Year

1953

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Mentioned People (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (2)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1917-1964	Bynner, Witter. The selected Witter Bynner [ID D32346]. 1917 Letter from Witter Bynner to Barry Faulkner ; Shanghai, May 22 / 27 (1917). Korea was exciting - but Peking is almost everything. I can't get my breath from the wonder of it. Japan is but bothersome dust in the nostrils of the dragon. Thank heaven I was away and this far away when the Thing happened [The US declared a state of war on April 6] ! I can get a clearer view of its large aspects and better find my own place than if I had been on the spot of agitation. China's holy mountains counseling across deserts of ancient dead bid the soul smile at the hand. An so I cannot feel excitement or ardor – or even as yet resignation… China still stirs me to the depths – Japan (Kobe) seemed strange this morning, exquisite, clean, courteaous, suave, civilized, assured after that vast magnificent chaos. 1920 Letter from Witter Bynner to Haniel Long ; China, Aug. 1 (1920). Settled at last—in just the place I had dreamed of! On the top of a mountain, whispering with bamboos and our own waterfall, brilliant hot with sun, cool with moon; and before us, or rather under us precipitate, and then reaching far off, glimmer by glimmer, to the sea the sublimest landscape I have ever seen from a dwelling, all the Chinese mountain paintings put end to end, enchanted with mists and with unearthly green, blessed with great rainbows, guarded by fantastic deities of cloud: quiet folds and folds of healing, always another fold! Our luck was prodigious. The heat in China is all that is said of it. Six days in Shanghai, though important after my fatuous misconception of Shanghai as uninteresting, wilted us into wet beings almost unbalanced. Kiang was to take us to West Lake (Si Wu) for refuge; but the day before the day we had planned, in a blind rush which may only be described as panic, we fled to Hangchou (two miles from West Lake) not even letting Kiang know. We lacked his address; but a day was more than we could wait, so off we went, leaving a brief note of farewell. Kiang and I had talked for two years of visiting Si Wu together, a place rich with beauties and memories, a haunt of our poets; and yet it was a week before I could manage to send him word as to what had become of us. I tell you this to show you that there is a kind of madness in the weather. Hangchou was as bad as Shanghai, and after one day the Fickes fled again, to Mokanshan, a mountain of whose coolness we had heard. I, in a kind of spell, stayed behind and for three days in a city of 350,000 Chinese saw the faces of only three foreigners. I had moved to a native hotel and, consumed with heat and mosquitoes and unable to sleep much on the bed of slung matting, was physically miserable. Fortunately I like the food and, clad in only a long linen Chinese coat, ate it on my own picturesque little balcony—ardently companioned by two Chinese students of twenty who had come to my rescue with a little English on the roof of the Hangchou hotel, where I was listening, my first night there, to some singsong girls. The two likable lads were with me after that from dawn to eve, my guides, my bargainers, my friends. In return I paid their slight expenses on our jaunts and taught them English. With the elder and abler I became more and more charmed. His gentleness, his courtesy, his fine young integrity are interwoven for me with the beauty and wonder of West Lake. There is plenty of age in China ; I was glad of some youth. And I realized again, as I realize often in my experience, that the accidental move, the inexplicable, even the unintelligent, like this running away from dear Kiang, brings a happy outcome and adds to the general good. I needed, for instance, to discover for myself, anonymously, so to speak, without introduction, the simple beautiful humanness of a Chinese. And there it was, written quick for me, a new verse in my gospel. Incidentally I discovered him on the edge of Christianity and discouraged him for all I was worth from differentiating among the wise and appointed teachers, from singling one of them out to the disparagement of the others, from yielding one jot of his birthright in Confucius, in Buddha, in Laotzu. There was a glad light in our eyes, and I knew for a moment the joy of being a missionary. When Nieh's vacation ended, so did mine; and I followed the Fickes to this rare place where we have taken a house and are at regular work again. Kiang will be joining us in a month (we are here till the 15th of September), and I shall have all I can do to put the first volume of Chinese poems into shape for his final revision. That means that I must renounce letter writing, in spite of all I have to say to you and a few others; but I could not rest nor work without sending you just this fond word to let you know of my happiness and of my love for you. I am hoping, before long, to hear from you that you are in patience with me again. I will not have it otherwise. Someday in a place like this you will be in person with me and there shall be long rich exchanges. Or perhaps something will bring about our living together in Berkeley; for that is where I wish eventually to have my being. I have even broached it to mother. I had rather be underground in Berkeley than above ground in New York. There will be