China and the West

Michael Aris ist Mitbegründer und Mitglied des Board der International Association for Tibetan Studies.

William Shakespeare ist der erste westliche Schriftsteller der als Abschluss eines M.A. oder einer Dissertation von der State Education Commission of China bewilligt wird.

Feng, Zhi. Bo luan fan zheng, kai zhan wai guo wen xue gong zuo. In : Shi jie wen xue ; no 1, Okt. (1978). [Rétablissons le cours normal des choses et reprenons les recherches sur la littérature étrangère].
Er schreibt über die Kulturrevolution : « La littérature étrangère a été devenue une zone interdite. Quiconque osait en parler risquait d'être condamné pour avoir voué un culte à tout ce qui est étranger et diffusé des idées pernicieuses. Leur (des extrémistes) attitude vis-à-vis de l'héritage de la littérature étrangère était de faire une opération de ratissage et de la destruction. Sous le contrôle de cette dictature culturelle fasciste, la recherche et la publication des oeuvres littéraires étrangères ont subi un grand dommage. Les journaux et périodiques n'ont plus publié d'articles concernant la littérature étrangère, les maisons d'édition ont très rarement publié les oeuvres littéraires traduites, les bibliothèques ont été fermées à clef pour que personne ne puisse emprunter les oeuves littéraires étrangères. Même les cours de littérature étrangère ont été supprimés dans les établissements d'enseignement supérieur. Résultat : une génération de jeunes Chinois n'avaient aucune connaissance de la littérature étrangère. Les établissement de recherche sur la littérature étrangère, dont la qualité était déjà terriblement faible, ont été dissous ou paralysés. L'achat des livres et des périodiques étrangers a été arrêté et beaoucoup de documents ont disparu. »

Aufführung von Le bourgeois gentilhomme = The would-be gentleman = Zui xin gui zu de xiao fu min von Molière durch das Hong Kong Repertory Theatre unter der Regie von Lai Kwok Pan = Li Jueben.
醉心貴族的小巿民

Cao, Yu. Ji nian Yibusheng dan chen yi bai wu shi [ID D26273].
Er schreibt : "I have worked at drama for decades. When I began to be interested in drama and playwriting, I certainly received a lot of influence from Ibsen."

Zhang, Yaozhi. Lun Bailun he ta de chang shi "Qiaerde Haluode you ji" [ID D26476].
Zhang schreibt : "[Byron] uses the magnificence of nature as a contrast to the ugliness of reality ; he uses it as an expression of his strong detestation for reality, and of his political passion. Byron describes the Rhine and the Alps as if they were a realm of freedom and harmony, in order to express his opposition to the restoration of autocracy in Europe and his loathing of social reality."

Miller, Arthur. Death of a salesman in China
1983 Aufführung von Death of a salesman von Arthur Miller im Beijing People's Art Theatre unter der Übersetzung von Ying Ruocheng, unter der Regie von Arthur Miller ; mit Ying Ruocheng als Willy Loman, Zhu Xu als Charley und Zhu Lin als Linda.

