China and the West

Qian, Zhongshu. Bu ping 'Ying wen xin zi ci dian'. In : Guan cha zhou kan ; vol. 3, no 5 (1947). [Kritik zum A dictionary of new English words, phrases, and usages ID D24242].
Er schreibt über das Wort 'existentialism' : « Cette explication n'est pas très exacte. Il vaut mieux dire : c'est une école philosophique moderne qui a été très répandue en Allemagne avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et qui est devenue pratique courante en France après la Guerre. J'ai Die Existenzphilosophie de Karl Jaspers. Ce livre est imprimé en 1938. Sa publication est donc de quatre ou cinq ans avant L'être et le néant de Jean-Paul Sartre et Le mythe de sisyphe d'Albert Camus. Maintenant, la version anglaise des oeuvres de Kierkegaard et de Heidegger sont déjà disponibles. Il semble que cette philosophie commenc à se faire une vogue en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis. »

[Sartre, Jean-Paul]. Qiang. Dai Wangshu yi [ID D24259].
Dai Wangshu schreibt im Anhang : « Jean-Paul Sartre, l'auteur de cette nouvelle, est un nouvel écrivain qui s'est fait remarquer peu avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il s'est rendu célèbre par le roman La nausée (1938) et le recueil de nouvelles Le mur (1939). Il est un philosophe profondément influencé par Kierkegaard et Heidegger. Il est aussi un génie littéraire. Durant l'Occupation, il a été un écrivain important de la Résistance par ses pièces comme Huis clos, Les mouches, etc. Après cette guerre, l'existentialisme qu'il a créé est en vogue dans le milieu littéraire de France et est devenu un mouveau courant de la littérature contemporaine. Maintenant, déjà un maître littéraire il est en train de lutter pour la suprématie avec le socialiste Aragon et le surréaliste Eluard, etc. Cette nouvelle est tirée du recueil Le mur. Bien qu'elle soit une de ses premières oeuvres, elle est déjà profondément marquée par la pensée existetialiste de Sartre telle qu'il la préconiserait un peu plus tard. »

Sun, Jinsan. Zhao huo lou yue ji [ID D24160].
Sun schreibt über Jean-Paul Sartre : "L'écrivain dont la renommée s'est le plus accrue pendant la Résistance. » Il présente deux pièces de Sartre, Les mouches et Huis clos. Il compare Les mouches avec Qu yuan von Guo Moruo. Il souligne que Sartre, comme Guo Moruo, emploie un sujet historique pour critiquer l'actualité. A propos de Huis clos, il dit : "La scène se passe dans un salon en enfer, où trois personnes sont enfermées. Et il n'y a aucune possibilité d'en sortir. Les relations entre les trois personnages se compliquent sans cesse, et chacun et chacune d'entre eux cherche une alliance avec l'un(e) ou l'autre. Bien qu'ils se haïssent, ils ne peuvent pas se parler. C'est une pièce très philosophique".

