Qian Zhongshu

Qian Zhongshu around 1940

Qian Zhongshu and his wife Yang Jiang

Qian Zhongshu , Chinese 钱锺书 (simplified) or 錢鍾書 (longhand), Pinyin transcription: Qián Zhōngshū, Wade-Giles transcription: Ch'ien Chung-shu, (born November 21, 1910 in Wuxi near Shanghai in Jiangsu Province ; † December 19, 1998 in Peking (Beijing) was a Chinese writer and scholar.

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Youth and study abroad

Qian Zhongshu has not commented in detail about his life, partly out of personal modesty, but partly also because of his conviction that a literary work has its own worth and that the author's biography can do little to explain it. This fundamental aversion to biographism in literature gives the references from the pen of his wife Yang Jiang special value, from which most of the information about his life comes.

The son of a Confucian scholar lived instead of a carefree childhood with his childless uncle, as was the custom in China. Because of his childish fondness for books, he gave him the first name "Zhongshu", "who attaches great importance to books", "the book lover". When the uncle died, the situation worsened for the widow, and ten-year-old Zhongshu learned classical Chinese again under his father's care. At the age of fourteen he attended the mission school in Suzhou , where his language skills showed, so that in 1929 he transferred to Tsinghua University north of Beijing to study Western languages ​​and literature. There he met his future wife Yang Jiang, who later worked as a translator of Romance languages. a. of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and was active as a playwright and had a great influence on his writing. After graduating in 1933, he taught for two years at the Guanghua University of Shanghai before - after marriage in 1935 - with a scholarship in Oxford , the Exeter College , visited one of the oldest colleges of the University, where he in 1937 his bachelor's degree in literature dropped. After the birth of his daughter Qian Yuan, he and his family moved to the Sorbonne , the University of Paris , to study French. In 1939 he returned to China as a lecturer, where he was professor of English a. a. taught in Kunming , Shanghai and Beijing.

Return to China

The country had been at war with the Japanese since 1937 ( Second Sino-Japanese War ), who occupied large parts of China, and initially by a volatile politico-military coalition between the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and the communists under Mao Tse-tung were fought before this alliance also fell apart and the partners warred against each other. Only with the departure of the Japanese, the victory of Mao and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 did stability return after years of war, civil war, unrest and chaos.

Author and linguist

Qian, who lived in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai from 1941 to 1945 , was very active as a writer in the ten years after his return and wrote during this time, in addition to his main work, the satirical novel "The Surrounded Fortress" (or "The Besieged Fortress", wéi chéng, 围城 simpl., 圍城 trad.), numerous other works of a scientific nature.

After the end of the war, Qian returned to his old school, Tsinghua University , as a lecturer in literature, which was integrated into Peking University in the early 1950s . Qian no longer had any teaching duties and since 1955, as a member of the academy, has only devoted himself to research and translation tasks, including the official translation of “Mao's Selected Works” into English.

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution , Qian - like the other members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences - was harassed and sent to a barracked cadre school in the country; he became a caretaker and had to give up his beloved books; he compensated for the deficiency by creating diaries and using his own notes (Guan Zhui Bian, 管 錐 編 ， 管 锥 编, English title “Limited Views”), in which he focused entirely on the “autonomous Republic of Poetry ”(Christopher Rea), d. H. the Chinese language and literature withdrew. While he, his wife, and his daughter survived the persecution, the son-in-law, a history teacher, killed himself out of desperation.

Only after Mao's death and the overthrow of the so-called " Gang of Four " in 1976 did Qian return to his research institute. The years from 1978 to 1980 were marked by his newfound freedom and by trips to universities in Italy, the USA and Japan, where he impressed with his acuteness and education. The changed circumstances found expression in his appointment as Deputy Director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from 1982 to 1993 and as Senior Advisor to this institute until his death.

Last years of life

Qian, never very sociable anyway and averse to any self-expression, avoided the media, political determinations and social life more than ever. In 1994 he was transferred to a hospital, which he did not leave until his death. The official Chinese press hailed him as "an immortal" ("an immortal").

Works

Qian was at home in both literature and science; accordingly, his works fall into these two categories. His intimate knowledge of classical and modern Chinese as well as the European languages ​​- English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin and, in translation, ancient Greek - enabled him to survey elements of both cultures and to incorporate them into his works. As one of the most famous modern authors in China, he was also one of the last writers to write works in Classical Chinese. During his lifetime he was considered to be "the greatest scholar in China" due to his immense reading, his language skills and his memory. He maintained his artistic and human independence from political, social and media claims to the end.

