世界友情 (friendship)集 (2)Rediscovering friendship： 米勒 Millet........談《余英時談話錄》中的史景遷及史景遷的《中國縱橫》，包括The Explorer Who Never Left Home By Jonathan Spence的中譯
Princeton University Press
What can we learn from ancient philosophers about friendships? The Roman writer Cicero knew that connecting with people is what makes life worth living:"Friendship is nothing other than a common accord with goodwill and affection between people about all things divine and human. With the exception of wisdom, I’m inclined to believe that the immortal gods have given nothing better to humanity than friendship."
Speaking of Books: The Explorer Who Never Left Home By
Arthur Waley selected the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature” and pinned them quietly to his chest. No one has ever done anything like it before, and no one will ever do so again.
There are now many Westerners whose knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is greater than his, and there are perhaps a few who can handle both languages as well. But they are not poets, and those who are better poets than Waley do not know Chinese or Japanese. Also the shock will never be repeated, for most of the works that Waley chose to translate were largely unknown in the West, and their impact was thus all the more extraordinary.
Waley sat on a quiet edge of “Bloomsbury.” Because he lived to fine age—from 1889 to 1966—I have always associated him in some cor ner of my mind with E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf, for they were all educated in the same special area of pre‐World War I Cambridge, and all lived well into the 1960's, shrewd observers of a cataclysmically chang ing scene. All three were very tal ented, and none of them was gre garious. They might meet occasionally for tea at Lytton Strachey's house Ham Spray, or run into each other in Gordon Square, but they all defended their right to run their own lives. And all three, rather oddly one might have thought, had an interest in Asia. For Forster there was India; for Woolf, Ceylon; and for Waley, China and Japan. But though Forster worked in India, and Woolf worked in Ceylon, Waley never even visited either of the two countries that gave him such extraordinary inspiration.
One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley's reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn't want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the mod em spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Cer tainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcert ing, and it is worth reflecting on why this might have been so.
Waley was a Classicist; and he was also in King's College at the time when Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson —known as Goldie to generations of students—still presided over young minds, inculcating the virtues of an esthetic humanism which are the heart of what people came to know as “Bloomsbury,” virtues that were permanently captured in the essays and novels of E. M. Forster.
Dickinson was dejected by the ugliness and cruelty and insensitivity of the world that lurked just outside Cambridge; how could the Athenian ideals be preserved in such an appall ing environment? Those men who valued decency, honesty and com passion must state their values clearly lest the new Englishman— “Divorced from Nature but unre claimed by Art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought”—inherit the earth.
This particular characterization of the Englishman was written by Dick inson in 1901, just after the Boxer Rising in China, and appeared in little book of anonymous essays called “Letters from John China man.”
As Dickinson warmed to the theme the inspirations came thicker, until his critique of his own society, his affection for his young friends, and shreds from the Chinese poets he had read in translation, all merged into remarkable hymn to Chinese human ism, written in the first person by “John Chinaman” himself:
“In China … To feel, and in order to feel to express, or at least to un derstand the expression of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end. A rose in a moonlit garden, the shadow of trees on the turf, almond bloom, scent of pine, the winecup and the guitar; these and the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the mo ment that glides for ever away, with its freight of music and light, into the shadow and hush of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, perfume escaped on the gale—to all these things we are trained to re spond, and the response is what we call literature. This we have; this you cannot give us; but this you may so easily take away.”
It is remarkable enough that Wil liam Jennings Bryan should have taken these letters literally, and writ ten a stirring rebuttal (published in 1906), in which he defended Labor saving Machinery, The Home and Christianity. But what is perhaps even more remarkable is that Dick inson—the political scientist and ex pert in comparative governments— could visit Peking in 1913 and come away with his fantasy confirmed as reality! As he wrote to E. M. Forster: “China! So gay, friendly, beautiful, sane, hellenic, choice, human … Yes, China is much as I imagined it. I thought I was idealizing, but now I doubt it.”
