Jiang, Kanghu
(Yiyang, Jianxi 1883-1954 Shanghai) : Politiker, Literaturwissenschaftler
Subjects
Index of Names : China
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Literature : General
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Politics
Chronology Entries (3)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1918 | Witter Bynner taught poetry at the University of California Berkeley and met the Chinese scholar Jiang Kanghu. They began to translate an anthology of three hundred Tang poems. | |
| 2 | 1929.2 |
The jade mountain. (2) Kiang, Kang-hu [Jiang, Kanghu]. Chinese poetry [ID D9794]. Poems of the Early Period Chinese poetry began with our written history about 5500 years ago. The oldest poems now extant were written by the Emperor Yao (2357 B.C.); and one of them was adopted as the Chinese national song in the beginning of the Republic, because Yao was in reality a life president of the most ancient republic in the world, and this poem expresses the republican spirit. Shun and Yü, the other two sagacious presidents, left with us also some poems. Their works, together with other verses by following emperors and statesmen, mav be found in our classics and official histories. In the Chou Dynasty (1122-256.B.C.) poetry became more important, not only to individual and social life, but also to the government. Emperors used to travel over all the feudal states and to collect the most popular and typical poems or songs. The collection being then examined by the official historians and musicians, public opinion and the welfare of the people jn the respective states would thus be ascertained and attested. In the ceremonies of sacrifice, inter-state convention, official banquet, and school and military exercises, various poems were sung and harmonized with music Poetry in this period was not a special literary task for scholars, but a means of expression common to both sexes of all classes. The Classical Poems One of the five Confucian classics is the Boo\ of Poetry. It is a selection of poems of the Chou Dynasty, classified under different types. This selection was made by Confucius out of the governmental collections of many states. It contains three hundred and eleven poems, all of high standard, both as literature and as music. Since the loss of the Confucian Book of Music during the period of the Great Destruction (221-211 B.C.) the musical significance of this classic can hardly be traced, but its literary value remains and the distinction of the classical poems, which can never bf duplicated. Poems Since the Han Dynasty The classical poems were usually composed of lines of four characters, or words, with every other line rhymed. Lines were allowed, however, of more or fewer words. Under the reign of the Emperor Wu (140-87 B.C.) of the Western Han Dynasty new types of poetry were introduoed; and the five-character and seven-character poems became popular and have dominated ever since. The Emperor himself invented the latter; while Li Ling and Su Wu, two of his statesmen-generals, wrote their verses in the former type. The number of characters of each line was uniform; no irregular line might occur. These two types were afterwards named the 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems. Nearly all poems before the T'ang Dynasty were in this form. The Emperor Wu introduced also the Po Liang style, which is a seven-character poem with every line rhyming in the last word. Po Liang was the name of a pavilion in the Emperor's garden where, while he banqueted his literary attendants, each wrote one line to complete a long poem. This has been a favourite game among Chinese poets. The Poems of the T'ang Dynasty As many a dynasty in Chinese history is marked by some phase of success representing the thought and life of that period, the T'ang Dynasty is commonly recognized as the golden age of poetry. Beginning with the founder of the dynasty, down to the last ruler, almost every one of the emperors was a great lover and patron of poetry, and many were poets themselves. A special tribute should be paid to the Empress Wu Chao or the 'Woman Empero' (684-704), through whose influence poetry became a requisite in examinations for degrees and an important course leading to official promotion. This made every official as well as every scholar a poet. The poems required in the examination, after long years of gradual development, followed a formula, and many regulations were established. Not only must the length of a line be limited to a certain number of characters, usually five or seven, but also the length of a poem was limited to a certain number of lines, usually four or eight or twelve. The maintenance of rhymes, the parallelism of characters, and the balance of tones were other rules considered essential. This is called the 'modern' or 'ruled' poetry. In the Ch'ing or Manchu Dynasty the examination poem was standardized as a five-character-line ooem of sixteen lines with every other, line rhymed. This 'eight-rhyme' poem was accompanied by the famous 'eight-legged' literature (a form of literature divided into eight sections) as a guiding light tor entrance into mandarin life. The above-mentioned rules of poetry applied first only to examination poems. But afterwards they became a common exercise with 'modern' or 'ruled' poems in general. Chinese poetry since the T'ang Dynasty has followed practically only two forms, the 'modern' or 'ruled' form and the 'ancient' or 'unruled' form. A poet usually writes both. The 'eight-rhyme' poem, however, was practised tor official