翻译做完有感

Getting to Know Them Better: Ding Ling in the upper left; down one row and to her right is the poet Sun Li

Four translation gigs so far this semester have certainly eaten into my own research and creative writing time, but it was good work for all that -- work that simply increases background knowledge and language ability, familiarity with Chinese academic rhetoric. And more than anything, I think what is important is the feeling of work, of the pen rushing over the page, the output of something created, crafted. I'm just like a jewelry maker who receives an order over the internet, makes the product in his home, and delivers it back, hoping his fee is paid promptly and his customer is satisfied. There is a basic goodness to the ethic of the business transaction that in other areas of my work feels too sorely lacking.

Anyhow, it's time I began a full accounting of my translations, both for my CV and for my own notes. This latest article, for example, seems like it adds directly to my dissertation in two ways...

First, the business of "cross-period writers" suggests deeper comparisons with Yang Jiang. Like Yang Jiang, for example, Ding Ling lived a life that spanned the twentieth century and went through phases (albeit phases of a very different kind than Yang Jiang's).

Her life, from its ascent to fame in the 1920s as "yesterday's literate 'Miss'" to answering Lu Xun's call to arms with left-wing literature in the 1930s, to "Today's Martial General" under the flag of Mao Zedong, to facing over 20 years of suffering after 1957 before emerging once again in the 1980s, is a life of literary activities that spans the entire twentieth century. Her literary paths and her life experiences progressed in close lock-step with the modern and contemporary literature of China. They echo each other.

The really interesting question here is, how might these phases line up with Yang Jiang's? Ding Ling is a bit older, so we find no work by Yang Jiang in the 1920s to match up with Ding Ling's. But 1957 is an important year for both; Yang Jiang later wrote a sanwen essay detailing how 1957 was the first time she was "sent down."

Perhaps the main issue to consider is simply that Ding Ling was completely devoted to expressing the political in literature, even when she wasn't adhering to the rules of Mao's 1942 "Talks at Yan'an" literally. Yang Jiang, though is not terribly interested in "making literature for the service of the people." She is more interesting in finely-crafted portraits of human nature. Her art is of service, certainly, but not simply political service. In this she seems to have a soulmate in the poet Sun Li:

Sun Li was once and for all an old author known for discovering the beauty in human nature, of celebrating that beauty of human nature in song. In his later years he wrote a series of short works which, however, often lament the baseness of the human heart and the alienation of human nature; it was easy for people to see these as symptoms of his declining years. But actually, to observe coolly and calmy, with a transcendent attitude, the alienation of human nature during the revolutionary period is only a deepening and a complement to a poetic sensibility that had traced the most basic qualities of beauty of human nature during the war years. This warm style, plain-spoken and natural, but with internal resonance of meaning that draws readers to savor afterward, remained unified and consistent on the whole, before and after. There was certainly no great degradation.

The question of "degradation" in the quality of works by older writers is a most pressing one, so it is of interest to find that at least two Chinese scholars feel that old Sun Li did not degrade. One wonders if a Confucian bias towards respecting elders is at work here.

English Citation:

Liu Yong and Ji Xueyou. "Difficult Problems of the Practice of Holistic Approaches to Twentieth-century Chinese Literature: Taking the Study of Individual Cases of "Cross-Period" Authors as Examples" (Look at the turned-in draft of my translation, if you like)





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Outlining C.T. Hsia (1/2)

I've gone back to that ur-text explaining modern Chinese literature to English readers, C.T. Hsia's A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. Here are a few authors that might be worth considering to understand the position of biography and autobiography in the turbulent 20th century.

Ye Shaojun

"Ye Shaojun's preoccupation with educational problems finally led him to write in 1928 a novel which is more or less autobiographical, Ni Huanzhi."