Sun, Jinsan. Suo wei cun zai zhu yi : guo wai wen hua shu ping [ID D54261].
Zhang Chi : Sun signale aux lecteurs que, pendant et après la Seconde guerre mondiale, ce qu'on nomme 'existentialisme' a beaucoup influencé la philosophie et la littérature de l'Occident. L'influence de l'existentialisme sur les intellectuels occidentaux de l'après-guerre, dit-il, est aussi forte que celle du communisme sur la politique. D'après Sun Jinsan, l'existentialisme est en train d'exercer une influence dominante sur l'art et la littérature de l'Occident de l'époque. Il souligne que l'existentialisme, dont Jean-Paul Sartre est la figure majeure, est né du grand désespoir et de la tristesse qui ont couvert toute la France.
Sun fait remqrquer une différence fondamentale entre l'existentialisme et d'autres philosophies : ces dernières se limitent aux réflexions métaphysiques ou aux valeurs morales et éthiques, alors que l'existentialisme discute directement sur l'existence de l'homme et cherche des interprétations de la vie. En rejetant la manière de penser traditionnelle, les existentialistes ne parlent plus de concepts abstraits et ils ne s'intéressent qu'au fait essentiel : l'existence de l'homme. Selon l'existentialisme, il n'y a pas d'essence prédéterminée ou de destin préfixé, il n'y a que des possibilités. Un homme peut se développer dans de différentes directions selon ses choix. Bien que l'on ne puisse pas choisir d'être né ou non, et d'être né dans quelle société et dans quel milieu, on porte la responsabilité de réaliser sa vie après sa naissance.
Qu'est-ce que l'homme doit faire alors ? Sun Jinsan dit que, selon Sartre, la liberté est essentielle pour l'homme, et l'homme ne peut acquérir sa liberté que par ses actes. Etant différent des autres êtres, seulement l'homme peut librement choisir ce qu'il veut faire. Un homme ne peut pas être considéré comme libre s'il n'utilise pas sa liberté de choisir. Donc, d'une part, l'existentialisme est pessimiste ; d'autre part, il est positif. Sur la nature de la vie, les scènes que l'existentialisme décrit sont très tristes. L'homme est jeté dans un monde hostile et étranger, et il est placé devant les forces incontrôlables de l'univers. Il n'a aucune certitude sur l'avenir. Pour cette raison, la vie est toujours pleine de terreurs, d'inquiétudes, de soucis et de craintes. L'homme ressent toujours du désespoir et s'éprouve de vivre à contrecoeur. Mais ça ne veut pas dire que l'homme n'a pas de Salut. S'il choisit, s'il a un objectif, il peut acquérir sa liberté et il peut remporter des succès. Malheureusement, il y a trop de gens qui craignent la liberté et échappent à la responsabilité de l'homme (la liberté). Conséquence : en décinant leurs responsabilités, ils ont abandonné leurs chances d'être un homme authentique.

Sheng, Chenghua. Xin fan lan xi za zhi yu Faguo xian dai wen xue [ID D64262].
Er schreibt : « La France est riche de théories littéraires. Approximativement pendant la Première Guerre mondiale ont surgit dans le milieu littéraire trente-six écoles, dont le dadaïsme fait partie. La plus remarquable après la Seconde Guerre mondiale est l'existentialisme. Malraux, renommé pour ses descriptions de la guerre et de la révolution, est considéré comme le précurseur de cette nouvelle école. Mais le véritable chef en est Jean-Paul Sartre, un écrivain de la Nouvelle revue française depuis quelques années. L'être et le néant, son ouvrage philosophique à 700 pages, publié en 1943, fournit la théorie de ce mouvement et en est le canon. La vie est condamnée d'être absurde, mais elle peut avoir un sens grâce aux efforts humains. Donc, bien qu'il ait la négation philosophique comme le point de départ, il préconise l'amélioration du monde par les coopérations entre les êtres humains. Aujourd'hui ce mouvement se développe encore de façon très dynamique. Il y a déjà des gens qui prophétisent que le sartrisme devientra l'école dominate de la philosophie française moderne après le bergsonisme. »

Ding Xilin was the only playwright of the modern period who concentrated solely on writing comedy. His genesis as a dramatist can be credited in large measure to the inspiration he drew from the British and Irish writers whose work he had become familiar with while a student in England between 1914 and 1920. Ding once commented that his works ought to be regarded more as translations of foreign plays than as original creations. In the work of Ding and Oscar Wilde, a range of subsidiary themes, including relations between the sexes, as well as marriage and th4e place of women in society generally, and relations between one generation and another, are embedded in one fundamental theme : morality.

"O'Neill and The iceman cometh". In : Wen yi chuan jiu ; Febr. (1947). Article about the production of The iceman cometh on Broadway in October 1946.

