I think I did Stoppard a disservice when I read him in college. Of course, it was partly a survival technique to speeze texts in order to get every drop of mening out of them, but now that the pressure is off, I find that meaning is overrated. What has annoyed me at arat shows and museums for ages has now come to annot me about literature as well, namely the hunt for the message. The question should be, "Is it pleasing?". Instead, the question is, "What was the artist trying to say?". Blech. It's art, not an essay. Why does it have to say anything?
Which brings me to these little gems. For all my talk in college about how Stoppard was trying to make a statement about the line between fantasy and reality, or the question of identity, these are really just plain fun. Stoppard himself says that "neither play is about anything grander than itself. A friendly critic described Hound as being as auseful as an ivory Mickey Mouse. After Magritte may be slightly less useful than that . . . the 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as recreation. This seems satisfactory."
Li Po and Tu Fu
In preparation for my big project on Ondra Lysohorsky, I picked up this item, works of two authors in one volume. Lysohorsky repeatedly refers to Li Po as a kindred spirit, so I thought there might be some useful insight here. What turned out to be of most interest, though, was not Li Po's work itself, but the side by side comparison of both authors. The editor, the late Arthur Cooper, has cleverly set up a dialectic between the two, framing Li Po as the consummate Taoist poet and his compatriot Tu Fu as a Confucianist master. And the distinction is well observed. The difference in tone, subject matter and style is consistent with the frames into which Cooper has put the two artists.
Which raises the question, to whom can Lysohorsky be similarly compared? Since he and Li Po both stick to the "dream vision" type of poetry, which of his peers is the corresponding Tu Fu? Perhaps W.H. Auden, with whom Lysohorsky carried on a friendship is a candidate, though I would have to look even further to validate such a claim.
Academics aside, as per my earlier post, it is interesting that, although I bought the book to read Li Po, I enjoyed Tu Fu quite a bit more. Both are held in great regard in China, being seen as possibly the greatest poets in millenia of Chinese literature, but I found Li Po's random musings a bit unsatisfying. Where Li Po merely observes something and describes it poetically, Tu Fu draws out the observation, adds his own thoughts, and generally connects to the reader a bit more. It is only natural that the Taoist should have a more relaxed approach, but Li Po's famous five-syllable poems can't help but lose most of their meaning in translation. Or maybe I'm lazy.
Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro: Son of the Revolution
This item falls under the "books I pretended to have read in college" category, but also into the growing trend in my reading habits to read material that focuses on chinese culture. This first-hand account of the events surrounding the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s is neither self-conscious nor melodramatic in its narrative, flaws to which many personal suffering accounts fall prey. At the same time, it seems genuinely sympathetic to the reforms enacted by Deng Xiaoping, and ends on a note that does not criticize the Chinese givernment, a surprising move that may have been politically motivated but keeps the book from wallowing. The only fault that I can relate is that it is a bit shallow and light, so caveat emptor.
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