No, Virgil, No

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/no-virgil-no/

Disillusioned with poetry’s ability to influence politics, W.H. Auden attacked the ancient Roman poet Virgil:


No, Virgil, no
Not even the first of the Romans can learn
His Roman history in the future tense
Not even to serve your political turn
Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.
(“Secondary Epic”)

Virgil’s epic, Aeneid, first published in 19 BCE, is notorious for its “political turn”. Written in Rome during the reign of Augustus, first emperor in all but name, the Aeneid traces the legendary origins of Rome back to Aeneas. Escaping from the cinders of burning Troy with his young son and his father, the Trojan hero travelled to Italy with divine guidance and founded Lavinium, the antecedent of Rome.

For Augustan Rome, old tales provided opportunities to accommodate and flatter the new political situation. Popularised in the first century BCE was a version of the story in which the son of Aeneas, Ascanius, takes the name “Iulus”. This conveniently made him the ancestor of the house of the Julii, to which Augustus (Octavian), as the adopted son of Julius Caesar, belonged. The “Iulus” version therefore legitimised the house of Augustus as the rightful rulers of Rome, with the added bonus of divine descent from Aeneas’s mother, Venus. This is the story told in the Aeneid. In a series of passages, the glorious future of contemporary Rome is predicted as the Trojan hero makes his way to Italy. When Aeneas goes down to the Underworld in Book 6, he sees the spirits of future Romans, “all the descendants of Iulus”, waiting to be born, among them Augustus:


Here is the man whose coming you so often hear prophesied, here he is, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, the man who will bring back the golden years…and extend Rome’s empire beyond the stars. (Aeneid 6.791-6)

Roman history in the future tense, then, and inescapably propaganda.

Virgil’s “political turn” did not raise the hackles of Auden alone. According to Servius, a fourth-century CE grammarian, Virgil wrote the Aeneid precisely in order “to praise Augustus”. This “political turn” became an increasingly vexed issue as the epic assumed a place of immovable prestige in Western culture. As T.S. Eliot put it, Virgil’s epic became “the Classic of all Europe”: until a generation ago, the Aeneid was a standard text in many European schools, inspiring our most influential writers, from Dante and Milton to Seamus Heaney. Yet there is a darker side to this influence, most recently foregrounded by the poem’s strong associations with Italian fascism. In an age when so many books were banned, the power of Augustan Rome was held up as an ideal, and Virgil celebrated as the regime’s poet. Mussolini subsidised publication of the Aeneid by the Roman Academy “Iussu Benedicti Mussolini“, “by order of Benito Mussolini”. And in Britain, the title of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech uneasily evokes a famous line from the epic.

What might seem paradoxical in light of this troubled history is the fact that the Aeneid has also been celebrated for its sensitivity to “the tears of things” (lacrimae rerum), and in particular to the horrors of war. For Alfred Lord Tennyson, Virgil was “majestic in thy sadness/ and the doubtful doom of human kind”. The German writer Theodore Haecker went so far as to declare in 1940 that “Virgil, who was so often able to express the horror of war, would today be speechless in a concentration camp.” This so-called “pessimistic” aspect of the poem was cited by those eager to rescue it from charges of being propaganda. In particular, a group of critics associated with Harvard University saw in the poem a “voice” attuned to the disturbing aspects of its age, one that challenges its otherwise propagandistic message.

In Britain, the so-called “Harvard School” has among its spokesmen Oliver Lyne, the late Oxford scholar and fellow of Balliol. For Lyne, the Aeneid is full of dissenting “further voices” beneath its nationalistic overtones, which ultimately undercut its pro-Augustan message. Lyne’s view is the one most readily accepted in England—talk to most undergraduates at Oxford reading classics about Virgil and you will probably hear something similar. Besides Lyne, R.D. Williams is most responsible for promoting this reading of the poem in Britain. His two-volume commentary on the whole of the Aeneid remains the standard work on undergraduate classics reading lists; and for those who don’t read Latin, Willams has extended his reach with a widely used commentary based on translation.

