China and the West

Paul L.-M. Serruys ist Direktor der Chinese Division des Institute for Languages and Linguistics der Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Ross Terrill erhält den B.A. der University of Melbourne.

André Saint-Mleux ist Generalkonsul in Hong Kong und Macao.

Giuliano Bertuccioli wird Direktor des Istituto per l'Oriente della fondazione Cini in Venedig.

Giuliano Bertuccioli ist Botschafter der italienischen Botschaft in Tokyo.

Piero Corradini ist Professore ordinario di lettere italiane e storia des Istituto technico nautico, Roma.

Fosco Maraini reist in Indien, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan und Korea.

Gloria Bien erhält den B.A. in French und German der University of California, Berkeley.

Aufführung von Twelfth night von William Shakespeare in der Übersetzung von Cao Weifeng durch die Shanghai dian ying zhu an ke xue xiao (Shanghai Film School) unter der Regie von Lin Zhihao.

Film : You kou nan yan = 有口难言 [Unspeakable truths] unter der Regie von Lou Yizhe und dem Drehbuch von Stephen Soong nach France, Anatole. La comédie de celui qui épousa une femme muette. (Paris : E. Champion, 1912).

Cheng, Yisi. Cun zai zhu yi wen xue yin xiang [ID D24272].
Cheng Yisi condamne l'existentialisme comme « le produit spirituel de l'ultra-individualisme des derniers moments du capitalisme agonisant. » « Le triste concept de la vie et l'empreinte dominante d'ultra-individualisme de l'existentialisme manifestent la dépression et l'hésitation des écrivains, artistes et intellectuels bourgeois après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La littérature existentialiste ne peut pas s'accorder avec la littérature chinoise socialiste. »

[Wahl, Jean André]. Cun zai zhu yi jian shi. Ma Qinghuai yi [ID D24273].
Ma Qinghuai schreibt im Nachwort : « L'existentialisme est l'une des philosophies réactionnaires très répandues dans le monde capitaliste d'aujourd'hui. Ayant le Danois Kierkegaard comme son fondateur, il a été développé par Heidegger et Jaspers. Avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il s'est rallié au fascisme hitlérien. Diffusé par Sartre et d'autres, il a été largement répandu parmi les étudiants et les petits et moyens bourgeois dans l'Europe de l'Ouest après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Puis il s'est dirigé vers l'ouest aux Etats-Unis pour pourvoir les besoins de l'impérialiste américain et pour servir directement l'hégémonisme capitaliste. Les idées principales de l'existentialisme se résument en refus de l'essence, de l'existence objective, de la raison, de la société et de l'histoire. L'accent mis sur les expériences subjectives, la dépression, l'angoisse et l'échec sont donc loués. La 'décision' aveugle est consiérée comme l'issue de l'impasse de l'existence et les actes aveugles comme la manifestation de l'essence. L'existentialisme s'exprime ouvertement que l'existence objective est comme la 'nuit' et le 'néant' d'une existence qui n'a pas d'essence. A y regarder de près, il y a des tendances différentes dans ces écoles réactionnaires. C'est la manifestation des consciences sociales de différentes catégories – de la bourgeoisie monopoliste à la bourgeoisie petite et moyenne – au moment où l'effondrement de l'impérialisme s'approche. »

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Shanghai xi ju xue yuan (Shanghai Theatre Academy) in Shanghai unter der Regie von Xiong Foxi mit Cao Lei als Nora und An Zhenji als Helmer.

Peter Venne ist Professor und Leiter der Fakultät für English an der Furen-Universität Taipei.

Xu, Guozhang. Ying yu. Vol. 1-2. (Beijing : Shang wu yin shu guan, 1962). [English textbook].
英语
[Enthält eine Adaptation des ersten Kapitels von Jane Eyre von Charlotte Brontë].
Note : "Jane Eyre is a long novel which is quite successful in description of Jane Eyre's childhood. The heroine had a strong character in the beginning, but she gradually gave up her rebellion against feudel sexual discrimination and depended on the landlord Mr. Rochester by willingly being his wife".

