Thoughts on Translating

So I'm translating another article for pay. It's really very pleasant work. I wish writing my dissertation was like a translation -- just stare at one document, read it carefully, and then write out another document in perfect response. Then turn it in. Then receive the money back. What an elegant model of thinking!

I know writing my dissertation is a much more complex task than translating, but there are a number of lessons to be learned from translation. Here's a few that come to mind:


1. Translating is really careful reading.

1a. A good way to inspect a Chinese article or even book-length expository work is to translate the chapters, then the section headings, and finally the main idea sentences of paragraphs.

2. Translating Chinese literary criticism exposes the assumptions of Chinese thinking.

I'm not so sure where I'm going to go with this idea yet, but check out some examples of an article I've just begun to translate for my own purposes:

This poem was written when the poet was 42 years old; he goes through the course of a bird returning home in each of the different seasons spring, summer, fall, winter as a metaphor for the experience of his own life, from service as an official to reclusion.

My emphasis on "experience:" I'm interested in the biographical understanding of poetry, and thus the connections between history, poetry, and experience, in Chinese thinking.

The poet tends towards the free life of field and garden, producing a special feeling for birds in flight; birds seem to become his only true friends.

That's an interesting understanding that helps bridge the connection between the subject of the poem (birds) and the allegorical referent (the course of the poet's own experience; the grown and change of the poet's mind)

(Source: 略论陶渊明诗歌中的鸟、菊意象
Image of bird and chrysanthemum in Tao Yuanming's poems
<<广东青年干部学院学报>>2004年 第18卷 第01期
作者: 刘振燕,

期刊 ISSN : 1009-5446(2004)01-0087-02)

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Tao Qian, "Drinking, Twenty Poems"

饮 酒 二 十 首 并 序 Preface to the "Drinking, Twenty Poems"
　　
余闲居寡欢，兼比夜已长，偶有名酒，无夕不饮。顾影独尽，忽焉复醉。既醉之後，辄题数句自娱。纸墨遂多，辞无诠次。聊命故人书之，以为欢笑尔。

I reside in leisure with few pleasures. Recently the nights have grown long. I happened to have good ale; there is never a night without drinking. Looking after my shadow, I finish alone, and then suddenly I'm once again drunk. And after I'm drunk, I come up with several verses to amuse myself. Paper and ink follow along, lots of both, yet the words lack any explanation or sequence. In jest, I ordered a good friend to write them out, to please us and make us laugh.

1.

Decline and bloom have no certain place,
That one, this one exchange and share it.
Shao grew melons in fields midst,
Prefer to resemble the Dongling times!
Cold and heat have their times of alternation,
The Way of humans is always like this.
The comprehending person dissects this concept,
Passing away with it no longer will suspect,
Suddenly he's with his bucket of ale,
At dusk of day pleased with it, holding it.

其一∶
衰荣无定在，彼此更共之。
邵生瓜田中，宁似东陵时！
寒暑有代谢，人道每如兹。
达人解其会，逝将不复疑；
忽与一樽酒，日夕欢相持。

Roost after roost, the bird still lost from the flock
The sun sets but, still alone, it flies,
Back and forth, no certain place to stop.
Night after night, the cries turn sorrowful.
A piercing noise, missing the clear distance.
Going and coming, reluctant, ambivalent.

So it was, that, meeting a lone growing pine,
It folds back its wings, coming back, returning.
No morning glories in this stiff wind,
But this shade, alone, never will decline.
Project the body: it already has what it needs.
Wouldn't part with it in a thousand years.

其四
栖栖失群鸟，日暮犹独飞。 徘徊无定止，夜夜声转悲。
厉响思清远，去来何依依。 因值孤生松，敛翮遥来归。
劲风无荣木，此荫独不衰。 托身已得所，千载不相违

I corrected my first translation against A.R. Davis' (p. 95) and began reading Davis' translation of all 20 poems. But besides the poems, the prose style of this preface is extremely interesting. It comes in quick, clipped sentences with often only implied paratactic structures, and I've tried to reproduce that here. I need to learn to translate this style in such a way as to minimize parataxis while at the same time keeping the thing readable. Maybe I should read more Hemingway.

