China and the West

Gu Cheng : Interview with a Hong Kong poet.
"Whitman is transcendental ; he manages to have straight access to the ontological being. I first read Whitman's poems at an early age but got reawakened much later. I was a curbed person. It was not until one morning in 1983 that the electricity of my anguish dissolved my skin, which had been as stiff as lead, and as a result I came to perceive the great ontological being - Whitman. His sound came down vertically from the air, blowing on me and shaking my every hour and minute. The century between us no longer exists ; nor does the Pacific Ocean, leaving Whitman himself – the visible but untouchable 'I' and himself only – the eternity that was getting nearer and clearer. I was stunned, almost desirous to throw myself away and give up my work grinding flowers on the glass of images. I was shaken again and again, lying there and feeling like a wooden piece in a piano. From morning to evening I was just listening to the sound of the falling raindrops. On that day I ate nothing."

Feng, Zongpu. Shi lun Mansifei'erde de xiao shuo yi shu [ID D30056].
"…Some critics hold the view that Katherine Mansfield effected a revolution in the short story comparable to that achieved by Joyce in the novel. Her revolution started with Prelude, and it never ceased developing. Her work is characterized by a unity of interior and exterior, a fusion of emotion and setting, an interdependence of suppression and expression. It succeeds in evoking an imaginary, poetic realm uniquely her own. In this realm she affects her readers with atmosphere and mood… Speaking of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry claimed rightly that 'her affinities are rather with the English poets than with the English prose-writers. She was specially gifted at depicting a scene. It was more than a mere technique to her. She saw and felt in a scene what was not seen or felt by others… The blending of scenic description and expression of emotion gives Mansfield's work a special mood, and the reader derives from it the same pleasure as that obtained from reading poetry… There are two devices which reinforce the background in her writing. One is symbolism, an art of indicating something more than narration. The other is an art of exclusion and suggestion, a way of concealing meaning and leaving it to the reader to discover. The former is expression and the latter suppression… The exquisiteness of Mansfield's art of implication lies in withholding her artistic effect until the last moment. With the story unfolding gradually she would bring a sudden stop to her delineation of external events and turn inward… Although her heart responded turbulently to what she observed in her environment, Mansfield always managed to control herself, betraying few inner thoughts or emotions of her own in her work… Mansfield's suggestive style creates a spiritual ambience very similar to that of Chinese painting, where the croakings of frogs in a ten-acre field can be imagined from the simple drawing of a few tadpoles, or where a departing sail against the horizon, depicted on mere paper, can trigger off boundless wistfulness. It is a subtle aesthetic effect, and the key to Mansfield's 'secret' as well… Most of Mansfield's stories are events happening on a single day, such as a dinner party, a reunion, relating the events of a journey, or a visit to a doll's house…Her language is as purified and concise as the structure of her fiction, making her work crystal clear. Because she was ill, and because she lived in the shadow of death, the tragic events in some of her stories tended to be tinged with fatalism. In her eyes the tragedy of life was unavoidable."

Feng, Zongpu. Shuo jie zhi [ID D30057].
"… Katherine Mansfield's skill in economy is first demonstrated in her forging and pruning of the content of her stories. Her writing about class oppression is, in my view, better than the work of Virginia Woolf and Bowen. It might have been through her worries over her livelihood and her wandering way of life that she knew about human suffering and hardship, and became endowed with profound sympathy. She nevertheless wrote with restraint, never letting her pen wander into areas that she knew little of… Mansfield's art of economy is her selection of details. This is indeed a platitude, yet she is really outstanding at it. The most suitable and convincing details should be chosen in order that the many ideas intended to be conveyed in a limited space would be expressed in the best possible way. Mansfield wasted few words on the outward appearances of her characters, and, often, captured the essence with only a few notes on what her characters were wearing… Her art of economy is represented in her language, which is simple and clear-cut, reading like a gurgling stream, resonating with a feeling of transparency…"

