China and the West

Zhang Chi : En 1948 Jean-Paul Sartre était en train de subir des insultes de la part du Parti communiste français et de l'URSS à cause des Mains sales. L'existentialisme, le courant le plus remarquable à ce moment-là, était critiqué donc le plus sévèrement en tant que phénomène de la 'décadence' de la littérature de l'Europe et l'Ouest par des 'théoriciens littéraires marxistes'. La victoire du Parti communiste chinois en 1949 va confirmer leur condamnation sur les idées littéraires non-marxistes et anti-marxistes.

Feng Zhi schreibt über Politik über die fremdsprachige Literatur und die russische Literatur in China. In : Shi jie wen xue ; no 2 (1960) : "Le domaine de la littérature étrangère doit aussi mettre en application 'Intervention aux causeries sur la littérature et l'art à Yenan' (mai 1942) de Mao Zedong. La littérature étrangère devait être au service de la littérature des ouvriers-paysans et soldats et à celui du développement de la littérature socialiste de Chine. Ceux qui faisaient de la littérature étrangère devaient, eux aussi, faire de fond en comble la refonte idéologique pour se former à la conception marxiste du monde. Et quand ils menaient des recherches sur la littérature étrangère, il leur était nécessaire de suivre les points de vue et la méthode marxiste-léniniste."

La Chine a prohibé les oeuvres d'Albert Camus et sa personne n'a jamais été présentée dans ce pays. Les raisons pour lesquelles Camus fut prohibé étaient les suivantes : L'étranger d'Albert Camus 'flatte le goût de la bourgeoisie' par son sentiment de solitude. Mais le problème essentiel, reposait, sur le plan politique et social. L'absence de Camus en Chine, a pour cause la politique appliquée dans le domaine de la littérature et des arts, et formulée par Mao Zedong, ce dernier ayant défini l'orientation vers une littérature nouvelle et un art nouveau de la Chine nouvelle.

Zhang Chi : A partir de 1949, André Gide est condamné en Chine et ses traducteurs chinois ont dû faire de 'serieuses autocritiques' pour être pardonnés.

Xiao, Qian. Pei'er Jinte : yi bu qing suan ge ren zhu yi de shi ju [ID D26256].
Xiao schreibt : "Ibsen is no longer suitable for us, not only because he belonged to far away Northern Europe. Yet as a forerunner of our profession [writers], we cannot deny that he had observed the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out its rotten parts. His weakness lay in the fact that he just attacked the corruptions of society but did not analyse the economic causes. Therefore he recongnized only the existence of the individual, but did not see that there were the masses. He advocated the improvement of the individual, but neber that of the environment. Ibsen was spiritually an anarchist.
Today China has stepped into socialism, in which everything is put under organization and becomes part of a larger syste, from the anarchism of thirty years ago, which produced a spirit of rebellion in favour of individualism.. We have inherited from Ibsen the poisonous idea of perfecting oneself without much care for the others. As for our self-reform, can Ibsen contribute something to compensate the losses he has caused us ? Yes, Ibsen can. He gives us Peer Gynt which has a grander atmosphere, profounder significance and higher artistic accomplishment than A doll's hous and An enemy of the people.

Tam Kwok-kan : Xiao believes that Ibsenism is no longer needed in China, not only because Ibsen was a writer of the last century, but also because he belongs to the faraway Northern Europe, where the society is essentially different from that in China. As a forerunner of literary realism, Ibsen, Xiao said, examined the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out the roots of its evilness. Xiao believed that Ibsen's weakness lay in the fact that he attacked only the surface corruptions of society and did not analyze their economic causes. He therefore attacked Ibsen for his advocacy of individualism. He thought that Ibsen recognized only the importance of the individual and not of the masses, because Ibsen failed to relate the victimization of the individual to the injustice hidden in the social structure. Xiao claimed that Ibsen's play Peer Gynt should be read as a critique of individualism. According to Xiao Qian, the play is a caricature of selfishness as exemplified in the self-centered Peer Gynt. Xiao asserted that the object of attack throughout Peer Gynt was the idea of individualism.

