INTRODUCTION

DURING THE PAST two decades or so, an increasing number of books, articles, dissertations, and papers have appeared in English, all of which purport to be, implicitly if not explicitly, critical studies of Chinese poetry. Who are the people who write these works? Why do they write? And for whom do they write? Simple and obvious as these questions may be, they have seldom been raised, let alone answered. Let me try to answer them as briefly and bluntly as possible, before proceeding to consider in greater detail some of the implications of my answers. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of critics who write in English about Chinese poetry: native speakers of Chinese (no matter what dialect) who were born and educated in China but are now living in an English-speaking country or at least working at an academic institution where the medium of instruction is English, and native speakers of English or some other European language who have studied Chinese as an academic subject and are engaged professionally in teaching or studying Chinese literature. Of course, there may be some cases in between, such as those who speak some Chinese dialect as their first language but have been educated mostly in English, and those whose native language is English but have lived for years in China. The relative advantages and disadvantages of these two kinds of interlingual critics will be discussed later. For the time being, let us simply register their existence.

As to why they write, a cynic might reply that since practically all those who write about Chinese poetry are academics, they are expected to write and publish, or perish. But apart from practical motives, I believe that most people who write about Chinese poetry genuinely wish to accomplish something intellectually meaningful to themselves and their readers, although their intellectual aims are not always clearly defined.

The question “For whom do they write?” is also often left unanswered. Some writers appear to address other specialists, for they make liberal use of Chinese words, names, and book titles without any explanation or translation, and refer frequently to Chinese works that the reader is presumed to be able to consult. In that case, one wonders why such a reader would need English translations of Chinese poems. If, on the other hand, the critical works are intended for readers who do not know Chinese, then the transliterated but unexplained Chinese words, names, and book titles would be meaningless, and the references to Chinese works useless. I do not mean to suggest that it is impossible to write for more than one kind of reader, but only point out the necessity of making some simple technical adjustments, such as relegating specialized discussions to footnotes and separating works in Chinese from those in Western languages in the bibliography.

There are, I realize, some Western scholars who think that writings in English about Chinese poetry should be limited to translation and annotation but should not attempt criticism. Such modesty is commendable but cannot fully absolve one from the onerous responsibilities of interpretation and evaluation, which together constitute practical criticism, since translation is a form of interpretation, though neither necessary (except in an interlingual situation) nor sufficient, and the choice of poems to translate implies prior value judgment, even if this is not independently arrived at but inherited from native critics. Individuals, of course, have the right to limit themselves to translation and annotation, but this should not prevent others from attempting overt interpretation and evaluation.

If interpretation and evaluation are the main tasks of a critic, whether practicing interlingual or intralingual criticism, then problems involved in interpreting and evaluating Chinese poetry for the benefit of English-speaking readers obviously deserve serious attention, yet these problems have seldom been squarely faced. Furthermore, anyone who writes about poetry must have some conception of what it is, as well as some idea as to how one should study it and what one may hope to achieve by studying it, yet few writers on Chinese poetry have explicitly stated their basic conceptions of poetry or their critical approaches. Some have borrowed terms, concepts, methods, and standards from one school of modern Western criticism or another, with or without acknowledgment, and have used such words as “archetype” and “intertextuality” without closely examining their precise meanings or considering the degree of their applicability to Chinese poetry. Similarly, the most elaborate but jejune kind of semiotic analysis has been applied to the simplest kind of anonymous Chinese poetry, with impressive diagrams and charts but little real insight.