1978
On the trip to China 1978, Arthur Miller met many luminaries in Chinese theater, including Cao Yu, Ying Ruocheng, actor-director Jin Shan, and director Huang Zuolin.
1980
The idea for this unique collaborative venture grew out of a conversation between Arthur Miller, Center director Chou Wen-chung, Chinese playright Cao Yu, and Ying Ruocheng, when Cao and Ying visited New York in 1980 as guests of the Center. Ying, China's leading actor, played Willy Loman in the production. He visited the United States for four months in the fall of 1982 as Edgar Snow, Visiting Professor of Theater at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, began to prepare a new translation of the script. The Center sent to Beijing set designs and photographs of previous productions, tapes of the incidental music, and stage props unavailable in China—such as a football, helmet, and shoulder pads.
Miller eagerly anticipated the experience of directing his prize-winning 1949 play with an all-Chinese cast and crew. "Believe it or not," he told the Center before he flew to Beijing, this is the first time I'll be fully involved in directing 'Salesman' in any language. It is going to be a fascinating anthropological experience…a real challenge."
1983
The production was made possible by the Chinese Theatre Association and the U.S.-China Arts Exchange.
To celebrate the opening of the play, the Center organized a special tour of China for a delegation of artists and art patrons. The Center also arranged for correspondent Bill Moyers and a CBS television news team to film final rehearsals and cover the premiere. Miller kept a journal during his six-week stay in China.
The production, co-sponsored by the Center and the Chinese Theater Association, was hailed in the Chinese press as "the most significant cultural event in China since the Cultural Revolution." Performed in Chinese, it spawned an explosive growth in contemporary vernacular theater. The recognition awarded Arthur Miller in turn stimulated a renewal in his career.
April 6
"Xinhua has published a narrow description of the play as a condemnation of monopoly capitalism, period. But the actors and others around the theatre seem totally undisturbed, dismussing this as inevitable and as something nobody reads but foreigners and newspapermen... Ying Ruocheng is trying to sell it to the reporters and politicos, I think, in order to keep it from becoming a political bone of contention."
May 7. The opening.
"But whatever my owen reaction, the audience's is passionate. At the end they would never stop applauding. Nobody left. When he was taking his bows, I thought I saw a dremendously serious victory in the look of Yang Ruocheng's face. The gamble has paid off, the Chinese audience has understood Salesman and was shwoing its pride in the company."

Film : Great expectations von Charles Dickens (1974) unter der Regie von Joseph Hardy mit chinesischer Synchronisation in Shanghai.

[O'Neill, Eugene]. Chang lu man man ru ye shen. Shi zheng ju zhu ban, Xianggang hua ju tuan di er ji yan chu. (Xianggang : Shi zheng ju, 1978). Hong Kong Repertory Theatre. = O'Neill, Eugene. Long day's journey into night. [Theaterprogramm]
長路漫漫入夜深

