Chinese Music in Dream of Fair to Middling Women: Adaptation and Misreading

Samuel Beckett’s virgin novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women is “a patchwork of quotations, allusions and meta-fiction”. Its allusions to Chinese music are mostly inspirations from Louis Laloy’s La Musique Chinoise. Of them, the legends of “Líng Lún Inventing Pitch Pipes and the Twelve Lǜlǚs” are ultimately the adaptation of a section of the ancient Chinese encyclopedia Master Lǚ’s Historical Records. The contrastive studies of the legends of Líng Lún and the phoenix and the story of Confucius playing “cubs of jade” in Beckett’s English adaptation, Laloy’s French adaptation and the Chinese source texts help discover and solve previously unknown errors in those adaptations and relevant Western scholarship. Besides, the contrastive study of the legends of Líng Lún in the published Chinese translation of Beckett’s adaptation and the Chinese source text reveals more defects and mistakes in the above two adaptations and may lead to the most faithful Chinese back translation. As some of Beckett’s “wild thoughts”, those allusions help draw not only “the portrait of an artist as a young man”, but also a chart of the reception of the legendary birth of Chinese music in West Europe in the early twentieth century, thus they are worth studying in terms of scholarship history.