While I do not approve of indiscriminate application of modern Western critical terms, concepts, methods, and standards to Chinese poetry, I cannot agree with those who go to the opposite extreme of insisting that one should only adopt a traditional Chinese approach to Chinese poetry, for several reasons. To begin with, traditional Chinese criticism does not represent a single approach but involves various concepts of poetry, as I have attempted to show elsewhere.¹ Indeed, I have stressed the diversity in traditional Chinese thinking about literature, and it seems to me that those scholars who wish to paint a monolithic picture of “the Chinese view of literature” betray the same kind of mentality that created such popular myths as that all Chinese look alike. Second, traditional Chinese critical terms and concepts themselves require interpretation before they can be used in English. Third, traditional Chinese critics wrote for an elite readership with shared educational and cultural backgrounds, so that they took much for granted and felt no need to define their terms or identify their references, whereas a critic writing in English can take little for granted. Even someone writing in Chinese today can hardly assume that the reader is familiar with the whole tradition of classical Chinese literature. Fourth, the very fact that one is writing in English makes the interlingual critic a comparativist, willy-nilly. As soon as one uses the word “poetry,” one is assuming that there is something in common between what is called “poetry” in English and what is called shi in Chinese. Here we are already running into trouble, for there are other Chinese literary genres such as ci, qu, and fu, which may or may not be considered “poetry,” but I will not pursue the problem here.

Indeed, there are more positive reasons for adopting a comparative approach. As George Steiner has rightly observed, “literature should be taught and interpreted in a comparative way,” and “chauvinism . . . has no place in literature.”² A comparative approach to Chinese poetry will help avoid cultural chauvinism and parochialism not only by making students of Chinese poetry aware of other poetic and critical traditions but also by making students of Western poetry aware of Chinese poetry and poetics. At the same time, such an approach will also enable one to view Chinese poetry in a broader perspective and throw new light on it, for it is often by comparison that one becomes aware of the distinctive if not unique features and qualities of poetry in a particular language. A Chinese critic without knowledge of any other language, for example, may not realize that tonal patterns are a distinctive feature of Chinese poetry.

Since I have raised the three questions of who, why, and for whom at the beginning, it seems only fair that I should answer them with regard to myself. I shall first explain my linguistic, educational, and intellectual backgrounds, and then state my present aims and specify the kinds of readers for whom I am writing. What follows is not so much an apologia pro vita sua as a case history of “the making of an interlingual critic,” which may interest readers curious to know how I came to write in English about Chinese poetry.

I was born in Peking and lived there for the first twenty-two years of my life. My father was a traditional Confucian gentleman, who in his younger days published translations in classical Chinese of some English short stories and one detective novel, but I never heard him speak English. His interest in serious English literature can be gauged by the fact that when he read Leslie Hotson’s The Death of Marlowe, which for the first time correctly identified Marlowe’s killer as Ingram Frizer, he thought it worthwhile to make a note of it in his diary, as I discovered years later. On his bookshelves were some books and periodicals in English, into which I peered out of curiosity. It was among the pages of The Bookman (or was it The Century or The American Mercury?) that I first saw photographs of some American and British authors, whom I later identified as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and others. Little did my father dream that years after his death his youngest son would write academic theses on Woolf and Marlowe.

The primary school that I attended was a modern one, and the curriculum did not differ radically from that of an American elementary school. However, during summer vacations my mother made me memorize some Confucian classics, such as the Four Books (The Analects of Confucius, The Book of Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean) as well as some Tang poetry. Some of the classics had notes and paraphrases in modern Chinese, so that they were more or less comprehensible. Even if I did not fully understand everything I memorized, the experience proved very valuable later, for it is a great advantage to recognize quotations and sources of allusions when reading classical Chinese. As for the Tang poems, I enjoyed reciting them, and wrote my first juvenile “poem,” a pentasyllabic Quatrain (jueju) when I was seven. For reasons I need not go into, I went to five different middle schools (which corresponded to American junior and senior high schools) and finished in five years instead of the usual six by skipping the third year of junior middle school. Most of the schools I attended emphasized science and mathematics, but we did have to memorize quite a number of classical Chinese texts, both prose and verse, and it was in junior middle school that I first wrote essays in classical Chinese. As for foreign languages, when I was in primary and middle schools, Japanese was a compulsory subject, Peking then being under Japanese occupation, but out of resentment we managed to forget most of what we had learned at the end of each academic year, so that after eight years I still did not master the Japanese language. I began formal study of English in the first year of junior middle school (previously I had picked up a few words of English from my elder sisters and brothers) and continued for five years, under various teachers, some Chinese, others English, and one Spanish. It was the Spanish teacher of English who lent me the first book in English I ever read from cover to cover apart from school textbooks: Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs, of all things! To improve my English, I took private lessons from an Oxford-educated English-woman and mixed socially with other English people. I also took French lessons, first from a Chinese Catholic priest, who spoke with a Marseillaise accent, then with a Dutch priest, who spoke with a Dutch accent. On my own, I read various works including those of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Gorky in Chinese translation, and those of Dickens, Hardy, and Wilde in English. By the time I graduated from senior middle school, I could read English without much difficulty and speak and write grammatical English.

