Enlightenment-guided literary critic Jean Starobinksi dead at 98
About the author (1989)
Jean Starobinski is Professor of the History of Ideas and French Literature at the University of Geneva. His books in English include Blessings in Disguise: Or, the Morality of Evil; The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789; Montaigne in Motion; Revolution in Fashion: European Clothing, 1715-1815; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction; A History of Medicine; and The Living Eye.
圖書 The living eye Starobinski, Jean. 1989. Harvard studies in comparative literature. 40.
可在 總圖書館 Main Library 總圖2F人社資料區 (PN81 S6813 1989)獲得
Ivan Turgenev was a novelist, poet and playwright, known for his detailed descriptions of everyday life in 19th century Russia. Although Turgenev has been overshadowed by his contempo
The Russian government celebrates the writer Ivan Turgenev even though it scorns many of his negative views of his homeland and his embrace of Western, liberal values.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in Orel, Russian Empire on this day in 1818.
“O youth! youth! you go your way heedless, uncaring – as if you owned all the treasures of the world; even grief elates you, even sorrow sits well upon your brow." --from "First Love and Other Stories" by Ivan Turgenev
"Give me the woman precious to thy heart, Give up to me thy Laura! Beyond the grave will usury pay the smart."— I wept aloud, and from my bleeding heart With resignation tore her.
昨天聽楊澤博士閒聊， 他要為新書《初戀》寫導言。 他說尼采可能讀過屠格涅夫 : 我一時找不到其關連。 Nietzsche on Women : Philosophical Misadventures - [ 翻譯此頁 ]He clearly is not saying “whip woman”, literally. He says to me “Don't be scared of criticizing there opinions because they are intelligent too”. ...
My father flung the whip away from him and, hastily running up the steps, ... father and son in love with the same woman--the father's passion for the mysterious ... Excerpts of "First Love" are from "The Essential Turgenev," edited by ... www.jeffersonflanders.com/turgenev.html - 頁庫存檔 - 類似內容
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev - 1999 - Fiction - 298 頁 She embodied for him that 'image of a woman and the vision [the Russian literally suggests a ghost: ... His 'first love' for Zinaida was eventually to seem, ... books.google.com.tw/books?isbn=0192836897...
My father suddenly lifted the whip, with which he had been switching the dust off ...'My son,' he wrote to me, 'fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, ...
詩人北島這本文集《時間的玫瑰》，小有名氣，出版半月網路上就有些介紹。我們知道，它有兩版本，裝潢都講究（「牛津當然是出版社裏的精緻牌子，取得好作者的好作品，主編先生豈敢偷懶，於是精挑細選，用了French Flock Paper - Suedel Luse做封面材料，硬皮精裝，雅淡灰底， ……」；北京的也採非硬式精裝和塑套）：
北島《時間的玫瑰》香港：牛津大學出版社，2005
北島《時間的玫瑰》（或：《北島隨筆：時間的玫瑰》 ）北京：中國文史出版社，2005
本書曾在 上海《收穫 》雜誌以《世紀之鏈》專欄發表【網路可讀部分】— 我猜，所謂《世紀之鏈》意思是北島認為 20世紀 詩歌輝煌，尤其以上半世紀為最。所謂「《世紀之鏈》」表示許多詩人彼此互動、影響（譬如說，Celan was strongly influenced by Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, and Osip Mandelstam. 我們從策蘭（Celan ）一文，還可知道他受法國詩人的影響 ）--- 可惜這一重要、有趣之主題，在本書幾乎「無法」發揮。書名《時間的玫瑰》，即以「玫瑰」這一主題作幾位詩人之鍊（如里爾克的墓誌名到策蘭（ Celan）之詩文。）
案：「北島隨筆」說法，容易令人誤解，因為這本書是北島之「嘗試集」：他在「后記」中說，本書文體較為複雜，難以歸類…… ..譬如說，「曼德爾思塔姆：昨天的太陽被黑色擔架抬走」中，「曼德爾思塔姆和愛倫堡 vs. （約半世紀之後）北島與趙一凡」相呼應……】
關於「策蘭：是石頭要開花的時候了」可參考Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rudiger Safranski, N Person - Trans. E. Osers. Cambridge, MA and London: HarvardUniversityPress, 1998 之翻譯本：呂迪格爾.薩弗蘭斯基著『海德格爾傳— 來自德國的大師』靳希平譯，北京: 商務印書館，1999。中文本也許多缺點，不過直接翻譯德文本。注意副標題，原書名為「來自德國的大師」（靳希平有譯注，說明採自 Celan之「死亡賦格一詩」 --北島談這首 這書名可能是誤解 因為原詩之master 是死亡），英文為「善惡之間」。
Mang Ke, born in 1951, is a prominent Chinese poet and co-founder of the underground literary journal Today, which appeared irregularly between 1978 and 1980 before being shut down by the Chinese Government. Wikipedia
Japanese literature expert Keene plans move to Tokyo
BY TOSHIHIRO YAMANAKA CORRESPONDENT
2011/04/19
