China and the West

Aufführung von Yan = A midsummer night's dream von William Shakespeare in der kantonesischen Übersetzung von Ruper Chan durch die Chung Ying Theatre Company unter der Regie von Bernard Goss in Hong Kong.

Radio Sendung einer Adaptation von Szenen aus 37 Dramen von William Shakespeare durch die Jilin ren min guang bo dian tai jiao tong guang bo (Julin People's Broadcasting Station) in der Synchronisation durch Schauspieler des Changchun Film Stuio.

Zao, Wou-ki. Autoportrait. (Paris : Fayard, 1988).
Er schreibt : "Il [Henri Michaux] est 'un ami sacré' ! un des seuls qui comprenne vraiment le sentiment Oriental. Mes longues conversations téléphoniques avec Henri Michaux ne nous amenaient pas à parler de la peinture, mais de la Chine. Il évoquait le peuple avec beaucoup de gaieté et d'enthousiasme."
Lors d'un entretien, Zao Wou-ki a souligné que les rencontres amicales avec Henri Michaux étaient nourries de discussions techniques sur les pinceaux, les encres, les papiers, à propos desquels il instruisait Michaux ; mais c'est Michaux qui l'a encouragé à se mettre à l'encre de Chine, ce qu'il refusait.
Michaux a fait des commentaires sur les dessins de Zao Wou-ki : « Ah ! Cette surprise ! Et quelle joie ! Il avait donc retrouvé son bien héréditaire : les rythmes de la nature, plus importants que la nature, plus importants que la nature, comme ils apparurent à la pensée là-bas. Le 'Yang' l’attendait. Le 'Yin' aussi, immanquablement. Le papier sans épaisseur les avait recueillis tout naturellement. » Michaux trouve que les peintures de Zao Wou-ki constitutent un art plein de vie. Zao Wou-ki apprend à Michaux la technique de la peinture chinoise.

Marián Gálik ist Dozent an der Faculty of Philosophy der Comenius Universität, Bratislava, Tschechoslowakei und gibt Vorlesungen über chinesische Geschichte, Literatur und Philosophie.

Aufführung von The caine mutiny court-martial von Herman Wouk im Beijing People's Art Theatre, in der Übersetzung von Ying Ruocheng unter der Regie von Charlton Heston.

Film : The greatest lover = Gong zi duo qing in Hong Kong. Adaptation von Pygmalion von George Bernard Shaw unter der Regie von Clarence Ford, mit Chow Yun Fat und Anita Mui Yim Fong.

Aufführung von L'histoire du soldat von Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, unter der Regie von Mou Sen in Beijing.

International Conference on 'Whitman and the world'.
Geoffrey M. Sill : Walt Whitman and his works have been absorbed more affectionately by the rest of the world than he has been by his own country. In France, China, the Soviet Union, and many South American countries, he is regarded as the spokesman for that romantic impulse through which the individual self declares its liberty, or affirms its solidarity with its comrades, regardless of time, race, or national identity.

Zhang, Weishui. [On Henry James's satire of American culture through the scenic irony]. [ID D29918].
Zhang thought Henry James, using 'situational irony', 'satirized the vulgarity of American culture', thous 'showing the success of the higly cultured Europeans over the vulgar and simple Americans'.

[Mansfield, Katherine]. Mi yue. Wen Jieruo, Li Zi yi. [ID D30032].
Wen Jieruo : "My response to Mansfield in the past is likely to have been influenced by Xu Zimo's article, with its emphasis on her physical beauty and early death. Kirkpatrick gave me a copy of Katherine Mansfield : short stories selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, and I have read it. Tomalin selected twenty-one stories. I also selected twenty-one stories, of which ten were the same as hers. It doesn't mean that I disliked her selection of the other eleven. I didn't choose them because they had already been translated. She detested wars, and resolutely opposed letting her work be used to stir up nationalistic hatreds. Although she was weriously ill and needed royalties to pay the large medical fees for the treatment she was receiving at that time, she never allowed this book (In a German pension) to be republished in her lifetime."
Wen Jieruo praised The baron and The sister of the baroness for their ruthlessly ironic exposure of the 'snobbishness of the Bavarians at the beginning of this century', as well as the 'romantic ending' of A suburban fairy tale, for its emphasis on 'the young son's sympathy for hungry children outside their house'.