At Fu Jen University, also known then as the Catholic University of Peking, I majored in Western Languages and Literature and took a variety of courses from a truly cosmopolitan faculty. To give just a few examples: I studied English and American literature with Chinese and American professors, French language with two Chinese professors (one of whom spoke with a Parisian accent and made me unlearn my Marseillaise and Dutch accents; the other had a strong Henan accent), Latin with a German priest who conducted his classes in English and taught us the pronunciation of Church Latin with its Italian propensities, so that we pronounced “Caesar” more like “Chase-her” than “Seize-her,” French literature with a French Sinologist, and Greek and Roman literature in English translation with a German professor, Gustav Ecke, who was well known in the West as an authority on Chinese art. How I survived, linguistically, such a curiously mixed education (which at the time did not strike me as such) is a mystery to me. At the same time, we had to take courses in Chinese history and literature and to write essays in classical Chinese, using a brush and not a pen. Apart from authors we studied in class, I discovered William Blake on my own, from some books left to my family for safekeeping by an English friend who was being sent by the Japanese to a concentration camp in Weixian, Shandong province. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my intellectual life. Eventually I took my B.A. with a thesis written in English on Virginia Woolf, having read all her novels and some of her essays, as well as the few critical studies of her works then available. It was long before she became a popular cult, and books by her and about her were not easy to obtain in China. I managed to get a Chinese pirated edition of Mrs. Dalloway, a Japanese edition of To the Lighthouse with notes in Japanese, and a Tauchnitz paperback edition of Orlando. The rest I borrowed from the National Peking Library, university libraries, and friends. Meanwhile, I had published some translations, including an early poem by T. S. Eliot, a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde, and a short story by Katherine Mansfield.

I then entered the graduate school of National Tsing Hua University and continued to study English literature, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and modern poetry, as well as French literature. Sir William Empson was then teaching at both Tsing Hua and Beida (short for Beijing Daxue or Peking University), and I attended his lectures on Shakespeare and modern poetry at both universities. I also struggled through his Seven Types of Ambiguity, even though he had warned us to keep off it. After one semester at Tsing Hua I left for England, having been awarded a British Council scholarship. At the University of Bristol I began writing an M.A. thesis on Marlowe, under the supervision of Bertram L. Joseph, who made arrangements for me to be admitted to Wadham College, Oxford University, on the understanding that I would submit the thesis, when completed, to Bristol and not Oxford. The Warden of Wadham, Sir Maurice Bowra, having been born in China and being a comparativist, encouraged me to undertake comparative studies of Chinese and Western literature. My first efforts in this direction resulted in a paper, Elizabethan and Yuan, which was later published in London as a pamphlet.³ I also published some translations of classical Chinese poetry and notes on Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Subsequently I taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. During my five years in London I read a great deal of Chinese poetry as well as literature in English, including most of the novels of Henry James. I published a few of my own poems in modern Chinese and more translations of classical Chinese poetry.