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Donald Keene conducts a lecture last month at Columbia University. (Mari Sakamoto)
NEW YORK--The renowned Japanese literature expert Donald Keene, professor emeritus at Columbia University, is teaching for the last time this spring term. The 88-year-old Keene will step down in late April, bringing to an end a teaching career at Columbia that began in 1955. After concluding his teaching duties, Keene plans to move permanently to Tokyo and fulfill his dream of writing full time. Keene was very concerned following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11. He had made many visits to Chusonji temple in Hiraizumi, Iwate Prefecture, and Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, two of the hardest-hit prefectures in the Tohoku region. "I have had special feelings toward the Tohoku region since I first traveled along the 'Oku no hosomichi' 56 years ago," Keene said. "I lectured for about six months at Tohoku University, and I am acquainted with the priests at Chusonji temple. I am very worried." Keene referred to the classic work of literature written by the haiku master Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), which he translated into English under the title, "The Narrow Road to Oku." While there is high scientific interest now in the United States on how to prevent earthquakes and tsunami, Keene is skeptical about the Western-style conviction in science that believes humans can control natural disasters. "I am a person who has been heavily influenced by Japanese culture," Keene said. "I am moved by the sense of resignation that feels the power held by nature cannot be resisted." In his final term at Columbia, Keene has been lecturing on such Noh songs as "Funabenkei" and "Yuya." His initial encounter with Japanese literature was purely by accident. Having skipped grades in school, Keene entered Columbia University when he was 16. One day, he happened to sit next to a Chinese-American student and started learning kanji from him. Keene was deeply struck by the beauty of kanji. He was also fascinated by the English translation of "The Tale of Genji" that he read when he was 18, and he volunteered to enter the U.S. Navy's Japanese language school. He was surprised to hear about Japanese soldiers fighting to the death at Attu in the Aleutian chain. During the Battle of Okinawa, he searched for Japanese hiding in caves. His days in Qingdao, China, were spent interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. "I saw the dark side of humans," Keene said. "There were Japanese POWs who betrayed their fellow soldiers, and there were U.S. soldiers who duped Japanese POWs into giving up their artwork possessions." Becoming fed up with the interrogations, Keene asked for a discharge. He returned to New York, but he could not find an occupation that interested him. "I resumed my study of Japanese literature because I felt the Japanese language best suited my constitution," he said. Over the course of 70 years of research, he has written more than 40 books. When asked to name his personal top three among all the books he has published, Keene gave the Japanese titles for works that he also wrote in English, a multivolume "History of Japanese Literature" as well as books titled in English as "Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion" and "So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish." "Looking back, what I feel about my life is that it is not me who chose Japan, but Japan who chose me," Keene said. "After retiring from teaching, I will move to Japan and apply for Japanese citizenship. While immersing myself in the Japanese language, I want to devote my time to reading and writing." His first project is to complete a biography of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku poet of the Meiji Era (1868-1912).