I next corrected my version of number 4 against Davis (p. 96). It was exhausting, comparing back and forth.

More glosses of interest:

逝将 : (found under 逝 alone): def 7: 通“誓”。表决心 [vow] 逝将去女,适彼乐土。——《诗·魏风·硕鼠》def 8: 又如:逝将(即誓将)

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Drinking, Twenty Poems -- #4, second version

Of course, Chinese poetry does not actually apply the pronoun "I" very often in verse. This is clearly just a linguistic convention, but still, one could argue that we benefit from seeing in English the person-less-ness of the Chinese verse.

Roost after roost, still lost from the flock
The sun sets but, still alone, flying,
Back and forth, no certain place to stop.
Night after night, cries turn sorrowful.
Midst these sounds, miss those clear, distant...
Going and coming, reluctant, ambivalent.

There, straight and alone grows a pine,
Drawing back the wings, come back, return.
No morning glories in this stiff wind,
But this tree, alone, never will decline.
Project the self: the pine already has what it needs.
Wouldn't go against it in a thousand years.

其四
栖栖失群鸟，日暮犹独飞。 徘徊无定止，夜夜声转悲。
厉响思清远，去来何依依。 因值孤生松，敛翮遥来归。
劲风无荣木，此荫独不衰。 托身已得所，千载不相违

Doing this in English lends a bizarre sort of imperative sense, doesn't it? 'Miss those clear distances!" (Miss 'em, bitch!).

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Tao Qian, "Drinking, Twenty Poems"

4.

Roost after roost, still lost from the flock
The sun sets but I'm still alone, flying,
Back and forth, no certain place to stop.
Night after night, my cry turns sorrowful.
Midst the sound, I think of clear distances,
Going and coming, reluctant, ambivalent...

There, straight and alone grows a pine,
Drawing back my wings, I come back, return.
No morning glories in this stiff wind,
But this tree, alone, never will decline.
I project a self that already has what it needs...
Never opposing that in a thousand years

其四
栖栖失群鸟，日暮犹独飞。 徘徊无定止，夜夜声转悲。
厉响思清远，去来何依依。 因值孤生松，敛翮遥来归。
劲风无荣木，此荫独不衰。 托身已得所，千载不相违


That's of course just a raw, first-timer translation. A few interesting glosses:

得所 谓得到安居之地或合适的位置。语出《诗·魏风·硕鼠》：“乐土乐土，爰得我所。”

敛翮 lian3he2 收拢翅膀。指回归。晋 陶潜 《饮酒》诗之四：“厉响思清晨，远去何所依；因值孤生松，敛翮遥来归。” 唐 元稹 《雉媒》诗：“敛翮远投君，飞驰势奔蹙。”

荣木 木槿。晋 陶潜 《荣木》诗：“采采荣木，结根于兹。晨耀其华，夕已丧之。” 逯钦立 注：“荣木，木槿。其花朝生暮落。” 明 宋濂 《叶夷仲文集序》：“ 夷仲 生有异资，其文辞之进，如荣木升而春涛长。” 清 钱谦益 《追和朽庵和尚乐归田园十咏·农人告余以春及次韵》：“泉流荣木下，春入老农颜。” Not the morning glory of course, but the Rose of Sharon.

依依 [be reluclant to part;feel regret at parting]∶恋恋不舍的样子 依依不舍 ; 二情同依依。——《玉台新咏·古诗为焦仲卿妻作》 尚依依旁汝。——清· 林觉民《与妻书》

At SWCAS I was on a panel with some interesting other scholars, one of whom was an older gentleman named Vincent Yang. Sitting in his old-fashioned polyester tweed coat (ok maybe not tweed, but grey, checked in really small knit squares -- what's that called?) and huge, owlish glasses, he read a paper on Tao Qian that I would have found very boring except that he was winding his way toward a very simple point using close readings of the poems, and this point is one that I had already sort of come up with on my own, by looking at the end of the cautionary piece to Tao's sons. The point is this: Tao was not whole-heartedly a recluse, but at times felt some tension, and some guilt, over not serving the state.