Prose works

In the years before the end of the war, in 1941, Qian wrote Marginalias of Life , a collection of satirical short stories (“Marginal notes on life”, 寫 在 人生 邊上 ， 写 在 人生 边上, Xie zai rensheng bianshang; English under the title “Written on the Verge of Life ”), 1946 Men, Beasts and Ghosts , a small collection of satirical stories (“ Men, Animals and Ghosts ”, 人 ‧ 獸 ‧ 鬼, Ren, shou, gui), finally in 1947 his most famous work“ The encircled fortress ” . Although the novel was translated into many world languages, it did not attract attention in China until the late 1970s.

"The encircled fortress"

Emergence

After Qian had already caused a sensation with some literary critical works, shorter essays and biting, satirical narratives, he ventured with the support of his wife Yang Jiang to an extensive prose work, "The Surrounded Fortress" since 1944. His hunger for reading had devoured a number of crime novels in Oxford, and his enthusiasm for dramatic scenes from Chinese opera was well known. His wife's successful theater production also encouraged him.

Published in a magazine as a serial novel in 1946, “Die umschlelte Festung” (wéi chéng, 围城 simpl., 圍城 trad.) Appeared as a book the following year and was well received by Chinese critics. One foreign critic said it was better "to ban the book and not even show it to young people".

action

The lost 27-year-old international student Fang Hongjian (方 鴻漸), the spoiled son of a country gentleman for whom the family has already arranged a marriage at home, is returning to China after a stay of several years in Europe with a manufactured diploma from a nonexistent Irish university, because he was too lazy for a regular graduation - a typical “sea turtle” (海龟 hăī guī) that one has just been waiting for at home. When he, who had hopefully been sent abroad to study abroad by his future in-laws, received a letter from his father informing him in a dry tone of the death of the bride he was supposed to be, he read the letter "with the joy of a pardoned criminal." On board the ship, which will finally bring him and other foreign students back to China, everything can be done quite well for the self-confident, quite funny catch: he is tying up with a number of Chinese women on board, but has to find out at the latest on arrival at home that the young women have long been in steady hands and given to boring but professionally solid competitors. All his further attempts in erotic terms also fail again and again due to the shrewdness and instinctive caution of his beloved, and only when he is appointed to a lectureship in Germany after various entanglements does he get to know his future wife, who is the charming, but obviously he accompanied the incorrigible loser and good-for-nothing after his failure at his previous job to Shanghai, where he became embarrassed by his relatives by marriage. He doesn't want to succeed professionally either, and wherever he turns - the doors close to him, the newcomer and man without connections, and the best places are already occupied by more successful competitors. Little by little the paint on his foreign prestige is peeling off, giving way to the rather bleak realization that it has to be submitted. In view of his hopeless success and uselessness, however, his wife finally separates from him, and Fang can only listen to the chiming of the wrong ancestral clock in the empty apartment; that ends the novel.

The title

The title goes back to a French proverb, possibly of Arabic origin, according to which “marriage is like a besieged fortress, in which those who stand in front want to get in and those who are inside want to get out.” The programmatic title refers not only on the situation of the fictional characters, but generally characterizes a way of life that is based on the self-deception that it is better anywhere than where you are.

interpretation

The “rebirth” after almost forty years and the astonishingly modern effect of the novel may perhaps a. This is because Wéichéng was never just an intellectual or elite novel, but continues to lead to the heart of traditional Chinese society with its web of family relationships and dependencies that appear impenetrable to outsiders; in an entertaining, witty way he addresses many of the still latent problems of a society that places the individual, whether they like it or not.

The fact that the novel - despite the author's aversion to such an interpretation - bears autobiographical traits is beyond question in view of the parallels between the lives of the protagonist and the author, but the relationship between fiction and reality was artistically designed by the author - probably with full intent alienated, distorted and blurred. His sense of satire, his temperament, his unconventionality - in the time of the Cultural Revolution, which pursued every individual deviation, serious offenses - not only characterize the figure of his antihero, but were also always formative characteristics of Qian himself.

As the many quotes, style comparisons and storylines show, Wéichéng used not only the European picaresque novel - Qian's wife translated Don Quixote des Cervantes - but also the Chinese classics and the entire breadth of European literary history. Qian merges and processes Daoist , Confucian and European ideas almost imperceptibly , without ever losing sight of the thread of the actual plot.