[Faulkner, William]. Xuan hua yu sao dong. Li Wenjun yi. [ID D29247].
Li Wenjun remarks in the preface that "William Faulkner was not merely a provincial writer of local color, as he deals with almost all the major issues that confront sensitive intellectuals in the West". In his discussion of the story itself, Li Wenjun warmly applaudes the characterization of Dilsey : "Inexhaustible compassion flows out of her. She protects the weak in defiance of her master's hostility and the prejudice of conventional ideas. She is the only bright spot in the gloomy picture. Her kitchen is the only place that offers warmth in the ice-cold tomblike house. Dilsey is the pillar in the entire tottering world. Her loyalty, endurance, perseverance, and compassion form a striking contrast with the three morbid narrators before her. Though Dilsey, the author acclaims the spiritual beauty of simple and honest people." Li Wenjun also makes the point that Faulkner's repeated use of stream of consciousness is not just out of his belief that "fragments of experience are truer to reality" but is totally subjected to the need of characterization, as "the three narrators are all mentally unbalanced and incapable of logical and rational thinking".

Liu, Zhongde. Cong fan xiao shuo pai zuo jia Bekaite jin zhu shi bai tan qi [Beckett]. [ID D30776].
Liu borrowed the concept of anti-fiction in his essay. Based on his analysis of the characters, themes, self-assertion, and unconsciousness, Liu used the story as an example to mount his biting attack on those critics who were sympathetic to modernist literature at the time.

Chen, Jia. Tan huang dan pai ju ben Deng dai Geduo [ID D30777].
It is precisely due to Samuel Beckett's use of unprecedented representational techniques, and, to a larger degree, to the author's portrayal of the suffering vagrants and slaves as ignorant and docile human beings that Waiting for Godot became highly acclaimed in the circle of Western literature. Yet, such portrayal of characters only suited the needs of Westenr bourgeois ; for this reason, we must not follow the footsteps of foreign critics in paaising the play to the sky as a masterpiece when the play is seriously flawed by its pessimism.

Lisa Rofel ist Research Fellow für die Dissertation der National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China.

[Orwell, George]. 1984. = Yi jiu ba si. Liu Shaoming [Joseph S.M. Lau] yi [ID D21368].
Lau recognizes in the preface the fact that Nineteen eighty-four is not a groundbreaking work by artistic standards and one ought not read it as a work by Flaubert or by Henry James. Therefore, this might have given the translator more freedom to explore the resources of the target language to a further extent, because there seems no strong obligation to represent the author's language style accurately in the translation.
Lau's approach is liberal as it hosts more variations in language and introduces highly idiomatic Chinese expressions. The language of Lau's version varied unreasonably from point to point throughout the story regardless of the language of the original at the respective points. After reviewing Lau's general beliefs, it is obvious that the translator as reader considers more important the political elements present in the novel. Towards the end of the preface, he clearly states that he has very high opinion of Orwell's way of producing such terror as the world of Oceania and strongly recommends the novel. Lau seems eager to allow his shadow to be present in the translation because he has his own considerations as a literary writer of Chinese.

Roberto Ciarla ist Miglied des Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, Roma.

Orientalia Venetiana. Fondazione "Giorgio Cini." Centro di cultura e civiltà.; Istituto Venezia e l'oriente. (Firenze : L. Olschki, 1984-).
1984 hrsg. von Mario Sabattini.

Ellen B. Widmer ist Assistant Professor der Wesleyan University.

Hugh Davies ist Commercial Counsellor der britischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Richard Evans ist Botschafter der britischen Botschaft in Beijing.

Anthony Galsworthy ist Head of Hong Kong Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Catherine E. Nettleton lernt Mandarin in Beijing.

Peter A.B. Thomson is Consellor and Head of Chancery der britischen Botschaft in China (Beijing ?).

Werner Meissner doktoriert in Politischen Wissenschaften von an der Freien Universität Berlin.

Werner Meissner ist Lektor für Ostasienwissenschaften Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Konstanz und Universität Saarland.

Wiedereröffnung des amerikanischen Konsulats in Shenyang.

Treffen von Hu Yaobang mit der Delegation des Zentralkomitees der Partei der Arbeit der Schweiz unter Leitung von Armand Magnin im Park Zhongnanhai in Beijing.