Snyder, Gary. Wild in China [ID D29194].
Hsie's shoes.
The people of mainstream China call themselves "Han" people, even today. The term is contrasted with any and all "ethnic" groupings—such as the people of the south known as the Yiieh (modern Viet of Vietnam), who "cut their hair short and tattooed themselves". (These days, cadres organizing and educating in Tibet who are too grossly contemptuous of local customs might be sent back labeled "Han chauvinists".)
Even in the fourth century A.D. we can assume that the forests and agriculturally marginal areas of greater China were inhabited, even if thinly, by either backwoods Han people or tribal people.
The post-Han "Six Dynasties" period witnessed a flourishing back-to- nature movement from within die ruling gentry class, a "nature" that extended from the fields and gardens of the suburbs to the really deep hills. Many people who might in less turbulent times have exercised their class prerogative of administrative employment turned instead toward an idea of purity and simplicity. Not all were wealthy or self-indulgent. The poet Tao Yuan-ming (Tao Ch'ien) (365-427) was a minor official whose early retirement to a small farm was his own choice. His poems are still the standard of a certain quietness, openness, emptiness, and also human frankness and frailty in the confusions of farm, family, and wine, that much later Chinese poetry aspires to. The Taoist idea of being nobody in the world, "behind instead of in front", gave strength to those who often must have missed the social life of their urban literati friends as they sat up late reading and drinking alone in their estates or homesteads out amongst the peasants.
Some of the Han Dynasty poems portray the wild mountain world as horrible and scary. As Burton Watson points out, a gradual shift in the mode of seeing nature took place. In the songs of die Classic of Songs, which reflect so much of the life of the people, plants were named specifically; die scene was the ground and brush right before one—where one danced or harvested. By the Six Dynasties, the view moved back and became more panoramic. A case in point in the work of the poet Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433)—who has only a few rare poetic ancestors in earlier China. His aristocratic family had moved south, and he grew up in a biome that would have been considered exotic and barbarous by Confucius.
Hsieh was a lover of mountains. His fascination with the densely wooded, steep hills of South China (peaking between 4,000 and 6,000 feet) took him on long climbs and rambles, including one month-long trail-cutting exploration. He combined in himself would-be Taoist recluse and vigorous wilderness adventurer. An early follower of Buddhism (a new thing at that time, limited to upper-class circles), he wrote an essay expounding "instant enlightenment".
Hsieh's ambivalent pursuit of success in politics ended when he was ban-ished to a minor position in a remote south coast town; he soon resigned totally from the administration and moved to a run-down family estate in the hills southeast of present-day Hangchow. The place and life there is detailed in his long fu ("prose poem") called Living in the Mountains. The farther and nearer landscapes are described in detail. The fish, birds, plants, and mammals are listed. The whole is seen as an ideal place for pursuing Taoist and Buddhist meditations. Thus,
I cast no lines for fish.
I spread no nets for hare.
I have no use for barbed shafts.
Who would set out rabbit snares or fish traps?
And he says he "awoke to the complete propriety of loving what lives". Later in the poetical essay he describes his workers, "felling trees; they clear the thorns and cut bamboo", and sundry bark and reed and rush gathering activities; and charcoal-making. This faint contradiction, intensified later in history, can become a major problem: individual animals' lives are carefully spared, while the habitat that sustains them is heedlessly destroyed.
Hsieh is a puzzle. Arrogant and overbearing at court, he made enemies there. Intensely intellectual as a Buddhist, and careless of the needs or feelings of local people, he managed to get intrigued into a charge of rebellion, and was beheaded in the marketplace. Hsieh was probably already out of place in China—he should have joined the Rock Mountain Fur Company and gone out to be a trapper. He was "wild", and as an aristocrat that took some contradictory and nasty turns. But he opened up the landscape—"mountains and waters"—to the poetic consciousness for all time, and he was a fine poet.
Mountains were always foci of spirit power in China, beginning perhaps as habitat for the hsien, a shaman who gained "power" in the hills. Later they became a place of retreat for the Taoist practitioner of "harmonizing with the Way" and again as sites for Buddhist monasteries. Hsieh Ling-yün plunged into the watercourses and thickets, camped in the heights alone, walked all night in the moonlight. These years and energies lie behind what we now take to be the Chinese sense of nature as reflected in art. Hsieh is also remembered as the inventor of a unique mountaineering shoe or clog—no one is quite sure how it looked.

Oxchead Mountain
Buddhism began and remains (at center) a set of ethical observances and meditation disciplines by means of which hard-working human beings can win through to self-realization and understanding of the way of existence. This effort is instructed by the content of Shakyamuni's enlightenment experience: a realization that all things are co-arising, mutually causing and being caused, 'empty' and without 'self'.
In the time of the historical Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni, the community or Sangha of Buddhists was an order of monks and nuns who had renounced the world. It was held that one could not really achieve enlightenment as a householder. Laypersons might build up a store of good merit by helping the Buddhist Order, and living virtuous lives, but the deeper experiences were not for them.
The expansion of the concept of Sangha, or Community, is a key theme in the history of Buddhism. In the Mahayana, or 'Great Vehicle' branch, lay¬men and women are also considered worthy aspirants and almost equal practicers with monks, or, at the very least, theoretically capable of achieving enlightenment while living the householder's life. The inherent capacity to achieve enlightenment is called 'Buddha-nature'. At one stage in Buddhist thought (second century AD India roughly), it was held that not quite all human beings had the capacity. Those excluded, called 'icchantikas', were (to judge by description) tribal and aboriginal people who live by hunting.
Some early Chinese Buddhist thinkers were troubled by this. In another century or so, other Indian Buddhist texts were brought to China that taught that salvation was accessible not only to all human beings but to all sentient beings, vindicating the Chinese thinkers. This was commonly understood to mean that animals and even plants are part of the Mahayana drama, working out their karma through countless existences, up to the point of being born into a human body. It was popularly assumed that a human body was a pre-requisite to Buddhist practise.
The eighth century monk Chan-jan, of the T'ien T'ai sect, was one of the first to argue the final step. He concluded that non-sentient beings also have the Buddha-nature. 'Therefore we may know that the single mind of a single particle of dust comprises the mind-nature of all sentient beings and Buddhas' and 'The man who is of all-round perfection, knows from beginning to end that Truth is not dual and that no objects exist apart from Mind. Who then, is 'animate' and who 'inanimate'? Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division'.
The Chinese philosophical appreciation of the natural world as the visible manifestation of the Tao made a happy match with Indian Mahayana eschatology, Chinese Buddhists could say, these beautiful rivers and mountains are Nirvana in the here and now. Buddhists located themselves on famous old numinous mountains, or opened up wilderness for new monasteries. In Ch'an (Zen) the masters were commonly known by the name of the mountain they lived and taught on. An early line of Ch'an, which died out in the eighth century, was called the 'Oxhead mountain' sect. These monks did more than just admire the scenery — they were on intimate terms with the local wildlife, including tigers. The Oxhead Master Tao Lin built a nest in a tree for his meditation. Sitting up in it, he once had a conversation with the poet Po Chü-i : 'Isn't it dangerous up there ?' Po asked, in his Government Official's robes. 'Where you are is far more dangersou' was Tao-Lin's response. In this branch of Ch'an (and no other ever) when monks died, their bodies were left out in the forest for the animals to consume. It's also said, they had a great sense of humour.

