China and the West

Franco Demarchi und Riccardo Scartezzini gründen das Centro Martino Martini in Trento.

Klaus Sagaster wird Honorarprofessor der Universität der Inneren Mongolei in Hohhot.

Federico Masini ist Professore associato per l'insegnamento di filologia cinese des Dipartimento di studi orientali der Facultà di lettere e filosofia der Università di Roma "La Sapienza".

Chen, Guohua. Lun sha ju chong yi. In : Wai yu jiao xue yu yan jiu ; no 2-3 (1997). [On re-translating Shakepseare's plays].
Li Ruru : Chen argued that the best translation should be evaluated on the accurate understanding and full expression of the original taking account of Shakespeare's varied use of stye and language. From his analysis Chen concluded that translations should be based on the First Folio, with modern editions being consulted merely for reference.

Vicki Ooi Cheng-har und Jane Lai Chui-chun gründen die Hong Kong Shakespeare Society = Hong Kong Shashibiya xue hui = 香港莎士比亞學會.

Aufführung von A midsummer night's dream von William Shakespeare durch das Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (Xianggang hua ju tuan) unter der Regie von Daniel S.P. Yang.

Derrida, Jacques. Of grammatology [ID D24730].
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak schreibt im Vorwort : "Even though Derrida points out in Of Grammatology that Chinese writing "functioned as a sort of European hallucination,"his own project does not go beyond the ethnocentrism of a repeated reference to the other culture as a bearer—a sign—of the limits of the West . . . By insisting that logocentrism is "Western," Derrida forecloses the possibility that similar problems of the "proper" exist in as deep-rooted ways in the non-West and require a deconstruction that is at least as thorough and sophisticated as the one he performs for "his" tradition.”

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Xianggang ying shi ju tuan (Hong Kong Movie and TV Theatrical Company) in Hong Kong unter der Regie von Bai Yaocan.

[Spenser, Edmund]. Sibinsai shi xuan. Hu Jialuan yi. [ID D26569].
Li Zhengshuan : http://bibs.slu.edu/spenser/result.php?topic=&diss=&query=&start=2590
Although Spenser has ranked among the greatest of English poets since the sixteenth century, there has until now been no comprehensive Chinese version of his poetry. That gap has recently been filled by the appearance of Professor Hu's translation, which embraces almost all of Spenser's important works. It includes the following: "Januarye," "Aprill," "October," and "November," with a commentary on The Shepeardes Calender's remaining eight eclogues; forty-four of the Amoretti sonnets (1, 3-6, 9-10, 12-13, 15-16, 22, 26, 28-30, 34-35, 37, 40, 42, 45, 46, 50, 52, 54, 60-64, 67-68, 70-71, 75-76, 78-81, 84, 86, 88, 89) ; Epithalamion and Prothalamion complete; and The Faerie Queene I.i,ii, and xi, and II.vii and xii. In a twenty-five page Preface Professor Hu gives a detailed introduction to the life and works of Spenser, highlighting his literary career and the background of his works and providing insightful comments aimed at piecing together all of the poems, both translated and untranslated. In a separate introduction to the sonnets, Professor Hu briefly compares Spenser's sonnets with those of Sidney and Shakespeare and then analyzes the structure and meaning of the sequence. The theme of time expressed in the two marriage songs, especially Epithalamion, is vividly dealt with, with the commentary providing information on views of marriage and birth in the Renaissance. Professor Hu also provides an introduction to the whole plan of The Faerie Queene, with detailed analysis of the themes and forms of Books I and II in particular.
Although Spenser's poems are beautiful--intellectually, emotionally, and musically--for Chinese readers, they are very difficult to read and understand, in part because their beauty is obscured by his use of old spellings and by the complexity of his ideas. Professor Hu's translation seeks to convey the beauty of Spenser through a faithful translation of his ideas and poetic forms. In his graceful retention of Spenser's original rhyme schemes, the careful reader should gain some feeling of the "presence" of Spenser. Professor Hu's theory of translation is one that opposes the notion of "nationalizing" a foreign poem just to cater to the taste of readers in his own country. He especially avoids the use of four-word phrases to embellish the original text. For him, the faithfulness of the target language to the source language lies in an almost equivalent re-presentation of ideas, structure, and even punctuation marks from the original, neither over- nor underdoing it, without presenting a totally literal translation either. He insists that the poetic form is an inseparable part of the poem. Thus he tries faithfully to re-present the original arrangement of rhymes and the length of the individual lines. He finds a modern idiom to replace the archaisms of Spenser's original, on the grounds that much of Spenser's original flavor will be destroyed by using ancient Chinese poetic forms. In ancient Chinese poetry the number of words, the rhythm, and the arrangement of rhymes is so strictly kept that the idioms in a foreign poem can hardly find equivalents in the target language. This is especially true of a poem in English, which has a strictness of its own in the rules of rhythm and meter. Professor Hu has taken great pains in translating Spenser, and the pleasure that his readers will get in reading his work will be rich.

