China and the West

Mao, Dun. Shashibiya yu xian shi zhu yi [ID D23874].
Einführung der Beurteilung von Marx und Engels von Shakespeare in China durch Mao Dun, basierend auf Aussagen des russischen Kritikers S. Dianamov.
Er schreibt : "… They [Marx and Engels] once tried to persuade Lassalle to study Shakespeare. When they commented on Shakespeare, their focus was not on the external shape of Shakespeare’s works... Both Marx and Engels thought that on the basis of the themes, content and real nature of these plays, Shakespeare is a truly realistic writer... He [Shakespeare] was eager to look for a new foundation in life. By evaluating the whole experience and the history of the class that he belongs to, he attempts to seek the basis of the new, fresh, and free life. He created a gigantic encyclopaedia of morality and an upright life style."

Liang, Shiqiu. Hamuleite wen ti [ID D23875].
Li Ruru : Liang began by analyzing the various arguments put forward by writers in the West on the subject of Hamlet’s indecision and distinguished three schools of thought. He represented Romantic criticism by T. Hammer, H. Mackenzie, Goethe, S.T. Coleridge and W. Hazlitt who were all obsessed by Hamlet’s character. Liang's second group was represented by C. Lamb and K. Werder who, having dismissed the alleged flaw in Hamlet's character as deriving from the critics’ own imaginations, considered instead the world surrounding Hamlet and concluded that the delay in his taking action was necessitated by the external conditions. Liang rejected the arguments of both of the above groups because their interpretations were based on the subjective opinions of the essayists rather than an objective study of the text. Liang was more convinced by the contribution of critics who examined the theatrical conventions and applied textual analysis to expose the possible errors that Shakespeare made when he wrote the play. In his conclusion, Liang commented that the research on Hamlet was not only fascinating but also revealed the important points that literary criticism must be founded on detailed textual research and that Shakespeare should not be idolized since even the greatest writer's masterpiece could have errors.

Luo Dagang studiert französische Literatur an der Université de Lyon und erhält den M.A. ès lettres.

Brief von Romain Rolland an Fu Lei.

Lu Xun schreibt in einem Brief über die Übersetzung von La véritable histoire de Ah Q durch Jing Yinyu : "On dit que le français de Jing Yinyu est bon, mais sa traduction ne peut être parfaite, car son but, c'était de l'argent." Les neuf chapitres du roman deviennent huit. Jing Yinyu a sauté tous les passages qui le gênaient.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Molun zhong xue (Molun-Schule) in Shanghai mit Hu Ping als Nora und Gu Menghe als Helmer.

Aufführung von Nora von Henrik Ibsen durch die Shanghai ye yu ju ren xie hui (Shanghai Amateur Actors Association) in Shanghai unter der Regie von Wan Laitian und Bühnenbildner Zhang Min mit Lan Ping (Jiang Qing) als Nora, Zhao Dan als Helmer, Jin Shan als Krogstad und Wei Heling als Dr. Rank.
Kam Kwok-kan : The play was for the first time presented in a spectacular manner. It was a shocking event to the Shanghai audience. It was the spectacularly realistic effect that distinguised the production from all previous ones which were in one way or another tinted by the colours of traditional operatic performance. Zhang Min for the first time introduced the Stanislavsky method to the Chinese theatre.
Jiang Qing enthusiastically admired Nora and wished all women who were treated as playthings by men would become Nora. Soon she also left family : "I must try to become a real human being !"

Xia, Yingzhe. Li xiang zhong de Nuola [ID D26236].
Xia Yingzhe proposes that Chinese women, the ideal Noras, should be healthy, independent personalities with an iron will, critical ability and at least the minimal knowledge and skill to earn a living. They would return home only if their husbands agreed that they were mistresses of the family. If they could not bear loneliness in society and had to remarry, they should also keep themselves in the position of a mistress, sharing the obligations and duties. As human beings, women have the right to do what they are entitled to, and society, family ad husbands should recognize their existence.

