This is the second post in a multi-part mini-series on Recipes in Time and Space. For previous installments in this mini-series, see here.

One of the most important aspects of a recipe is the work that it does to bring elements together. This can happen in many different ways. A recipe combines ingredients and objects, it combines bodies (human with nonhuman, living with inert, sick with healthy), and it combines directions and rules of practice, among many other kinds of combination that a recipe enacts.

Manchu medical recipes, specifically, combine much more than that. As we’ve seen, these texts function as translations that bring together object, terms, and bodily conceptions from several textual and medical cultures that don’t otherwise have the chance to meet and inform one another. Each Manchu medical recipe in our Si yang-ni okto-i bithe (Ch. Xiyang yaoshu 西洋藥書) [Handbook of Western Drugs] also functions in conversation with other recipes included in the text, and these recipes often reference one another in a wonderful inter-textual tapestry. In many ways, “with” – effecting combination, juxtaposition, conversation – is one of the key attitudes animating a Manchu medical recipe.

Future posts in this mini-series will consider the same recipe by zooming in on other attitudes (on, inside, etc.) to explore the ways that temporal and spatial orientations shape the kind of work that the recipe does to create relationships in the embodied world. We will conclude with a post that zooms back out to consider how these re-orientations can collectively help us read and experience medical recipes in general (and Manchu recipes in particular) in a new way, and ultimately generate new kinds of story-translations from them.

With that in mind, let’s return to the recipe that we’ve been variously translating over the course of this series and re-encounter and re-translate it in the spirit of celebrating the way that the recipe situates bodies in time and space in a “with” kind of a way. (You can find alternate translations of the same recipe from previous installments of Translating Recipes here and here.) This is appropriate to the nature of the recipe, which is (as you’ll recall) a remedy for poison. A poisoning, after all, is a relationship, and thus an event of with-ness: it is a meeting of substances and bodies whose coming-together creates an emergency. We might consider this a circumstance of being “with poison,” analogous to (and perhaps the inverse of) the way we describe pregnancy as being “with child”: in both cases, one body occupies another and transforms it. Both result from a with-ing of a body. Translation, like poisoning, accomplishes a roughly equivalent kind of work: the translators of a text, by joining with it, create an emergency that transform it into something new.

In the Englishing of the Manchu recipe provided below, I’ve emphasized some of the different sorts of combination, juxtaposition, and with-ness that animate the recipe in an effort to show how important this kind of relationship is to the work that the recipe does. There are also implied moments of with-ness that I haven’t called attention to, but that this re-orientation will hopefully help us be more sensitive to even when it’s not explicitly marked.

The Manchu text:

emu hacin. niyalma ehe horon bisire jaka de oktolobuci.  neneme ehe horon be geterembure ufa  okto be [gvsici fangdz de bi..] fangdz songkoi omifi. oksibufi. sirame ere nimenggi be guwejihe teisu bade ulenggu de iju.. aikabade jeke omiha  ehe horon umesi amba ofi. dolo wajime fathaxame gvwaliyaxame bucere de isiname ujen oci. ere  nimenggi okto be tofohon sabdan ci wesihun orin sabdan ci fusihvn gaifi. eici yali bujuha tarhv sile de. eici sun nimenggi suwaliyaha sun de suwaliyafi omi.. guwejihe teisu bade ulenggu de. ere nimenggi be juwe erin ome emgeri dasame ijume. jai inenggi geli juwe mudan iju.. aikabade ehe horon kemuni majige getereke akv oci. ere nimenggi okto be geli emu udu sabdan gaifi fangdz songkoi omifi fangdz songkoi ijuci sain..

The translation, in the spirit of “With”:

Here is a medicinal oil that will help a body part ways WITH the poison inside it. This should be used if a person is WITH poison. Before being WITHOUT the poison, after taking a flour-based drug that will interact WITH the one being prescribed here [and one which is found in the thirtieth prescription that is collected WITH this one in this text] in accordance WITH the prescription, and after that drug causes the poison to be vomited up and thus no longer WITH the body, spread this oil on the navel part of the stomach so that it interacts WITH the skin. If the poisoned person has consumed a lot of the poison such that it’s wreaking havoc WITH the body and the condition has become very serious WITH respect to what it had been earlier, combine 15-20 drops of the oil WITH either the fatty broth produced WITH boiled meat or butter combined WITH milk, and then drink the oil WITH the liquid. Having smeared this oil on the navel part of the stomach (blending oil WITH skin again) after waiting for one erin period WITH an additional erin period, the following day spread the oil two more times. If this has still not succeeded in removing all of the poison, take one or more drops of this medicinal oil and smear it on (blending oil WITH skin again) in accordance WITH the prescription. Good health will then be WITH you.