Bristol Classical Press has republished Williams’s introductory guide to the poem, first published posthumously in 1987. The press aims to reach a broad audience, targeting “students and teachers of literature and knowledgeable non-academic readers”. It includes a new foreword by James Morwood, former head of classics at Harrow and then Grocyn Lecturer at Oxford, which will help to promote Williams’s book in schools (though Morwood’s adjectives of choice, “first-class” and “splendid”, will not do much for its popular appeal). There are two existing guides, however, which it would thereby aim to replace: W.A. Camps’s An Introduction to Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1969) and Philip Hardie’s Virgil (Greece and Rome, 1998). In combination, these already provide a broader and deeper view of the epic. Camps is clear and insightful on the key aspects of the poem without being patronising, while Hardie is sophisticated and particularly informative on the epic’s critical reception in the 20th century. Williams, by contrast, makes virtually no references to secondary works, not even those that clearly inform his views.

Above all else, this volume shows Williams to be a proponent of the “further voices” reading of the Aeneid. For Williams, Virgil’s epic has both a public voice, “an optimistic vision” of Rome’s greatness, and a more conflicted “private voice of sympathy and sorrow over the fate of the lonely individual…or the warrior who loses his life in a war which is seen in the poem to have been, in the end, senseless.” Williams’s reading, then, promotes an attractively humanist Virgil. But it also has agenda, one which the commentary mostly conceals.

Virgil has always been what his readers want him to be, from Mussolini’s poet of the glory of a nation to the poet of the senselessness of war. As a result, Williams’s book, with its unambiguous espousal of the “Harvard School” reading, is also in danger of oversimplifying the matter. The Aeneid is a political poem, but its “political turn” manifests itself in more ways—and more complexly—than Williams allows us to see. Part of the richness of Virgil’s epic lies in the fact that, despite its undoubtedly “political turn”, it has a cunning ability to dodge any single political reading.

Depeche Mode

"Du Shiniang Sinks Her Jewel Box in Anger": A Story to Defend Folk Literature

This thesis takes a look at one of the short stories in Feng Menglong's Sanyan collection, "Du Shiniang Sinks Her Jewel Box in Anger." Written during the late Ming dynasty, the story has been typically analyzed by present-day scholars as a political allegory or as a lesson to teach qing, a term which translated alternately as "passions," "love," or "romantic sentiments" in English. Based on the background that the archaic elite literature was advocated through the Ming literary movement called "the restoration of the past" and Feng Menglong, as a follower of key anti-archaists like Wang Yanming, Li Zhi, and Yuan Hongdao, emphasized authentic feelings and spontaneity in literature, this thesis argues that in "Du Shiniang Sinks Her Jewel Box in Anger," Feng Menglong metaphorically defended folk literature by defending Du Shiniang. Through examining the ways in which Feng Menglong praised the courtesan Du Shiniang's spontaneous and sincere nature that embodied in her xia (chivalry) and qing characteristics in the story, it becomes clear that Feng Menglong advocated folk literature as what should be extolled in the late Ming. The thesis concludes by recommending that this Feng Menglong's story is possibly a forerunner of a growing genre in the Qing dynasty which makes it worth for further researches.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7f5e/e3c524747a2834db31f26cdc1ca06851c1e7.pdf

The Historical Origins of 'Open Science': An Essay on Patronage, Reputation and Common Agency Contracting in the Scientific Revolution

Golgo 13: The Professional

Offa's Dyke

Winter Solstice, Camelot Station, by John M. Ford

Camelot is served
By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,
The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,
At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.
Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,
Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table
(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin
Or class of accommodation, are equal),
And around it murals of knightly deeds in action
(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).
It is the only terminal, other than Gare d’Avalon in Paris,
To be hung with original tapestries,
And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.
During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,
Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,
Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.
(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays
A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King’s own collection.
Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of “Old XCVII,”
The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)
The first of a line of wagons have arrived,
Spilling footmen and pages in Court livery,
And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,
Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,
Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,
Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,
To help mature women that they may encounter,
Report pickpockets, gather up litter,
And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)
Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.
He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch
(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):
The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,
And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.
He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,
Doling out pennies for platform tickets,
Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,
Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.
The patrons half turn–it’s the fella from Camelot, innit?
And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.
He’s barely halfway when a page tumbles in,
Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,
So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),
Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,
And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)
To summon his liveried army of lads.