difficulties; but I am not afraid of difficulties any more: I have a steadier spirit than once I had and a little money. Meantime this is what I wanted. I took it, and I am glad. China has much more to teach me at present than America. The discouragements in both places are the same: the greed of an eminent few corrupting the simple decency of the many. The marvel is how much a few can accomplish, whether for evil or for good. With a reminder to you that people may be hypocritical but that books are more so and with my two arms out to the three of you. 1920 Letter from Witter Bynner to Edna St. Vincent Millay ; Shanghai, Sept. 10 (1920). … I have written you another poem. I enclose it. It is not so much about you as about the holy wonders of this place, this Chinese mountaintop. In Japan, nature is material for artistic man ; here man is material for artistic nature. I shall try to explain it some time in verse, but I shall fail. I wish you were here to do it. I do not think of anyone else who could. For Edna. From a Mountain in China To the Young Poet Millay If I sent in a flash these hills to you Would you be hushed like me ? Or must one's heart fill with a view Gradually? And might you merely nod your head, Accepting as your due Valleys not to be mistreated Even by you – And not to be sent to you by me, No matter what I said Or sang or painted? Let it be. The wish is dead. 1921 Letter from Witter Bynner to Albert M. Bender ; Shanghai, Jan. 2 (1921). Your kindnesses heap up like the cliffs along the Yang-tse Gorges and darken my conscience. I do not deserve them. But that would be the last of your considerations, wouldn't it !... Kiang, according to the strange ways of life, I have only just found, again after four months. He is lecturing everywhere, enormously popular, offered governorships, etc. – and yet suspect and ahadowed as a former Socialist and possible future Bolshevik. Dewey I have played with ; and I have enjoyed and admired Bertrand Russell. The month ahead is to be intensive work with Kiang in Peking, whither I return from Shanghai as soon as I have dispatched mby friend, Mrs. Simeon Ford, with a note to you… I'll be lodging in Peking by another quirk of fortune, in the Chinese house of George Atcheson, one of my poetry pupils. He is a student-interpreter at the American Legation and is living there in one of the beautiful small buildings of what was formerly a fine old temple. I think I sail on February 28 for S.F.; but I never know much of anything – except that you and Anne are among those closest to the heart of. 1923 Letter from Witter Bynner to Kiang Kang-hu ; Hotel Arzapalo, Chapala, July 20 (1923). … Thanks for you comment on the Li Po translations. I enclose you a letter from a Chinese student, S.Y. Chu, with a referenct to Li Po's 'A song of Chang-Kan'. In it you will find some penciled queries which I wish you would answer. Long ago, by the way, I sent you a complete list of the poets in our anthology asking you to fill in such dates as I lacked. I wonder if that list failed to reach you. I enclose another. The book progresses a little more rapidly ; and as I have said before, the delay is advantageous for us in the fact that many of the poems are appearing in magazines and giving the volue, before its issue, a growing prestige. The question of notes troubles me. It seems to me that figures set here and there against words in the text are disfiguring and distracting. Hence I am arranging our note system and am thinking seriously of a geographical index at the back of the book in which those interested might find the modern equivalenst of T'ang places. The difficulty would be that some of these T'ang names, like Wu, mean in different poems, different places. In the case of such names I should have to differentiate and make specific references to the poems in which they appear. I mention this because I wish you would take pains on the group of manuscripts I am sending you today under separate cover, to set down the modern names of places for such us as I propose. You may either return me the manuscripts with your comments or send me the comments in a letter carefully listing them under the titles. From time to time as I can supply you with copies, I shall send you other groups of the poems, hoping thereby to save extensive revision on the proofs, and consequent expense. Please notice that I wish your supervision on the printed poems as well as those typed… Hoping to be in China within two years… 1931 Letter from Witter Bynner to Miss MacKinnon ; Santa Fe, July 20 (1931). [Betr. Fir-flower tablets by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough]. The third question is more difficult. I should say, first of all, that I consider my method more faithful to the balanced meaning of the original than Mrs. Ayscough's method. Suppose, for instance, the radical meaning of composite English words were translated into a for¬eign tongue—suppose "extravagant terms" were translated "beyond- straying terms" or "at daybreak" "when the day cracked"—then you might have a literal translation of what, in English, correspond to a combination of root strokes in a Chinese character; but the meaning and stress of the word in its context would be distorted and swollen beyond the intent of the author. It is true that a Chinese scholar pleasingly feels in an ideograph the two or three roots that make the meaning. It is true also that a Western scholar feels, say, in a word made from Greek or Latin the