Chronology Entry
Year
1993
Text
Wu, Ningkun ; Li, Yikai. A single tear : a family’s persecution, love, and endurance in communist China. (New York, N.Y. : Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993).
Er schreibt über Hamlet von William Shakespeare : "At the end of my long day's work it was a joy for me to spend time talking with [my wife] about her reading. I would recite Hamlet’s great soliloquies for her... Hamlet was my favorite Shakespeare play. Read in a Chinese labor camp, however, the tragedy of the Danish prince took on unexpected dimensions... The outcry 'Denmark is a prison' echoed with a poignant immediacy, and Elsinore loomed like a haunting metaphor of a treacherous repressive state. The Ghost thundered with a terrible chorus of a million victims of proletarian dictatorship. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would have felt like fish in water, hat they found their way into a modern nation of hypocrites and informers... I would say to myself, 'I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be', echoing Eliot's Prufrock. Rather, I often felt like one of those fellows 'crawling between earth and heaven', scorned by Hamlet himself. But the real question I came to see was neither 'to be, or not to be', nor whether 'in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', but how to be worthy of one's suffering. Hamlet suffered as an archetypal modern intellectual. Touched off by practical issues in the kingdom of Denmark, his anguish, emotional, moral, and metaphysical, took on cosmic dimensions and permeated the great soliloquies with an ever-haunting rhytm. When I recited them to myself on the lake shore, I felt this anguish was the substance of the tragedy."
Er schreibt über Hamlet von William Shakespeare : "At the end of my long day's work it was a joy for me to spend time talking with [my wife] about her reading. I would recite Hamlet’s great soliloquies for her... Hamlet was my favorite Shakespeare play. Read in a Chinese labor camp, however, the tragedy of the Danish prince took on unexpected dimensions... The outcry 'Denmark is a prison' echoed with a poignant immediacy, and Elsinore loomed like a haunting metaphor of a treacherous repressive state. The Ghost thundered with a terrible chorus of a million victims of proletarian dictatorship. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would have felt like fish in water, hat they found their way into a modern nation of hypocrites and informers... I would say to myself, 'I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be', echoing Eliot's Prufrock. Rather, I often felt like one of those fellows 'crawling between earth and heaven', scorned by Hamlet himself. But the real question I came to see was neither 'to be, or not to be', nor whether 'in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', but how to be worthy of one's suffering. Hamlet suffered as an archetypal modern intellectual. Touched off by practical issues in the kingdom of Denmark, his anguish, emotional, moral, and metaphysical, took on cosmic dimensions and permeated the great soliloquies with an ever-haunting rhytm. When I recited them to myself on the lake shore, I felt this anguish was the substance of the tragedy."
Mentioned People (2)
Shakespeare, William
(Stratford-upon-Avon 1564-1616 Stratford-upon-Avon) : Dramatiker, Dichter
Wu, Ningkun
(um 1953)
Subjects
Literature : Occident : Great Britain
Documents (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2009 | Huang, Alexander C.Y. Chinese Shakespeares : two centuries of cultural exchange. (New York, N.Y. : Columbia University Press, 2009). (Global Chinese culture). S. 139-140. | Publication / Shak36 |
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