* * *

Bors arrives behind steam, riding the cab of a heavy Mikado.
He shakes the driver’s hand, swings down from the footplate,
And is like a locomotive himself, his breath clouding white,
Dark oil sheen on his black iron mail,
Sword on his hip swinging like siderods at speed.
He stamps back to the baggage car, slams mailed fist on steel door
With a clang like jousters colliding.
The handler opens up and goes to rouse another knight.
Old Pellinore has been dozing with his back against a crate,
A cubical, chain-bound thing with FRAGILE tags and air holes,
BEAST says the label, QUESTING, 1 the bill of lading.
The porters look doubtful but ease the thing down.
It grumbles. It shifts. Someone shouts, and they drop it.
It cracks like an egg. There is nothing within.
Elayne embraces Bors on the platform, a pelican on a rock,
Silently they watch as Pelly shifts the splinters,
Supposing aloud that Gutman and Cairo have swindled him.

A high-drivered engine in Northern Lines green
Draws in with a string of side-corridor coaches,
All honey-toned wood with stained glass on their windows.
Gareth steps down from a compartment, then Gaheris and Aggravaine,
All warmly tucked up in Orkney sweaters;
Gawaine comes after in Shetland tweed.
Their Gladstones and steamers are neatly arranged,
With never a worry–their Mum does the packing.
A redcap brings forth a curious bundle, a rude shape in red paper–
The boys did that one themselves, you see, and how does one wrap a unicorn’s head?
They bustle down the platform, past a chap all in green.
He hasn’t the look of a trainman, but only Gawaine turns to look at his eyes,
And sees written there Sir, I shall speak with you later.

Over on the first track, surrounded by reporters,
All glossy dark iron and brass-bound mystery,
The Direct-Orient Express, ferried in from Calais and Points East.
Palomides appears. Smelling of patchouli and Russian leather,
Dripping Soubranie ash on his astrakhan collar,
Worry darkening his dark face, though his damascene armor shows no tarnish,
He pushes past the press like a broad-hulled icebreaker.
Flashbulbs pop. Heads turn. There’s a woman in Chanel black,
A glint of diamonds, liquid movements, liquid eyes.
The newshawks converge, but suddenly there appears
A sharp young man in a crisp blue suit
From the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits,
That elegant, comfortable, decorous, close-mouthed firm;
He’s good at his job, and they get not so much as a snapshot.
Tomorrow’s editions will ask who she was, and whom with…

Now here’s a silver train, stainless steel, Vista-Domed,
White-lighted grails on the engine (running no extra sections)
The Logres Limited, extra fare, extra fine,
(Stops on signal at Carbonek to receive passengers only).
She glides to a Timkin-borne halt (even her grease is clean),
Galahad already on the steps, flashing that winning smile,
Breeze mussing his golden hair, but not his Armani tailoring,
Just the sort of man you’d want finding your chalice.
He signs an autograph, he strikes a pose.
Someone says, loudly, “Gal! Who serves the Grail?”
He looks–no one he knows–and there’s a silence,
A space in which he shifts like sun on water;
Look quick and you may see a different knight,
A knight who knows that meanings can be lies,
That things are done not knowing why they’re done,
That bearings fail, and stainless steel corrodes.
A whistle blows. Snow shifts on the glass shed roof. That knight is gone.
This one remaining tosses his briefcase to one of Kay’s pages,
And, golden, silken, careless, exits left.

Behind the carsheds, on the business-car track, alongside the private varnish
Of dukes and smallholders, Persian potentates and Cathay princes
(James J. Hill is here, invited to bid on a tunnel through the Pennines),
Waits a sleek car in royal blue, ex-B&O, its trucks and fittings chromed,
A black-gloved hand gripping its silver platform rail;
Mordred and his car are both upholstered in blue velvet and black leather.
He prefers to fly, but the weather was against it.
His DC-9, with its video system and Quotron and waterbed, sits grounded at Gatwick.
The premature lines in his face are a map of a hostile country,
The redness in his eyes a reminder that hollyberries are poison.
He goes inside to put on a look acceptable for Christmas Court;
As he slams the door it rattles like strafing jets.