Chen, Jianing. Mansifei'er de san wen shi xiao shuo yi er tan [ID D30061].
"At the turn of the century quite a few masters of fiction in Western literature happened to turn away at the same time from the elaborately-plotted story in the writing of fiction. They were Chekhov, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Katherine Mansfield, who stood out most prominently as an exponent of plotless fiction. Although she [Mansfield] did not entirely exclude plots in her own writing, she succeeded in creating the genre of the plotless story. What she exposed was the darkness of society and the inequalities in human life ; and she satirized stupid men of letters and good-for-nothing artists. She praised the sincerity of young hearts and the purity of real love."
"… Reading Katherine Mansfield's poetic style of fiction, I have exclaimed on more than one occasion that hers are artistic works of photography. She could skillfully snatch from life pictures imbued with essential meaning and rich in artistic colours and then harmonize them into a soft limpid glow… She simply captured in actual life those illuminative moments, feelings, emotions, and impressions and presented them with her excellent writing techniques. Her work were pictures taken immediately from life, with a lustre of original light and beauty of life… She often employed various techniques of writing, and sometimes more than ten different means of artistic expression could be discerned in a very short work. In terms of the content of her work, there are exposure and satire as well as praise. What she exposed was the darkness of society and the inequalities in human life ; and she satirized stupid men of letters and good-for-nothing artists. She praised the sincerity of young hearts and the purity of real love… Mansfield manifested her talent wholly in her depiction of the internal world of her characters. She had an unerring grasp of the idiosyncrasy and psychology of her characters, making analyses using the details of life. She was good at describing human feeling, emotions, impressions and thoughts, which is demonstrated to the fullest extent in those of her stories with little or even no plot."

Ren, Rongzhen. Mansifei'erde he ta de duan pian xiao shuo [ID D30062].
"All writer, in creating their fictional characters, betray, consciously or not, their own characteristics, leaving a complete portrait of themselves to their readers. There are often many specific and internal connections between the images of fictional characters from Katherine Mansfield's pen and her self-portrait revealed by those images... Mansfield's wandering life, sickly constitution, and feeling of loneliness determined her ideological inclination : opposing social injustice and war, and sympathizing with the weak and ordinary working people. Most of her characters are female, and a great part are women from the lower stratum of society… All of her characters are non-heroic figures of ordinary common people, dissatisfied with the imperfection of real life or feeling resentful toward the dark side of society… The sense of loneliness occupied a prominent position in her mind when she entered the stage of maturity… Her career did not start off smoothly, and with it came upheavals and poverty in life as well as frustration in love affairs. All this produced in her a sense of disillusionment, which would naturally have an effect on her characters… Mansfield's fiction has been well-known for its fine, accurate description of psychology and for its interior monologue… Another important artistic feature of her work is that hers is a language with a strong sense of colour, also a characteristic of twentieth century Western literature. Her language of fiction, marked by the conciseness of English poetry as well as by the exquisiteness of prose, flows smoothly, naturally forming an integral whole."

Xiao, Qian. Mansifei'erde he ta de "Yi ge yi hun nan zi de zi shu" [ID D30063]
"…The extraordinary from out of the irdinary is one of the most important features of Mansfield's work. With a highly artistic summarization and detailed, true to life descriptions, she has created a gallery of unforgettable portraits, and by delineating different layers of human psychology, she has revealed the inner world of her characters. Mansfield lived only until the age of thirty-four, her career spanning just over ten years. A married man's story was one of her masterpieces produced in the mid-years of her career, when her early years' humour and irony gradually gave way to a mood of sentiment and depression. This must have been related to the unfortunate episodes that she had undergone in her love and marriage. As her life experience grew, so the theme of her work deepened, and her artistic summary of the evils and injustice of bourgeois society, powerfully appealing, has left much food for thought."

Xiao, Qian. Mei you pi qi de nan ren de yi shu te se [ID D30064].
"… Most of Mansfield's characters have striking personalities. Often she employed the artistic technique of hyperbole in delineating some habitual gestures or expressions of her characters, and in doing so she succeeded in exposing their inner spiritual world… A style of simplicity infused with profound meaning and a poetic language flowing smoothly and naturally forming an integral whole are among other special qualities of Mansfield's writings. She frequently employed metaphorical language in her descriptions…"

Liu Baiyu. Tan yi ri ji san ze [ID D30304].
Liu Baiyu spoke highly of Faulkner's achievement in artistic skills and his accomplishment as a human being. He pointed out that the starting point for Faulkner studies should be "how he used different devices to express a great but tragic theme". It seems to me that Liu Baiyu was thinking of the recent situation in which more and more young Chinese writers became interested only in the mechanism of techniques and in writing about crimes and sex when he stressed that "Faulkner did not give up the essential principle of the form being decided by the content ; Faulkner never did away with the experience of reality in his works ; he did not take sex as the only subject of his writing ; and he did not use stream-of-consciousness technique or other artistic devices just to show off".

He, Huaihong. Suoluo he ta de hu [ID D30711].
He Huaihong's reading of Walden by Thoreau arousing the Chinese interest in Thoreau's ecological thought, appraising Henry David Thoreau's retreat and insightful reflection upon nature and human conduct.

Lisa Rofel ist Mitglied der American Anthropological Association.

Kenneth Dean promoviert an der Stanford University.

Kirk A. Denton promoviert in modern Chinese literature an der University of Toronto.

Xiao, Qian. Wei dai di tu de lü ren [ID D20278].
[Leonard Woolf spent a weekend with Xiao Qian in October 1943].
In the evening he [Leonard] brought out a stack of Virginia's diaries and let me copy from them. Early in the next morning, we went together with heavy hearts to the little brook where she had taken her life. I stood there on the bank, wanting to rebuke the gurgling waters. Then I felt perhaps I was wrong. The brook was just going endlessly on its way. Maybe it had simply relieved another transparent and from further torment.