Bing Xin

Bing Xin is an interesting case -- her position as an elder figure with a childlike mind makes me think of her as a forerunner of Yang Jiang. But C.T. Hsia does not find much worth noting here; commenting on her late story "The West Wind" he says it is "again about loneliness, indicating her inability to develop further." Maybe I need a second opinion?

Su Xuelin, esp. The Bitter Heart (1929, autobiographical novel)

Su Xuelin has gotten more attention in recent years. Hsia barely mentions this, but it might be worth an overview, at least.

Ling Shuhua

Hsia has a very high opinion of Ling Shuhua -- "unlike Bing Xin, she early manifested a more adult sensibility and psychological acumen." Her stories sound worthwhile, but I'm very curious now about her English-language autobiography, Ancient Melodies (1953), which I started but did not finish last year.

Guo Moruo

Nobody likes Guo Moruo, least of all C.T. Hsia, but the man was morbidly interested in autobiography (see volumes 6-9 of his Works (1959)). That there might be something of interest somewhere in there is partly confirmed by some very revealing letters to a friend, which Hsia quotes at length, pp. 98-100. Also note that Guo translated Goethe's Travels of Young Werther -- I wonder how influential this book has been in China.

Yu Dafu

Now here is a really interesting case. Commenting on "Sinking" and other stories, Hsia has that "one notices a kindness and ultimate decency on the part of the autobiographical hero, staying well within the bounds of Confucian propriety." I think this is definitely worth pursuing in more detail. It's interesting that Hsia sees Yu Dafu's career as falling into three stages: a passionate young person, a lackadaisical self-centered middle age, and finally, in a later career that includes books like Footprints Here and There, Yu Dafu takes on some of the persona of a "Taoist recluse;" he "shows a strong affinity with the older travel literature and reasserts his literary importance."

Shen Congwen

Hsia likes him even more than Yu Dafu -- and who wouldn't, he's a more versatile talent with no less an egotism. Hsia says of his work, like Lao She's that it "defies translation;" I now mean to take Hsia's challenge. First off, it will be necessary to see what has been translated into English, beginning with the volume The Chinese Earth. (It's about time I read Jeffrey Kinkley's book, as well.)

Ding Ling

Ding Ling may truly be "a bad writer,"(p. 276), but I think her vision of herself as a public, service-seeking, striving-for-martyrdom sort of identity is definitely worth representing. If not Ding Ling, then perhaps Xie Bingying. This is a vast subject that Hsia barely touches on, because in his anti-Communist mind, one need not spend time on what are "essentially exercises in propaganda clichés." I think that without contradicting this statement in anyway, we will need to find something to help us understand the identity formation revolutionary women (I'm looking at you, Amy Dooling.)
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Reading Yang Jiang (III): Min Ze

Min Ze 敏澤 (Hou Minze . "Gan xiao liu ji du hou 《幹校六記》讀後" (A Response to Six Chapters of a Cadre School). Du shu 讀書, 9 (September 1981): 9-12.


A sensitive reader

To see that Six Chapters of a Cadre School calls for nuanced, politically sensitive reading strategies, I turn now to one of the work's earliest and most sympathetic readers, 侯敏泽 Hou Minze (1927-2004). Min Ze (Hou Minze's pen name), was evidentally a close friend of both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu; his review reflects this intimacy from its very beginning: "I was lucky enough to be one of the very first readers of Six Chapters of a Cadre School. One day, I went to see Mocun and Jikang, and we three chatted on and on about this and that, and as we talked we grew warmer and more enthusiastic -- altogether a most congenial time, just like those of the past." In his retelling, Jikang (he calls her Jikang, Yang Jiang's real name) gave Min Ze the manuscript of Six Chapters as a sort of parting gift, and she asked him to read it and to offer suggestions. Min Ze lay in his bed that evening and decided to get just a few pages of Six Chapters in before going to sleep, but once he began reading, he could not put the book down. Not only did he stay up until the small hours of the morning to read the entire work, he also felt compelled to respond immediately to the work in a long personal letter back to Yang Jiang. All of these details, from the congeniality (touji 投機) of the chat to his need to write back to her, show how Min Ze frames his comments with a strong sense of personal engagement with both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu. Readers are invited to imagine that the rest of this review is that letter to Yang Jiang. In this way, a clear community of readers is drawn. As we can see in the review, speaking up to praise and defend Yang Jiang is thus, for Min Ze, a way to speak up for a whole community, and a way to speak up for himself, as well.