Pacifism of Bertrand Russell and A.J. Muste : http://www.san.beck.org/GPJ24-Russell,Muste.html.
In November 1962 Russell was similarly involved in mediating the border dispute between China and India in Kashmir. In numerous telegrams to Nehru and Zhou Enlai, Russell urged a cease-fire and withdrawal so that negotiation and arbitration could settle the conflict. He also urged President Sukarno of Indonesia and U Thant to help mediate. In this situation India, which as a neutral nation, had so often pleaded for peaceful relations, seemed to be overcome by war hysteria, and thus Russell found that the nation for which he had the most sympathy again was being the most unreasonable. This time Zhou Enlai exercised wisdom and thanked Russell for his peacemaking efforts.

Pound, Ezra. The art of poetry No. 5. Interviewed by Donald Hall [ID D29185].
Hall : You are nearly through the Cantos now, and this sets me to wondering about their beginning. In 1916 you wrote a letter in which you talked about trying to write a version of Andreas Divus in Seafarer rhythms. This sounds like a reference to Canto 1. Did you begin the Cantos in 1916?
Pound : I began the Cantos about 1904, I suppose. I had various schemes, starting in 1904 or 1905. The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn't exclude something merely because it didn't fit. In the first sketches, a draft of the present first Canto was the third.
Obviously you haven't got a nice little road map such as the Middle Ages possessed of Heaven. Only a musical form would take the material, and the Confucian universe as I see it is a universe of interacting strains and tensions.
Hall : Had your interest in Confucius begun in 1904?
Pound : No, the first thing was this: you had six centuries that hadn't been packaged. It was a question of dealing with material that wasn't in the Divina Commedia. Hugo did a Légende des Siècles that wasn't an evaluative affair but just bits of history strung together. The problem was to build up a circle of reference—taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance. That was the psyche, if you like. One had to deal with one's own subject.
…
Hall : Well, was there a point at which poetically and intellectually you felt further apart than you had been?
Pound : There's the whole problem of the relation of Christianity to Confucianism, and there's the whole problem of the different brands of Christianity. There is the struggle for orthodoxy—Eliot for the Church, me gunning round for particular theologians. In one sense Eliot's curiosity would appear to have been focused on a smaller number of problems. Even that is too much to say. The actual outlook of the experimental generation was all a question of the private ethos.
…
Hall : I suppose your interest in words to be sung was especially stimulated by your study of Provence. Do you feel that the discovery of Provençal poetry was your greatest breakthrough? Or perhaps the Fenollosa manuscripts?
Pound : The Provençal began with a very early interest, so that it wasn't really a discovery. And the Fenollosa was a windfall and one struggled against one's ignorance. One had the inside knowledge of Fenollosa's notes and the ignorance of a five-year-old child.
Hall : How did Mrs. Fenollosa happen to hit upon you?
Pound : Well, I met her at Sarojini Naidu's and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn't have time to finish it.
…
Hall : Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder? Suppose good language is used to forward bad government? Doesn't bad government make bad language?
Pound : Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out…
…
Hall : What kind of action can you hope to take?
Pound : … It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it. An Indian Circe of negation and dissolution…
…
Hall : During those years in the war in Italy did you write poetry? The Pisan Cantos were written when you were interned. What did you write during those years?
Pound : Arguments, arguments and arguments. Oh, I did some of the Confucius translation.
…
Hall : Since your internment, you’ve published three collections of Cantos, Thrones just recently. You must be near the end. Can you say what you are going to do in the remaining Cantos?
Pound : It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio. I am trying to collect the record of the top flights of the mind. I might have done better to put Agassiz on top instead of Confucius.
...