日本文學散步 Some Japanese Portraits (Kodansha Amer Inc, March 1, 1979)
KyotoAshikaga Yoshimasa (Jp. 足利 義政) (January 20, 1435–January 27, 1490) was the 8th shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate who reigned from 1449 to 1473 during the Muromachi period of Japan. Yoshimasa was the
比喻光陰。唐˙李白˙春夜宴桃李園序：夫天地者，萬物之逆旅；光陰者，百代之過客。 路過的客人、旅人。史記˙卷七十七˙魏公子傳：Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.然嬴欲就公子之名，故久立公子車騎市中，過客以觀公子，公子愈恭。Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.短暫停留的旅人，含有短促漂泊、渺小的意味。唐˙李白˙春夜宴從弟桃園序：Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.夫天地者，萬物之逆旅。光陰者，百代之過客 。Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Donald Lawrence Keene (born June 6, 1922 in New York City) is a Japanologist, scholar, teacher, writer, translator and interpreter of Japanese literature and culture. Keene is currently University Professor Emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught for over fifty years. Keene has published about 25 books in English on Japanese topics, including both studies of Japanese literature and culture and translations of Japanese classical and modern literature, including a four-volume history of Japanese literature. Keene has also published about 30 books in Japanese (some translated from English). Keene is the president of the Donald Keene Foundation for Japanese Culture.
Keene received a Bachelor's degree from Columbia in 1942. He studied Japanese language at the U.S. Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado and in California, and served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific region during World War II. Upon his discharge from the Navy, he returned to Columbia where he earned a master's degree in 1947. He studied for a year at Harvard University before transferring to Cambridge where he earned a second masters, after which he stayed at Cambridge as a Lecturer from 1949-1955. In the interim, he also studied at Kyoto University, and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1951. Keene credits Tsunoda Ryūsaku as a mentor during this period. Keene taught at least two courses [Elementary Conversational Japanese, and Japanese Literature in (English) Translation] at the University of California (Berkeley), c. 1954/55[citation needed]
Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 (Stanford Univ Pr, June 1, 1969)
Twenty Plays of the No Theatre (Columbia Univ Pr, June 1, 1970)
World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867 (Henry Holt & Co, October 1, 1976) -(Second book in his "A History of Japanese Literature" series)
Some Japanese Portraits (Kodansha Amer Inc, March 1, 1979)
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (Henry Holt & Co, September 1, 1987)
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era; Poetry, Drama, Criticism (Holt Rinehart & Winston, April 1, 1984) -(Fourth book in his "A History of Japanese Literature" series)
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era; Fiction (Holt Rinehart & Winston, April 1, 1984) -(Third book in his "A History of Japanese Literature" series)
On Familiar Terms: A Journey Across Cultures (Kodansha Amer Inc, January 1, 1994)
Modern Japanese Diaries: The Japanese at Home and Abroad As Revealed Through Their Diaries (Henry Holt & Co, March 1, 1995)
The Blue-Eyed Tarokaja: A Donald Keene Anthology (Columbia Univ Pr, June 1, 1996
On Familiar Terms: To Japan and Back, a Lifetime Across Cultures (Kodansha Amer Inc, April 1, 1996)
Donald Keene with Anne Nishimura & Frederic A. Sharf, Japan at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Woodblock Prints from the Meija Era, 1868-1912 (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, May 1, 2001)
Sources of Japanese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600 compiled by Donalde Keen, Wm. Theodore De Bary, George Tanabe and Paul Varley (Columbia Univ Pr, May 1, 2001)
Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 (Columbia Univ Pr, April 1, 2002)
Donald Keene with Lee Bruschke-Johnson & Ann Yonemura, Masterful Illusions: Japanese Prints from the Anne Van Biema Collection (Univ of Washington Pr, September 1, 2002)
Five Modern Japanese Novelists (Columbia Univ Pr, December 1, 2002)
Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan (Columbia Univ Pr, November 1, 2003)
Frog In The Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan 1793-1841 (Asia Perspectives),(Columbia Univ. Press, 2006)
Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. (Columbia Univ. Press, 2008)