[Mengzi]. Mencius, or the economist [ID D29115].
Book One : King Hwuy of Leans or King
Benevolent of Woodbridge
Chapter I
1. Mencius saw King Benevolent of Woodbridge.
2. The King said: Your Honor has not found a thousand le too long a journey, but you have come. May we take it that you have something that will profit my kingdom.
3. Mencius replied, with due politeness in the tone of his voice: What forces your Majesty to use that word 'profit'? I have my humanity and my sense of equity (honsety) and that's all.
4. If your majesty says: How can I make a profit for my state, the great officers will say: "Where's the rake-off for my family?" and each of the minor officers and people will say: "What's there in it for me?" From top to bottom everyone will try to snatch profits from everyone else and the country will be brought to the edge of the precipice. In a ten thousand war-car state, the murderer of the prince will be the head of a hundred chariot family; a thousand out of ten thousand, a hundred out of a thousand, is not very much but the effect won't be long delayed; if you put honesty behind profits and profits before (anything else), no one will be satisfied until he has swiped everything.
5. There never has been a man fully human who neglected his immediate relatives; there never has been a perfectly honest man who failed in his duty to his sovereign.
6. If your Majesty would turn the conversation to Humanity (discussing the full meaning of humanity) and equity, what need would there be to drag in the question of Profits?
Chapter II
1. Mencius saw King Benevolent of Woodbridge. The King took his stand by the bank of a pool contemplating the fat geese and sleek deer. He said: Do men of wisdom take delight in this sort of thing?
2. Mencius replied deferentially, saying: As they are (by definition) men of wisdom (and character) it follows that they take such delight. Those who are not good and wise, even if they have such possession get no pleasure from them.
3. It is said in the Odes :
He made the measurements
And began the Tower of Augury.
He made the measurements and the plan
And the people went at it.
They didn't miss a whole day's work on the job
Until the tower was finished.
He began it not urging anyone to exert himself
And the whole multitude of the people
Came as if they had been children of his family.
The King stood in his Park of Augury.
The plump sleek does rested about him;
White birds were there in their brightness.
The King stood by the Pool of Augury
With lots of fish there leaping within it.
Moving their wing-like feet,
(Shi King, III, 1, 8)
King Wan used the people's strength to build the pagoda and to make the pool, and the people took delight in doing it; they called the tower the Tower of Good Hope, and the pool the Pool of Good Augury; they enjoyed his sleek deer, his fishes and turtles. The men of old took the people into their pleasures, the whole people, and therefore they (the sovereigns) could enjoy them.
4. The T'ang Manifesto says :
Sun, if you would only die
We will all come die with you.
The people wanted him to die to the point of being ready to die themselves to get rid of him. (This re¬fers to the tyrant Kee.) Even if such a man possessed pagodas and birds and animals, how could he have pleasure in them alone by himself,
Chapter III
1. King Benevolent of Woodbridge said: I am pretty small when it comes to running the state, but I do use what heart and mind I possess. When they have bad crops inside the river, I move some of the people to the East Shore, and have grain brought to the people (who stay) on the inside. When the crops are bad on the East shore, I carry on with the same system. When I look over at what is done in the governments of neighboring states, I don't find anybody using his heart like poor me, and yet the folks in the neighboring states don't get any fewer, and the people of your humble servant don't get any more numerous. How's that?