Moore, Marianne. Worth of Rue de la Paix. In : Harper's bazaar ; no 96 (April 1962).
In this day of jets, blenders, and a page of print grasped at a glance, the perfected workmanship – inside and out – of a dress by Worth seems as unaccountable as the flawless replica – wrong side like right – of antennae, wing-spots, eyes and moth-fur, of Chinese embroidery on imperial satin : an abnormal calligraphy of the imagination-by-finger (finger in gold thimble, as one pictures it), faintly etched…
Forsaking the armorers, the gem of the collection, I would say, is a featherweight azure tissue velvet jacket matching a ball dress, edges with snow leopard down, or at a guess, owl down bronzed by guard hairs ticked like Abyssinian car fur, lined with China silk of the same blue, quilted in wide diagonals. As important as the Beardsley jacket, Mrs. Cheney's riding tunic with Chinese collar double jabot, and deep points traced in steel, has much going on…

Sterne, Laurence. The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman [ID D30999].
Chapter 3.XXV.
"'Tis a point settled,—and I mention it for the comfort of Confucius, (Mr Shandy is supposed to mean..., Esq; member for...,—and not the Chinese Legislator.) who is apt to get entangled in telling a plain story—that provided he keeps along the line of his story,—he may go backwards and forwards as he will,—'tis still held to be no digression."
Chapter 4.XI.
"I'll go see the surprising movements of this great clock, said I, the very first thing I do: and then I will pay a visit to the great library of the Jesuits, and procure, if possible, a sight of the thirty volumes of the general history of China, wrote (not in the Tartarean, but) in the Chinese language, and in the Chinese character too.
Now I almost know as little of the Chinese language, as I do of the mechanism of Lippius's clock-work; so, why these should have jostled themselves into the two first articles of my list—I leave to the curious as a problem of Nature. I own it looks like one of her ladyship's obliquities; and they who court her, are interested in finding out her humour as much as I."
Chapter 4.XX.
"And now for Lippius's clock! said I, with the air of a man, who had got thro' all his difficulties—nothing can prevent us seeing that, and the Chinese history, &c. except the time, said Francois—for 'tis almost eleven—then we must speed the faster, said I, striding it away to the cathedral.
I cannot say, in my heart, that it gave me any concern in being told by one of the minor canons, as I was entering the west door,—That Lippius's great clock was all out of joints, and had not gone for some years—It will give me the more time, thought I, to peruse the Chinese history; and besides I shall be able to give the world a better account of the clock in its decay, than I could have done in its flourishing condition—
—And so away I posted to the college of the Jesuits.
Now it is with the project of getting a peep at the history of China in Chinese characters—as with many others I could mention, which strike the fancy only at a distance; for as I came nearer and nearer to the point—my blood cool'd—the freak gradually went off, till at length I would not have given a cherry-stone to have it gratified—The truth was, my time was short, and my heart was at the Tomb of the Lovers—I wish to God, said I, as I got the rapper in my hand, that the key of the library may be but lost; it fell out as well—
For all the Jesuits had got the cholic—and to that degree, as never was known in the memory of the oldest practitioner."
Chapter 4.XLIII.
"And all the world knows, that Friar Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and had generously given the world a receipt to make it by, above a hundred and fifty years before even Schwartz was born—And that the Chinese, added my uncle Toby, embarrass us, and all accounts of it, still more, by boasting of the invention some hundreds of years even before him—"

Wang Zuoliang. [Review of the 6 Autobiographies by Sean O'Casey (1939-1956)]. In : Shi jie wen xue ; no 3 (1962).
I Knock at the door
Pictures in the hallway
Drums under the window
Inishfallen fare thee well
Rose and crown
Sunset and evening star
I had read the volumes with deep interest. O'Casey's own life was full of incident, and the people he had associated with – Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the men of Easter, 1916 – were in their different ways heroic. The work also struck me as a new type of writing, fiction-like in its narrative technique, but freer in movement, allowing easy transition from recollection to reflection and back again, in a prose that is remarkable for its mixture of parody, invective, lyricism and a kind of stream-of-consciousness reverie quite reminiscent of Joyce.