in particular.

In recent years, she published a monograph The Same Music in Different Notes—A study on the Aesthetic Communication in the Translation of Classical Chinese Artistic Essays, a number of academic papers, and some translations such as Best Chinese Flash Fiction: An Anthology (By Overseas Writers) and The Commerce of Jiang Nan.

The Sea Dream

 The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband

 Daban

 The Beijing People(Excerpts)

 The True Heroes(Excerpts)

 Under the Sky (Excerpts)

 An Old Well

 The Wilderness

 Flying Over My Hometown of Maple and Poplar Huang Yao

 Quhu

 The Dry Ravine

 The Stories of the Taibai Mountain(Excerpts) New Literary Sketches (Excerpts)

 Silence

 Walking on the Street

 On Edge

 The Scissors

 The Presidents Last Words

 Fathers Stories: Camel Dung

 Taotao the Novice Monk..

 The Reincarnation

 The Death of the Gatekeeper

 The Horse-carriage Driver

 The Public Kitchen

 In the Grass

 The Earrings

 The Festival of the Eighteenth

 The Hidden Darts

 The Bitter Bamboo

 A Bird Passing By

 The Dreamlike Song

 The Lynx

 The Debt in1956