I almost forgot about Professor Yang's talk, but I re-encountered his handout, which contains poems 1 and 2 from the "Twenty Poems on Drinking." The fifth of these is one of those that is iconic for its celebration of the recluse life, but I'm not as sure what is going on in the 4th. I wrote a note at the top of the page that says, "his heart knew no return -- failed." I can't remember which poem that note was supposed to have gone with. I'll have to ask Professor Yang for a copy of his paper!

(Side note: This should be completely unsurprising since I knew Professor Yang came from Baylor University, but he is an evangelical Christian who commented in the student newspaper The Lariat, "There are literally billions of people in China who don't know Jesus." One would love to draw a connection between the professor's religious beliefs, political agenda, and close-reading of Tao Qian's poetry, but that is at the moment beyond me.)

陶 渊 明 集
饮 酒 二 十 首 并 序 Preface to the "Drinking, Twenty Poems"
　　
余闲居寡欢，兼比夜已长，偶有名酒，无夕不饮。顾影独尽，忽焉复醉。既醉之後，辄题数句自娱。纸墨遂多，辞无诠次。聊命故人书之，以为欢笑尔。

I reside in leisure with few pleasures. Around here the nights have grown long. I happened to have good ale; there is never a night without drinking. Looking after my shadow, I finish alone, and then suddenly I'm once again drunk. And after I'm drunk, I come up with several verses to amuse myself. Paper and ink follow along, lots of both, yet the words lack any explanation or sequence. In jest, I ordered a good friend to write them out, to please us and make us laugh.

As usual with my approaches to classical Chinese poetry these days, I turn first to the discussion at Baidu.com. There's a whole Baidupedia entry on this set of poems, with a nice extended introduction.

According to Baidupedia, Tao Qian wrote these poems in a fit of unhappiness during the year 416, just when the general Liu Yu 刘裕 had beaten back the northern barbarians and regained some of the ground lost by the Western Jin. Liu Yu was full of bravado, but Tao Qian must have found him overconfident, or so the Baidupedia would have us understand.

Here's the connection between drinking, politics, life, and poetry, formulated by the Baidupedia author.

Tao Yuanming only wanted to drink; never a night passed that he didn't drink himself utterly drunk. He understood that life in this world is like a flash, around for an instant then passing away, so one should remain open-minded, unbound by convention, and also loose, cool, stable, passing through life without worries and concerns. It is perhaps by drinking that our Tao Yuanming was able to secure his name in history.

陶渊明只要弄到酒，没有一个晚上不喝他个一醉方休。他认识到，人生在世像闪电一样，稍纵即逝，就应该坦荡从容，无忧无虑地度过。也许靠着饮酒，我陶渊明就能青史留名。

Of course, there are some paradoxes and tensions here -- did Tao worry about 'securing his name in history'? If not, why did he publish his poetry, or ever even show it to his friends? Also, I really wonder about the qualities of personhood so celebrated here: open-minded, unbound by convention, and also loose, cool, and stable. This awkward phrase translates the two terms 坦荡 and 从容. Looking at women's writings I think we also see a celebration of 从容, the whole "keep your cool" thing, but I think there is a gender to this term: for women, it has more of a sense of accepting one's fate and learning to bear suffering.

Here's a paper that Google revealed, that might help me translate some of the more difficult lines. More importantly, it might help me understand more deeply something about the concepts of "self," "identity" and "experience" in Tao Qian:

略论陶渊明诗歌中的鸟、菊意象
Image of bird and chrysanthemum in Tao Yuanming's poems
<<广东青年干部学院学报>>2004年 第18卷 第01期
作者: 刘振燕,

期刊 ISSN : 1009-5446(2004)01-0087-02

在陶渊明诗歌的诸多意象中,写得最多而且最能代表诗人人格美的意象是鸟与菊.诗人通过对鸟、菊意象的构建,艺术地再现了其对理想的追求,对自由的向往,以及敢于在逆境中抗争的高蹈独善、率真的人品. Abstract: Among the multitudinous imagery of Tao Yuanming's poetry, the most numerous in his writing and the most representative of the poet's individual image of beauty are birds and chrysanthemums. The poet through the images of birds and chrysanthemums structurally and artistically reproduces his search for ideals, his inclination towards freedom, as well as the aloof integrity and personal quality of forthrightness with which he dared to resist an adverse world.

