To be frank, I started reading Ye Mi (葉彌) only a little over three years ago when she was recommended to me by both Su Tong (蘇童) and Fan Xiaoqing (範小青), who said that she was a writer of real narrative power with a unique style of her own. The first story I read of hers and then published in CAL is“Family,” one that is vastly different from others in that it smacks of a strong flavor of the ambiance prevalent in the writings of the Republican period of China. Her mind seems to me to be totally engrossed in a serene world far away from the madding crowd of today. Mountains and flowers, temples and monasteries, the bright moon and a sprinkling of lonely, leisurely souls—all these seem to have made up the entire world of her literary landscape. She is instinctively attached to these things and people and seems to have little interest in what is going on in this world of mundane existence. I’ve always been wondering what could possibly be the reason behind this literary preference of hers. Then I was reminded of her retreat from the city to the countryside a few years ago, where she preferred a self-contained, rustic life with her patches of vegetables and fruit trees and flocks of fowls and pets. Ye Mi is my age and not that old to retire to the country like China’s reputed recluses of the olden days when they had either suffered enough setbacks in the realistic world, or when they were tired of the schemes and struggles of the outside world and dreamed of withdrawing to the mountains and waters for an unperturbed life. Ye Mi seems to fit into neither category. But then who knows! What I do know is that the female author is very happy with what she has and what she is. She is at present the proud master of her own house at the side of the Taihu Lake, now working in the fields, now walking with her cherished pets, but most of the time peacefully working away at her letters.
Starting this issue, CAL has a new column added to it:“Echoes of Classics.” We’ll pick and choose those cultural and literary gems throughout the history of Chinese civilization from Laozi’s Daodejing, Confucius’ Analects, the pre-Qin prose, the works of the Pléiade of the Bamboo Grove, Tang and Song poetry, Yuan drama, Ming and Qing fiction, all the way down to the May 4th literary masterpieces. For Daodejing, which is the first on our long list and is known to have been the most translated Chinese classic with one hundred versions or so in English alone, we hesitated a lot as to which of these renditions to choose. James Legge? Frederic Henry Balfour? Witter Bynner? Arthur Waley? Lin Yutang (林語堂)? Or D.C. Lau (劉殿爵)? All towering figures in sinology or literary translation, but finally we came down to Bill Porter, a.k.a. Red Pine, a name with some Zen implication in it which Porter adopted for himself after more than a dozen years of life and work in Taiwan and Hong Kong. His rendition of Daodejing, using simple enough English to capture the austere and sometimes elusive meaning of the original text, impresses me as having the advantage of better fluidity in reading and easier accessibility to the modern reader. What is more noteworthy is his eclectic selection from the ocean of literary commentaries and exegeses on Daodejing throughout Chinese literary history which is yet another sure evidence of Porter’s extensive reading and rigorous scholarship. Dadejing, like The Analects, with its colloquial style, is relatively a simple text, but translating it is by no means easy. That’s why the Canadian sinologist W.A.C.H. Dobson, whose translation of Mencius won him world-wide accolade, said that it was time for a sinologist to retire when he announced that he was working on a new version of Daodejing. We don’t know exactly what is behind Dobson’s words, but we are moved by Porter’s courage to take up the challenge of translating this Daoist classic at an age when most people would prefer a cozy, retired life with their family and yet he decided to follow the dictates of his heart and set his mind on burning the long, solitary midnight oil.
One of the problems prior to translating Daodejing is that the translator will come across different versions of the text, including different punctuations, for throughout the ages, the text of Daodijing underwent numerous recensions and each would claim itself to be authentic. This alone will result in different enough interpretations and accordingly, divergent renditions. I take this to be quite normal with most ancient texts. Porter claims to have compared several dozen
versions of the original and we respect his final choice of the version to base his translation on.
The whole text of Daodejing, which is made up of the Scriptures of Dao (Way) and the Scriptures of De (Virture), has 81 chapters in all and approximately 5,400 words. It is impossible
to have the entire text and its English equivalent printed here in CAL. Besides, some sayings are more or less redundant semantically. We’ve picked those most well-known sayings, 16 chapters in all, for our readers. For those who care to do further comparative research on the classic, we’ve put the original Chinese alongside its English translation. And to make the Chinese look more like a bona fide original text, we’ve arranged it in the traditional rather than the simplified script and on a vertical setting of types. This arrangement will remain unchanged with all the other Chinese texts in“Echoes of Classics” that are to follow. Porter’s illuminating Introduction to Laozi, Daodejing and his translation of the work in Mercury House in 1996 is also printed here for those who might be first readers of this Daoist classic.
And a bit of change to one of CAL’s regular columns“Articles.” Renamed “Culture and Heritage,” this column, self-evidently more revealing by the sheer name of it, will include anything written, or translated, about Chinese culture at large, regardless of genre, style, time period, or subject matter. “The Essentials of Chinese Calligraphy,” my piece based on my two Dartmouth lectures during my one-year stint as a post-doc at Harvard twelve years ago, is printed here for the scrutinizing eye of both the professionals and common lovers of Chinese calligraphy. Comprised of three parts, viz., Evolution, Aesthetic, and Technique, the article is meant not as a pure academic research into one of the most abstract forms of traditional Chinese art, but as a primary on a brief history of calligraphy, on how calligraphy is usually appreciated, and how calligraphy is normally practiced. Each and every word is spoken from my thirty-odd years of experience of daily practice and I hope I’m not blowing my own trumpet.
The short story in this issue is Pang Yu’ (龐羽) “Wealth, lessings and Longevity.” As a young writer of the post-90s generation, Pang is a rising star in contemporary Chinese literary arena, and her style is easily recognizable for its raciness and saltatory way of thinking and word manipulation. Not easy to translate though, and that’s why we’ve asked Denis Mair, one of our most adept and exact translators, to do the job, and even he acknowledged to have to “wrestle with the picturesqueness of the language” in order to best preserve its“folksy charm.”
One needs a pair of poetic eyes to see the extraordinary through the ordinary, and that’s the case with Hu Xian (胡弦), the featured poet of this issue of CAL. There really is nothing remarkably stunning about the things he writes about, pebbles, trees, clouds, roads, spiders, circus troupes, fish on a chopping board, etc., but our poet has unusually keen antennae for the nature of these insignificant things or their facets easily ignored by us commoners. Even the decadent is transformed into the magical, as “Insects in Amber” well manifests, and that’s what poetry is all about, I guess.
After a whole three years of reticence, Shen Li (瀋黎) resurfaces with her short piece on Lin Fengmian (林風眠), one of the most successful Sinicizers of western painting tradition of 20th century China. Lin was a very lonely man throughout most of his career; he was active in the artistic circles only in his early and later life, but other than that, he was rejected and marginalized, even maltreated in his prime years largely due to the ignorance of his contemporaries. Paradoxically, however, the misfortune turned out to be an actual blessing. Pushed to the limbo, away from all the hustle and bustle in the mainstream, Lin was able to settle down to the ontological study and practice of painting. And faced with seemingly endless days and months to kill, he produced one after another the most dazzling works of art ranging from fishing villages, birds and trees, old-day maids to Peking opera figures, female nudes and still life of all kinds. Not until his octogenarian years though did he enjoy a triumphant comeback and a universal recognition as one of the few genuine masters of 20th century Chinese art history.
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