Contributions by Pablo Maurette
Pablo Maurette writes essays and teaches comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated works by Porphyry, Robert Burton, and Thomas Hobbes. His first book, El sentido olvidado: ensayos sobre el tacto (The Forgotten Sense: Essays on Touch) was published by Mardulce Editora in 2015. Some of the authors he has read the most in the past couple of years are Lucretius, Plotinus, Sir Thomas Browne, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The Forgotten Sense (fragment)
Pablo Maurette
translated by Andrea Rosenberg
In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner … Read More »
sending...