Picking out themes

Min Ze was an extremely prolific expert on
Chinese aesthetics and Chinese literary theory; in 1981 alone, he put
out 15 articles in addition to his review of Yang Jiang's new book;
early 1982 saw the publication of his mammoth History of Chinese Literary Criticism in two volumes (see his profile on the website Beijing University's Research Center for Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education). As a somewhat younger but in no way less illustrious member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, his positive review in Reading magazine (Du shu) may have helped shape the official reception of the book. At the very least, the main themes of future reviews, essays, prefaces, and biographies that mention Six Chapters are all found here, and have perhaps never been stated so concisely. These themes include the highly elevated concision embedded with a modest, plainspoken (pusu 樸素) tone, the focus on quotidian detail and the poetic potential that details have, to open out into a world fused between the inner self and the historical situation. Like future reviewers, Min Ze recognizes a highly personal take on an experience virtually all Chinese intellectuals of the time could understand, drawn up in a form that celebrates their aesthetic values, and their particular skillsets, such as the strong humanistic temperament (qingcao 情操) that empowered the older generation in particular to survive the Cultural Revolution intact and ready to return to work.

Politics

Another theme that pervades practically every word of this review is a political one. Clearly delineating Yang Jiang's book as a form of biographical writing, within the scope of historical writing and the truth value that this entails, Min Ze goes on to fill in, to supplement the portrait of Yang Jiang in order to establish her legitimacy as a Chinese patriot and as a loving and dutiful wife. In this way, Min Ze hopes to place Yang Jiang among a broader set of Marxist socialist intellectuals. Yang Jiang should not be seen as a critic of socialism, says Min Ze. Min Ze offers some strong criticism, calling the Cultural Revolution a shocking waste of human talent, a national tragedy for which Lin Biao and the Gang of Four are directly responsible. It is Min Ze who draws our attention first to a particularly oft-quoted passage near the end of the book, when Yang Jiang asks Qian Zhongshu whether he regrets staying in China after 1949:

My mind wandered back to the days just before Liberation when so many people were fleeing overseas. Why hadn't we taken one of the many offers and left as well? ...

When Mocun passed the garden I pointed to the hut. 'If we had a little hut like this one we could settle down here, couldn't we?' He thought it over for a moment and replied dolefully, 'We don't have any books.'

He was right. We could do without every other type of material comfort, but without books, life would be impossible. All he had brought with him were dictionaries, notebooks, and calligraphic inscriptions. 'Have you ever regretted that we stayed in China?' I asked.

'If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn't want to change a thing.'

Later readers would see in this scene a classic articulation of patriotism in a Chinese intellectual: "The simple fact was that we couldn't abandon our homeland" For Min Ze, they are all that and just as much a testament to the undying love of the couple, a beautiful statement of the habitual way that "we usually arrived at the same conclusions." [To be continued]
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Culture Doesn't Love a Revolution

Making time for a little background reading. Alright, making time for any reading, in between grading papers, grant applications, and special events. Ugh.

Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Culture of the Culture Revolution: Culture-Fail?