So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (Columbia Univ. Press, 2010)
Kikuchi Kan Prize (Kikuchi Kan Shō Society for the Advancement of Japanese Culture), 1962.[1]
Van Ameringen Distinguished Book Award, 1967
Kokusai Shuppan Bunka Shō Taishō, 1969
Kokusai Shuppan Bunka Shō, 1971
Yamagata Banto Prize (Yamagata Bantō Shō), 1983
The Japan Foundation Award (Kokusai Kōryū Kikin Shō), 1983
Yomiuri Literary Prize (Yomiuri Bungaku Shō), 1985 (Keene was the first non-Japanese to receive this prize, for a book of literary criticism (Travellers of a Hundred Ages) in Japanese)
Award for Excellence (Graduate Faculties Alumni of Columbia University), 1985
Nihon Bungaku Taishō, 1985
Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University named in Keene's honour, 1986
Tōkyō-to Bunka Shō, 1987
NBCC (The National Book Critics Circle) Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing, 1990
The Distinguished Achievement Award (from The Tokyo American Club) #65288;for the lifetime achievements and unique contribution to international relations）, 1995
Award of Honor (from The Japan Society of Northern California), 1996
Asahi Award, 1997
Mainichi Shuppan Bunka Shō (The Mainichi Newspapers), 2002
Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Kōrōsha) (Japanese Government), 2002 (Keene is the third non-Japanese person to be designated "an individual of distinguished cultural service" by the Japanese government)
Donald Keene, a scholar of Japanese literature who became the first foreigner to receive the country's highest cultural award, died of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital on Sunday.
U.S.-born scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene dies at 96
FILE PHOTO: Donald Keene shows off a placard with his name written in Japanese at Tokyo's Kita ward office after becoming a Japanese citizen in Tokyo, Japan, in this photo taken by Kyodo March 8, 2012. Mandatory credit Kyodo/via REUTERS
TOKYO (Reuters) - Donald Keene, a scholar of Japanese literature who became the first foreigner to receive the country’s highest cultural award, died of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital on Sunday.
Keene, 96, was known for introducing Japan’s culture in the United States and around the world through his scholarship and translations of classical and modern Japanese literature.
“It was all of sudden. I was shocked,” Akira Someya, the director and secretary-general of the Donald Keene Centre in the northern city of Kashiwazaki, told Reuters.
Keene, who befriended giants of Japanese literature such as Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, was awarded the Order of Culture in March 2008, the first non-Japanese to receive it, and became a Japanese citizen in 2012.
He graduated from university in 1942 and studied Japanese under the auspices of the U.S. Navy before working in military intelligence during World War Two, interrogating prisoners and translating documents.
Keene went on to a career as a scholar of Japanese literature and was credited with a key role in winning recognition for “The Tale of Genji”, an 11th-century masterpiece often called the world’s first novel, as world-class literature.
After more than half a century teaching at Columbia University, Keene moved to Tokyo full-time and took Japanese citizenship following the devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster in northeast Japan in 2011.
Prominent U.S.-born Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene, who introduced a number of talented Japanese writers to the world, died of cardiac arrest at a Tokyo hospital on Sunday. He was 96.
He obtained Japanese citizenship in 2012 after seeing the struggle of people hit by the 2011 quake-tsunami disaster that devastated the coastal Tohoku region on March 11, 2011.
Keene was a close friend of a number of Japanese novelists and scholars, including late novelist Yukio Mishima, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata and writer Junichiro Tanizaki.
Born in New York in 1922, he became fascinated with Japanese literature after he read an English translated version of the Tale of Genji, at Columbia University when he was 18.
The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century, is a love story of a son of an emperor and is generally considered the world’s first novel.
Keene’s interest in contemporary Japan grew while as he served as the Japanese-language interpreter for the U.S. Navy during World War II, interrogating a number of Japanese prisoners and translating diaries left by Japanese soldiers.