Yang, Zhensheng. Nuola yu Luosimo [ID D 26241].
Yang thinks that Rosmer is in one sense a male Nora. While Nora is dissatisfied with her husband, Rosmer dislikes his wife. He thinks that one way to solve the Nora problem is to be realistic about marriage and that both husband and wife should understand and respect each other. Economic independence, according to Yang, ist still the biggest problem in women's liberation.

Edward H. Hume arbeitet in der Chinese National Health Administration in China.

Liang, Shuming. Duwei jiao yu zhe xue zhi gen ben guan nian. [Fundamental ideas in Dewey's philosophy of education : review of 'Democracy and education' by John Dewey] : Lecture delivered at Shandong Rural Reconstruction Research Institute.
杜威教育哲學之根本概念
Liang Shuming was deeply impressed by Dewey's seminal work, in which Dewey had presented a more profound and comprehensive conception of education than anything he had encountered before. Liang's essay is a penetrating analysis of Dewey's ideas from Confucian perspectives. Liang acclaims Dewey's conception of education for encompassing life itself. Liang argues that life is the central concept in Dewey and that his understanding of education derives from his view of life. Since Dewey understands human life to be ineluctably social, he sees education to be possible and necessary only where individual life intersects with social life. As Liang comments, 'where there are no people, there is no education ; and where there is only one person, there is no education'. Liang suggests that, in reading 'Democracy and education', one should start with chapter four, 'Education as growth', which explores the meaning of life from an individual perspective, and then continue with chapters three, two, one, and finally chapter seven. Liang believes that in so reading, one can better comprehend the meaning of individual life in the larger context of social life and thus better grasp Dewey's central contention that democracy is education and education is democracy.
Liang comments that Dewey's philosophy is deep and thorough because he always tries to trace the origin of things, to 'start from the very beginning', as Liang puts it. According to Liang, Dewey rightly understands that the most active part of human life – and the universe at large – is 'renxin', the human heart-and-mind. As he observes, Dewey's writings are filled with profound insights into the nature of human sociality.
He observes that Dewey and Confucius share the same conception of social individuals, for they both understand that humans are inevitably bound together by their very nature. Since human life is naturally social education, to be worthy of the name, must be essentially social and moral. Liang claims that by education Dewey means educating the human-hear-and-mind for a social life. He notes that Dewey end his book by reminding readers what it means to be moral : 'All education which develops power to share effectively in social life is moral' and particularly that 'interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest'. Liang laments the fact that most people fail to understand Dewey's view of morality because they have a narrow and rigid conception of morality as following rules or obeying duty.
Even though Liang praises Dewey and sees many commonalities between Dewey and Confucius, he nonetheless points out what he thinks is lacking in Dewey's philosophy. Although Dewey has a penetrating understanding of the endlessly changing, lively, and dynamic aspects of life, he fails to see another side, that is, the unchanging and the absolute. According to Liang, Dewey makes circular arguments, such as, the end of education is more education, because 'he has not discovered morality, even though everything he said is quite moral'. Liang thinks that Dewey has taught people only how to apply intelligence in dealing with the practicalities of life, but not in reflecting inwardly upon the value of life. Liang's comment seems to reflect a prevailing criticism of Dewey in China during the 1920s and 30s – that he often fails to not the tranquil, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of human life.

Performance of Beyond the horizon by Eugene O'Neill in Shanghai under the direction of Zhao Dan.

O'Neill, Eugene. Days without end. (New York, N.Y. : Random House, 1934).
FATHER BAIRD : …And what do you think was his next hiding place ? Religion, no less - but as far away as he could run from home - in the defeatist mysticism of the East. First it was China and Lao Tze that fascinated him, but afterwards he ran on to Buddha, and his letters for a time extolled passionless contemplation so passionately that I had a mental view of him regarding his navel frenziedly by the hour and making nothing of it !
Virginia Floyd : The philosophical and religious stages chronicled in Days without end for a novel's eighteen-year-old college student are identically those of O'Neill at that age when he attended Princeton. In his search to replace a lost faith, the student, like O'Neill tried the mysticism of the East.