The Chase in the Park
By Shang dynasty times hunting had already become an upper-class sport. The old hunters' gratitude for the food received, or concern for the spirits of the dead game, had evaporated. Hunting had become 'the chase'—an expensive group activity requiring beaters who drove the game toward the waiting aristocrats who pursued and shot it with bows from chariots or horseback. Large-scale exercises of this sort were considered good training for warfare. They were followed by feasts with musicians, and slender dancers wearing diaphanous gowns. Warfare and hunting are popularly thought to be similar in spirit, and in post-civilized times this has often been the case. In hunting and gathering cultures the delicacy of preparation, and the care surrounding the act of taking life, puts hunting on a different level.
Chinese culture is strikingly free from food taboos, and the upper-class cuisine is the most adventurous in the world. Even so, from Shang times on, meat was a luxury that the common people could seldom afford. Furs and feathers of animals were vastly used in the costuming of officials. Idealized instructions can be found in the Li Chi or 'Collected Rituals', which was put together in the Han dynasty.
When a ruler wore the robe of white fox fur, he wore one of embroidered silk over it to display it. When the guards on the right of the ruler wore tigers' fur, those on the left wore wolves' fur. An ordinary officer did not wear the fur of the white fox. Great officers wore the fur of the blue fox, with sleeves of leopard fur, and over it a jacket of dark-colored silk to display it; with fawn’s fur they used cuffs of the black wild dog, with a jacket of bluish yellow silk, to display it. . .
Han dynasty ritualism has an oddly alienated quality. The nature phi losophy and the plant and mineral experimentation of the Taoists, or the direct knowledge of the natural world necessary to the life of working people, is far from the highly ordered ceremoniousness that surrounded government bureaus and the court. The Han upper class did admire those who were skilled and bold in gambling for power, but always against a background of strict propriety. Taking animal lives is easier for those accustomed to taking human life. Respect for nature comes with knowledge and contact, but attention to the observable order of nature is rarely practiced by those who think that wealth is purely a creation of human organization, labor, or ingenuity.
Still, all through history, the emperor continued to offer sacrifices to the Earth, to Heaven, and to the great mountains and rivers of the land. Calamitous floods, or prolonged drought, would bring the state up short, and the emperor himself would have to ask if he had somehow offended heaven. Whatever these offenses might be, it doesn’t seem that destruction of wildlife habitat or waste of animal or human lives, or deforestation, was perceived as a possible offense against the unearthly power of T'ien (sky or heaven). The wealthy governors and emperors thus maintained large hunting parks. Edward Schafer’s study of 'Hunting Parks in China' (the source for all this information) suggests that they evolved from Bronze Age preserves established originally to continue supplying certain wild species for the periodic state sacrifices; species whose use had been established when their numbers were far greater. By the Chou dynasty such preserves were a place for sport and recreation that might contain exotic species as well as native animals, with artificial lakes and ponds, stables, hunting lodges, and pleasure pavilions. They were an ideal 'Beheading, or being boiled alive, was the fate of those who lost in the game of power.
place to lodge and entertain visiting heads of state. The park of the Han emperor Wu Ti, 'The Supreme Forest', was about forty by twenty miles in size and contained thirty-six detached palaces and lodges. Within its varied terrain it contained both native and exotic species of fish, birds, amphibians, and mammals. Rivers were stocked with giant softshell turtle and alligator as well as sturgeon and other fish. Caribous, sambars, rhinoceroses, and elephants were symbolically (and perhaps practically) located in the 'south' of the preserve, and wild horses and yaks in the 'north'. 'The ground of the Supreme Forest was prepared for the great winter hunt by the royal foresters. They burned clear a large open space and cut away brambles. Beaters, hunters, and athletes readied themselves for the onslaughts of wild beasts and forest demons with spells and peri¬apts. When the royal party arrived, the birds and beasts were driven into the cleared areas, and the slaughter began:
A wind of feathers, a rain of blood,
Sprinkled the countryside, covered the sky.
Some advisors openly criticized parks as wasteful and politically inexpedient. In Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju's fu on 'The Supreme Forest' the Emperor is urged to terminate the park and open it to the people for cultivation and firewood and fishing. It's interesting to note that no middle course is considered, such as keeping a wildlife preserve for its own natural, nou-menal, or scientific interest. The virtuous alternative is to turn it over entirely to human use.
(No comparison could be made between Chinese hunting park wantonness and the destruction of animal, not to mention human, life that took place in the Roman Arena. There thousands of animals might be destroyed in a few days. The constant supplying of animals to the Arena made extinct numerous species throughout the Mediterranean basin.)
Hunting parks survived into T'ang times and later, but new ideas from Buddhism or old ideas revived from Taoism stressing compassion for all creatures enveloped them in a mist of moral doubt. T'ang was the high point of much poetry, and of Ch'an Buddhist creativity, but it must be remembered that it was not peopled by effete scholars in flowing robes who detested violence. It was a time of hardy Northern-derived gentry who were skilled horsepersons and archers and falconers, hard drinkers and fighters. Women were much freer then, and the custom of bound feet was yet to come. These aristocrats backed Buddhism, in part from a cos¬mopolitan interest in the cultural and trade exchanges possible with the little nations of Central Asia, but they kept their robust habits. An aristocratic maiden was once sought out by a suitor who was told by her parents she'd gone out hunting on horseback. That probably never happened again after T'ang.

