Tale of the Pipa

, circa 1305-1359 The play is set during the Han dynasty. Gao reportedly composed The Lute over a three-year period of solitary confinement, locking himself in an attic room and wearing down the floorboards by tapping out the rhythms of his songs. The Lute won considerable critical acclaim amongst Gao's contemporaries, since it raised the popular but somewhat rustic form of Southern folk opera (Nanxi) to a higher literary standard, and it became a model for Ming dynasty theatre. ==Translations==

Antoine (A. P. L.) Bazin wrote a French translation in 1841. This version, titled ''Le Pi-pa-ki ou l'Histoire de Luth'', was published in Paris in 1841 by the Imprimerie Royale. A group of Chinese students in Boston performed an English-language version of the play in 1925, translated by Y.H. Ku and Liang Shih-chiu, and acted by Liang and Bing Xin among others. Vincenz Hundhausen wrote a German translation in 1930. A complete English translation and study by Jean Mulligan appeared in 1980. It is a part of the "Translations from the Oriental Classics" set, published by Columbia University Press. There is an introduction, which has six sections: "The Play and Its Genre," "The Author," "Sources of the Play," "The Play as Literature," "On the Translation," and "Notes." The translation also has a bibliography in English and Chinese, a synopsis, a glossary, and a list of titles of songs. Birrell stated that Mulligan did her work "courageously". ==Adaptations==

Memoirs of the Guitar, published in Shanghai in 1928, is an English-language novel self-described as "A Novel of Conjugal Love, Rewritten from a Chinese Classical Drama". The author was Yu Tinn-Hugh and the publisher was the China Current Weekly Publishing Company. A 1946 American musical comedy based on the Chinese play, titled Lute Song, was written by Will Irwin and Sidney Howard. This adaptation was produced on Broadway. It starred Yul Brynner and Mary Martin. Cyril Birch, collaborator in a translation of The Peach Blossom Fan, wrote that presumably the basis of the American play was the A. P. L. Balzin French translation of the Chinese play. ==References==