There are some very interesting key words in the abstract. Professor Scott would no doubt direct my attention to the author's assumption of a clear sense of "individuality" (ren ge) in Tao's poetry, a clear anachronism. I think she and I are both curious about the concept of 'personal quality' (ren pin), which suggests that poetry is 'evidence of the personality' in a fashion that is similar to the 'evidence of experience' in foundationalist Western history. (Yes, I'm basically just mouthing off at this point)

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Dude, that's totally A.O. Scott's mom

I'm crushed a bit by the amount of thinking that is required do wade through theoretical articles relevant to life writing, but I'm also energized by this one...

Scott, J. W. (1991). The Evidence of Experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773-797.

Documenting the experience of others in this way has been at once a highly successful and limiting strategy for historians of difference. It has been successful because it remains so comfortably within the disciplinary framework of history, working according to rules that permit calling oldnarratives into question when new evidence is discovered. The status of evidence is, of course, ambiguous for historians. On the one hand, they acknowledge that "evidence only counts as evidence and is only recognized as such in relation to a potential narrative, so that the narrative can be said to determine the evidence as much as the evidence determines the narrative."

This is very much 'food for thought' -- my mind will continue to munch on these ideas for awhile. Particularly the pitfalls Scott points out:

When the evidence offered is the evidence of "experience," the claim for referentiality is further buttressed-what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is based-that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured-about language (or discourse) and history-are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.

It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience.

Raymond Williams assumes that we are all individuals. R. G. Collingwood assumes we can be objective analysts of our experience. E. P. Thompson said class was a product of experience, but never explained experience directly. Feminists demand attention to their experience, but forget to explain what "their" means. Toews is worst of all, since experience is for him a universal, always used but never defined.

Talking about experience in these ways leads us to take the existence of individuals for granted (experience is something people have) rather than to ask how conceptions of selves (of subjects and their identities) are produced.

The concepts of experience described by Williams preclude inquiry into processes of subject-construction; and they avoid examining the relationships between discourse, cognition, and reality, the relevance of the position or situatedness of subjects to the knowledge they produce, and the effects of difference on knowledge.

The question of where the historian is situated-who he is, how he is defined in relation to others, what the political effects of his history may be-never enters the discussion.

Thompson's brilliant history of the English working class, which set out to historicize the category of class, ends up
essentializing it.

The kind of argument for a women's history (and for a feminist politics) that Riley criticizes closes down inquiry into the ways in which female subjectivity is produced, the ways in which agency is made possible, the ways in which race and sexuality intersect with gender, the ways in which politics
organize and interpret experience-in sum, the ways in which identity is a contested terrain, the site of multiple and conflicting claims. In Riley's words, "it masks the likelihood that ... [experiences] have accrued to women not by virtue of their womanhood alone, but as traces of domination, whether natural or political." I would add that it masks the necessarily discursive character of these experiences as well.

A refusal of essentialism seems particularly important once again these days within the field of history, as disciplinary pressure builds to defend the unitary subject in the name of his or her "experience."

It ought to be possible for historians (as for the teachers of literature
Spivak so dazzlingly exemplifies) to "make visible the assignment of subject-positions," not in the sense of capturing the reality of the objects seen, but of trying to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced, and which processes themselves are unremarked and indeed achieve their effect because they are not noticed.

The question then becomes how to analyze
language, and here historians often (though not always and not necessarily) confront the limits of a discipline that has typically constructed itself in opposition to literature.

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From Yuan to Ming

Armenian Bishop, 1287: check out his dragon-print dress

Jonathan Spence, Our Guide

Ghenghis Khan: The Conquering Bad-ass

Khubilai Khan: A Portrait of Sinicization

Zhu Yuanzhang, aka Ming Taizu, the Hongwu Emperor

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Form Letter from Dunhuang

Bu-hao-yi-si

Thanks to my friend Stacey Burns for pointing this out.
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Learning about Language Learning

What is best way to teach Chinese?