Empty mountain.
China is wide. Travel was mostly on foot, maybe with a packhorse, sometimes also a riding horse. In the lowlands a network of canals provided channels for slow-moving passenger boats as well as freight barges. Travelers moved by boat on the big rivers, slowly and laboriously upstream, pulled by men on shore, and swiftly and boisterously back down. Boats sailed across the lakes and slow-moving lower river reaches. Horse and ox carts moved men and materials in the alluvial plains and rolling hills. In the mountains and deserts, long caravans of pack animals moved the goods of empire.
Government officials were accustomed to traveling weeks or even months to a new appointment, with their whole family. Buddhist monks and Taoist wanderers had a tradition of freely walking for months or years on end. In times of turmoil whole populations of provinces, and contending armies, might be tangled in frenzied travel on the paths and waterways. It was said, "If a man has his heart set on great things 10,000 li are his front yard". So the people of the watersheds of the Yang and Huang rivers came to know the shape of their territory.
The officials and monks (and most poets were one or the other) were an especially mobile group of literate people. Travelers' prose or rhymed-prose descriptions of landscapes were ingenious in evoking the complexity of gorges and mountains. Regional geographies with detailed accounts of local biomes were encouraged. Hsieh Ling-yün’s fu on his mountain place is descriptive and didactic—but his poems in the shih (lyric) form already manifest the quiet intensity that becomes the definitive quality of Chinese shih poetry in its greatest creative T'ang and Sung Dynasty phases.
The Chinese and Japanese traditions carry within them the most sensitive, mind-deepening poetry of the natural world ever written by civilized people. Because these poets were men and women who dealt with budgets, taxes, penal systems, and the overthrow of governments, they had a heart-wrenching grasp of the contradictions that confront those who love the natural world and are yet tied to die civilized. This must be one reason why Chinese poetry is so widely appreciated by contemporary Occidentals.
Yet it's hard to pin down what a "Chinese nature poem" might be, and why it is so effective. They are not really about landscapes or scenery. Space of distant hills becomes space in life; a condition the poet-critic Lu Chi called "calm transparency". Mountains and rivers were seen to be the visible expression of cosmic principles; the cosmic principles go back into silence, non-being, emptiness; a Nothing that can produce the ten thousand things, and the ten thousand things will have that marvelous emptiness still at the center. So the poems are also "silent". Much is left unsaid, and the reverberation or mirroring—a flight of birds across the mind of the sky—leaves an afterimage to be savored, and finally leaves no trace. The Chinese poetic tradition is also where human emotions are revealed; where a still official can be vulnerable and frail. Lu Chi [Lu Ji] says poetry starts with a lament for fleeting life, and regard for the myriad growing things—taking thought of the great virtuous deeds of people past, and the necessity of making "maps" for the future. Chinese poetry steps out of narrow human-centered affairs into a big-spirited world of long time, long views, and natural processes; and comes back to a brief moment in a small house by a fence.
The strain of nostalgia for the self-contained hard-working but satisfying life of the farmer goes along somehow with delight in jumbled gorges. Nature is finally not a "wilderness" but a habitat, the best of habitats, a place where you not only practice meditation or strive for a vision, but grow vegetables, play games with the children, and drink wine with friends. In this there is a politics of a special order—the Chinese nature poet is harking back to the Neolithic village, never forgotten and constantly returned to mind by the Taoist classics—as a model for a better way of life. Sectarian Taoism and its secret societies fermented a number of armed peasant uprisings through history that unwittingly had "Neolithic" on their standards. "Playing with your grandchildren"—"growing chrysanthemums"—"watching the white clouds"—are phrases from a dream of pre-feudal or post-revolutionary society.
Chinese poets of these centuries were not biologists or primitive hunters, though, and their poetics did not lead them to certain precisions. What they found were landscapes to match inner moods—and a deep sense of reverence for this mystery of a real world. In Burton Watson's analysis of nature imagery in T'ang poems he finds more references to non-living phenomena than living, and more than half of those looking upward to sky, weather, wind, clouds, and moon. Downward, rivers, waters, and mountains predominate. Among living things willow and pine are the most-mentioned trees, but the specific names of herbaceous plants and flowers are few—with "flowers" usually meaning the blossoms of trees like cherry or peach. Wild goose is the most common bird associated with being separated from a friend; and monkey the most common mammal—because of its mournful cry. Cicada and moth are the most common insects. Many natural references, then, are used for their symbolic or customary human associations, and not for intrinsic natural qualities. No doubt the oral poetry of a pre-literate people will have more acquaintance with the actual living creatures as numinous intelligences in furry or scaly bodies. But this does not detract from what the Chinese poems are, highly disciplined and formal poems that open us to the dilemma of having "regard for the myriad growing things" while being literate monks or administrators or wives of officials in the world's first "great society". The reign of the Emperor HsuanTsung [Xuanzong] (712-756) is considered one of the high points of Chinese cultural history: the poets Wang Wei, Li Po [Li Bo], and Tu Fu [Du Fu] were at the height of their powers during those years, and so were the brilliant and influential Ch'an Masters Shen-hui, Nan-yüeh, Ma-tsu, and Po-chang. The national population may have been as high as 60 million.
I first came onto Chinese poems in translation at 19, when my ideal of nature was a 45-degree ice slope on a volcano, or an absolutely virgin rain forest. They helped me to "see" fields, farms, tangles of brush, the azaleas in the back of an old brick apartment. They freed me from excessive attachment to wild mountains, with their way of suggesting that even the wildest hills are places where people, also, live.
Empty mountains:
no one to be seen,
Yet—hear—
human sounds and echoes.
Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods;
Again shining
on green moss, above.
Wang Wei