The novel has been accused of lack of action, a certain lack of history - “the novel takes place in a strangely historyless space” -, typification of the main characters and a drop in tension in the second part. In fact, the novel tips in the middle in the sense of a classic peripetia: the brother Leichtfuß Fang is increasingly becoming a doggedly fighting, completely disillusioned stranger in his own country, who can only be saved from a really tragic end by an insight into his complete insignificance and a hunch that it will somehow go on. It speaks for Qian's narrative art, his Daoist-philosophical serenity and at the same time explains the topicality of this novel that he does without a dramatic conclusion in the good or bad sense - the book ends with a big question mark. Qian's mixture of satire, scholarly allusions and encyclopedic mastery of world literature did not meet with everyone's approval, but is tempered by his wit, the well thought-out narrative structure and the striking design of the v. a. of the female characters in the plot, who, in view of the men in the novel, seem to be the really "strong sex" anyway.

Aftermath, valuation

If the book was not reprinted in mainland China because of its individualistic, bourgeois tendencies and because of its lack of nationalism in the following thirty years, the official side of Taiwan was not particularly pleased with the novel either, as the conditions were below the The Kuomintang government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is presented in an unfriendly light. Nonetheless, the book quickly became famous not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and abroad. In 1961 it was named “the best novel in modern Chinese literature” (CT ​​Hsia), and translations into many cultural languages ​​soon appeared. It did not experience a revival in mainland China until 1980, when it was reissued and achieved several editions. A television and radio series followed the book success in 1990/91. Although suggested several times, Qian never won a major literary award for his novel .

Wéichéng is now part of the Chinese reading canon, and some idioms and expressions have become proverbial. In addition, it is now part of world literature; Chinese and western readers alike recognize themselves in it.

Quotes on Wéichéng

• “A China etiquette that always applies”; Daily China, January 24, 2010
• "A Comédie humaine ... one of the greatest novels of modern China"; Christopher Rea

More novels

The beginning of another novel, "The Artichoke Heart" (Pai-ho hsin) got lost in the turmoil of the post-war period, much to the annoyance of the author, who enjoyed the work and had high hopes for the new work.

Scientific writings

In classical Chinese, Qian wrote On the Art of Poetry in 1948 , also in English under the title “Reflections in Appreciation”, (談 藝 錄 ， 谈 艺 录, Tanyilu , expanded and revised 1983).

In 1958 he published a collection of poems from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), "Selected and Annotated Song Dynasty Poetry" (宋 詩選 注 ， 宋 诗选 注, Songshi xuanzhu). Although the selection was highly valued abroad and the author highlighted Mao's views at the appropriate point, the work in China earned him the charge of not being Marxist enough. It was not re-issued until 1988.

In 1984 a literary critical collection was published in everyday Chinese ("Seven Pieces Patched Together", 七 綴 集).

The five-volume Guan Zhui Bian (管 錐 編 ， 管 锥 编), the "Bamboo Cane and Awl Collection," also known as the Collection of Limited Insights into the World (of Literature) , was combined and linked in the late 1970s to 1990s Essays on poetics, literary history and semiotics in Classical Chinese. The treatises on the theory and aesthetics of literature, originally written during the Cultural Revolution , emerged as an escapist flight from the humiliations of the present day and consist of 781 notes on ten traditional works of Chinese literature. In traditional characters, which have not been used on the mainland since the writing reform of 1955, and without any reference to contemporary works, the author uses his knowledge of song poetry (960–1279), the heyday of Chinese poetry, which he is referring to annotated and reinterpreted on almost a thousand works of European literature.

Qian's other writings include Jiuwen sipian from 1979 (Four Early Articles) and Qizhuiji (1984), a collection of science studies.

Quotes

• "The best Chinese author you've never heard of ... one of the great literary cosmopolitan of the twentieth century"; Christopher Rea (2010)
• "China's most important writer"; Ronald Egan
• "One of the greats of Chinese literature in the 20th century ... a true universal scholar"; Cao Jin (2011)

Editions in selection

Total expenditure

In 2001 a thirteen -volume complete edition of his works was published ( Works of Qian Zhongshu , 錢鍾書 集 ， 钱锺书 集), in 2003 a ten-volume supplementary edition ( Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi , 宋詩 紀事 補正), 2004 facsimile editions of parts of his diaries, 2005 a partial edition of its English-language titles. However, the quality of the overall expenditure was met with skepticism by the critics

Single issues

• Humans, beasts, and ghosts. Stories and essays . New York: Columbia University Press 2010.
• The encircled fortress . Novel. Munich: Schirmer Graf 2008, ISBN 978-3-86555-059-0 . - New edition of The Encircled Fortress. A Chinese society novel . Frankfurt am Main: Insel 1988.
• Limited views. Essays on ideas and letters . Cambridge, Mass. u. a. : Harvard Univ. Asia Center 1998. - Partial translation of the Guan Zhui Bian.
• The souvenir. Narratives . Cologne: Diederichs 1986.
• Cinq essais de poétique . Paris: Bourgois 1987.
• Fortress defeated . Obs.v. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. Bloomington: Indiana UP 1979. Several reprints.

literature

After his death, a wealth of biographies and memoirs appeared about Qian Zhonghu, of which only the most important or most recent in European languages ​​are listed here.