Cao, Yu. Lei yu = Thunderstorm. In : Wen xue ji kan ; vol. 1, no 3 (1934). = (Shanghai : Wen hua sheng huo chu ban she, 1936). (Wen xue cong kan ; 1). [Uraufführung in Nanjing 1936]. 雷雨
Cao Yu writes in the preface to Tunderstorm : "Critics have regarded me as a disciple of Ibsen, or conjectured that certain parts of the play are inspired by Euripides' 'Hippolytus' or Racine's 'Phedre'. I am still myself, be so small as I am. I cannot fathom the profundity of the masters, just as the beetle in the dark wonders about the brightness of the day. Over the past decade I have read several plays and have performed in them. However hard I try, I still wonder which part of the play I have deliberately imitated. Perhaps at the lower stratum of my subconsciousness, I have deluded myself : I am an ungrateful servant. I have stolen thread by thread the golden yarn of my master's house, and woven my ugly garment out of the stolen threads and deny the discolored threads (now in my hands) remain the master's."

Cao, Yu. Ri chu = The sunrise. (Shanghai : Wen hua sheng huo chu ban she, 1936). 日出
Cao Yu writes in the postscript to The sunrise : "It is a novel attempt, which I have seen in O'Neill's plays and I know it has been successful."

Cao, Yu. Yuan ye. = The wilderness. (Shanghai : Wen hua sheng huo chu ban she, 1937). 原野
Cao Yu writes in the postscript to The wilderness : "I had trouble writing the third act. I have adoped two techniques that O'Neill uses in The emperor Jones – the drums and the gunshots in two of my scenes. At first I didn't think he exerted any influence on me, but after I finished writing and read it twice, I felt I was unconsciously influenced by him. The two techniques, to be sure, belong to O'Neill, and if they are aptly used, they are created out of O'Neill's ingenuity, not mine."

Sekundärliteratur
Cheng Fu-tsai : Cao Yu is fascinated with Greek drama, Aeschylus and Euripides. Several of Shakespeare's plays have influenced him considerably while in college and he was influenced by Eugene O'Neill. Cao Yu's plays, especially The wilderness and Thunderstorm bear a striking resemblance to O'Neill's plays in many aspects. Both of them, for example, employ the expressionistic technical devices to enhance the dramatic effect on the stage. There are also similarities in characterization, the connection between the individual and the race or society and the use of symbols. One remarkable similarity is the treatment of the conflicts of the inner world. In The wilderness Cao Yu adapts O'Neill's The emperor Jones to a Chinese background. Cao Yu does not merely borrow the structure, theme and expressionistic devices from The emperor Jones. He has successfully blended the expressionism of O'Neill with his own realistic portrayal of Chou Hu's regression into a delirious state.
Liu Haiping : All these plays are indebted in different degrees to O'Neill in terms of characterization and stagecraft. We find striking parallels between Abbie in Desire under the elms and Fan Yi, the heroine in Thunderstorm, who is also a stepmother with an incestuous longing for her stepson. Robert in Beyond the horizon parallels Zhou Chong in Thunderstorm, also a younger brother with a touch of the poet and a longing for beauty beyond the horizon. Anna in Anna Christie and Chen Bailu, the heroine in Sunrise are both prostitutes hurled into intense suffering by the evil forces of life. Like O'Neill, Cao Yu uses the hallucinatory scenes not only to externalize the haunting memories of the character and explain the source of his tragedy, but also to present a brief, panoramic review of the nation's past.
Joseph S.M. Lau : The wilderness resembles the American prototype in 'its bold and inventive use of grotesque images, disconnected plots, contrived symbolism, and deliberate pauses between the already sparse dialogues to create tension'.
Chen David Y. : Wilderness adopts the form and technique from its prototypes with so much flexibility that it works out a pattern of its own. Wilderness seems to follow The emperor Jones in the artistic pursuit, lending itself to the expressionistic treatment of emotion through advanced stagecraft and extensive use of symbolism.
Horst Frenz : The main character Zhou Fanyi in Thunderstorm is modeled upon Abbie Putnam in Desire under the elms. Like Abbie, Fanyi longs for her stepson. Their incestuous passion becomes a most eloquent and powerful expression of their defiance of traditional morals.

