世新中文 ‧ 中國文學名著英譯選讀教室

FENG YEN

Feng Yen was a hero from Wei.[1] His ancestors were not particularly distinguished. While young he was a wild one given to ball games and cockfights. Once in some marketplace a fight broke out over a question of money. Yen was drawn there and in assisting the wronged party hit and killed someone. Thus he took cover in the countryside. As the official search for him heightened, he fled to Hua,[2] where he grew close to the young men of the Hua garrison, joining them in their usual amusements.

At that time his lordship Prime Minister Chia Tan[3] was in Hua and, recognizing Yen’s talents, kept him in his headquarters [for his own service]. When Yen was out for a stroll of the neighborhood one day, he saw a woman in a doorway watching him even as she veiled herself with her sleeve. Her appearance was so seductive that her intentions were not to be missed. So Yen took her as a lover. Her husband, Chang Ying, however, was the garrison commander of Hua. When Ying heard of the affair, he beat his wife repeatedly. For this her family and friends alt hated and resented him.

Once when Ying had gone to drink with friends, Yen, seizing the opportunity, lay again in his bedchamber, shutting the door. On Ying’s return, his wife opened the door to let him in, at the same time concealing Yen behind her skirt. Yen then, crouching low, tiptoed to cover; and as he was turning around to hide behind the door, his kerchief fell to the pillow near Ying’s sword. Ying was drunk and had fallen asleep. Yen pointed to his kerchief, asking the woman to get it, but she handed him the sword instead. Yen looked at her for a long time, then slit her throat, put on his kerchief, and left.

The following morning when Ying got up and saw that his wife had been murdered, he was amazed. Just as he was about to go and surrender himself, his neighbors, thinking that Ying had actually killed her, bound him and went to inform the wife’s parents. The relatives all came and one said, “You have been beating our daughter regularly out of jealousy and then accused her falsely of indiscretions. Now you’ve even killed her with no justification! How could it have been someone else who killed her? If that were the case, why would you still be alive?”

They held Ying and gave him more than a hundred strokes with the bamboo, so that he could no longer speak. The officials placed him under arrest for murder. Since the truth was nowhere to be found, he was forced to suffer such injustice. Several dozen constables from the bureau of justice, armed with poles, took Ying to the marketplace. More than a thousand onlookers surrounded the area. Suddenly, a man pushed through the crowd and called out, “Hold! Don’t sentence an innocent man to death! I stole his wife and I killed her. You should imprison me.”

The constables took hold of the man who made the confession—-it turned out to be Yen! The judge took him before Lord Chia and stated the charges in detail. Chia in turn relayed the details of the case to the emperor, offering his resignation in exchange for Yen’s life. The emperor felt this to be just and sent down a proclamation granting amnesty to all those who had received the death penalty in the city of Hua.

In eulogy let it be said: “I [the storyteller] esteem the words of the Grand Historian[4] and also am fond of relating events in which justice and righteousness are upheld. Those things which my associates had experienced or witnessed, they often told me. During the Yüan-ho period [8o6-82o][5] Auxiliary Secretary Liu Yüan-t’ing[6] related this account of Feng Yen to me, thus making it possible for it to be recorded and handed down. Alas! An immoral and treacherous mind is worse than flood or fire and certainly to be dreaded! But Yen’s killing of an unjust person, his exonerating an innocent man—-these are truly the ways of the heroes of old!”