• Christoper Rea: "Life, it's been said, os one big book ...": One hundred years of Qian Zhongshu. In: the China Beat - This Day in History of October 21, 2010.
• Christoph Anderl (ed.): Studies in Chinese language and culture . Oslo: Hermes Academic 2006.
• Yang Jiang: We Three (我們 仨 Women san). Hong Kong: Oxford UP 2003
• Hong Yu: Principle - Criticism - Method. Studies on Qian Zhongshu's Guan zhui bian . Munich: Univ.Diss. 2002.
• Monika Motsch: With a bamboo cane and awl. From Qian Zhongshu's Guanzhuibian to a reconsideration of Du Fu . Frankfurt am Main [u. a.]: Lang 1994.
• Michael Friedrich: Guanzhui Bian . In: Kindlers Neues Literaturlexikon, Vol. 13 (1991), pp. 779 f.
• Stephan von Minden: Weicheng . In: Kindlers Neues Literaturlexikon, Vol. 13 (1991), pp. 780 f.
• Monika Motsch: Epilogue to the German translation of "Die umzingelte Festung" (1988), pp. 421–441
• Yang Jiang: Weicheng yanjiu ("Study of the" Surrounded Fortress "). Taipei: Chengwen 1980.
• Yang Jiang: 記 錢鍾書 與 《圍城》 ， 记 钱锺书 与 《围城 1985. In: Yang Jiang's Selected Prose (杨绛 散文). Hangzhou: Zhejiang Literary Press 1994.
• Yang Jiang: Ganxiao liu ji ("Six stories about the cadre schools"). Beijing: Sanlian 1981. Six Chapters from My Life "Downunder" Ex. Howard Goldblatt. Seattle: Univ. of Washington. Hong Kong: Chinese UP 1984.
• Monika Motsch: Short Bibliography. Main works by Qian Zhongshu. In: "The surrounded fortress" (1988), p. 448 f.
• Theodore D. Huters: Qian Zhongshu . Boston: Twayne 1982.
• Theodore D. Huters: Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters . Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI 1977.

Web links

Commons : Qian Zhongshu  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Qian Zhongshu in the catalog of the German National Library
• Qian Zhongshu ( East Asia Institute at Ludwigshafen University )
• We three 我们 仨 (family biography of Qian Zhongshu 钱锺书 with his wife Yang Jiang 楊絳 and their daughter Qian Yuan 钱 瑗)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The birthplace is now a museum; Xinhuanet October 21, 2002
2. ^ Motsch, afterword, p. 421; Friedrich p. 779
3. ↑ What Qian, the connoisseur of highly developed song poetry, thought of the literary qualities of the texts of the Great Leader that he had translated, he never said.
4. ^ Motsch, afterword p. 423
5. ^ Motsch, epilogue, p. 423
6. ^ Motsch, afterword p. 425
7. ↑ Le mariage est comme une forteresse assiegee; ceux qui sont dehors veulent y entrer et ceux qui sont dedans en sortir. Jean-Marie Quitard: Etudes sur les Proverbes Francais, p. 102; Qian's book title was already explained in this way in 1947 (Philobiblion: A Quarterly review of Chinese publications, Vol. 2-1, Nanking 1947; www.guichetdusavoir.org/ipb/index.php?showtopic=6482). - On the other hand, a quote from Montaigne often quoted here reads: Le mariage est une cage; les oiseaux en désespèrent d'y entrer, ceux dedans désespèrent d'en sortir. "Marriage is like a cage: the birds that are outside absolutely want to go in, those that are inside absolutely want to get out."
8. ↑ Rea, China Beat
9. ↑ Michael Müller, Qian Zhonshu. In: FAZ of July 30, 2009
10. ^ Ludger Lütkehaus, in: NZZ from January 22, 2009; Daily China from January 24, 2010.
11. ↑ von Minden, in KLL p. 781
12. ↑ After Mao's seizure of power, the Kuomintang fled to the island (1949) and formed their own government there
13. ^ Motsch, afterword p. 425
14. ↑ Daily China of January 24, 2010
15. ↑ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon, Vol. 13 (1991), pp. 779 ff.
16. ↑ According to the French saying: "avoir un coeur d'artichaut", "to fall in love easily"; “Coeur d'artichaut, une feuille pour tout le monde”, also a work by Charles Baudelaire (Motsch, epilogue p. 426; Kelly / Mao / Spence, Fortress 2004).
17. ^ So in KNLL Vol. 13 (1991), p. 779