Clark's new book has the stated purpose of putting the "culture" back in "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," by looking at just how much drama, opera, dance, film and literature was produced between 1966 and 1976 in China, so it's really wrong to say the period was a time when no new works came out, as in the joke "Eight-hundred million people watched just eight operas." The introduction to the book piques my interest when it mentions memoirs published overseas like Wild Swans, which are enjoyed by non-Chinese as stories of suffering and survival, but too often serve to re-inforce a simple dismissal of Cultural-Revolution-era cultural production because the writers of these memoirs are all responding to power challenges with re-assertions of their own social status, not to mention "political propriety." Clark's implicit point is that such memoir authors choose an anti-Communist stance because they wish the situation in China would go back to the way things were before they lost their jobs - reasonable enough, I suppose. I've often wondered to what degree Six Chapters of a Cadre School could be compared to Wild Swans, and this insight from page three of Clark's book already helps me to begin asking the necessary questions: how anti-Communist is Six Chapters? To what degree is Six Chapters a re-assertion of social status?

Yang Jiang: Culture of the End of the Cultural Revolution

I've worked before to show that Six Chapters is anti-Communist. It's remarkable that it made it past the censors during the semi-crackdown that was going on, 1980-84, but I've felt that this must have been the case because government authorities didn't really grasp the irony in Yang Jiang statements. I quoted from Kong Qingmao's biography to help defend this hypothesis. I've also done a little work in the past to show how Yang Jiang uses highly elevated language; to do this all we have to do is see the ways in which it engages with traditional Chinese poetics. This last bit of work is drastically incomplete, but I've been very uncertain about how to proceed with it. I think Clark helps put me on firmer footing by asking me to compare Yang Jiang with writers who were active in the years after 1970-1, when the Cultural Revolution "insurgents" began to die down and allow for more literary production, both official and unofficial. Many of these writers were working memory literature describing their experiences at labor camps, and and least some of them apparently took an elevated tone that made reference to traditional literary forms. Clark asks us to think of these writers as "specialists trying to survive in challenging circumstances," and points in several cases to the very positive responses that they got from audiences. I wonder if Yang Jiang could help solidify a point that Clark makes all too briefly in the last two pages of his book: that the autonomy of writers in the 1980s is in part an evolution of writers from the 1970s who were struggling with recent memory and the desire to re-assert their own social and professional status. As Clark puts it, during the Cultural Revolution China was full of "specialists trying to survive in challenging circumstances."

Readers Just Want to Have Fun

The evidence of literary works in the early 1970s shows that even as early as 1970, there was a significant demand for books that were actually fun to read, as opposed to the "agitprop" that was typically force-fed to audiences in bookstores and schools. At the end of his introduction, Clark asks us to think of the Cultural Revolution as a "doomed attempt to combine the vernacular and the elitist in a modern project." Coming up: how Yang Jiang fits in the new, revamped and less brow-beaten "vernacular modernism" of a literary movement that starts during the last stage of the Cultural Revolution.
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The Wounded

A Scarred Youth

"Scar" Literature, aka "wound" (shanghen 傷痕) literature, is the term for the soul-searching stories that came out in a flood immediately following the Cultural Revolution. Writing about recent literary trends in 1984, scholar Judith Shapiro describes "scar" literature as enjoying a brief heyday between the fall of the so-called "Gang of Four" (Madame Mao and three other Chinese leaders who ended up taking the blame for the Cultural Revolution) and the Deng Xiaoping's consolidation of power in October, 1980. Yang Jiang's memoir Six Chapters of a Cadre School shares many of the general themes of scar literature stories: the abused intellectual class, confused and disillusioned youth, and the general madness of intense, years-long political movements that swept up virtually all of the urban classes. Still, an almost constant refrain has it that Yang Jiang's writing is far better than any stories from the "scar" literature movement.

Well, what are some of these "scar" stories, anyway? I figured I'd better check some out myself.

Lee, Bennett, ed. The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution, 77-78. Hongkong: Joint Publishing Company, 1979.

"Ha, everything is lies, lies. I've seen through it all!"