Snyder, Gary. Working on the '58 Willys pickup. In : Snyder, Gary. Axe handles : poems. (Port Townsend, Wash. : Cooper Canyon Press, 1978).
For Lu Yu [Lu You].
The year this truck was made
I sat in early morning darkness
Chanting sutra in Kyoto,
And spent the days studying Chinese.
Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, French –
Joy of Dharma-scholarship
And the splendid old temples –
But learned nothing of trucks.
Now to bring sawdust
Rotten and rich
From a sawmill abandoned when I was just born
Lost in the young fir and cedar
At Bloody Run Creek
So that clay in the garden
Can be broken and tempered
And growing plants mulched to save water –
And to also haul gravel
From the old placer diggings,
To screen it and mix in the sand with the clay
Putting pebbles aside to strew on the paths
So muddy in winter –
I lie in the dusty and broken bush
Under the pickup
Already thought to be old –
Admiring its solidness, square lines,
Thinking a truck like this
would please Chariman Mao.
The rear and rebuilt and put back
With new spider gears,
Brake cylinders cleaned, the brake drums
New-turned and new brake shoes,
Taught how to do this
By friends who themselves spent
Youth with the Classics –
The garden gets better, I
Laugh in the evening
To pick up Chinese
And read about farming.
I fix truck and lock eyebrows
With tough-handed men of the past.