Contained here are a few texts glimpsed while I edit a Chinese student's masters thesis in language education:


One reference is to:

Harrison, I. (1996). Look who's talking now: Listening to voices in curriculum renewal. In K.M. Bailey & D. Nunan (Eds.), Voices from the language classrooms (pp. 283-303). New York: Cambridge University Press

points to other essays of interest from that volume:









Some volumes of what has been "an emerging field" since 1996:





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SWCAS 2009

Here's the presentation I'm planning to display tomorrow at my talk for the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies:



Sadly, I was not efficient enough to put together a clean, finished conference paper. Just as A. often says of himself, I was too lazy.


But as always when preparing to present at a conference, I feel a new burst of energy and productivity. I think what I learned this time around is that I need to pay attention to the action level of my mind, just as pay attention to my heart rate when I jog. And I need to keep the action of the mind high -- this will have me reading more and writing more, I hope.

One other thing: my presentation will actually be quite good I think. This partial paper, while not satisfactory in some senses, is actually a great start. The method that I see for writing is to select passages, come up with main idea sentences, and develop section headings practically all of the time. I'm still building towards the iterative process necessary to produce highly 'finished' work. More later on this.

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Fantasy Bibliography

Stuff I can probably write, if I work hard:

"Life Writing in China: State of the Field"


The Penguin Book of Chinese Life Writing (I need to work on the cover of this one)

"The Life Writing in the Guwen guanzhi" (okay, that's more like a footnote than a paper. But hey.)

The History of Chinese



About the Author (this is fake, duh): Jesse Field is the John King Fairbank Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Harvard University. His screenplay God Wars of the Chinese Mind was made into a film by a sexy young Chinese director and won the 2015 Oscar for Best Picture. He's also Master of Lowell House.
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The Great Book Migration

身邊的書籍

I'm going to slowly go through all of the Chinese books I've purchased (not as many as you'd think!) and prepare to get rid of them -- probably in one big sale to Book House, a great store right near my office.



As a first step, I'll move the books a few at a time from my house to my office. Today is the first installment:

Xu Zhen 許慎 (d. 120 CE) and Xiang Shu 向夏, editor. Shuo wen jie zi bu shou jiang shu : Zhongguo wen zi xue dao lun 說文解字部首講疏 : 中國文字學導論 [The Shuowen jiezi, with commentary and annotations arranged by radicals: a guide to Chinese philology]. Taipei: Shulin chuban youxian gongsi, 1999.

Gao Zhengyi 高政一 and Wu Shaozhi 吳紹志, editors and translators. Xin yi gu wen guan zhi 新譯 古文觀止 [The Guwen guanzhi, a new translation]. Tainan: Xin shiji chubanshe, 1985. An old high-school edition with no ISBN and a no entry in the Worldcat. Kind of a nice relic of Taiwan's early post-martial-law period. I paid a dollar for this in a Taipei used bookstore, but it may not even have that much value these days.

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Montaigne in the New Yorker

Montaigne a la New Yorker (Thanks stevereads)

KRAMER, JANE. “ME, MYSELF, AND I..” New Yorker 85, no. 27 (2009): 34-41.

"Suspend Judgment"

A tourist visits Montaigne's tower in Bordeaux

Friend in a high place

New Edition

Étienne de La Boétie

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Self and Reference

"The Self" and The Reference Problem

From some mostly incomprehensible notes I took while reading The Encyclopedia of Life Writing.


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Sinicization

Review of Wittfogel and Feng 1949 in Scientific American, of all places

After reading chapter 5 of Fairbank's China: A New History, I follow up with some searching into the last great work (or is there a newer one?) summing up the first major incursion of 'alien' peoples onto Chinese lands: the Khitans (or Qidan, or also Chitan, apparently). Somehow, I feel like questioning the objectivity of this most esteemingly objective periodical.

Still, how awesome would it be if Chinese history were still considered a topic for Scientific American?
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Forward to the Song Dynasty

Map of the Song, marked with the territory lost in 1279

It's time to end Unit 1 of my class. Historiography-wise, we are done learning about the various points on the traditional dynastic sequence of Warring-States, Han dynasty, and Period of Disunion: that is, we see the textbook example of the rise and fall of a unified Chinese dynasty.

