Tag Archives: Manchu

Translating Recipes 3: Fairy Tale Drugs

By Carla Nappi

Hello again! When last we met, I was telling you about a recent and ongoing experiment in translating Manchu-language medical recipes into different storytelling forms as a way to get at the narrative power of drug texts and their formulae. If you don’t recall that, take a moment to check out the previous two posts in this series and you’ll get the most out of what follows: Part 1: Narrating Qing Bodies and Part 2: A Drama of Butter and Pearls

All done? Good to have you back! Now, let’s reminisce a bit. Whether it was worrying over Little Red Riding Hood or wondering at the fate of Cinderella, many of us spent our childhoods reading and living a dream-life in fairytales. Many of these stories have common elements. Often, they incorporate some kind of magic or enchantment. They usually include conventional, stock characters that don’t change much over the course of any given story. And importantly, the stories move across time and space: different versions of a story might be found in very different contexts; often a fairytale story is transmitted orally rather than depending on a specific textual materialization of the narrative. In his introduction to Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm: A New English Version, Philip Pullman thus characterizes fairy tales as being in “a perpetual state of becoming and alteration.”

Image:   A Manchu woman in a rocky garden, taken by John Thomson in 1869. Image 19678i from the Iconographic Collection, Wellcome Library, London.
Image: A Manchu woman in a rocky garden, taken by John Thomson in 1869. Image 19678i from the Iconographic Collection, Wellcome Library, London. 

If you think about it, an early modern medical recipe shares many of the same narrative features as a fairy tale. (At least, this is true of the early modern Manchu medical recipes that we’ve been exploring together.) These recipes often incorporate ingredients with (at least reputedly) incredible powers: gold, pearls, precious animal horns. They also feature a limited number of stock directions (mix this, smear that) and basic ingredients (wine, fat, water). There often exist many versions of the same formula, with the core identity of a particular recipe not dependent on its materialization in a particular text. And like Pullman’s fairy tales, if we consider how these recipes are used, they are also in a constant state of alteration and variation. Put another way, both Manchu medical recipes and fairy tales exist in a continuing state of translation. Like a fairytale, the recipe becomes a kind of basic storyline that is recorded into textual form but doesn’t depend on any single, specific textual inscription and can be adopted and adapted into different local contexts.

So what would happen, I wondered in the course of considering this parallel one afternoon, if we read a medical recipe as a fairy tale? Are there stories hidden in the lines of these Manchu texts, and how might looking for them change (at least in some small way) how we think about the kind of work a medical recipe does? Translating a recipe as a fairy tale does a few useful things for us. It emphasizes the translatability, literary form, and movement of these texts, and of the bodies within them. It puts a different spin on early modern medical recipes: sometimes, the formula (or, storyline) was more important than the identities of the individual ingredients it combined. And it highlights the fact that, for many readers, there was a kind of magic at work in an early modern medical recipe: powerful, unfamiliar ingredients were invoked in powerful, unfamiliar language. (Plus, it’s a whole lot of fun.)

In the next post, I’ll share the result of this experiment with you.

Translating Recipes 2: A Drama of Butter and Pearls

By Carla Nappi

Translation 1

A medicinal oil eliminating (harmful) poison.

One kind [of oil] used if a person has just been poisoned.

Before eliminating the poison, after taking a flour-based drug in accordance with the 30th prescription, and after that drug causes the poison to be vomited up, spread this oil on the navel part of the stomach.

If the person has consumed so much poison that a lot of internal things are going wrong and the condition has become very serious, after taking 15 – 20 drops of the oil and combining it with either the fatty broth from boiled meat, or butter combined with milk, drink it. Having already smeared this oil on the navel part of the stomach again after 2 erin periods, the following day smear it again two times.

If this has still not eliminated the poison, after taking one or more drops of this medicinal oil again according to the prescription, if you smear it according to the prescription all will be well.

IMG_9087The text above is a fairly straightforward translation of a Manchu medical recipe into English, preserving the structure and form of the original. But what if we were to read the recipe in another way, translating it instead (in light of my previous post) as another kind of narrative altogether?

I’ve incorporated Manchu phrases to give a sense of the disorientingly multilingual character of the original, with includes Latin, French, Manchu, and Chinese. The story is intimate, reflecting the sensual nature of the relationship that this recipe creates among its ingredients and the human body. Some of the plot is playful. For example, “nure” is the Manchu term for wine or alcohol, leading to the “drunken conversation” with her. “Manju beye” is a term for the Manchu body.

There are resonances that aren’t obvious on the first (or fourth) reading. Partly, this reflects the obscurity of some references in the original recipe. With that, I bring you the second translation of the recipe.

Translation 2

Act I, Scene 1.

You are incense. You are pearls. You are amber, roses, sugar. You are urine and clay, saliva. You are cinnamon and bile.

It is the end of the seventeenth century and you are the protagonist. (You are always the protagonist.)

You are booxi or nicuha. You are aisin, ding hiyan, gu-i pi. You are gingina okto.

You have just arrived at the court of the Kangxi Emperor. (Or maybe you’re still at the capital, en route to the court.)

You’ve spent the last months stuffed into close quarters with different ones in different languages: Eliksir, Mei Gui, Balsamun. At the beginning, you didn’t understand each other. Some muttered uncomfortably in Latin. You thought you heard a few of them complaining to each other in Chinese. There was a very quiet one in the corner that may have been French, but you’re not sure.