examinations only. The progress of T'ang poetry may be viewed through a division into four periods, as distinguished by different styles and a differing spirit. There were, of course, exceptional works, especially at the transient points, and it is difficult to draw an exact boundary-line between any two periods. The first period is approximately from A.D. 620 to 700, the second from 700 to 780, the third from 780 to 850, and the fourth from 850 to 900. The second period, corresponding to the summer season. of the year, is regarded as the most celebrated epoch. Its representative figures are Li Po (705-762), the genie of poetry; Tu Fu, (712-720), the sage of poetry; Wang Wei (699-759) and Meng Hao-jan (689-740), the two hermit-poets, and Ts'en Ts'an (given degree, 744) and Wei Ying-wu (about 740-830), the two magistrate-poets. The first period is represei ted by Chang Yiieh (667-730) and Chang Chiu-ling (673-740), two premiers, and by Sung Chih-wcn (died 710) and Tu Shen-yen (between the seventh and the eighth centuries); the third, by Yuan Chen (779-832) and Po Chii-yi (772-846), two cabinet ministers, and by Han Yii (768-824) and Liu Tsung- yüan (773-819) two master literati more famous for their prose writing than for their verse; and the fourth, by Wen T'ing-yün (ninth century) and Li Shang-yin (813-858), the founders of the Hsi K'un school, and by Hsü Hun (given degree, 832) and Yao He (A.D. 9th century). All these poets had their works published in a considerable number of volumes. Secondary poets in the T'ang Dynasty were legion. Poems after the T'ang Dynasty Since the T'ang Dynasty, poetry has become even more popular. Its requirement as one of the subjects in the governmental examinations has continued, for a thousand years, to the end of the last century, through all changes of dynasty. Many great poets have arisen during this time. Su Shih (1036-1101), Huang T'ing-chien (1050-1110), Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072) and Lu Yu (1125- 1209), of the Sung Dynasty, are names as celebrated as those great names of the second period of the T'ang Dynasty. But people still honour the works of the T'ang poets as the model for ever-coming generations, though many of more varied literary taste prefer the Sung works. Chao Meng-fu (1254-1322) of the Yüan Dynasty and Yuan Hao-wen (1190-1258) of the Kin Dynasty were the shining stars of that dark age. Many poets of the Ming Dynasty, such as Liu Chi (1311-1375), Sung Lien (1310-1381), Li Tung-yang (1447-1516), and Ho Ching-ming (1483-1521) were very famous. Still greater poets lived in the Ch'ing Dynasty. Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1581-1664), Wu Wei-yeh (1699I-1671), Wang Shih-cheng (1526-1593), Chao Yi (1727-1814), Chiang Shih-ch'üan (1725-1784), Yuan Mei (1715-1797), Huang Ching-jen (1749-1783), and Chang Wen-t'ao (1764—1814) are some of the immortals. Their works are by no means inferior to those in the previous dynasties. Literature differs from science. It changes according to times and conditions, but shows, on the whole, neither rapid improvement nor gradual betterment. Later writings might appear to be more expressive and therefore more inspiring, but the dignity and beauty of ancient works are inextinguishable and even unapproached. This is especially true of poetry and of the T'ang poems, for the reason that during those three hundred years the thinking capacity and the working energy of all excellent citizens in the Empire were encouraged and induced to this single subject. Neither before nor after has there been such an age for poetry. Selections of the T'ang Poems Hundreds of collections and selections of T'ang poems have been published during the succeeding dynasties. Two compiled in the Ch’ing Dynasty are considered the best. One is the Complete Collection of T'ang Poems and the other is the Three Hundred T'ang Poems. These two have no similarity in nature and in purpose. The first is an imperial edition aiming to include every line of existing T'ang poetry: which amounts to 48,900 poems by 2,200 poets in 900 volumes. The second is but a small text-hook for elementary students, giving only 311 better-known works by 77 of the better-known writers, the same number of poems as in the Confucian Classic of Poetry. This selection was made by an anonymous editor who signed himself 'Heng T'ang T'uei Shih' or 'A Retired Scholar at the Lotus Pool', first published in the reign of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung (1735-1795). The title of this selection was based upon a common saying: 'By reading thoroughly three hundred T'ang poems, one will write verse without learning. ' In the preface the compiler assures us that 'this is but a family reader for children: but it will hold good until our hair is white'. This statement, as years have passed, has proved true. The collection has always stood in China as the most popular volume of poetry, tar poets and for the mass of the people alike. Even illiterates are familiar with the title of the book and with lines from it. Other selections may he of a higher standard and please scholars better, but none can compare with this in extensive circulation and accessible influence. The anthology in Chinese is in two volumes. The first contains all 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems, and the second all 'modern' or 'ruled' poems. The former is again divided into two parts of five-character lines and seven-character lines, the latter into four parts: (i) eight five-character lines, (2) eight seven-character lines, (3) four five-character lines, and (4) four seven-character lines. In learning Chinese poems the order is always reversed. The shorter line of fewer characters should come first. We have, however, re¬arranged the volume in English, according to poets rather than to poetic technique, the poets following one another in the alpha- Detical order of their surnames. (The surname in Chinese comes first.) Under each poet we have kept the following order of poems: 1. Modern poems of four five-character lines. 