2. Mencius replied: Seems like your Majesty is fond of warfare. Let me draw a military simile. The drums sound, and the sharp blades are crossed, and some men throw away their armor, trail their weapons and run—some a hundred paces and stop, some fifty paces and stop. Is there any way for those who run fifty paces to make fun of those that run a hundred? (The King) said: No go! Clearly they did not run a hundred paces, but they 'also ran'. (Mencius) said: If it is like that, you your Majesty, know that; you needn't expect your population to multiply more than that in the neighboring states.
(Economy of Abundance)
3. If the seasonable work on the farms be not in-terrupted there will be more grain than the people can eat; if the small-meshed nets are not set in the ponds and lakes, there will be more fish and turtles than can be eaten; if you don't hack at the mountain forests with your axes, there will be more wood (timber and firewood) than you can use. When you can't exhaust the grain, fish and terrapin by eating them, when there is more wood than you can use, people will be able to feed the living and bury their dead without resentments; and when people can feed the living and bury the dead without feelings of resentment, you have the beginning of the royal process (of government).
4. On a five-mow (five hectaire, say 2 1/2 acre) home¬stead, let them plant mulberry trees. People of fifty can then wear silk (that is, warm clothing). In pig, dog and hog raising, don't miss the breeding seasons. Then people of seventy can eat meat. A farm of a hundred mow, if you don't interrupt the seasons will support a family of quite a few mouths, so that they won't feel the pinch of hunger. Have proper school education, with emphasis on the filial and fraternal observances, and you won't have gray-head-ed men on the roads toting heavy loads on their backs and heads. With people of seventy wearing silk and eating meat, and the black-haired people (the Chinese) not suffering hunger or cold, there is no case of a ruler (of a state) failing to rise to imperial dignity.
(I am accepting Legge's note for the meaning o) this 'Wang'—'low 3rd tone', according to Legge. It might mean, I should think, no case of a man not reigning, and not being deprived of his kingdom. The bearing of Mencius' philosophy does not seem to me to require the strong-er statement.)
5. Your big dogs and fat swine eat men's food, and you don't know how to impose restrictions. People die from famine along the roadside and you don't know how to issue provisions. They die, and you say: “not my fault, bad season.” What's the difference between this and stabbing a man and say¬ing, "It wasn't me, it was the sword". If your Majesty will desist from blaming the inclemency of the year's weather, all the people of China will gather round you.
Chapter IV
1. King Hwuy of Leans said: Your humble servant (poor me) would like to learn all this quietly.
2. Mencius replied courteously, saying: KILL A MAN WITH A CLUB OH WITH A SWORD - IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE? (The King said: There is no difference.
3. Do it with a sword or a system of government— is there any difference? (The King) said: There is no difference at all.
4. (Mencius) said: In your Kitchen is fat meat; in your stables are fat horses. Your people have the look of hunger; in the waste places, men lie dead from famines. This is marshalling beasts to eat men (or leaving beasts and devouring men).
5. Wild beasts eat one another, and men (who have arrived at the level of having religious rites) despise them (for it—hate them for doing it). But being father and mother of the people and following a mode of government regimenting the beasts and de-vouring men (might even mean training horses), that is a bad basis for being father and mother of the people.
6. Chung-ne (Confucius) said: The man who initiated the use of wooden dummies (in funeral rites) had (probably) no posterity.
7. (There seems to be various ways of taking this ; might even mean that it looked as if this humane substitution of the dummy for sacrificial victims hadn't yet inculcated kindliness. Legge takes is from commentators in a more complicated way.)
8. He made them (the dummies) and used them in place of men. How about a man who causes his people to hunger and die ?