I'm not including any readings from the Tang dynasty, so I will skip right over it with brief mention (sorry, class -- maybe on another iteration we'll do Li Bai). Tomorrow the students are expecting to talk about the autobiography of Li Qingzhao and a one or two of her poems, so I'll need to give them a brief historical background.

A map shows us that the important thing to know about the Song is that half of the kingdom was lost to the Northern Jin in 1179. I mention my favorite image of the Khitan, their funny pots:



Quickly, though, we have to move on to Li Qingzhao. We'll talk about her autobiography, certainly -- that's the central feature of this lecture. We'll also explore a bit of her lyric poetry as well, though:

One poem covered by Theresa Teng.



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Daji the Evil Bitch

Daji, 1964 Shaw Bros. film

I talked about the figure of the evil concubine Daji today as I introduced Ban the Concubine to class, and I wasn't at all surprised to find that they loved her immediately. But unfortunately there is no good solid translation of her life into English; looks like a job for Life Writing Man!


Among several sort of substandard retellings of the story, one that made me smile is a new volume called Liberal Utopianism Is Destroying the United States (2009) by Charles Keitz. I'm not sure what role Daji plays for Mr. Keitz -- maybe she's Hilary Clinton?










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Autobiographical Subjects

Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

p. 48

Memory

(See my last entry)

Experience

When the evidence offered is the evidence of "experience," the claim for referentiality is further buttressed -- what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through? It is precisely this kind of appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation-as a foundation on which analysis is based that weakens the critical thrust of histories of difference. By remaining within the epistemological frame of orthodox history, these studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. They take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturalize their difference. They locate resistance outside its discursive construction and reify agency as an inherent attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it. When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one's vision is structured-about language (or discourse) and history-are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what it constitutes who see and act in the world.

"The Evidence of Experience"
Joan W. Scott
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 773-797

Identity

"Some models of identity culturally available in the United States over the last three hundred years have included the sinful Puritan seeking signs of salvation, the self-made man, the struggling and suffering soul, the innocent quester, the "bad" girl or boy, the adventurer, and the trickster." -p. 34

While President Obama’sbiracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s
pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides
said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.” -- The New York Times, October 8, 2009

Embodiment

The rhetoric of the "body" is trendy in feminism; it's interesting to think about how it makes its return to the male-centered world...

Agency

Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984.

...

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Memory

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Chapter 2, "Autobiographical Subjects"

It's hard to evaluate this book: it mainly seems a rather bland literature review, but one that nevertheless introduces key terms and interesting examples. In place of my typical effort to annotate the argument carefully, I'm going to try taking at least parts of the text in a "commonplace book" mode. This from the first section of chapter 2, devoted to "memory."

Olney on Augustine, Memory and Narrative, 19-21

Silko, Leslie. Storyteller. New York: Arcarde Publishers, Little Brown & Co., 1981.

Engel, Susan. Context Is Everything: the Nature of Memory. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1999.

Wolf, Christa. Patterns of Childhood: (formerly a Model Childhood). New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Alexie, Sherman. First Indian on the Moon. Brooklyn N.Y.: Hanging Loose Press, 1993.

"communities of memory"

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking, or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

"an intersubjective phenomenon" mitchell 193 n17

Augustine's pears

Akmatova, A Poem without a Hero

"communities of memory"

Akhmatova, Anna. A Poem Without a Hero. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. (trauma, conscience) ; Art's ... dead mother, n2 "postmemory"

scriptotherapy

Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing. London: Macmillan, 1998.

Fraser, Sylvia. My father's house : a memoir of incest and of healing. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988.

Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

The "self-absorption" fallacy:

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1998.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography. Boston Mass.: D.R. Godine, 1982.

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Exemplary Ladies

A decent introduction to exemplary ladies, and thus to writing women's lives in China in turn, is Shane McCausland's First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll (New York: George Braziller Publishers, 2003)

First there is the following early comment from McCausland, which leads me to the central theme of this lecture: the difficulty of writing a true, as opposed to exemplary, female life.