"Sacred Duty," "Class Counsellor," and "'Awake, My Brother!'" all feature members of the older generation, the generation that had experienced the war years and the first decades of Communist rule. Though Bennett Lee's introduction focuses only on the younger generation that came of age during the years 1966-1976, the so-called "lost generation," it is these members of the older generation who re-store faith to the "lost generation" in all of these stories. In each case, young people are compelled to leave a state of apathy or non-action, to re-enter the "mundane world" with a renewed faith in Chinas new leaders. While returning to a state of political engagement required members the "lost generation" to spurn the actions of the Gang of Four, Lin Biao and other leaders of China during the Cultural Revolution, it was also necessary for the young people in these stories to find viable role models in the older generation.

Wang Gongbo: Not just a Communist, but a Good Person.

I particularly liked the story "Sacred Duty," a tale of a hardened but ultimately faithful and virtuous police inspector, Wang Gongbo, who is released from a cadre school in 1975 at the age 59. Wang has been pulled from the labor camp and placed in charge of a special investigation regarding the case of an innocent man convicted of rape. As the plot twists and turns, we learn that the alleged rape victim, a girl named Yang Qiong, has been co-erced into false testimony against the innocent man, Wang Shuo, as part of a plot among her parents and other dastardly affiliates of the Gang of Four. These enemies of the state told Yang Qiong that her false testimony was a necessary sacrifice for the nation, but after Wang Shuo is convicted of rape and sent to prison, Yang Qiong is not able to forgive herself. Intrepid investigator Wang Gongbo tracks her down in another town, where she has fled her past and taken a new name, Ai Hua:

Ai Hua was looking thoughtfully at the hardened and experienced old man in front of her. Something that had always been very difficult for her to grasp suddenly became clear: this is what a common, yet at the same time great, man was like. It was in that same instant that she realized she had the courage to say what she had made her deepest and most carefully kept secret for the past eight years. She leaned against the windowsill, her hand shaking uncontrollably. Her face was stiffened by mixed and conflicting emotions, yet it was already lit with something new, a spirit of determination.

This is the existential moment when Ai Hua makes the decision to return to the world, to live again with certainty about what is good. I like it very much, partly because the clear, simple language of the passage shows us a member of the "lost generation" inspired by the very appearance of this upright old man. Visual cues in this and other stories -- a firm, implacable look, worn clothes with all the buttons done up just so -- are crucial in convincing lost youth that the world is more than a pack of lies, and that there is goodness in the world. Another reason this scene works is that it comes as the conclusion to a crime thriller. The perpetrator has been caught by the expert police work of our hero, despite aggressive opposition from the forces of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four -- at the very moment the passage above occurs, a contingent from the Public Safety Bureau has been sent to arrest Wang Gongbo and stop his investigation from getting to close to the truth. Wang Gongbo has caught his man, and she has turned out to be a young person whose trust has been sadly betrayed by her own parents. But that trust can be regained, if she joins him to stop the forces of corruption and right the wrong she committed during the Cultural Revolution. Wang Gongbo is just a touch younger than Yang Jiang would have been in 1975, and also a man and a political leader for young people to look up to. But I wonder if there is a connection in that Yang Jiang's readers have always included young people with a still-developing set of political and moral values. We might closely compare the cool, implacable way that both elders carry themselves: each in their own distinct ways preserve at all times personal dignity and respect for others. As A. would say, they carry themselves through the difficult times "with aplomb." Broadly speaking, I think that Yang Jiang shares with other scar literature portraits of good people; the main distinction is just in the character of the portraits.
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Chinese memoir on NPR

Another scholar doing work quite similar to mine, Claire Conceison, went on the NPR show "Here and Now" this week (scroll down to "From Mao’s Prison to Playing Willy Loman" to hear the segment). The 10-minute spot on the memoir she helped write with an old Chinese actor named Ying Ruocheng really inspired me, and anyone curious about my work can get a good idea from listening to this. Also, Claire has organized a panel on Chinese autobiography at the national conference for our field next March in Chicago, and I'm on the panel too.

Must...finish...draft paper! Ugh.
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