interesting original courtship of images which have quieted into a final everyday marriage of meaning. The Chinese character for "quarrel" indicates two women under one roof; but imagine translating it that way. Equally absurd is it to say "upper and lower garments" when the character, though literally conveying that, means "clothes." I made my translations from literal texts given me by Dr. Kiang —or my other Chinese friends. Their phrases were often, of course, odd and tickling to the fancy. My constant effort, however, was to I let detailed fancy go, for the sake of the imagination behind the poem—to find as nearly as I could, the exact English equivalent of, the Chinese word—the real rather than the literal translation—that I is if "literal translation" means translating parts of words and then | binding the parts of words into phrases rather than translating the customary finished meaning of the composite word. In a way, I was lucky in not knowing the Chinese language. A moderate knowledge might have tempted me astray from poetry into etymology. My first interest in Chinese poetry came from Chinese friends whom I met in California during 1917 and 1918. With their help I translated "ancient" poems (mostly from the Confucian "Book of Poetry", I believe) which appear in my "Canticle of Pan" (Knopf). In 1918, Dr. Kiang (on the faculty of the University of California, as I was) initiated me deeper into the realm, and ever since then I have been working with him on "The Jade Mountain", which the Chinese call "modern" poetry. Before that, in 1916, on my first trip to China, I had been drawn to its poetry by stanzas written on the earliest acquired of my collection of Chinese paintings. Some day I shall translate those inscriptions. 1962 1962 Letter from Witter Bynner to Mabel MacDonald Carver ; June 12 (1962). [Kiang Kang-hu is believed to have died in prison in Shanghai on December 6 or 7, 1954]. Poor Kiang made the grave error of accepting the secretaryship of education in the cabinet of Henry Pu Yi in the Manchukuo, called the Puppet Government. Kiang insisted to the end that he merely wished to keep the youngsters in his country educated, while subject ot Japan, and that he hever was in the least politically active. Unfortunately, the Nationalists did not take it that way and put the man in jail where later the Communists kept him until his tragic death there. A am amazed that my inscribed copy of The way of life was allowed to reach the prisoner and his note about it allowed to reach me. The sad en was when a note of his did reach his daughter living in China, asking her if she could bring him some candy. She did, only to be told by an official at the prison : Your father died last nith of malnutrition. They did not even return her the candy. 1964 Letter from Witter Bynner to Ruth Witt-Diamant ; Santa Fe, Aug. 7 (1964). … I envy you the life in Japan. In 1917 and 1920, when I wen there and to China, I found the beauty and assuagements of Japan very pleasant both before entering, and after leaving China. I think an indication of what was a bit difficult was the fact that in Japan, for all the slight squirming and giggling, I was never sure whether or not we were seeing and feeling with the same humor, whereas in China the mirth bottle would pop with champagne. Perhaps this Japanese eagerness to be laughing with us has reached through the years toward an inclination to be laughing at us. When I was in the Orient, I thought it would have taken very little decency for us to earn and keep a warm liking from the Chinese people, whereas the Japanese largely baffled me with their apparent eagerness toward a liking they could not really muster. And I shoud say that on the whole we Americans were better then all round than we are now – both more real and more civilized. But as I say I wish I could go again to the Orient.	Document: Bynner, Witter. Selected letters. Ed., and with an introd. by James Kraft. (New York, N.Y. : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981). (Byn7, Publication) Person: Bynner, Witter
2	1953	Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar [Jiang Kanghu]. [ID D32411]. In suggesting that, after an interval of many years, I again contribute to The Occident, its editor wrote me that the autumn issue "is to focus upon Asiatic literature" and added that "this theme was given impetus by a sense of its necessity in our present Western thought." With more time and space, I should have liked to dwell on the theme as it relates to that necessity, our present political involvement with Asia making acutely necessary our understanding of the Oriental spirit; but I hope that a brief factual account of my connection with Chinese poetry and philosophy will not only record experience pertinent to the theme and to the impetus prompting it—as well as incidentally pertinent to the University of California—but will help to indicate the fact that human emotion and thought are of sympathetic kinship the world over and that such thought in Chinese philosophy as has lasted from the 6th century B.C. and in Chinese poetry from the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries A.D. is basically close to what is likely to last of "present Western thought." In 1918, when I was a member of the faculty at Berkeley, I met a fellow member, Dr. Kiang Kang-hu, to whom I was at once drawn. What he had recently done as a man of principle and brave action was enough to evoke my interest even before I