That China should be Hellenic comes hard on a modern graduate school product. But when Arthur. Waley took his job in the Oriental Sub‐department of Prints and Draw ings in the British Museum in 1913 such an esthetic approach was very much in the air, and he breathed in a good deal of it. His first book, “A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems,” appeared in 1917, and in the introduction Waley wrote of the rationality and tolerance of the Chinese, of their powers of self analysis, and of their friendship, in a way that could satisfy both Athens and Bloomsbury: “To the European poet the relation between man and woman is a thing of supreme importance and mystery. To the Chinese, it is something commonplace, obvious—a need of the body, not a satisfaction of the emotions. These he reserves entirely for friendship.” And again, “For sympathy and
Furthermore, in the person of Po Chu‐i, the great rang poet who lived from 772–846, Waley found someone who was immensely compatible, who spoke directly to the worries of Waley's time with a wise voice 1100 years old. It was a witty, warm, slightly melancholy voice, one that abhorred pretension, one that could both sympathize with the poor and excoriate the vulgar. On the death of his little daughter Po Chil‐i said: “At last, by thinking of the time be fore she was born,/By thought and reason I drove the pain away.” When traveling through the dangerous Yangtze gorges the poet wrote: “How can I believe that since the world began/In every shipwreck none have drowned but rogues?” And, with startling force:
Sent as a present from Annam A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peachtree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent. They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
A second volume, “More Trans lations from the Chinese,” appeared in 1919. In a brief introduction, Waley noted that no reviewers had treated the first book of poems “as an experiment in English unrhymed verse, though this was the aspect of it which most interested the writer.” I am not sure about that “most in terested,” but certainly Waley's touch was growing more sure, and he was writing his translations with total simplicity, and total command of stress, as in these lines by Po Chu‐i's contemporary Wang Chien:
Poisonous mists rise from the damp sands,
Strange fires gleam through the night‐rain.
And none passes but the lonely fisher of pearls
Year by year on his way to the South Sea.
Astonishingly, in the same year of 1919, Waley had produced his first volume of translations from Japanese poetry, having taught himself that language as he had taught himself Chinese. Two years later he publish ed “The No Plays of Japan.” This was an immense leap away from Po Chil‐i, but here again Waley found a deeply personal echo. In No plays, he wrote in the introduction, “We get no possibility of crude realities; a vision of life indeed, but painted with the colours of memory, longing or regret.”
In another passage of the same introduction, Waley shows his mas tery of combining paraphrase, trans lation and analysis, when he writes of the No drimatist Seami's usage of the Zen word yugen:
“It means what lies beneath the surface': the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement. It is applied to the na tural grace of a boy's movements, to the gentle restraint of a noble man's speech and bearing. ‘When notes fall sweetly and flutter deli cately to the ear,’ that is the yugen of music. The symbol of yugen is ‘a white bird with a flower in its beak’ ‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower‐clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest with no thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that goes hid by far‐off islands, to ponder on the journey of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds'—such are the gates to yugen.”
Such a passage is art, as surely as the poetic translations themselves, or the originals from which the translations were taken. If one has a feeling that Waley found what he needed to find—a wryness, a deli cacy, a languor, that seems to imbue Genji and Ytlan Meil, Sei Shonagon and Monkey, even the Imperial Com missioner Lin Tse‐hsil—one cannot cavil, and (Continued on Page 36) can immediately find other works that negate any sim ple generalization. He also translated the Book of Songs and Confucius's Analects, for example, and the Ainu poems.
The force of the impact that Waley had, over the 50 years of his creative life, upon a wide circle of artists, intellectuals, teachers and students is now abundantly recorded in a risky but beautifully executed book that Ivan Morris has compiled: “Madly Singing in the Moun tains: An Appreciation and An thology of Arthur Waley” (Walker & Co., New York, 403 pp., $12.50). I say risky, he cause one may collect remini scences, accolades and pas sages of a person's works, with out having any kind of a read able book. But this beautifully executed anthology is an ex ception.
Ivan Morris, himself an out standingly good translator of Japanese literature, has some how composed a book that is both intimate and distant, that manages to respect Waley's privacy and to be forthright. Much of the credit for the book's effect must go to the essay with which the book opens, “Intent of Courtesy” by Carmen Blacker, a wild, gentle and beautiful example of the genus “Eulogy,” building up to a savagely romantic ending, that puts most other such pieces to shame.
As the book progresses, the range of Waley's talents be comes increasingly apparent. The more each modern spe cialist says how good WaleY was in his particular field, the more one is conscious of Waley's independence; his re mark that he “would rather be dead” than a professor at Cam bridge dances in the air above those pages that sometimes grow a little solemn.
