Chronology Entries
| # | Year | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1934 |
Zheng, Zhenduo. Zhongguo wen xue lun ji [ID D29986].
Memorial article about Lin Shu : "Lin Shu helped Chinese intellectuals to learn about the Westerners, their societies, and their national characters and to see that the West was not too different from China. He showed them that Chinese literature was not the only beautiful and wonderful literature in the world. There existed in Europe and the United States literary works that were as great as those written by Sima Qian, the most respected writer in Chinese history." |
| 2 | 1934 |
[Melville, Herman]. Taipi. Wu Guangjian yi. [ID D30230].
Wu Guangjian discusses in a brief introduction Melville's major works, mentioning briefly his volumes of poetry : Timoleon, John Marr and other sailors, and Battle-pieces and aspects of the war. Wu's abridgment of Typee with his critical commentary did much to spread the influence of Melville among Chinese literary scholars. |
| 3 | 1934 |
Yeats, W.B. Introduction. Hamsa, Bhagwan Shri. The holy mountain : being the story of a pilgrimage to lake Manas and of initiation on mount Kailas in Tibet. (London : Faber and Faber, 1934).
"It is that whenever I have been tempted to go to Japan, China or India for my philosophy, Balzac has brought me back, reminded me of my preoccupation with national, social, personal problems, convinced me that I cannot escape from our Comédie humaine…" "Much Chinese and Japanese painting is a celebration of mountains, and so sacred were those mountains that Japanese artists, down to the invention of the colour print, constantly recomposed the characters of Chinese mountain scenery, as though they were the letters of an alphabet, into great masterpieces, traditional and spontaneous. I think of the face of the Virgin in Siennese painting, preserving, after the supporting saints had lost it, a Byzantine character. To Indians, Chinese and Mongols, mountains from the earliest time have been the dwelling places of the Gods. Their kings, before any great decision have climbed some mountain, and of all these mountains Kailas, or Mount Meru, as it is called in the Mahabharata, was the most famous. Sven Hedin calls it the most famous of all mountains, pointing out that Mont Blanc is unknown to the crowded nations of the East. Thousands of Hindu, Tibetan and Chinese pilgrims, Vedantin, or Buddhist, or of some older faith have encircled it, some bowing at every step, some falling prostrate, measuring the ground with their bodies ; an outer ring for all, an inner and more perilous for those called by the priests to its greater penance." |
| 4 | 1934 |
Letter from Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams ; January 26, 1934.
So bless the collective wheelbarrow ; with Wallace Stevens beside it like a Chinese beside a huge pair of oxen. |
| 5 | 1934 |
Shi, Zhecun. Meiguo xiao shuo zhi cheng zhang [ID D30390].
Zhao show that William Faulkner was a stylist and a rising star. He applaudes Faulkner as a truly native American writer, especially in the use of language : "The dialogues in Black English are the most beautiful part of each of his novels. His narrative technique of combining psychological description with dialogues is more worth noting than that of Sherwood Anderson or Ernest Hemingway. He has broken away from the restrictions of English literature and avoided Joyce's defect of incomprehensibility. As American society is moving towards disintegration, decline, defeat, and chaos, Faulkner has taken the cruelties and miseries of modern society as the subject matter and death as the center of his stories. Faulkner's bitterness, his distress at being unable to find a general solution to all the tragedies, brutalities, and savagery reflects the despair of the modern man who is trying desperately to survive in this crazy world of the 1930s". |
| 6 | 1934 |
Ling, Changyan. Fukena : yi ge xin zuo feng de chang shi zhe [ID D30392].
"Faulkner is a typical writer of modern life, he writes about crimes, brutalities, and primitive sexuality, his outlook on life is wholly pessimistic, Faulkner's writings are actually well-planned beneath the surface of total chaos." Ling suggests that Faulkner tried to win popularity by writing about "immoral matter and unpleasant happenings" and through the use of new techniques so as to cater to the reader's need for sensation and strangeness. "Faulkner is not a profound thinker, Faulkner has become popular simply because the present time is as unhealthy as the author himself". He concludes that Faulkner was not as good as Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis. "Their work force people to think against their will, while all that Faulkner gives to the reader is only sensation, an unusual kind of sensual excitement." |
| 7 | 1934-1935 |
Stein, Gertrude ; Van Vechten, Carl. The letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946. Ed. by Edward Burns. Vol. 1-2. (New York, N.Y. : Columbia University Press, 1986).