learned to know him as a gentle scholar and stimulating companion. He had been secretary to Yuan Shih-k'ai, China's first president after Sun Yat-sen's provisional presidency and patriotic withdrawal. When in 1916, Yuan schemed to make himself emperor, Dr. Kiang, denouncing the plot and instrumental in blocking it, had to flee for his life and, landing in the United States, speedily learned enough English to become an able and popular teacher at the University of California. Like most Americans, I had been trained exclusively in the European culture which stems from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. Until 1917, the best part of which year I spent in Japan and China, I had known next to nothing of the world's Asiatic background; and now at Berkeley I was finding myself moved by it as it reflected in Dr. Kiang, especially by fragments of Chinese poetry with which he would now and then illuminate his conversation. I had been superficially familiar with the ethical teachings of Confucius, had respected his sense of order, his successful rejection of divine attributes, and his intelligent concern with one world at a time, but had been a bit chilled by his preoccupation with domestic and social etiquette, his elaborate anticipation of Emerson's findings that in some respects manners are morals. Through glimpses of the calm, kind, almost democratic thinking, the intuitional sense of oneness in man, nature and eternity, which permeates many of the T'ang poems, I began seeing for the first time into an ancient society of individual spirits not shackled by dogma, by fixed commandment or code, not shadowed by jealous deity. Against the burdens and buffets of life, these poets had found an inner peace and a good will toward men at least as sure and sweet, it seemed to me, as any peace or good will found in a later world. Jesus says, Leave all else and follow Me, which no all-powerful God would need to say and no man, impotent against change, should assume to say. His followers say, God died for us. It's the Me and the me. T'ang poets, living their Taoism, had eased meship into the whole current of life itself, no god or man intervening. They acknowledged the melancholy natural to man over his predicaments, but had not let it become anything like the morbidly mystical egotism in which Christianity has mythologized it. Wang Wei says, I shall some day meet an old wood-cutter And talk and laugh and never return. Han Hung asks, Who need be craving a world beyond this one? Here, among men, are the Purple Hills! Meng Chiao asks, What troubling wave can arrive to vex A spirit like water in a timeless well? Liu Chang-ch'ing confesses, Mingling with Truth among the flowers, I have forgotten what to say. A wisdom was here, I thought, relaxed and open, of which Christian civilization—perhaps Buddhist civilization also—stood in need for a simplifying and cleansing and strengthening of life; a wisdom which, I felt, some unnecessary screen had been hiding from us of the West. Perhaps the screen was the fact that, through priesthood and pathetic credulity, Taoism had degenerated from a pure philosophic faith into superstition and claptrap, much as the teachings of Jesus have done; some of the Christian mythology seeming to me as savage as that of Greece but less engaging. Perhaps Jesus needs Laotzu over here, I won¬dered, and Laotzu needs Jesus over there. I tried to find Laotzu in translations of his sayings; but the translations only clouded him for me, whereas Kiang's oral Anglicizing of T'ang poets, and of their Taoism, illumined him. So I asked Kiang if he and I might not try collaborating in translating poems by Wang Wei. I wish we had then thought of trying to translate the source, the Tao Teh Ching itself. But Kiang proposed an 18th century anthology, Three Hundred Pearls of the T'ang Dynasty (618 to 906 A.D.) the compiler of which had remarked in his preface, "This is but a family reader for children, but it will hold good until our hair is white": a collection of far wider popularity in China than, say, The Golden Treasury here. 170 Chinese Poems, the first book of translations by Arthur Waley, Britain's distinguished Sinologist, had not then appeared and resounded, or I might have quit my project; and earlier translations, except a few by Helen Waddell, had not held what I wanted. Ezra Pound's small sheaf, Cathay, printed in London three years before, contained passages arrestingly fine, as well as prophetic of Waley's direct manner; but Kiang, wondering why the American poet should call Li Po only by his Japanese name, Rihaku, recited off-hand versions of the same poems Pound had chosen, which I found, even in Kiang's halting English, still finer. So we went to work, believing that in a year's time we could string the three hundred Chinese pearls on English thread. Two years later we sailed for China together, planning continuance through the summer of our far from finished task. By a freak of fortune we lost each other. He was to spend a fortnight with relatives and on business in Shanghai. He had given me as his address a Chinese hotel there; but he had advised my going ahead with the Arthur Davison Fickes, our travelling companions, to Si Wu, the lake resort near Hangchow where he would join us later, for escape from Shanghai's terrific heat. When we still had to flee heat, we wrote giving him our address on Mokan-shan, a comparatively cool mountain, still farther from Shanghai. His hotel, being full as we