Letter from William Carlos Williams to Louis Zukofsky ; Jan. 26 (1947).
"I had been thinking and writing (private papers) of Ezra's encounter with Chinese poetry--thinking that at that very point his deterioration began due entirely (tho' the inclination was already in him) to his turning from sound to pronunciamentos. He from that moment imagined himself Kung or equated himself with all wisdom and, by that failing against which all poets must guard themselves went straight to hell."

Guo, Moruo. Wo de tong nian. (Shanghai : Hai yan shu dian, 1947).
我的童年
Guo remarked that he had been much influenced by Sir Walter Scott.

Lowry, Malcolm. Under the volcano. (New York, N.Y. : Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).
Sekundärliteratur
The Malcolm Lowry Project: Under the Volcano - University of Otago
http://www.otago.ac.nz/englishlinguistics/english/lowry/content/00_annotations/00_pages/ann_frameset4.html.
Hugh's trip to China is modelled on Nordahl Grieg's assignment there in 1937 as a war correspondent, after which he went to Spain. Hugh's role in China, given how recent his visit was, is strangely suppressed. He could not have been with the Communist forces in the isolated northwest, so, like many Western pressmen, he must have been with the Nationalist forces under Chiang-Kai-Shek in the south, who were the main opposition to the invading Japanese (by October, astride all roads to Canton). ‘China’ is a private allusion to Lowry's short story (1934) of that title, on the theme that every man lies imprisoned in his own consciousness: "And you carry your horizon in your pocket wherever you are".

Robert Burns and China : general
1991
Zhou Guozhen : Of all the poems translated and published in the past few decades, Robert Burns' are best understood and really appreciated in China where people have a special taste for poetical works. It is not very easy for a foreign poet to enjoy great popularity in this land, but Burns has done so ever since some of his poems were translated and published in a magazine for the first time in the twenties of this century. In 1959, for the bicentenary of his birth two collections of Burns' poems were published, translated by Yuan Kejia and Wang Zuoliang.
The reason why the readers in China love Burns' poems so much has two causes : first the immortality of themes – love and friendship, equality and fraternity, democracy and freedom and patriotism. His songs, for the most part, were direct transcriptions from personal experience. So it seems that his works of this group, owing to their deep and sincere feelings, express not one single mood or temperament, but the moods of thousands. Burns was a genuine democrat ; he loved liberty as the breath of life. He wrote a number of poems on social equality and human fraternity. The best known in China are Is there for honest poverty ? and The slave's lament. Burns' poems of this group find echoes in the hearts of Chinese readers, because democracy and freedom have always been lofty ideals for the Chinese people in general, and with the intelligentsia in particular, on account of the country having long been ruled by emperors from different races and invaded by foreign countries. Of the numerous Burns poems of patriotism, the most familiar to the readers in China are My hearts's in the highlands and Robert Bruce's march to Bannockburn.
The second reason for Burns' popularity is the magnetism of his poetry – simplicity, directness, enthusiasm and optimism. Burns deals with a great variety of themes. But no matter what he writes he is always vividly concrete and straightforward, with affection and hope for the future. These characteristics of his works make him a poet quite different in the method of thinking and in technique from most of his Chinese counterparts, either before of after him, even though they sometimes wrote on the same subjects ; Burns appears to the Chinese reader to be an entirely new type of poet with an exotic attraction both in ideological content and in style and manner.
2010
Commemorations of Robert Burns around the world
http://www.scotland.org/features/commemorations-of-robert-burns-around-the-world
Burns's poems have a resonance with traditional Chinese poetry, with themes about the land and love and a peasants struggles with life and an enduring love of his country. In fact, sixty years ago a translation of 'My Hearts in the Highlands' was adopted as the marching song of the Chinese resistance fighters in the Second World War! It's hard to underestimate the love felt for our Poet in China today.

Gertrud Schäppi ist als Missionarin der Basler Mission in Heyuan (Guangdong).

Julian Schuman arbeitet beider China Press, dann für die China weekly review in Shanghai.

Karl Ludvig Reichelt verlässt China.

Wilhelm Dunsing gründet und leitet die Firma Tongshi in China.

Elisabeth von Meier ist Dozentin für Western language and literature an der Furen-Universität in Beijing.

Henry Racmond Williamson ist Vorsitzender der China Christian Universities Association.

Henry Whitfield Guinness kehrt nach China zurück, nimmt an der InterVarsity Conference in Nanjing teil und gibt Bibel-Stunden bis er China verlassen muss.

Jiao Juyin acclaimed Anton Pavlovich Chekhov as "the supreme taste for arts and literature."
Jiao, one of the pioneers who introduced Chekhov to China's drama circle and translated some of Chekhov's works into Chinese in the early 1940s, once said he benefited much from Chekhov. "I started directing in a unique way: It was not Konstantin Stanislavsky who helped me understand Chekhov, it was Chekhov who helped me understand Stanislavsky."