Next I went to Hong Kong and taught first in the Chinese Department of Hong Kong University and then in the English Department of New Asia College, which became part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. During my five years in Hong Kong I published articles and poems in classical Chinese, modern Chinese, and English. In fact, it was in Hong Kong that I wrote my first book, although it was not published until several years later, after I had come to the United States.

Since coming to the United States, I have taught Chinese literature at the universities of Hawaii, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, and at Stanford University. I have published six books and numerous articles on Chinese literature, some of which have been translated (or mistranslated, with or without permission) into Chinese (ironically enough), Japanese, and Korean. It is not that I can no longer write Chinese; I simply do not have the time to rewrite in Chinese everything that I have written in English. Besides, most of my works have been specifically intended for the Western reader. Apart from poetry, which I now prefer to write in classical Chinese, I am indifferent as to which language I use, Chinese or English, for most purposes. As far as English is concerned, I have had to make some adjustments in pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling. I have learned to say “tomayto” instead of “tomahto,” and “sidewalk” instead of “pavement” (otherwise I might have been run over by a “lorry”—I mean a “truck”), and publishers’ copyeditors see to it that I write “color” instead of “colour,” although I notice that when American publishers publish works by English authors they do not insist on Americanizing the spelling or the vocabulary. But these linguistic readjustments have not been difficult.

Intellectually, I have naturally been influenced by various writers, both Chinese and Western. When I first sketched a theory of poetry as a double exploration of “worlds” and language in The Art of Chinese Poetry,⁴ the theory was partly derived from certain traditional Chinese critics whom I then designated Intuitionalists—Yan Yu (fl. 1180-1235), Wang Fuzhi (1619-92), Wang Shizhen (1634-1711), and Wang Guowei (1877-1927)—and partly from such symbolist and post-symbolist poet-critics as Mallarmé and Eliot, while on the methodological level my treatment of Chinese poetry was influenced by I. A. Richards and William Empson. Subsequently I tried to develop and clarify this theory in an article, “Towards a Chinese Theory of Poetry,”⁵ in which I referred, not necessarily with approval, to such diverse critics as R. G. Collingwood, I. A. Richards, René Wellek, G. Wilson Knight, and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. Still later, when I was preparing my book on Chinese theories of literature, I began to read such phenomenologists as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Roman Ingarden, and Mikel Dufrenne, and was struck by the similarities between some of Ingarden’s and Dufrenne’s ideas about literature and some of my own. For example, when I wrote, “Each poem embodies a world of its own,” which is “at once a reflection of the poet’s external environment and an expression of his total consciousness,”⁶ or when I wrote, “The poet explores the potentialities of language as he seeks to embody a world in the poem, and the reader, by following the development of the verbal structure of the poem, repeats the process and re-creates the world,”⁷ I did not know that Ingarden and Dufrenne had expressed somewhat similar notions in their descriptions of the literary work of art. Further, when I wrote, “It seems to me that a poem, once written, has only a potential existence, until someone reads it and actualizes it, to a greater or lesser extent, according to that reader’s ability to recreate the poem,”⁸ I did not realize that Dufrenne had repeatedly maintained that a poem truly exists only when perceived by a reader and “consecrated” by that perception,⁹ or that Ingarden, though strongly opposed to psychologism, had admitted that “every concretization [of a literary work of art] necessarily belongs to the corresponding subjective experiences and exists if, and only if, these experiences exist.”¹⁰ Again, when I suggested that it would be better to describe the structure of a poem as “polyphonic” rather than “stratified,”¹¹ I had no direct knowledge of Ingarden’s theory of the stratified structure of the literary work of art but only Wellek’s brief account of it, which, as I learned later, Ingarden repudiated as a misrepresentation,¹² nor was I aware that Ingarden himself had used the word “polyphonic,” though with reference to what he called “aesthetic value qualities” rather than the structure of a work.