2. Modern poems of four Seven-character lines. 3. Modern poems of eight five-character lines. 4. Modern poems of eight seven-character lines. 5. Ancient poems of five-character lines. 6. Ancient poems of seven-character lines. Various Poetic Regulations and Forms There are more strict regulations in writing poems in Chinese than in any other language. This is because Chinese is the only living, language governed by the following rules: First, it is made of individual hierographic characters; second, each character or word is monosyllabic; and third, each character has its fixed tone. Hence certain very important regulations in Chinese poetry are little considered or even unknown to the poetry of other languages. For instance, the avoidance of using a word twice, the parallelism pf words of the same nature and the balancing of words of different tones, all need special preliminary explanation. The first of these regulations is possible only in Chinese poetry. We find many long poems with hundreds or even thousands of characters, and not a single one repeated, as in the form of p'ai-lü or 'arranged rule'. The second means that all the characters of one line should parallel as parts of speech those of the next line; thus noun with noun, adjective with adjective, verb with verb, etc. Even in the same parts of speech, nouns designating animals should be parallel, adjectives of colour, numbers, etc. The third means that all the characters of a line should balance, in the opposite group of tones, those of the next line. There are five tones in the Chinese written language. The first is called the upper even tone; the second, the lower even tone; the third, the upper tone; the fourth, the departing tone; and the fifth, the entering tone. The first two are in one group, named 'even tones', and the last three are in the other group and named 'uneven tones'. Thus, if any character in a line is of the even group, the character which balances with it in the next line should be of the uneven group, and vice versa. These strict regulations, though, very important to 'modern' or 'ruled' poems, do not apply to 'ancient' or 'unruled' poems. The ancient form' is very liberal. There are but two regulations for it—namely, a limit to the number of characters in each line, five or seven; and rhyme on the last character of every other line. The seven-character 'ancient' poem gives even more leeway. It may have irregular lines of more or fewer characters, and every line may rhyme as in the Po Liang style. There are also, as in English, perfect rhymes and allowable rhymes. The perfect rhymes are standardized by an Imperial Rhyming Dictionary. In this dictionary all characters are arranged, first according to the five tones, and then to different rhymes. The two even tones have 30 rhymes; the third, 29; the fourth, 30; and the fifth, a very short sound, only 17. These rhymes are so grouped, following the old classical pronunciation, that some rhyming words may seem to the modern ear discordant. The allowable rhymes include words that rhymed before the standard was made. The 'modern' poem must observe perfect rhymes; the 'ancient' poem is permitted allowable rhymes. Again, the former should use only one rhyme pf the even tones; the latter may use many different rhymes of different tones in one poem. The 'modern' poem has also its fixed pattern of tones. There are four patterns for the five-character poems and four for the seven-character poems. The signs used in the following charts are commonly adopted in Chinese pcetry: —indicates an even tone; indicates an uneven tone; indicates that the character should be of an even tone; but that an uneven is permitted; indicates the reverse; indicates the rhyme. The first group of a 'ruled poem' is named the 'rising pair'; the second, the 'receiving pair'; the third, the 'turning pair'; and the fourth, the 'concluding pair'. This exampie shows us that in writing a 'modern' or 'ruled' poem many essential regulations are involved. They may be summed up in six rules: 1. Limitation of lines (four or eight, though the p'ai-lü or 'arranged rule' poem may have as many lines as the writer likes). 2. Limitation of characters in each line (five or seven). 3. Observation of the tone pattern (the five-character four-line poems in old times did not ohserve this rule stricdy). 4. Parallelism of the nature of words in each couplet (though the first and the last couplets may be exempted). 5. Selection of a single rhyme from the even tones and rhyming the last characters of alternate lines (the second, the fourth, the sixth, ana the eighth lines; sometimes the first line also). The five-character four-line poems in the old days, however, were allowed rhymes from the uneven tones. 