A Study on Omission of Verses in Egerton’s Translation of Chin P’ing Mei from the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

The integration of prose and verse is a pivotal stylistic hallmark of vernacular novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties, marking the major stylistic difference between classical Chinese novels and Western novels. Numerous inserted poems were omitted in the Clement Egerton’s English version of Chin P’ing Mei. From the cognitive logic of “the unity of form and spirit”, the omission of such formal carriers may, to a certain extent, impair the complete conveyance of the original’s spiritual and cultural connotations, and may even result in the loss of spiritual essence alongside discarded form. Although verse omission effectively removes reading barriers and thus facilitates target textual reception, it also weakens the original work’s narrative texture, structural design, intertextual interconnections, and generic features to varying degrees. In essence, this translation strategy reveals the translator’s attempt to incorporate the distinctive narrative system of classical Chinese novels into the evaluative framework of Western realist novels. As a result, the genre-specific features are weakened, the intertextual chains are broken, and the qualities of traditional Chinese poetics are diminished. Egerton’s omission of verse passages was, to some extent, conditioned by its particular historical context, and its gains and losses offer important lessons and insights for the global dissemination of classical Chinese novels.