Eliot, T.S. "What Does Mr. Pound Believe?". January 28, 1934.
Pound : "I believe the Ta Hio" [Da xue].

Pound, Ezra. The literary essays of Ezra Pound [ID D29121].
"Fenollosa's work was given me in manuscript when I was ready for it. It saved me a great deal of time. I saved probably less time to a limited number of writers who noticed it promptly but who didn't live with is as closely as I did. Fenollosa died in 1908. I began an examination of comparative European literature in or about 1901 ; with the definite intention of finding out what had been written, and how. The motives I presumed to differ with the individual writers."

Pound, Ezra. ABC of reading [ID D29058].
The First definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa's Essay on the Chinese written character.
The complete despicability of official philosophic thought, and, if the reader will really think carefully of what I am trying to tell him, the most stringing insult and at the same time convincing proof of the general nullity and incompetence of organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general, and their learned publications at large, could be indicated by a narrative of the difficulties I encountered in getting Fenollosa's essay printed at all… Fenollosa's essay was perhapts too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language.
The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows :
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and prog4essively remoter abstraction.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour'.
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or division of the sprectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth…
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is the method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussion', and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing…
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese Ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing ; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.
Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, 'Of course, you can see it's a horse' (or a wing or whatever).
In tables showing primitive chinese characters in one column and the present 'conventionalized' signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or 'was simplified from', or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise.
Thus : 人 man / 木tree / 日 sun / 東sun tangled in the tree's branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East.
But when the chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it ?
He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint ?
He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE, CHERRY, IRON RUST, FLAMINGO.
That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.
The chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.
(If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo).
Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC ; simply couldn't help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of english type might very well not stay poetic.
He died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a 'method'…
I once got a man to start translating the Seafarer into Chinese. It came out almost directly into Chinese verse, with two solid ideograms in each half-line. Apart from the Seafarer I know no other european poems of the period that you can hang up with the 'Exile’s letter' of Li Po, displaying the West on a par with the Orient…
For those who read only English, I have done what I can.
I have translated the TA HIO so that they can learn where to start THINKING.

[Twain, Mark]. Tuomu Suoye'er de mao xian shi. Wu Guangjian yi. [ID D29503].
Li Xilao : In his introduction Wu spoke more highly of Huckleberry Finn. Why not translate Huckleberry Finn ? We may get a cluer from his observation of Mark Twain's style : the author 'shifts fast' in his writing, suddenly 'from being comic to tragic, from being sentimental to hilarious' ; and, what is more, Finn uses 'a lot of slang and mispronounced dialect'. It is 'hard to understand for non-natives'.

Zhao, Jiabo. Meiguo xiao shuo zhi cheng zhang [ID D29504].
"Today American fiction has embarked upon the road of realism in a mighty and powerful manner, thanks to the great trail-blazing contributions of Mark Twain. He merits the title of the Founding Father of American modern fiction."

Mu, Mutian. [I stand for more learning]. In : Literature and I. (Shanghai : Shanghai Life Bookstore, 1934).
"Shame on poets playing upon wind, flowers, snow and moon, in such a critical moment for the nation !... Poets should raise their voices to call forth the people to embark on the national salvation… Aren't we now in need of poets such as Du Fu, Milton, Whitman, Hugo and Shelley ?"