ABSTRACT
JPM furnishes the readers with a veritable encyclopaedic representation of sexual life in ancient China. Indeed, one significant feature of the erotic passages in JPM is the profusion of metaphorical expressions. Interestingly, some poems were excised by Egerton in his translation – another kind of translatorial censorship, but those which survived his filtration all escaped the institutional censors, even though they were used for erotic descriptions. A complete picture of the English translations of the metaphorical references to the body parts is restricted here not only due to space limitation, but because of the fact that the majority of these references have been Latinised in Egerton's LOTUS. In LOTUS, the graphically explicit sexual passages are incongruously presented in Latin in English's stead. The Latin patch in bold is from the 1939 publication of LOTUS, and its corresponding English version in square brackets is from the 1972 re-version.