learned afterwards, not only had no room for him but apparently took no interest in his mail, though he called there again and again and I wrote there again and again all summer, he thinking as ill of an American as I of a Chinese. In the autumn, we met by accident on a Shanghai street. Since he had left with me his rough literal texts of the poems and I had been hard at work on them, we were able to go over them for accuracy, as we had done before and were to do again many times. The publishers' announcement of The Jade Mountain for 1921, when we had expected it to be ready, led to an amusing literary panic of which I knew nothing until 1946 when, asked to review a volume of correspondence between Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, I discovered how hard Miss Lowell had driven her collaborator in order to issue their translations from the Chinese ahead of ours. As it happened, Fir-Flower Tablets appeared in 1921 and The Jade Mountain—after eight more years of work on it—in 1929. Meanwhile the popular welcome given Arthur Waley's and Shigeyoshi Obata's translations, as well as magazine publication of nearly all our three hundred "pearls," had shown a marked Western interest in Chinese poetry, not as something exotic or picturesque but as a record of human feeling and thought so simply and rightly expressed as almost to conceal its artistry. I often wish that among our own contemporary poets there were more of the T'ang awareness that "a poem can be tipped over by one heavy word." In poetry, apart from political comments, officially commanded tributes or playful literary games, those old boys used no ponderous or intricate symbolism, no foppish babble, but the grace of an art in which a man's mind never grows childish and a child's heart never dies. It is of course gratifying to me that Dr. Kiang's work and mine, as translators, stays alive; and I attribute its vitality to the fact that in spirit and expression the poems remain as close as we could keep them to what the originals mean in China. Mr. Waley, who knows Chinese, greeted the book warmly and took generous pains to point out a number of initial errors which have been corrected in later editions. I trust that the vogue of flashy, deliberately false translations, like those of Powys Mathers in Colored Stars, is past. I used to argue with Miss Lowell and Mrs. Ayscough against their exaggerated use of root-meanings in Chinese characters, so that under their hands what was natural, direct, every-day expression in the Orient would become in English odd or complex or literary. The temptation to dart toward such glitter is easy to understand; but I early agreed with Kiang that for translators the bright fly concealed a hook. I quote from one of Mrs. Ayscough's letters: "Take, for instance, yu, formed of the two radicals 'the wind' and 'to speak'; instead of just saying 'a gale Miss Lowell has rendered this 'shouts on the clearness of a gale.' One must be careful not to exaggerate," continues her collaborator, "but it makes lovely poems." Though it may gratify Mrs. Ayscough's weakness for "lovely poems" and though Chinese scholars may have sensitive feelers for the roots of their written characters, such translation does not give the reader or auditor in English the equivalent of what a Chinese reads or hears in the original. Poets write for people, not for etymologists. Whether or not Po Chü-yi, as is said, tested his poems by reading them to his cook, they are as human and simple as if he had done so and can be finally as appealing in Canton, Ohio, as in Canton, Kwangtung. On Second Avenue in New York I noticed years ago a Chinese restaurant called The Jade Mountain and, told by a waiter that the owner had taken the title from a book of translated poems, I hoped it was because they were well translated. But it was more probably because of magic in the name, Kiang Kang-hu. I had already been shown respect by the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Santa Fe due to my connection with "a great scholar." These days when Kiang is mentioned in The New Canton Cafe, my friend there shakes his head sadly and observes, "Maybe he was too ambitious, but he is still a great scholar." It happened that, during the Sino-Japanese war, Dr. Kiang joined the puppet government at Nanking as Minister of Education. He wrote me that he considered his act not political but a means of serving his people in captivity, as a scholar should. Unfortunately, when he became later a captive of the Nationalists, they did not relish his explanation and sentenced him to death. Because of appeals from many sources, including two American generals who had met and admired him, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. There had to be more appeals before he was permitted brush and paper for writing. It was after his imprisonment that, still unsatisfied with English versions of the Tao Teh Ching, even with Arthur Waley's and Lin Yutang's which were published after my earlier research, I decided that I must attempt one by myself, must try to uncover in Laotzu's book the secret of his profound influence on China's loftiest thinkers and doers. Without Kiang's help, except for the general perception due to our eleven years of collaborating, I pondered and worked for many months, digging out from a dozen or so translations in English what I felt Laotzu must have meant; and for better or worse the resultant "American version" has maintained remarkable popularity