In 1953, he entered a graduate school of Kyoto University to study Japanese literature. He also taught at Columbia University in New York, frequently visiting Japan and translated a number of contemporary works of Japanese novelists into English, becoming close friends of them.
“I have been happiest when I thought I had discovered some work not fully appreciated by the Japanese themselves, and as an enthusiast, I have not tried to keep my discovery to myself but to ‘publish’ it,” Keene wrote in his autobiography titled “On Familiar Terms,” published in 1994.
“I am glad that I had the chance to contribute to a basic understanding in the West of Japanese literature, and of Japanese culture in general,” he wrote.
Keene was a professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Columbia University.
“Professor Keene played the leading role in the establishment of Japanese literary studies in the United States and beyond,” the university said in a statement posted at its Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture.
“Through his scholarship, translations, and edited anthologies, and through the work of students he trained and inspired, he did more than any other individual to further the study and appreciation of Japanese literature and culture around the world in the postwar era,” the university said.
Lifelong Scholar of the Japanese Becomes One of Them
By MARTIN FACKLERJanuary 04, 2013
TOKYO WITH his small frame hunched by 90 years of life, and a self-deprecating manner that can make him seem emotionally sensitive to the point of fragility, Donald Keene would have appeared an unlikely figure to become a source of inspiration for a wounded nation.
This year, when Donald Keene, 90, a New York native and retired professor, became a citizen of Japan, he gained what eludes many Westerners who live there: acceptance.
Yet that is exactly how the New York native and retired professor of literature from Columbia University is now seen here in his adopted homeland of Japan. Last year, as many foreign residents and even Japanese left the country for fear of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident that followed a deadly earthquake and tsunami, Dr. Keene purposefully went the opposite direction. He announced that he would apply for Japanese citizenship to show his support. The gesture won Dr. Keene, already a prominent figure in Japanese literary and intellectual circles, a status approaching that of folk hero, making him the subject of endless celebratory newspaper articles, television documentaries and even displays in museums. It has been a surprising culmination of an already notable career that saw this quiet man with a bashful smile rise from a junior naval officer who interrogated Japanese prisoners during World War II to a founder of Japanese studies in the United States. That career has made him a rare foreigner, awarded by the emperor one of Japan’s highest honors for his contributions to Japanese literature and befriended by Japan’s most celebrated novelists. Dr. Keene has spent a lifetime shuttling between Japan and the United States. Taking Japanese citizenship seems a gesture that has finally bestowed upon him the one thing that eludes many Westerners who make their home and even lifelong friendships here: acceptance. “When I first did it, I thought I’d get a flood of angry letters that ‘you are not of the Yamato race!’ but instead, they welcomed me,” said Dr. Keene, using an old name for Japan. “I think the Japanese can detect, without too much trouble, my love of Japan.” That affection seemed especially welcome to a nation that even before last year’s triple disaster had seemed to lose confidence as it fell into a long social and economic malaise. During an interview at a hotel coffee shop, Japanese passers-by did double takes of smiling recognition — testimony to how the elderly scholar has won far more fame in Japan than in the United States. A product of an older world before the Internet or television, Dr. Keene is known as a gracious conversationalist who charms listeners with stories from a lifetime devoted to Japan, which he first visited during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. BUT what is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth. When he legally became a Japanese citizen this year, major newspapers ran photographs of him holding up a handwritten poster of his name, Kinu Donarudo, in Chinese characters. To commemorate the event, a candy company in rural Niigata announced plans to build a museum that will include an exact replica of Dr. Keene’s personal library and study from his home in New York. He says he has been inundated by invitations to give public lectures, which are so popular that drawings are often held to see who can attend. “I have not met a Japanese since then who has not thanked me. Except the Ministry of Justice,” he added with his typically understated humor, referring to the government office in charge of immigration. Still, in a nation that welcomes few immigrants, Dr. Keene’s application was quickly approved. To become Japanese, Dr. Keene, who is unmarried, had to relinquish his American