Aufführung von Saint Joan von George Bernard Shaw unter der Regie von Fredric Mao im Hong Kong Repertory Theatre.

Aufführung von Yao tiao shu nu, Musical, Adaptation von Pygmalion von George Bernard Shaw unter der Regie von Clifton Ko in Hong Kong.

Huang, Jiande. Xi fang zhe xue dong jian shi : 1840-1949. [ID D17438].
"John Dewey's influence has two sides : The negative and the positive. The negative influence is traced in his preference for social reform to Marxism, while the positive derives from his advocacy of pragmatism, new educational philosophy, and democracy. These ideas oppose dogmatism, and stress reflective thinking, drawing on spirits of practicality and innovation formed during America's pioneering years. Dewey conveyed to Chinese listeners American style characterized by pioneer spirit and determination to succeed, which are concurrent with the spirit of 'science' and 'democracy' that many Chinese intellectuals were promoting at this time."

Liu, Fangtong. Dai xu : chong xin ren si he ping jia Duwei. Preface. In : [Dewey, John]. Xin jiu ge ren zhu yi : Duwei wei xuan [ID D28559]. [Re-understanding and re-evaluation Dewey].
"In the mid-fifties, dominated by the leftist political ideological line, a large-scale movement was launched in order to criticize pragmatism. This wave of critique mainly aimed to serve certain political purposes ; as a result, most critics divorced themselves from Dewey's pragmatism itself. Henceforth, the leftist political criterion dominated the academic criticism of Dewey and other western philosophers, resulting in oversimplified negation taking the place of objective and concrete analysis. As a result, the real image of Dewey and other western scholars as well as their theories was often twisted.
Actually, the fundamental feature of Dewey's philosophy lies in its opposition against dualism, stressing that the world that man confronts, lives in and regards as the object of cognition, is the world in man's view (experience) that has been acted upon and reconstructed (humanized) instead of the world per se that exists outside of man."

[Marx, Karl]. Shashibiya lun jin qian. Liang Shiqiu yi. [ID D28855].
"The text The power of money by Marx contains significant insight, and I think that there are two points worthy of attention : 1) Shakespeare is a great artist, and one aspect of his greatness is that his works to not belong to any class and that they comprise all humankind from emerpors and aristocrats to the common people. People who say that Shakespeare is a bourgeois artist should read Shakespeare and then read the text by Mars. 2) Shakespeare is not a writer of a certain party or group. Rather, his art is to use a mirror to reflect human nature."

Shu, Xiaomei. Shi lun Beikete xi ju zuo pin zhong di shi kong jie gou [ID D30779].
Shu argues that Beckett's plays surpassed the traditional temporal and spatial designs by making time opaque, circular, and disorderly, and my making the locations obscure, abstract and symbolic.

Lu, Jiande. Zi you xu kong de xin ling : Samiaoer Beikete de xiao shuo chuang zuo [ID D30780].
Lu argues that technical innovation and self-dispossession constitute the main motifs of Beckett's fiction, which Beckett uses as an allegory and an instrument to concene an idea ; it is 'the embodiment of Tao that is empty and murky, the Tao as manifestations of ideas.

Shu, Xiaomei. Shi hua dui chen huang dan : Beikete Deng dai Geduo xi ju yu yan zhu yao te zheng [ID D30781].
Shu shows that the language of Beckett's plays exhibits a poetic quality and tendencies towards symmetry and absurdity.

Lisa Rofel ist Associate Professor of Anthropology der University of California, Santa Cruz.

David Hinton received the Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for his three volumes published in 1996 : The Selected Poems of Lí Po and Bei Dao's Landscape Over Zero and The Late Poems of Meng Chiao.

Begley, Louis. Old flames and trillionaries. [Review of] Bellow, Saul. The actual. [ID D32604].
Harry Trellman, the novella's narrator and protagonist, is in his 60's, a product of one of those lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhoods of Chicago that are Bellow's heartland, and a very odd duck indeed. His father was a carpenter, his mother an oddly elegant hypochondriac whose sojourns in American and European spas were financed by her brothers, who were rich sausage manufacturers. Although both parents were perfectly alive at the time, they put Harry in an orphanage -- for convenience. This circumstance, together with his appearance -- a face sufficiently Asiatic to let him pass in China for a native -- has reinforced his sense of having ''a masked character'' and made him a nihilist.
After the Korean War and Chinese language school, Harry went to China and then, for two years, to Burma. There, he tells us, ''I made important business connections. . . . Provided with a lifetime income through the Burmese operation, which had a Guatemalan branch, I returned to Chicago where my emotional roots were.''