Outside the Station proper, in the snow,
On a through track that’s used for milk and mail,
A wheezing saddle-tanker stops for breath;
A way-freight mixed, eight freight cars and caboose,
Two great ugly men on the back platform, talking with a third on the ballast.
One, the conductor, parcels out the last of the coffee;
They drink. A joke about grails. They laugh.
When it’s gone, the trainman pretends to kick the big hobo off,
But the farewell hug spoils the act.
Now two men stand on the dirty snow,
The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.
The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,
Singing “Wenceslas” off-key till the other says stop.
There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,
Considering. The men mount up.
By the roundhouse they pause,
And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,
The look for a long time at the turntable,
Until the one who is King says “It all seemed so simple, once,”
And the best knight in the world says “It is. We make it hard.”
They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.

The sun is winter-low. Kay’s caravan is rolling.
He may not run a railroad, but he runs a tight ship;
By the time they unload in the Camelot courtyard,
The wassail will be hot and the goose will be crackling,
Banners snapping from their towers, fir logs on the fire, drawbridge down,
And all that sackbut and psaltery stuff.
Blanchefleur is taking the children caroling tonight,
Percivale will lose to Merlin at chess,
The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,
The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.
And at the great glass station, motion goes on,
The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,
The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,
The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,
The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,
Running to a schedule as the world ought,
Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,
The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,
The boilers that turn raw fire into power,
The driving rods that put the power to use,
The turning wheels that make all places equal,
The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;
The train may stop
But the line goes on.

Dazexiang uprising

"What's the penalty for being late?" 

"Death." 

"What's the penalty for rebellion?" 

"Death." 

"Well -- we're late."

Selected Ambient Works Volume II for Half-Life 2

https://jp.itch.io/saw2-hl2


This is an "ambient mod" that combines the sounds of Aphex Twin's 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II with environments from Valve's Half-Life 2 games.

To be very clear, in addition to the games you must also provide your own digital copy of this album - see below for a link to buy one.


Select an album track from the game's chapter select menu and you will load into a story-and-combat-free audiovisual sequence from one of Half-Life 2's levels. I'm not sure if this counts as "machinima" or not - you can look around freely at any time, and I think of it more as an environmental mood piece than a film. Make of it what you will.

For this first release of the mod, only the album's first track, commonly known as "Cliffs", is available. I will add more tracks as I find the inspiration and energy to do so. The tool setup I have built for this mod makes it reasonably easy to do a track - see the Technical Details section in the readme - but I can't promise any timeframe on when new tracks will be added. The album has 24 tracks total (25 if you count the UK vinyl release, 26 if you count the recent digital edition bonus track) and that's a lot to get through, but that is my ultimate goal.

This mod is in some sense a follow-up to my earlier Ghosts I-IV for Quake mod, which pairs the 2008 Nine Inch Nails ambient album with id Software's landmark 1996 first person game Quake.

See this page for an explanation of SAW2's unusual track organization and naming scheme.

Evita Concept Album (1976)

Trucktoons

Delacroix - Lion Hunt

Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis

http://www.operationbarbarossa.net/

On 22nd June 1941 the Wehrmacht launched the largest invasion in recorded history, under the code name Operation Barbarossa. Barbarossa needs no introduction to students of the Second World War, as it is unrivalled in military history for size, speed of operations, and the magnitude of its geographic objectives. The Wehrmacht’s objective was no less than the complete defeat of the USSR, a country possessing by far the largest army and air force in the world at that time. This study focuses on the period from 22nd June 1941 to 31st December 1941, the period when the Soviet Union came closest to defeat, and arguably the only period when Germany could still win WWII outright. Since the end of WWII, debate has raged about the key operational and strategic decisions made by the German and Soviet high commands, especially during the critical period from July to September 1941.

The objective of Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis is ambitious: to create the most historically accurate, advanced and comprehensive quantitative model, of the first six months of the largest and costliest military campaign in history. The work includes a full statistical analysis of the belligerents’ military, economic and logistical capabilities, as related to their war effort on the East Front in 1941. Furthermore, the work presents what amounts to a large ‘data warehouse’ of historical data, and in the final (separable and optional) part uses it to construct, what I believe to be, the most comprehensive operational-strategic military simulation of Operation Barbarossa yet.

The work’s pedagogy is best described as a combination of: military history, military organisations and command structures, operational research, applied physics and mathematics, statistical analysis, and analytical methodology as related to modern military simulations.

The key rationales behind this work are:
To bring together an immense amount of information from disparate sources, and present it in the form of a large database in a single body of work. The professional researcher or amateur scholar of WWII is provided with a comprehensive data source, containing the details of all the armed forces involved on the East Front from 22nd June to 31st December 1941. Currently there is no single source detailing the actual land, air and naval forces involved in Operation Barbarossa.
To fully analyse each of the belligerents’ military, economic and logistical capabilities, as related to the East Front during 1941 and in the strategic context of their overall war effort.
To bring an in-depth quantitative analysis to bear on probable outcomes resulting from different operational and strategic decisions by the German and Soviet high commands in 1941. For the first time, a single work presents the advanced student of this campaign with a mechanism for quantitative analysis of the actual forces, logistics and economies involved. Even more significantly, the work enables an examination of the probable outcome of various ‘what if’ scenarios. In so doing, many of the historically accepted ‘myths’ surrounding Operation Barbarossa are questioned, while other less appreciated historical factors are shown to have been far more significant than commonly perceived.
The application of quantitative analysis to military history, and to demonstrate the potential power of modern military simulations in the study of military history. The purpose here is to demonstrate why sophisticated operational-strategic military simulations provide one of the most powerful methods of studying military history available today. In so doing, the reader is provided with a generic methodology for researching, cataloguing and building the elements needed to create a realistic simulation of a historical military event.

Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis does not assume the reader has detailed knowledge of the history of WWII, or extensive knowledge of the various disciplines mentioned. The approach includes an analytical methodology for analysing a country’s armed forces and its overall war effort. The methodologies defined in this work are designed to be generic, in that they can be employed to analyse a military campaign other than Barbarossa. In this sense Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis is also a guide to designing and building a quantitative analysis of a military campaign to the level needed to create a realistic military simulation. One of the distinguishing features of this work is that it is one of the first to formalise and document such a methodology.

The large bulk of the work then applies these methodologies (although the methodology itself is transparent to the reader in the various volumes) to the various belligerents involved in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. By selecting such a massive military operation as the historical case study, it is able to demonstrate the power of quantitative analysis as well as military simulations in studying military history. In so doing, Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis produces a new and unique perspective on a very famous, immensely important and tragic historical event.

王子言

Akroterion - Journal for the Classics in South Africa

https://akroterion.journals.ac.za/pub

VITESSE CYCLING MUSETTE

 https://www.sfbags.com/collections/shoulder-messenger-bags/products/vitesse-cycling-musette

Armored Brigade Field Manual

Postface of the Shuo wen chieh tzu

East Asian Scroll Paintings

https://scrolls.uchicago.edu/search

Assyria, mid 7th century BC

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/corpus

Herzog's Nosferatu

In Australia by V.I Lenin

Anna Akhmatova by Tora Vega Holmström, 1921

Qian Zhongshu as a comparatist

The name of Qian Zhongshu (or Ch’ien Chung-shu in the Wade-Giles system) should have been familiar to literary scholars in the international communities. He was made an honorary member of the Modern Language Association of America in 1985, but compared with the other MLA honorary members of the same year – Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, and Robert Weimann – Qian Zhongshu remains largely unknown in the West except in a small circle of Sinologists. Qian’s scholarship belongs not just to China studies, however, but is truly comparative and global, with extensive references to world literature and culture. “His knowledge of Chinese literature, of the Western tradition, and of world literature is immense (Sa connaissance de la littérature chinoise, du patrimoine occidental, de la littérature universelle, est prodigieuse),” says Pierre Rickmans in Le Monde as early as 1983. “There is no one like Qian Zhongshu today in China, not even in the world (Qian Zhongshu n’a pas son pareil aujourd’hui en Chine et même dans le monde)” (Rickmans 1983: 15). But not until 1998 do we have Ronald Egan’s selected English translation of Qian’s major work, Guan zhui bian or Limited Views, and so far there has been very little critical assessment of Qian’s scholarship to give it the credit and appreciation it deserves. Now that we are embracing a truly global concept of world literature beyond the familiar grounds of the European tradition, we should know what a great comparatist and humanist Qian Zhongshu was and how exemplary and significant his works are for anyone interested in world literature and East-West comparative studies. Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) may be said to represent the best of humanistic scho-

larship in twentieth-century China, a scholarship deeply entrenched in the tradition of more than three thousand years of Chinese culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, profoundly influenced by the culture of the West. This is already discernible in his family background and upbringing. He was born into an intellectual family in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, where his father was a well-known scholar of traditional Chinese literature who gave him a solid training in classical Chinese; the high schools he went to were established by Episcopal missionaries, where he gained an excellent command of English. After China’s defeat in the Opium Wars in the late nineteenth century, most Chinese painfully realized that the world was no longer the

traditional Sinocentric “all under heaven,” in which China stood at the centre and the rest were peripheries of less cultured barbarians; instead, they found a much larger and completely different world, in which the presence of Western powers posed a threat to be reckoned with, but also a model to emulate and learn from. Translation of Western works thus emerged at the turn of the century as an important intellectual activity. Yan Fu (1854-1921), who studied at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, in the late 1870s, became most influential for his translation of major works on European political and social theory. Equally significant and influential were Lin Shu’s (1852-1924) translations of more than 180 European and American novels into classical Chinese, even though Lin himself knew no foreign language and had to work with collaborators knowledgeable in the originals. As a school boy, Qian Zhongshu ravenously read dozens of those novels, which

he described many years later as his “great discovery at the age of eleven or twelve” that led him to a completely new world outside the familiar world of traditional Chinese literature. In reading Lin’s translations, says Qian, “I came to know that Western novels could be so fascinating! I was never tired of reading Rider Haggard, Dickens, Washington Irving, Scott, and Swift time and again. If I had any conscious motivations for learning English at the time, one of them was that one day I could indulge myself in reading all the adventure stories by Haggard and other writers” (Qian 1985: 70). Interestingly, translation aroused his desire for the original. “Translation is meant to save people the trouble of learning foreign languages and reading the originals,” says Qian, “but all of a sudden it may change to tempt some to learn foreign languages and read works in the original. It may stir their curiosity and make them long for the original, as if whetting their appetite with a tasty morsel without satisfying their hunger and craving.” Goethe, in his Maximen und Reflexionen, he goes on to add, “compared translators rather impolitely to lowly and pushy matchmakers (Übersetzer sind als geschäftige Kuppler anzusehen),” who “show a half-concealed beauty (eine halbverschleierte Schöne) of the original, leaving readers desperate to see the beauty in their fevered imagination” (Qian 1985: 68-69). Translation, he argues, may “entice” readers to the original, and that was what Lin Shu’s translation did to him. Qian Zhongshu studied English at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Exeter Col-

lege, Oxford, where he earned his B. Litt. degree in 1937 with a thesis on China in the English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He went on to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne for another year before returning to China in 1938. By that time, the Japanese had invaded China and occupied Shanghai and much of the northern territories. Qian could hardly find a peaceful environment for his scholarly pursuits during the Sino-Japanese war and then the civil war between the Kuomingtang and the Communists, but he managed to teach in several universities and started to publish. Written on the Margins of Life, a collection of essays, came out in 1941, followed by Men, Beasts, and Ghosts, a collection of short stories, in 1946, and Fortress Besieged, his only novel, in 1947, considered by many as the finest modern Chinese fiction, as C.T. Hsia remarks, “for its delightful portrayal of contemporary manners, its comic exuberance, and its tragic insight” (Hsia 1971: 434). While those literary works were written in the modern vernacular, Qian published a book of criticism in classical Chinese, Tan yi lu or Discourses on the Art of Literature, in 1948. It is an early example of his scholarship that draws on incredibly rich

Chinese and European textual sources for comparisons, intertextual connections, and mutual illuminations. Discourses on the Art of Literature appears to be a fairly traditional book, as it is

written in classical Chinese and follows the traditional form of shi hua (remarks on poetry) or bi ji (written notes), in which fairly short entries are loosely put together without a particular order or consistent argument. But actually it is a completely new book in modern scholarship, for no traditional book has ever had such a wide range of reference to situate Chinese literature in the context of world literature, with quotations not just in Chinese, but in five or six European languages. In reaching out to the West, Qian Zhongshu consciously positions himself in an intellectual genealogy that dates back to the late sixteenth century, when Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and the other Jesuit missionaries came to China and started the intellectual contacts between China and Europe. The neo-Confucian thinker Lu Xiangshan (1139-92) famously said that “there are sages emerging from the eastern sea with the same mind and principles; and there are sages emerging from the western sea with the same mind and principles” (Lu 1992:317). Because of the universalistic idea articulated here with reference to “the eastern sea” and “the western sea,” these words have often been cited to justify the acceptance of new ideas from the West ever since Ricci’s time. Qian Zhongshu is alluding to these words when he declares, in the preface to the Discourses, that “from the eastern sea to the western sea, the minds and principles are the same; in the teachings of the south and the north, the way and the means are not separate” (Qian 1984: 1). This effectively lays down the foundation of East-West comparative studies buttressed by a traditional philosophical argument, thereby demonstrating that in assimilating ideas from the West, Chinese scholars follow an intellectual genealogy of their own, rather than just acting upon a desire to emulate the West. The Discourses contains discussions of Chinese poetry since the Tang and the Song

dynasties, often through a dialogue of classical Chinese texts with those in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Latin. For example, it is a conventional view among Chinese historians that different genres arise and develop in different dynasties, and thus poetry became perfected in the Tang, ci or lyric poetry emerged in the Song, followed by the rise of drama in the Yuan and Ming, etc. Qian Zhongshu criticizes such a view for its simplification of complex historical continuities and transformations, and he concludes that “the way literature evolves and develops is nothing but taking what was not literary to be literary, and taking what was prosaic to be poetic. What used to be considered not suitable for literature is admitted as stuff for literature, and what used to be considered vulgar expressions are taken to be materials for the weaving of an elegant text” (Qian 1984: 29-30). The great Tang writer Han Yu (768-824) is particularly noted for turning phrases fit for prose into innovative poetic expressions. In discussing Han Yu’s use of prose in poetry, Qian opens the question up, relat-

ing it to a more general discussion of world literature. He points out the same tendency in William Wordsworth, who in his preface to Lyrical Ballads dismissed “poetic diction” in favor of ordinary language; in Victor Hugo, who in his preface to Les Orientales argued that anything can be a suitable literary subject (Tout est sujet); and in Friedrich Schlegel, who in Athenäumfragmente, no. 116, considered poetry as

the culmination of all forms, “a progressive universal poetry (eine progressive Universalpoesie).” Then, as a rule in all literary histories, Qian reminds us with Victor Schklovsky that “New forms are simply canonization of inferior genres” (Qian 1984: 34-35). By putting Han Yu in comparison with Wordsworth, Hugo, and Schlegel, and by referring to Schklovsky’s theoretical summing-up, Qian Zhongshu makes it clear that the development of literary genres and the changing concept of literature is a process of constant expansion, the assimilation of elements of prose into poetry, and the integration of what was considered non-literary into the sphere of literature. What, within the limits of Chinese literature, is taken to be a particular feature, even a feature of a particular writer, is thus better understood as an exemplification of a general tendency in world literature, even of a rule or principle in the history of literature. It is worth noting that Qian Zhongshu cited Schklovsky in 1948, some twenty

years before Russian Formalism and Schklovsky became well known among Western literary scholars. Qian was extremely well read and had an acute sense of what was new and important in the world of literature and criticism, but just as he was reaching the prime of his creativity as a writer and critic, the political situation in China changed, and for several decades incessant campaigns against intellectuals and increasingly tight ideological controls under Mao’s rule made it impossible for him to continue writing. He was not the only one, however. Shen Congwen (1902-88), one of the best and most prolific writers in modern China, who had published dozens of novels and short stories and cut a very prominent figure in the 1930s and the 1940s, suddenly stopped writing and never published a single work of fiction after 1949. Those who did write in Mao’s China were constantly subjected to critique, humiliation, and even worse treatment. From the 1950s till the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, Qian Zhongshu kept a very low profile and published almost nothing. In more than thirty years, as he told this author in a private communication, “of all the planned works, not one out of ten was completed” (Zhang 2004: 223). Such was the condition for most intellectuals in Mao’s China. In post-Mao China, however, things changed dramatically. In 1979, Limited Views,

Qian’s magnum opus written under difficult conditions during the Cultural Revolution, was published and won immediate critical acclaim. Fortress Besieged was republished in 1980 and made into a successful television serial in 1990, which made Qian Zhongshu a household name in China far beyond intellectual circles. The second and enlarged edition of Discourses on the Art of Literature was published in 1984, and the Collection of Seven Essays came out in 1985. Qian Zhongshu was “rediscovered” and became the object of a wave of “Qian studies.” Forty years after his return to China from Europe, he was allowed to join Chinese delegations and visited America (1979) and Japan (1980), and was made a Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1982. As he wrote to this author in a letter dated 28 June 1982, to be placed in such an office was something he “never dreamed of,” which he described in a self-mocking tone, deliberately misquoting Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, II.v): “Some are born mandarins, some become mandarins, some have mandarinate thrust upon them” (Zhang 2004: 231). Fame and prestige came to him in his old age, but Qian Zhongshu stubbornly

refused to be lionized. He urged his readers not to make Fortress Besieged the subject of critical studies, and turned down invitations to interviews or television

appearances. As his wife, Yang Jiang, recalled in her memoir, he even told an English lady rather bluntly, when she telephoned to request an interview: “If you ate an egg and thought it was good, why do you have to see the hen that laid the egg?” (Yang 1987: 102). What he wanted was time, to be left alone and do his work, for the five volumes of the Limited Views are only part of a much larger work he had planned, which, unfortunately, he never had time enough to bring to completion. Qian Zhongshu passed away in December 1998, and his unfinished manuscripts and notes were later published in their original, unedited form as facsimile reproductions. Despite its modest title, Limited Views is an ambitious work commenting on

Chinese classics in relation to various Western texts. It is written in classical Chinese, like the earlier Discourses, but on a much larger scale and covers not only literature, but also philosophy, history, philology, psychology, linguistics, and many other subjects. It evinces the author’s encyclopedic knowledge and offers an excellent model for Chinese-Western comparative studies. The very first entry, a commentary on the meaning of yi in the title of the great Chinese classic Yi jing (or I Ching, often translated as the Book of Changes), lays a new foundation for East-West comparative studies. Qian begins by quoting an ancient book and observes that the Han-dynasty commentator Zheng Xuan (127-200) explained that “the word yi has one name but three meanings: first, ‘easy,’ second, ‘change,’ and third, ‘not change.’” Of the three meanings, two are contradictory. He then cites other Confucian and Buddhist books to show that several other words, such as shi or poetry, lun as in Lun yu or the Confucian Analects, wang or king, and ying or response, all have different and sometimes contradictory meanings. Then, he turns the discussion of Chinese semantics to a wider context and says:

Hegel once denigrated our language and thought it unfit for philosophizing (Wissenschaft der Logik, Reclams “Universal-Bibliothek”, I, 19); while he praised the German language as suitable for expressing the subtlety of metaphysical meanings, as exemplified by the word Aufheben that contains in one and the same word two contradictory meanings (ein und desselbe Wort für zwei entgegengesetzte Bestimmungen), which, he claimed, not even Latin has a word to match in depth and subtlety (Ibid., 124-25). We need not blame Hegel for his ignorance of the Chinese language; neither should we be surprised at his careless high-sounding argument based on such ignorance, for that is not uncommon with those learned master-savants; but as scholars we do feel it a shame that he has turned what is the same in minds and principles from the eastern sea to the western sea into the proverbial incomparable apples and oranges.

Death Stranding