主编
杨昊成
江苏宜兴人,1963年生。博士,教授,江苏省外国文学学会会员,江苏省外国语言学会会员,南京市翻译家协会会员,南京师范大学外国语学院美国文明研究所所长,全英文期刊Chinese Arts and Letters(《中华人文》)主编。
目錄:
Editors Note by Yang Haocheng (杨昊成)
Featured Author: Jia Pingwa (贾平凹)
Autumn (《秋天》)
The Brick Bed (《土炕》)
Trees Can Talk! (《制造声音》)
Critique
A Fixed Star in the Literary Firmament by Yang Lesheng (杨乐生)
Interview
An Interview with Jia Pingwa by Shu Jinyu (舒晋瑜)
Culture & Heritage
An Incredible Marvel of the East by Li Denan (李德楠)
Life along the Grand Canal by Li Denan (李德楠)
Echoes of Classics
An Introduction to Confucius and His Analects by Burton Watson
Selections from The Analects Part Ⅰ
Short Stories
Auntie Xu 《胥阿姨》 by Jiang Limin 姜琍敏
On the Plateau 《在高原》 by Hu Xuewen 胡学文
I See the Light 《我望灯》 by Ge Shuiping 葛水平
Prose
Clamour 《声嚣》 by Siren 塞壬
Poems
Nine Poems by Xu Ze 徐泽
Art
Restriction and Creation Thoughts upon Reading Meibings Recent Oil Paintings by Cao Yiqiang 曹意强
內容試閱:
Starting this issue, CAL will branch out to cover our key writers across China and not just those active in Jiangsu Province. The first name that came to my mind was Jia Pingwa (贾平凹), a writer from Shaanxi Province, north western part of the country. I began reading Jia about thirty-five years ago when I was a new-baked teacher of English fresh from college. I was intrigued by the way Jia told his stories, all based on his intimacy with that land and its people. He seemed most adept at telling those stories with his distinct native dialect, and to someone like me from Jiangnan, south of the Yangtse River, his stories gave off an exotic flavor I never savored before. He was so fluent a raconteur and his tales were so full of color that when years later I happened to see him on TV, I was surprised to find that Jia Pingwa was in effect a very plain person, a weak physical specimen of unremarkable physiognomy, a halting speaker, to quote one of his many critics, and did not seem to be very comfortable talking to people or answering questions put to him on the spot. I then realized that his world belonged at his desk where, shrouded in heavy cigarette smoke, and with all the window curtains closely drawn, he span one yarn after another about the land and the people he knew and loved so much. His pen has never stopped writing ever since he took it up for the first time, and over the forty-odd years of literary creation, he went through innumerable ups and downs and finally made a name for himself as an unshakably established writer. Strangely enough, unlike the sad trajectory of many writers career that went from slogging uphill to reach the apex of fame to falling quickly downhill into the pit of oblivion, Jia Pingwas career was more or less plain sailing. As he matured, he became more and more eloquent in his story-telling, and his literary and artistic interests even expanded to cover such genres and fields as essays, literary criticisms, calligraphy, and paintings, each harvesting for him unusual gains and fruits. One cannot but acknowledge that Jia is a born genius and he came to this world mandated by Heaven to present spiritual miracles to the people.
Autumn (秋天) is the third chapter of Jia Pingwas fiction Tiangou (天狗), or the Heavenly Dog, a good-hearted, artless, diligent orphan. He was an apprentice to a master well-
digger and was in secret love with his masters wife. Well past the age of marriage (he was thirty-six), Tiangou would brush off any match-making proposal by anyone, even by his eldest aunt, who swore that she would not die with her eyes closed if Tiangou did not get his better half. His heart was with his masters wife, an able, warm-hearted, and equally hard-working woman, the Bodhisattva in his eyes. One day, as fate would have it, the expert well-digger, an iron-willed craftsman and the backbone of the household, got trapped in a well-digging operation when a huge rock fell off and half-buried him. When Tiangou was sent for, he managed to negotiate the passage downward, and frantically pawing at the soil under the unconscious man, he finally pulled him out. Although his master was dragged back to life from the verge of death, the nerves below his waist were beyond repair and he became a useless lump. To help support the family, Tiangou consciously and constantly lent a helping hand, so much so that he gradually
replaced his master to become the pillar of the family. The wasted man then had an idea; he wanted his wife to marry anew to support the old, and the man he had in mind was none other than Tiangou, his son-like apprentice. Tiangou was in two minds about this; on the one hand, he felt his long-cherished dream would finally come true; on the other, he felt somewhat guilty if he should have his masters wife as his own woman. The trio, plus Wuxing, the couples primary school kid, formed a new family in the end and began to live under the same roof albeit in an embarrassing way. It would take some time before they hit it off. The story is masterfully translated by Jun Liu (刘浚), one-time editor and journalist with China Daily and now a professional C-E translator residing in New Zealand.
The Brick Bed (土炕) tells of a barren woman who adopted a pregnant Eighth Route Army soldier who had strayed from her squad. The country woman waited on her like mother and sister until she gave birth to a baby girl Kitty. Then the female soldier left for the army, leaving her baby to the care of the country woman who took the girl as if she were her own flesh and blood. Kitty grew into adulthood, finally becoming a bureau chief in a big city. But when the Cultural Revolution came, she was sent to a reform school and, refusing to see her children suffer because of her, she decided to send her oldest daughter Xiuxiu to where she herself was raised by her foster mother. Two generations of mother and daughter were fed, nurtured, and raised up on the same large brick bed of the country woman, but both left for the city in the end, leaving the old woman all by herself to wither, shrivel, and die without making a stir in the world.
Trees Can Talk! is a simple enough story about an old stubborn man who, for fifteen years and three months, went petitioning to officials higher up that he owned a tree planted in 1948. All thought the man was insane, but he would not give up, claiming that the tree can talk. His repeated failure to convince people of his weird idea led to the reinvestigation of his case by I, a cadre in the local government, who was accidentally drawn into the picture. At long last, the wrong was righted, and he breathed his last, a good case in point of Confuciuss maxim In the morning, hear the Way; in the evening, die content.
Echoes of Classics of this issue does indeed feature Confucius and his Analects, perhaps the most iconic cultural embodiment of Chinese civilization. As a great educator, thinker, and founder of Confucianism, Confuciuss stature and influence even surpass those of his mentor Laozi, and he has been ranked Number One of the Top Ten World Cultural Celebrities. His dream, however, had been in the political arena, and thats why he and a few of his disciples spent fifteen years wandering from state to state as an itinerant preacher, to quote Christoph Harbsmeier, trying to have his voice heard by the rulers and princes. Only when he met with repeated cold shoulders and even hostility did Confucius settle down in his homeland and devote the remaining years of his life to teaching students regardless of their class distinctions. His talks mainly centered on politics, education, and human relations, and the key concepts of his preaching were loyalty, righteousness, ritual, wisdom, truthfulness, benevolence, the Way, Goodness, gentlemanship, and filial piety. Confucius is, however, a most humane, good-humored and humorous conversationalist, even a plaisanteur, quite different from the grim-faced moralist and ritualist later Confucianists helped to shape and uphold ever since Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒) of the Han and Zhu Xi (朱熹) of the Song dynasties. In other words, Confucius is much less Confucian for his multifarious characteristics, and above all, his humanistic sensibilities, as the text of the Analects well testifies.