I'll select two exemplary ladies to examine for this first lecture (we'll return to Concubine Ban, a third, on Friday):

Lady Fan (Fan Ji)

I was able to locate the second part of the Chinese text (after she reforms him from hunting by going on hunger strike) in a translation by Patricia Eberly:

Here is the Chinese text (From Chinapage.com)

　 　 楚 莊 樊 姬
　 　 樊 姬 ， 楚 莊 王 之 夫 人 也 。 莊 王 即 位 ， 好 狩 獵 。 樊 姬
諫 不 止 ， 乃 不 食 禽 獸 之 肉 ， 王 改 過 ， 勤 於 政 事 。 王 嘗 聽
朝 罷 晏 ， 姬 下 殿 迎 曰 ： 「 何 罷 晏 也 ， 得 無 飢 倦 乎 ？ 」 王
曰 ： 「 與 賢 者 語 ， 不 知 飢 倦 也 。 」 姬 曰 ： 「 王 之 所 謂 賢
者 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 也 。 」 姬 掩 口 而 笑 ， 王 曰 ：「

姬 之 所 笑 何 也 ？ 」 曰 ： 「 虞 丘 子 賢 則 賢 矣 ， 未 忠 也 。
」 王 曰 ： 「 何 謂 也 ？ 」 對 曰 ： 「 妾 執 巾 櫛 十 一 年 ， 遣 人
之 鄭 衛 ， 求 美 人 進 於 王 。 今 賢 於 妾 者 二 人 ， 同 列 者 七 人
。 妾 豈 不 欲 擅 王 之 愛 寵 哉 ！ 妾 聞 『 堂 上 兼 女 ， 所 以 觀 人
能 也 。 』 妾 不 能 以 私 蔽 公 ， 欲 王 多 見 知 人 能 也 。 今 虞 丘
子 相 楚 十 餘 年 ， 所 薦 非 子 弟 ， 則 族 昆 弟 ， 未 聞 進 賢 退 不
肖 ， 是 蔽 君 而 塞 賢 路 。 知 賢 不 進 ， 是 不 忠 ； 不 知 其 賢 ，
是 不 智 也 。 妾 之 所 笑 ， 不 亦 可 乎 ！ 」 王 悅 。 明 日 ， 王 以
姬 言 告 虞 丘 子 ， 丘 子 避 席 ， 不 知 所 對 。 於 是 避 舍 ， 使 人
迎 孫 叔 敖 而 進 之 ， 王 以 為 令 尹 。 治 楚 三 年 ， 而 莊 王 以 霸
。 楚 史 書 曰 ： 「 莊 王 之 霸 ， 樊 姬 之 力 也 。 」 詩 曰 ： 「 大
夫 夙 退 ， 無 使 君 勞 。 」 其 君 者 ， 謂 女 君 也 。 又 曰 ： 「 溫
恭 朝 夕 ， 執 事 有 恪 。 」 此 之 謂 也 。

　 　 頌 曰 ： 樊 姬 謙 讓 ， 靡 有 嫉 妒 ， 薦 進 美 人 ， 與 己 同
處 ， 非 刺 虞 丘 ， 蔽 賢 之 路 ， 楚 莊 用 焉 ， 功 業 遂 伯 。

Lady Feng

Lady Fu's low character is revealed:

McCausland makes reads the painting very perceptively:

I really like how McCausland includes other paintings with this theme; it displays the staying power, and the unfortunate woodenness of the "exemplary" life, very effectively.

One more:

McCausland translates part of the Chinese text, which is a much longer and not actually in the Biographies of Eminent Ladies:

The Chinese text of the story (from Wikisource)

建昭中，上幸虎圈鬥獸，後宮皆坐。熊佚出圈，攀檻欲上殿。左右貴人傅昭儀等皆驚走，馮婕妤直前當熊而立，左右格殺熊。上問：「人情驚懼，何故前當熊？」婕
妤對曰：「猛獸得人而止，妾恐熊至御坐，故以身當之。」元帝嗟歎，以此倍敬重焉。傅昭儀等皆慚。明年夏，馮婕妤男立為信都王，尊婕妤為昭儀。元帝崩，為信
都太后，與王俱居儲元宮。河平中，隨王之國。後徙中山，是為孝王。

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