6. Avoidance of using a character twice unless deliberately repeated for effect. Thus we see the great difficulty in writing a 'modern' poem. But poets have always believed that the 'modern' poem, though difficult to learn, is easy to write, while the 'ancient' poem, though easy to learn, is very difficult to write well. Besides, the 'modern' poem is constructed in a very convenient length. It enables the poet to finish his whole work while his thought is still fresh and inspiring; and, if necessary, he can express it in a series, either connected or separated. We find, ever since the T'ang Dynasty, most of the poets writing most of their poems in the 'modern' forms. Chinese Poetry in General All the above statements treat only poems which are in Chinese called shih. This word is too narrow to correspond to the English word 'poetry', which is more like the Chinese word 'yün-wen' or rhythmic literature, and yet 'yün-wen' has a broader content, for includes also drama. There are, however, many other kinds of yün-wen besides shih, not only drama, but poetry in general. I will give a brief explanation of each; my idea being that the works we present in this volume, though the most common type of Chinese poetry, are but one of many types. In the later part of the Chou Dynasty two new types of poetry were originated; one is the ch'u-ts'u, by Ch'ü Yuan (fourth century, B.C.), and the other fu, by Hsün K'uang (fourth century B.C.). They are both, though rhymed, called rhythmic prose, and have been much practised ever since. The latter is more popular and used to be a subject in the official examinations. Since the Han Dynasty, the yüeh-fu, or poem 'written for music', has been introduced into literature. We have a few examples in this volume in different forms. Because we do not sing them with their old music, which has vanished, they have practically lost their original quality, though still distinguished by title and style. Another type of poetry, named ts'ü, was formulated in the second period of the T'ang Dynasty, but was not commonly practised until the last, or fourth, period. The Sung Dynasty is the golden age of the ts'u poems and Li Ch'ing-chao and Chu Shu-cheng, two woman poets, are the most famous specialists. This form is composed of-lines irregular, but according to fixed patterns. There are hundreds of patterns, each regulated as to the number of characters, group of tones, etc. In the same dynasty the ch'ü, or dramatic song, the t'an-ts'u, or string song, and the ku-shu, or drum tale, were also brought into existence. The next dynasty, the Yuan or Mongol Dynasty, is known as the golden age of these forms of literature. Professional story-tellers or readers are found everywhere singing them with string instruments or drums. Besides these, the ch'uan-ch'i, or classical play, the chiao-pen, or common play, and the hsiao-tiao, or folk-song, are all very popular. There are numberless Chinese poems written in the revolving order, to be read back and forth. The most amazing poerns in human history are the Huei-wen-t'ü or the revolving chart, by Lady Su Huei, of the Chin Dynasty (265-419), and the Ch'ien-tzu-wen, or thousand-character literature, by Chou Hsing-ssu, (fifth century A.D.) The former is composed of eight hundred characters, originally woven in five colors on a piece of silk, being a love-poem written and sent to her husband, General Tou T'ap, who was then guarding the northern boundary against the Tartar invasion. The characters can be read from different ends in different directions and so form numerous poems. Four hundred have already been found, some short and some very long. It is believed that there are still more undiscovered. The latter, made of a thousand different characters was a collection of stone inscriptions left by the master calligrapher, Wang Hsi-chih. They had been but loose characters in no order and with no connexion, but were arranged and rhymed as a perfect poem by Chou Hsing-ssu. The same thousand characters have been made into poems by ten or more authors; and these marvels in the poetical world can never be dreamed of by people who speak language other than Chinese! All these various forms under various names are not shih in the Chinese sense, but are poetry in the English sense. Each of them possesses its own footing in the common ground of Chinese poetry. To make any remarks bn Chinese poetry at large, or to draw any conclusions from it, one must take into consideration not only the shih, but all the various forms. I sometimes hear foreigners, as well as young Chinese students, blaming Chinese poems as being too stiff or confined. They do not realize that some forms of Chinese poetry are even freer than English free verse. They also criticize the Chinese for having no long poems, as other races have, ignoring the fact that many fu poems are thousands of lines long, with tens of thousands of characters, and that many rhythmic historical tales fill ten or more volumes, each volume rollowing a single rhyme. |
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| 3 | 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." |
Bibliography (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1929 |
Hengtangtuishi. The jade mountain : a Chinese anthology ; being Three hundred poems of the T'ang dynasty, 617-906. Translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-hu [Jiang Kanghu]. (New York, N.Y. : A. A. Knopf, 1929). [Übersetzung von Tang shi san bai shou]. 唐詩三百首 [Enthält] : Bynner, Witter. Poetry and culture. Kiang, Kang-hu. Chinese poetry. http://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshidao/hanshi/tang.htm. [Siehe Appendices] |
Publication / Byn1 |
Secondary Literature (1)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1953 | Bynner, Witter. Remembering a gentle scholar. In : The Occident ; Winter (1953). [Betr. Jiang Kanghu]. | Publication / Byn20 |