Plagues and pandemics are nothing new in history with the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome certainly having their share. In a famous passage in the Peloponnesian War, often studied during the COVID outbreak of the last two years, the historian Thucydides describes how a devastating disease ripped through Athens leaving large parts of the city dead and dying. Nothing anyone could do made any difference for their prospects of recovery, with good and bad alike passing away in the streets, prayers to the gods unanswered. Most of the population descended into to acting out their worst instincts while they were still breathing, reckoning with good reason that they might perish the next day.
I’ve read and discussed this Thucydides passage with my undergraduate students over Zoom classes these last few semesters while we’ve been huddled alone at our homes. All of us have been struck by the parallels between our society and ancient Athens. Most haven’t suffered the terrible trials and loses that Thucydides describes, but the selfishness bred by fear is still all around us as we struggle to emerge from the pandemic and find our way back to a normal life.
Seemingly against all odds, my California university was at last able to safely reopen our London campus this term after it was shuttered a year and a half ago. As the faculty member resident here with the students and anxious to watch them emerge from their previously-isolated lives to live, study, travel, and interact with other young people for the first time in so long, I’ve been both fascinated and terribly worried to see how things would turn out. All of us, including classics professors in their 60s, have gotten rusty at dealing with others face to face. The first time someone extended their hand to shake mine a few weeks ago I stared at them dumbly having honestly forgotten what I was supposed to do. Would the students be any better? Living in a tightly-packed community with thirty other college students is hard enough in the best of times, but would they be able to make the transition during the post-COVID era?
What I’ve seen has surprised me. When they all got off their planes at Heathrow Airport and met each other for the first time in person, they seemed shy and awkward, like children on the first day of kindergarten. But by the time they collected their luggage and we found our way to the taxis to take us to our new South Kensington home, they were beginning to loosen up. They made a game out of spotting the first red double-decker bus and seeing who could find the most Bentleys in London traffic. After they arrived at our campus and moved into their rooms, they had a few hours allotted to sleep off the jet lag before we began orientation. To my surprise, not a single one crashed on their beds, but instead all of them gathered to explore London together. By dinner that night they acted like they had known each other for years.
Call it the unbounded resilience and enthusiasm of youth, but to me it seemed like something more was at work. This group of sophomores had been living at home and taking online classes for their whole college careers so far. Aside from a few old high school buddies, they had hardly spoken to a living soul their own age for over a year. Now they could talk, eat, argue, laugh, cry, and share their dreams with others their age in person again. They had rediscovered friendship.
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.
I’m sure there are plenty of bumps and tears ahead this semester for our little group of college students here in London, but whatever the problems, these kids will be alright. After so long away from others, they at last have friends again.
Philip Freeman, a classics professor at Pepperdine University, is the translator of Cicero’s How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship.
瘟疫和大流行病在歷史上並不新鮮，古希臘和古羅馬的古典世界當然也經歷過。在伯羅奔尼撒戰爭中，歷史學家修昔底德在一段著名的文字中描述了一場毀滅性的疾病如何席捲雅典，城中大片地區死傷慘重，奄奄一息。當時，人們無能為力，也無法改變他們康復的希望，好人和壞人都死在街頭，向神靈的祈禱也得不到回應。大多數人在還活著的時候，就本能地做出最壞的舉動，並且有充分的理由相信自己第二天就會死去。
過去幾個學期，我和我的本科生都待在家裡，透過Zoom課堂閱讀並討論了修昔底德的這段文字。我們所有人都被我們社會與古雅典之間的相似之處所震撼。大多數人還沒有經歷過修昔底德所描述的可怕考驗和損失，但當我們努力擺脫疫情、回歸正常生活時，恐懼滋生的自私依然縈繞在我們周圍。
我所在的加州大學似乎克服了重重困難，終於在一年半前關閉後，於本學期安全地重新開放了倫敦校區。作為與學生們一起居住在這裡、與世隔絕的教職員工，我迫切地希望看到他們擺脫此前的孤立生活，如此長久以來第一次與其他年輕人一起生活、學習、旅行和互動。我既著迷又擔憂地想知道事情會如何發展。我們所有人，包括那些年過六旬的古典文學教授，都已經不擅長與人面對面交流了。幾週前，第一次有人伸出手來和我握手時，我呆呆地看著他們，真的忘了自己該做什麼。學生會好過嗎？即使在最好的情況下，與三十名大學生生活在擁擠的社區裡也已經夠難的了，但在後疫情時代，他們能適應嗎？
我的所見所聞讓我大吃一驚。當他們在希思羅機場下飛機，第一次見面時，他們顯得害羞又尷尬，就像剛上幼兒園的第一天的孩子一樣。但等到他們拿好行李，我們找到計程車，準備送我們去南肯辛頓的新家時，他們開始放鬆了。他們玩起了遊戲，看誰能在倫敦的交通中找到最多的賓利，看看誰能找到第一輛紅色的雙層巴士。到達我們的校園，搬進宿舍後，在我們開始迎新活動之前，他們有幾個小時的睡眠來緩解時差。令我驚訝的是，沒有一個人睡在床上，而是都聚在一起一起探索倫敦。那天晚上吃晚餐時，他們表現得就像認識多年一樣。
或許這就是青春無限的韌性和熱情，但在我看來，這其中似乎另有玄機。這群大二學生先前整個大學生涯都住在家裡上網課。除了幾個老高中同學，他們一年多來幾乎沒有和同儕說過話。現在，他們終於可以面對面地與同儕交談、吃飯、爭論、歡笑、哭泣，分享他們的夢想。他們重新發現了友誼。
古羅馬作家西塞羅深知，人與人之間的連結才是人生的意義：
友誼無非是人與人之間對一切神聖和人間事物懷著善意和愛意的共識。除了智慧之外，我傾向於相信，不朽的神靈給予人類的美好事物莫過於友誼。
我相信，我們這群在倫敦的小大學生，這學期將會經歷許多坎坷和淚水，但無論遇到什麼困難，這些孩子都會好起來的。在遠離他人這麼久之後，他們終於又擁有了朋友。
佩柏代因大學古典文學教授菲利普‧弗里曼是西塞羅《如何成為朋友：通往真正友誼的古代指南》的譯者。
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."我們能從古代哲學家身上學到什麼關於友誼的道理？羅馬作家西塞羅深知，人與人之間的聯繫才是人生的價值所在：“友誼無非是人與人之間對一切神聖和人間事物懷有善意和愛意的共識。除了智慧，我傾向於相信，永恆的神靈給予人類的美好事物莫過於友誼。”
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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