Dong, Hengxun. Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603].
Li Xilao : The publication played a significant role in renewing interest in the study of American literature. Mark Twain has been given a fairly comprehensive and quite balanced representation.

Dong, Hengxun. Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603].
The editors maintained that Henry David Thoreau played a progressive role emphasizing individual resistance to civil government while neglecting the power of the masses.

Aufführung von Hei nu =黑奴 von Li Yuanhua. Adaptation von Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe durch die Xianggang hua ju tuan ju mu in Hong Kong.

Dong, Hengxun. Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603].
Article about Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
"As its subject matter was based on reality, its writing techniques tended to be realistic. Thus, the book was a break from the romantic tradition that had been dominated in fiction writing for a long time. Its descriptions are vivid and accurate, with strong artistic appeal in some places. It creates with great success different types of black slaves and paints truthful pictures of the disgusting nature of the slave owners, reproducing vividly the Southern society through the experiences of different characters. Although Uncle Tom's cabin is rather loose in structure, and affected in language, and although some of its characters are not fully developed, it deserves to be regarded as an important realistic novel in the history of American literature, a precursor of the movement of realistic fiction emerging after the Civil War."

Dong, Hengxun. Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603].
Dong and his colleagues argue that while Moby Dick contains mysticism – the incomprehensible White Whale suggests Melville's inability to comprehend the powerful drive of American capitalism - Melville's revelation of social inequities and criticism of American capitalist society are obvious throughout. In his preface, Dong also considers Bartleby as a victim of capitalism, for Dong, Bartleby suffers from the depressive alienation of American business life.