1934 Letter from Gertrude Stein to Carl Van Vechten ; [postmark 21 Sept. 1934]. Trac will have his, then our first China boy is so jealous he quite dropped tears… 1935 Letter from Carl Van Vechten to Gerturde Stein ; 18 March [1935]. Willy Seabrook says he'll come down for the Garden Party (organdies please, with the sweet-pea design) although it be held in China, which perhaps it will be. |
| 8 | 1934 |
Warren, Lansing. Gertrude Stein views life and politics. [Interview].
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/specials/stein-views.html. Gertrude Stein : "Building a Chinese wall is always bad. |
| 9 | 1934-1938 |
Alexander von Falkenhausen ist Militärberater von Chiang Kaishek.
|
| 10 | 1934-1936 |
Liu Chongjie ist Gesandter der chinesischen Gesandtschaft in Berlin.
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| 11 | 1934-1940 |
Gertrud Schäppi ist als Missionarin der Basler Mission in Langkou, Xin'an (Guangdong).
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| 12 | 1934-2000 |
James Fenimore Cooper and China : general
Zhang Aiping : Cooper's picturesque description of American landscape and realistic characterization of American frontiersmen instantly turned him into a popular American writer among Chinese readers and critics as well. Scholarly articles on Cooper have appeared not just in mainstream or specialized journals of the study of American literatury, they can also be found in a variety of non-literary magazines and journals. Common readers know Cooper as the American novelist who wrote extensively and beautifully about adventures in the wilderness, whereas scholars view him as the leader in American Renaissance literature, who established several new genres in American novel writing. In textbooks and scholarly writings, they lauded him as the pioneering figure who helped steer American writings out of the shadow of the British and European traditions and create a nationa literature for America. |
| 13 | 1934 |
Shao, Xunmei. Xian dai Meiguo shi tan gai guan [ID D30762].
Shao introduced Emily Dickinson as a newly rediscovered predecessor to modern American poetry. He mentions the 'shocking' power of her poetry. He left unanswered why Dickinson had been neglected for a long time ; how many poems she wrote ; in what style she wrote ; and why the inner power of her poetry was so shocking. |
| 14 | 1934 |
Fleming, Peter. One's company : a journey to China [ID D3337].
Peter Fleming reist 1933 im Auftrag des The Spectator mit der Transsibirischen Eisenbahn nach Mandschuguo, quer durch China bis Hong Kong. Foreword : The book is a superficial account of an unsensational journey. My Warning to the Reader justifies, I think, its superficiality. It is easy to be dogmatic at a distance, and I dare say I could have made my half-baked conclusions on the major issues of the Far Eastern situation sound convincing. But it is one thing to bore your readers, another to mislead them ; I did not like to run the rusk of doing both. I have therefore kept the major issues in the background. The describes in some detail what I saw and what I did, and in considerably less detail what most other travellers have also seen and done. If it has any value at all, it is the light which it throws on the processes of travel – amateur travel – in parts of the interior, which, though not remote, are seldom visited. On two occasions, I admit, I have attempted seriously to assess a politico-military situation, but ony because I thought I knew more about those particular situations than anyone else, and because if they had not been explained certain sections of the book would have made nonsense. For the rest, I make no claim to be directly instructive. One cannot, it is true, travel through a country without finding out something about it ; and the reader, following vicriously in my footsteps, may perhaps learn a little. But not much. I owe debts of gratitude to more people than can conveniently be named, people of all degrees and many nationalities. He who befriends a traveller is not easily forgotten, and I am very grateful indeed to everyone who helped me on a long journey. |
| 15 | 1934-1935 (Oct.-May) |
Peter Fleming ist special correspondent of The Times. He travels with Ella Maillart (Kini) as special correspondent of Le petit Parisien.
Manchuria – Harbin : he met Ella Maillart – Shenyang – Shanghai – Beijing – Zhengzhou – Dongguan - Xi'an, Lanzhou – Xining – Koko Nor – Kumbun – Tangar – Xinjiang – Kashgar - Kashmir. |
| 16 | 1934 |
Miller, Henry. Tropic of cancer. (Paris : Obelisk Press, 1934).
"One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins." |
| 17 | 1934 |
[Poe, Edgar Allan]. Pu de duan pian xiao shuo. Wu Guangjian yi. [ID D34995].
In the preface Wu Guangjian calls Poe "The greatest literary genius in America" and "The inventor of the short story". |
| 18 | 1934 |
Kurt Wulff wird Mitglied der Danish Royal Academy of Letters and Sciences.
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| 19 | 1934 |
The jungle and King coal by Upton Sinclair were banned in China.
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| 20 | 1934-1937 |
Jaroslav Prusek hält sich mit einem Stipendium in Tokyo auf.
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