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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