These similarities were not purely fortuitous coincidences, I realized, but (apart from any influences I may have felt indirectly from these theorists or earlier Western thinkers who had influenced them) may have stemmed from affinities between these Western theorists and certain Chinese critics, especially those whom I formerly called Intuitionalists but now prefer to call critics holding metaphysical views of literature, and from whom I had consciously or unconsciously derived some of my ideas. These affinities in turn may have stemmed from underlying philosophical affinities between phenomenology and Taoism, the latter of which profoundly influenced the Chinese critics concerned. What some of these affinities may be I have pointed out in Chinese Theories of Literature, and only a very brief summary need be given here.

In the first place, the Chinese metaphysical concept of literature as a manifestation of cosmic Tao is comparable to Dufrenne’s concept of art as a manifestation of Being, and the Taoist concept of Tao itself is comparable to the phenomenological-existential concept of Being, such as expounded by Heidegger. Second, some Chinese critics who held metaphysical views of literature (even if they did not hold these exclusively) asserted the solidarity of wo (“I” or “subject”) and wu (“thing” or “object”) and the inseparability of qing (“feeling” or “inner experience”) and jing (“scene” or “external environment”), just as some phenomenologists asserted the solidarity of “subject” and “object” and the inseparability of “noesis” and “noema.” Third, both the Chinese critics influenced by Taoism and the phenomenologists advocate a kind of second intuition, which is attained after the suspension of judgment on reality. Finally, both groups recognize the paradoxical nature of language as an inadequate but necessary means to express the inexpressible and to rediscover the preconceptual and prelingual state of consciousness in which no distinction between subject and object exists.

Indeed, it is possible that the idea of the solidarity of “subject” and “object” was basic to traditional Chinese thinking, as suggested by some features of the classical Chinese language. For one thing, in classical Chinese there is no equivalent to “I am.” The nearest counterpart is you wo or “There is I,” which belongs to the same category of statements as “There is a tree,” in contrast to the egocentric “I am.” When anyone writing in a Western language wishes to avoid this egocentrism, he is forced to be ungrammatical, such as when Rimbaud says “Je est un autre.” Strictly speaking, you means “have,” but it would be absurd to take you wo as “Someone or something has me,” instead of “There is I.” Even in modern Chinese, the equivalent to “I am,” Wo shi, usually requires a complement: one has to say, “Wo shi something.” The expression Wo cunzai for “I am” or “I exist” was a neologism coined to translate “Cogito ergo sum.” Furthermore, in classical Chinese the subject of a verb is often left unidentified, which suggests that traditional Chinese thinking was not teleologically but phenomenologically oriented. But to pursue this question further would be beyond the scope of the present book.¹³

I could no doubt think of other intellectual influences than those mentioned above, but I am less interested in influences than confluences, less in the phylogenesis of my ideas than their potentials for synthesis with other ideas. As an interlingual critic of Chinese literature, especially poetry, I have always aimed at a synthesis of Chinese and Western critical concepts, methods, and standards. My most recent effort in this direction was an article entitled “Towards a Synthesis of Chinese and Western Theories of Literature,” which is partially reprinted in this book, since in order to provide the ensuing discussions with a conceptual framework and a theoretical basis, it is necessary to repeat the substance of what I wrote in the article.¹⁴ I shall first set forth the theoretical framework and describe my basic conception of poetry formulated within that framework, then discuss some problems of reading, translation, interpretation, and evaluation, insofar as these affect the interlingual critic of Chinese poetry, and finally illustrate my own current approach to Chinese poetry with analyses of the interrelations between time, space, and self in some Chinese poems.

Although I am writing primarily for English-speaking readers of Chinese poetry, what I have to say may be applicable, mutatis mutandis, to other literary genres such as fiction and drama. Further, I hope that this book may be of some interest to students of comparative literature, general theories of literature, and hermeneutics. Since I am writing for several kinds of readers, it is necessary at times to explain what may seem obvious or elementary to some readers but not to others. For this I must ask for the indulgence of all readers.