Waley's reputation grew steadily. In 1929 he was able to retire from the British Museum and devote himself full time to writing—though how he could possibly have written more in the time past than he already had defies imagining. Fame brought its rewards, some con ventional and some surprising. How very nice it must have been, when everybody who was anybody in England thought that Edith Sitwell was brilliant and rather dotty, to have Edith Sitwell think that you were the one who was brilliant and dotty. Having found a book written in some exotic lan guage lying around her brother Sacheverell's library, she placed it next to Waley's bed (he was an overnight house guest) in the hopes that he might prove unable to translate it. As she recorded the sequel:
“Next morning, Mr. Waley looked a little pale; his manner was languid, but as he placed the book on the breakfast table he announced in a faint voice: ‘Turkish. 18th century.’ The pages were few; and after an interval of respect we enquired: ‘What is it about?’ Mr. Waley, with sudden animation: ‘The Cat and the Bat. The Cat sat on the Mat. The Cat ate the Rat’ ‘Oh, it is a child's book.’ ‘One would imagine so. One would hope so!’ “
It is an affectionate anecdote; all the Sitwells, indeed, seem to have been captivated by Arthur Waley. His ability to translate from the Chinese and Japanese languages so dazzled them that they spoke of all the works he translated as being his own work. Thus Edith Sitwell wrote in a letter about his translation of the 15th‐century Chinese novel “Monkey”: “I don't really know Monkey yet, of course. But it has given me that sense of inevitability, of excite ment with peace, that your work always does give me.” “Your work”—whether it was Chinese poetry,–“The Tale of Genji,” “The No Plays of Ja pan,” an “Introduction to Chi, nese Painting” or “The Analects of Confucius.” There is a kind of negative side to this: If the work was Waley's, then no attempt had to be made to com prehend the cultures that gave him his raw material.
As Sir Osbert Sitwell (circa 1950) could write in a passage extolling Waley: “It is precisely in individuality that Western Europe has excelled. Not for us of the Occident the schools of poets and painters, almost in distinguishable one from an other in style, and continuing for millenniums: our works of art are sharply differentiated and defined.” Yet if Waley felt patronized he didn't show it. He dedicated his marvelous book on the l&th‐century Chinese poet Yuan Mei to Sir Osbert.
The China and Japan that Waley gave to his readers were humane and balanced. From perusing their newspapers Westerners knew from 1895 onward that China was a torn and wretched country, with its people in misery from famine and civil war, and that Japan was entering a strident and dangerous phase following her startlingly rapid and successful industrialization on the West ern model. Later they could read of the 1911 Revolution and the Manchurian crisis, of Tejo, Mao Tse‐tung and Hiro shima. But with Sei Shonagon and Po Chtt‐i they were back in a world where courtesy mat tered, and good taste was not simply something connected with food.
Waley's translations enrap tured readers—whether they were of the Sitwells’ social class, or of the comfortable upper middle— who felt that the forces of darkness and un reason were taking over. His Oriental [benedictions to a way of life so seriously threatened were in no way banal. They were, rather, the products of a prodigious energy and erudition, and of a belief that there are certain values that are not transitory, certain attitudes that can never be anachronistic because they have always been (and always will be), true.
I find it very hard to take leave of Arthur Waley. This is, at least partly, because by read ing “Madly Singing in the Mountains” I have learned that at the time I spent a long happy afternoon with Waley when I was a graduate student just embarking on the study of Chinese history and literature, his lifetime companion Beryl de Zoete was dying painfully upstairs. It is clearly fitting that the last words should be his, not mine. So here are some lines from his translation of “The Bones of Chuang Tzu” by Chang Hang. This, he once told Carmen Blacker, was his favor ite Chinese poem.
Suddenly I looked and by the roadside
I saw a man's bones lying in the squelchy earth, Black rime‐frost over him; and I in sorrow spoke And asked him saying,
‘Dead man, how was it?
Fled you with your friend from famine and for the last grains
Gambled and lost? Was this earth your tomb.
Or did floods carry you from afar? Were you mighty, were you wise,
Were you foolish and poor? A warrior, or a girt?
Then a wonder came; for out of the silence a voice—
Thin echo only, in no sub stance was the Spirit seen—
Mysteriously answered, saying, I was a man of Sung.
Of the clan of Chuang;
Chou was my name. Beyond the climes of com mon thought
My reason soared, yet could
I not save myself!
For at the last, when the long charter of my years was told.
I too, for all my magic, by Age was brought
To the Black Hill of Death.’
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