in the United States through the past decade. Innumerable letters have certified a readiness among all sorts and conditions of Americans to add Laotzu's wisdom to the wisdom of the West. Partly because Arthur Waley had thought my turns of expression too smooth and had questioned some of my interpretations, partly because I feared that I had been presumptuous, but finally because I would rather have my readings in The Way of Life approved by Kiang than by anyone else, I needed most the letter which came from his Nanking prison, dated August 13, 1948, four years after I had sent him the book. I have heard nothing from him since; and for several years his wife and children have received no answer concerning him from Chinese authorities. But through the silence I hear again, in his letter, the gentle scholar I first heard in Berkeley thirty-five years ago. "As to your interpretation of Lao-tse" (he uses the older English spelling, instead of my Anglicized form, comparable to our spelling Kung Fu-tze, Confucius) "I can only say that it was entirely your insight of a 'fore-Nature' understanding that rendered it so simple and yet so profound. Lao-tse's text is direct, and we have to go around about it. It is impossible to translate it without an interpretation. Most of the former translations were based on the interpretations of certain commentators, but you chiefly took its interpretation from your own insight, which I term the 'fore-Nature' understanding or, in Chinese, Hsien-T'ien. This Hsien-T'ien understanding is above and beyond words. As the Chinese say, 'All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason.' If this reason was not sidetracked by anything of an 'after-Nature,' then everyone would come to an identical or similar understanding. So the translation could be very close to the original text, even without knowledge of the words. I am grateful to you indeed for your kind dedication, but rather shameful for not being able to assist you in any way." Though he does not commit himself to my interpretation, this gentle comment from Kiang Kang-hu has assisted me in more ways than one. I have tried to thank him in China, and I thank him here. It is a warming phenomenon that our having been to all purposes at war with the present government of China's mainland—this fact has not turned our people against the Chinese as people. Russia, behind China, has been our real dread. And I doubt that the Chinese people will long be docile to foreign-inspired masters. Docility to any master is not in their nature nor in their history. Although the Soviet system, insofar as it means local government by guilds, originated in China, the Soviet system as developed by Russia into a police state is alien to Chinese character and tradition. From earliest times scholars and poets have held high place in Chinese government and, though often punished for individualism and candor, have seldom feared to criticize and to oppose and undo tyranny, as Dr. Kiang opposed and helped to thwart the attempted tyranny of Yuan Shih-k'ai. It is notable today that not only a statesman like Syngman Rhee but many thousands of Korean and Chinese soldiers are gallantly, stoutly opposing both Communist tyranny and our own powerful, disgraceful and unprecedented tyranny in imprisoning and tormenting our declared friends. I have a feeling that our own people at large are ashamed of our captains and bargainers. At least there is no surging popular sentiment among us favoring assault on the people of China. And I am convinced that under similar circumstances our feeling would have been less civilized fifty years ago, that among people in the Occident an understanding of people in the Orient has subtly and surely arisen and that this understanding is due more than we realize to the fact that Asian thought and art has reached and touched the West, that we now know Chinese civilization, for instance, to be not only the oldest civilization still vigorous but to be a civiliza¬tion profoundly informed as to lasting values. At the moment the element which controls China would seem to have set its face against the wisdom of philosophers and poets who have made China great in the past and who have lately come alive anew in conveying a sense of its greatness to a wider world. But are we less fluctuant, we in the West? Three years ago I was calling on the Minister of War in London. He had recently returned from an official trip in the Orient and said that during his stay there he had written a poem which was to have been published in The London Observer. The Prime Minister, happening to notice a proof of it on the War Minister's desk, had to ask and be told what it was. He advised that it be withdrawn, since poetry writing was beneath the dignity of a Cabinet Member. He probably did not even know that for centuries Chinese Emperors, Premiers and Generals had been proud to write poetry, nor had he any suspicion that his own successor as Prime Minister in Britain would receive a Nobel award for literature. Cabinet Members come and go. But Li Shang-yin, a gentle scholar, continues saying, as he said in the 9th century: Literature endures, like the universal spirit, And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men. And Kiang Kang-hu continues quoting, even in prison: "All human beings are of the same heart, and all human hearts are for the same reason."	Person: Bynner, Witter Person: Jiang, Kanghu

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB