Patchwork East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture

Patchwork East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture Edited by Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) Wiebke Denecke (Boston University) Editorial Board Alexander Beecroft (University of South Carolina) Ronald Egan (University of California, Santa Barbara) Joshua Fogel (York University, Canada) Alexander Huang (George Washington University) Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University, UK) Karen Thornber (Harvard University) Rudolf Wagner (Heidelberg University, Germany) VOLUME 1 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/eacl Patchwork Seven Essays on Art and Literature By Qian Zhongshu Translated by Duncan M. Campbell LEIDEN | BOSTON This book was translated into English from the original《七綴集》(Qi zhui ji) by Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 with the permission granted by Yang Jiang 楊絳. This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-4772 isbn 978 90 04 27020 6 (hardback) isbn 978 90 04 27021 3 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. To Jonette and Grace Crysell Caleb Hoyle and Alexander Campbell with love ∵ Contents Series Editors’ Foreword viii Introduction by Professor Zhang Longxi 1 Translator’s Introduction 18 Preface by Qian Zhongshu 27 序 1. Chinese Poetry and Chinese Painting 29 中國詩與中國畫 2. On Reading Laokoon 79 讀拉奧孔 3. Synaesthesia 114 通感 4. Lin Shu’s Translations 139 林紓的翻譯 5. Poetry as a Vehicle of Grief 189 詩可以怨 6. Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”—the First English Poem Translated into Chinese—and Several Other Related Matters 211 漢譯第一首英語詩人生頌及有關二三事 7. An Historical Anecdote, a Religious Parable, and a Novel 247 一節歷史掌故一個宗教寓言一篇小說 Appendix Preface, Four Old Essays (Jiuwen sipian 舊文四篇) 269 Preface, This Also Collection (Yeshi ji 也是集) 270 Index of Proper Names, Book Titles, & Terms 271 Series Editors’ Foreword East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture East Asia is reaching into the world. The number of Chinese students and scholars studying at foreign universities has never been larger, the “Korean wave” washes K-dramas and K-pop ashore all continents, and Japanese manga and anime garner millions of young fans in New Delhi and Cape Town, Oslo and Vladivostok, New York and Rome. Popular culture proves a powerful medium to connect East Asian countries to the world, but also to each other, softening the divisions that the twentieth century has brought to this region. Much of what a good century ago connected the East Asian “Sinographic Sphere” of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam—cultures that traditionally relied on the Chinese script and literary language—has disappeared. East Asians around the year 1900 still communicated through the authoritative lingua franca of Literary Chinese. For almost two millennia “Chinese-style writing” had been the language of government, scholarship, Buddhism, and belles-lettres: Under China’s hegemony many states adopted Chinese culture and its script during the first millennium CE. During the second millennium Japan, Vietnam, and Korea developed phonographic scripts that led to the gradual abandonment of Chinese characters in Korea and Vietnam and the blossoming of local vernacular literatures. In the early twentieth century reformers inspired by Western ideas of “nation states” and “national languages” spearheaded vernacular movements that swept Chinese-style writing and the intellectual and literary culture that went with it aside. The death of Literary Chinese as East Asia’s venerable literary language over the past century and its replacement with the English language and West- ern culture marks an irreversible and little noticed inflection point in the history of humanity: the disappearance of the world’s last cultural sphere where a strongly “logographic” script (recording meaning of “words” rather than “sounds” as “phonographic” alphabets do) had enabled distinctive literary cultures to thrive for almost two millennia. The world history of writing starts with strongly logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopota- mian cuneiform, Chinese characters and Mesoamerican glyphs. Phonographic scripts have long since replaced all but Chinese characters. Thanks to the logographic writing system East Asia’s “bi-literacy”—textual production in Literary Chinese and local vernaculars—functioned quite differently from alphabetic lingua francas. Europe’s bilingualism during the Medieval Period was rooted in Latin, both spoken and read. In contrast, Chinese characters allowed East series editors’ foreword ix Asians (including speakers of Chinese dialects) to pronounce any given text in Literary Chinese in their local vernacular language. Thus East Asia shared a “grapholect,” or scripta franca, as we should call it more appropriately. In the absence of a common spoken language, people could communicate in “brush talk,” conversing by passing paper back and forth. Around the year 1900 East Asian elites were still part of a shared world of transnational education and Bildung through intensive training in the Chinese Classics or a Chinese-style civil service examination system that brought elites in Hanoi and Seoul closer to each other than they were to their fellow peasant countrymen living in a village just outside the capital. The last Chinese-style civil service examinations were held in Vietnam in 1919 under the French colonial government, fourteen years after the abolishment of the examination system in China herself. The painful history of wars and colonial exploitation in the twentieth century has added yet more visceral divisions and, more recently, economic and military competition have done little to mend rifts. Rather they add to the global stream of daily news that define East Asia, negatively, as a region that fights over history text books and the naming of war events as “massacres” or “incidents,” struggles over appropriate ways to honor the war dead, and quib- bles over uninhabited islands. Because national ideologies have come to define East Asia over the past century, the death of East Asia’s biliteracy and the shared culture it afforded have gone largely unlamented. But the awareness of this common heritage is not just of academic rele- vance or nostalgic interest. Rather, bringing the rich histories of shared and contested legacies back into collective memory within East Asia and into pub- lic consciousness throughout the world, while not erasing all the complicated political and ideological issues generated by recent history, will contribute to the creation of a positive transnational identity where Japanese or Koreans will hopefully one day proudly call themselves “East Asians,” just as most French and Germans have overcome their war wounds and both would call themselves “Europeans” today. This is the most ambitious goal of Brill’s new book series East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture. The book series responds to a swiftly grow- ing need as educational curricula, research agendas, and journalistic writing aim for an ever more inclusive global scope. With the increasing international importance of East Asia in economic, political, and cultural terms, more and more scholars and general readers are seeking a better grasp of this part of the world which can boast long-standing histories and traditions as well as vibrat- ing modern cultures. x series editors’ foreword East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture responds to the need for a deeper understanding and appreciation of this region by publishing substan- tial comparative research on the literary and cultural traditions of East Asia and their relation to the world. We showcase original research on the method- ology and practice of comparison, including intra-East Asian comparisons of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; East-West comparisons that examine Western alongside East Asian traditions; and comparative studies that examine East Asian literatures and cultures in the light of their relations with India, the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America. The series focuses on interpretive sciences, that is, the core Humanities of literature, history, religion, philosophy and thought, art history, but also welcomes contributions adopting culturally- informed approaches in archeology, historical geography, anthropology, political science, sociology, or linguistics. It befits our historical moment well to make sure that we

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