Li, Wenjun. [Fukena]. In : Meiguo wen xue jian shi [ID D29603].
Li Wenjun writes with admiration for Faulkner's stylistic achievement, his moral vision and he speaks well of such positive characters as Dilsey - "the only healthy person in the book, whose loyalty, perseverance, endurance and compassion constitute a resurrection of humanity". He concludes that while Faulkner presents a vivid picture of the South he also "explores the major problems of modern man : man's relationship with society, sin and redemption, the burden of the past and how to deal with this burden, the corruption of modern civilization and how to maintain one's purity, etc." He also notes that "these are issues often discussed by the middle class and its intellectuals in the West", that Faulkner "takes the stand of a sensitive intellectual, the stand of humanism and democracy" and thus embodies the "spirit of his age" ; therefore, he asserts, Faulkner is crucial for Chinese readers who would understand the "major problems of the West". Concerning style, he notes that Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness method is a "step forward from James Joyce", that his "works of many dimensions and their complex narrative methods further reflect the complexity of modern life". Then he suggests that "it is still too early to say whether his methods are the best. But, at least, he offers some experience for us in the development of technique in writing".

Zhu, Hong. Huang dan pai xi ju shu ping [ID D30773].
In contrast to the traditional bourgeoisie literature that tends to place man at the centre of the universe, Beckett's play Waiting for Godot lays emphasis on man's vulnerability in an absurd world. The two-act play well illustrates the general philosophical attributes of absurdist plays : an agnostic world, an unpredictable destiny, man's abject conditions, meaningless behavious, and the wish for death.

Kirk A. Denton erhält den B.A. in French language and literature des Colby Colleger, Waterville.

Inge Morath & Arthur Miller in China – Inge Morath Foundation
http://www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2009/01/inge-morath-arthur-miller-china-introduction/.
Introduction by John P. Jacob, Inge Morath Foundation, for the exhibition Inge Morath and Arthur Miller: China, University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor, 2008.
Morath preferred to work in "countries whose influence extends beyond their borders; mother cultures," and she dreamed of traveling the Silk Road, from Europe through Persia to China.
Morath enrolled in the Berlitz School of Languages to learn Mandarin Chinese. She would continue her studies of Chinese language and culture for the remainder of her life, noting more than once the pleasantly soporific effect that Chinese grammar had on her.
In the late 1970s, Morath and Miller were invited by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries to travel within China, and they made the first of several journeys in 1978 (Morath returned alone in 1979, and again with Miller, for the staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing, in 1983). Morath's journals reflect the depth of her experience of Chinese culture. They also reveal her recurrent frustration with the camera’s limited ability to capture the nuances of light and life in China. The frequent surprised, staring faces that distinguish her photographs of China confirm the difficulty that her journals describe for a foreign photographer to go unnoticed by her subjects in a nation where, only a short time before, the presence of foreigners was limited and communication with them restricted. China was one of the few countries to which she traveled where, in spite of her fluency in Mandarin, Morath remained an outsider. Morath's journals complain bitterly of her inability to blend in, and thus empathically to comprehend.
In China, however, Morath's and Miller's movements were limited to what policy and the interests of their individual guides would permit. China is experienced as something outside the window of a large black car which refuses to stop for her; a series of briefing rooms and banquets. For Miller, contact with China is achieved through probing; for Morath, through dining. Encounters with one superbly cooked dish after another, meal after meal, is as close to a sustained, satisfying dance with China as Morath's handlers would allow her.
"I am especially interested in photographing in countries where a new tradition emerges from an ancient one," Morath wrote. Certainly, China in 1978 was a country where civilization and development were subject to critical scrutiny, and both ancient and modern traditions were being publicly re-examined for their validity within a culture of change. What distinguishes Inge Morath's photographs of China from other, similar bodies of work, is her urgent desire to comprehend, and to convey in pictures, what Miller describes as "China's contradiction;" the ongoing struggle of new traditions in conflict with ancient ones. Although Morath is drawn to the beautiful and mysterious, the intensity of her experience and the intractability of her subject defy simplification. Morath encountered China as an irresolvable question, a dialogue between tradition and modernity within which beauty and tyranny collide again and again. The awareness of China's greatness, and of the concurrent greatness of her tragedy, is pervasive.