Gründung der Southern China Film Industry Workers' Union in Hong Kong = Hua nan ying lian = 華南影聯

Eliot, T.S. Christianity and culture : the idea of a christian society and notes towards the definition of culture. (New York, N.Y. : Harcourt, Brace, 1949). (A Harvest book ; HB32).
"In the literature of Asia is great poetry. There is also profound wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics ; but at the moment I am only concerned with poetry. I have no knowledge whatever of the Arabic, Persian or Chinese languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too ; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility. But generally poets are not oriental scholars – I was never a scholar myself ; and the influence of oriental literature upon poets is usually through translations. That there has been some influence of poetry of the East in the last century and a half is undeniable : to instance only English poetry, and in our own time, the poetical translations from the Chinese made by Ezra Pound, and those made by Arthur Waley, have probably been read by every poet writing in English. It is obvious that through individual interpreters, specially gifted for appreciating a remote culture, every literature may influence every other. The frontiers of culture are not and should not be closed."

Wang Shenfu immigrated to the United States.

David Rafael Wang emigriert nach Amerika und besucht die La Scuola Italiana of Middlebury, Vt.

[Thoreau, Henry David]. Hua'erteng. Suoluo zhu ; Xu Chi yi. [ID D29712].
Xu Chi about his experience of translation : 'I have drawn inspiration largely from Thoreau while translating his Walden. The experience is really gratifying, for I have absorbed not only his ideas but also his way of writing. I owe him a great debt. That's why I am often regarded as the right translator of Thoreau.

Moore, Marianne. E. McKnight Kauffer. [In the American British Art Gallery's Drawing for the Ballet and the Original Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe by E. McKnight Kauffer. New York : The Gallery, Batsford House, 1949.]
E. McKnight Kauffer is a very great artist… Shadows are as arresting as objects ; numerals and letters are so rare in themselves that opposing angles, contrasting sizes, and basic parallels, are of consummate elegance – the only kind of eloquence not intrusive. This language of blacks and grays is color in the sense that Chinese brush masterpieces are color.

Wilder, Thornton. Goethe and world literature. (1949). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361].
On this Wednesday Goethe was talking about a Chinese novel he had been reading…
[Goethe] :The epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must now get to work to hasten the advent of that epoch. However, while extending this high appreciation to foreign works we should not bind ourselves to any particular one and regard it as the final model – whether it be the Chinese or the Serbian or Calderón or the Niebelungenlied…
The Cantos of Ezra Pound require our familiarity with the civilizations which Frobenius claims to have distinguished in African pre-history, as well as a close knowledge of Chinese history, the Italian Renaissance, and the economic problems of the American Revolution.

Xian dai Meiguo shi ge. Aigen [Conrad Aiken] ; Yuan Shuipai yi. [ID D29779].
In his introduction Yuan gives a biographical sketch of Emily Dickinson's life, which is most likely the first ever written in Chinese. He writes : "Readers recognize that her poems have the same features as William Blake's : simple and pure, bright and limpid. Some say that her verse lines are as compact and intense as unburned shooting stars." Yuan singled out from his limited resources following five pomes to translate into Chinese :
I never saw a moor, I died for beauty – but was scarce, The mountains – grow unnoticed, A bird, came down the walk, Success is counted sweetest.

Salinger, J.D. The laughing man. In : The New Yorker ; March 19 (1949).
http://ae-lib.org.ua/salinger/Texts/N4-LaughingMan-en.htm.
The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow's head in a carpenter's vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right…
Soon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive…
His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles' blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates lived with him: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong, whose tongue had been burned out by white men, and a gorgeous Eurasian girl, who, out of unrequited love for the Laughing Man and deep concern for his personal safety, sometimes had a pretty sticky attitude toward crime…
I'm not saying I will, but I could go on for hours escorting the reader--forcibly, if necessary--back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border…
Abruptly, and rather unpleasantly, he interrupted the Laughing Man with the information that, in the first place, his name wasn't Dark Wing or Black Wing or Gray Legs or any of that business, it was Armand, and, in the second place, he'd never been to China in his life and hadn't the slightest intention of going there…

George Roerich unterrichtet Chinesisch und Tibetisch am Indo-Tibetischen Seminar von Kalimpong in Westbengalen.

Rudol'f Vsevolodovic Vjatkin wird Kandidat der Geschichtswissenschaften in Moskau.

Xu Beihong wird erster Präsident der Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing und Vorsitzender der China Artists Association.

Peter Goullart verlässt China.

Benjamin Videira Pires ist als Missionar in Macao.

Lionel Henry Lamb ist Botschafter des britischen Konsulats in Nanjing.