The only way you’ve managed to communicate is by using some of the words you’ve picked up from the world outside your temporary home. Cold words like xahvrun, watery words like muke. You had a drunken conversation with a mysterious one about nure: though you don’t remember much of it, it seems to have been heated and she’s been stealing looks at you since.

This last one, actually, might have potential: it’s a short life, and a lonely one, and any chance for intimacy before the final, sudden coming together…well, it gives you some sense that something might be in your control. Your first words are halting, but as they melt the silence she starts to turn toward them: uju. nimenggi okto. Ge-te-rem-bu-re nimenggi okto.

The first whispers of a response reach you…ehe horon be ge-te-rem-bu-re nimenggi okto…

And then you turn away as you realize that the words are coming from outside: someone has been poisoned, and everything changes.

Act II, Scene 1.

Everything in you has led to this moment.

The foreignness of the others to you, and yours to them, stops mattering.

You come together and now the only words you have are sounds that felt dissonant before but now flow like music. They surround you and come sliding out of you like the oil you’re feeling yourself dissolve into.

You see her – she’s also dissolving and you start dissolving into each other niyalma yaya ehe horon de neciburakv and you’re both moving toward the poisoned one and you’re absorbing into each other emu juwe sabdan gaifi and into him

and you’re moving and

he retches aikabade jeke omiha ehe horon umesi amba ofi and…

…And it doesn’t work. There was too much poison.

And now what do you do? She’s also half-dissolved and looks at you, disbelieving, not comprehending.

This is it. You can’t do anymore. This can’t be all there is…

Act II, Scene 2.

Here is what you do.

You don’t give up.

You collect what there is left of yourself and you wait and you wait and the others wait.

You turn away from each other, embarrassed, having forgotten how to communicate.

You’ve lost your language and you’re starting to reel from the swaying of the poisoned one, who is jerking as his systems shut down.

You have nothing to say.

And then. And then you smell something.

Butter…?

Act III, Scene 1.

Butter.

You smell butter and milk, and you feel some of it against you, and you look in surprise as she feels it too,

…and you start to speak and eici yali bujuha tarhv sile de and you find yourself moving down the poisoned one’s throat together and dissolving together, again, and you look at each other expecting to be torn apart again…

…try to get as much out of this brief time as possible eici sun nimenggi suwaliyaha sun de suwaliyafi omi and you sing to each other this time gu-we-ji-he teisu bade ulenggu de…and…

…and…and you stop singing. You start to drift. You lose the sense of a center, of your own boundaries.

You become her, become the once-poisoned one, become beye, Manju beye, and you sleep.

Translating Recipes 1: Narrating Qing Bodies

By Carla Nappi

Image from the manuscript of Dergici toktobuha Ge ti ciowan lu bithe, from a manuscript (Mandchou 289) in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
Image from the manuscript of Dergici toktobuha Ge ti ciowan lu bithe, from a manuscript (Mandchou 289) in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

I study and write about the history of science and medicine in early modern Eurasia, with a focus on China in that context. In particular, I’m interested in how medical and culinary recipes were translated in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, and how the recipe format became a medium of epistemic exchange across early modern Eurasia.

A text that has been particularly exercising me lately is the Xiyang yaoshu 西洋藥書 [Handbook of Western Drugs]. It was written by two French Jesuits, Joachim Bouvet (1656 – 1730) and Jean-François Gerbillon (1654-1707), some time after they had arrived at the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1688. The book itself was smaller than a modern passport. It begins with a series of thirty-six recipes for treating myriad illnesses, many of which were broken down into varieties on a common theme. After this, the text opens out into almost forty further discussions of drugs and illnesses, many roughly translated from European-language texts about health and the body.

Importantly, the text was written in a language called Manchu, one of the official languages of the Qing court and a crucial medium of translation of scientific and medical knowledge during the Kangxi Emperor’s reign. Many of the recipes used the Manchu script to transliterate the names for drugs in Chinese, French, Latin, and other languages. The text contains many recipes for making remedies for poisons of all kinds.

Reading through this text, I began to think deeply about these recipes as literary objects. What if we understand a recipe not just as a kind of text, but also as a form of storytelling? If a recipe does tell a story, what kind of story might that be? And how might understanding recipes in this way change the way we read and experience them?

Thus began the Qing Bodies project, a long-term multi-media foray into considering various forms of scientific and medical writing in the Qing period from the perspective of a history of storytelling. Qing Bodies asks a very simple, but potentially transformative, question: how might reading Qing medical and scientific texts with an eye to narrative form open up creative possibilities for working and writing with the history of Eurasian science and medicine? This has been tremendous fun, to put it mildly!

One recent experiment stemming from this project (and inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau) has led to me thinking about the relationship between recipes and drama. Can we map a recipe onto–for example–a traditional three-act dramatic form? And how might that change how we experience recipes as literature?

If Act I of the recipe introduces the protagonist (or protagonists), sets out the conflict, and presents the incident that will set the ensuing events in motion, Act II introduces an obstacle for the main character and brings the protagonist to a moment of crisis. Act III resolves the crisis. Here, the recipe becomes a story involving characters (drugs, a body in crisis) that are transformed through their interactions in time.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share the result of this experiment with you…