citizenship. His affection for Japan began in 1940 with a chance encounter at a bookstore near Times Square, where Dr. Keene, then an 18-year-old university student at Columbia, found a translation of the Tale of Genji, a 1,000-year-old novel from Japan. In the stories of court romances and intrigue, he found a refuge from the horrors of the world war then already unfolding in Europe and Asia. Dr. Keene later described it as his first encounter with Japan’s delicate sense of beauty, and its acceptance that life is fleeting and sad — a sentiment that would captivate him for the rest of his life. When the United States entered the war, he enlisted in the Navy, where he received Japanese-language training to become an interpreter and intelligence officer. He said he managed to build a rapport with the Japanese he interrogated, including one he said wrote him a letter after the war in which he referred to himself as Dr. Keene’s first P.O.W. LIKE several of his classmates, Dr. Keene used his language skills after the war to become a pioneer of academic studies of Japan in the United States. Among Americans, he is perhaps best known for translating and compiling a two-volume anthology in the early 1950s that has been used to introduce generations of university students to Japanese literature. When he started his career, he said Japanese literature was virtually unknown to Americans. “I think I brought Japanese literature into the Western world in a special way, by making it part of the literary canon at universities,” said Dr. Keene, who has written about 25 books on Japanese literature and history. In Japan, he said his career benefited from good timing as the nation entered a golden age of fiction writing after the war. He befriended some of Japan’s best known modern fiction writers, including Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe. Even Junichiro Tanizaki, an elderly novelist known for his cranky dislike of visitors, was fond of Dr. Keene, inviting him to his home. Dr. Keene says that was because he took Japanese culture seriously. “I was a freak who spoke Japanese and could talk about literature,” he joked. Japanese writers say that Dr. Keene’s appeal was more than that. They said he appeared at a time when Japan was starting to rediscover the value of its traditions after devastating defeat. Dr. Keene taught them that Japanese literature had a universal appeal, they said. “He gave us Japanese confidence in the significance of our literature,” said Takashi Tsujii, a novelist. Mr. Tsujii said that Dr. Keene was accepted by Japanese scholars because he has what Mr. Tsujii described as a warm, intuitive style of thinking that differs from what he called the coldly analytical approach of many Western academics. “Keene-san is already a Japanese in his feelings,” Mr. Tsujii said. Now, at the end of his career, Dr. Keene is again helping Japanese regain their confidence, this time by becoming one of them. Dr. Keene, who retired only last year from Columbia, says he plans to spend his final years in Japan as a gesture of gratitude toward the nation that finally made him one of its own. “You cannot stop being an American after 89 years,” Dr. Keene said, referring to the age at which he got Japanese citizenship. “But I have become a Japanese in many ways. Not pretentiously, but naturally.”
2012.4.17 Keene's love for Japan still growing after 70 years
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Donald Keene relaxes in the Kyu-Furukawa Gardens in Tokyo’s Kita Ward, near his home for 38 years. (Makoto Kaku)
Keene's love for Japan still growing after 70 years
April 17, 2012
By YOSHIKO SUZUKI/ Staff Writer
In 1940, the Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene came across an English translation of the acclaimed 11th-century Japanese novel “Genji Monogatari" (The Tale of Genji) in a bookstore in Times Square.
War had started in Europe the previous year after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, but Keene found himself transported to a different world inhabited by Japanese court nobles, apparently insulated from violence.
It was a life-changing experience. He glimpsed an entirely different face of a country he had thought of as nothing more than a dangerous military state. It triggered a search for the real identity of Japan and the Japanese that has occupied the rest of his life. “Not a day has passed without thinking about Japan (since I began studying Japanese at Columbia University at the age of 17),” Keene, 89, said in an interview after obtaining Japanese nationality in March.
Soon after, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Keene became an interpreter for the Navy, traveling to Attu in the Aleutian Islands and Okinawa. He met real Japanese for the first time and also read diaries and letters left by dead Japanese soldiers.
The writers’ last words revealed fear of death and longing for their loved ones back home. The hackneyed language of wartime propaganda was noticeably absent.
Much later in his life, those experiences helped him write “So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers,” which analyzes the diaries of Jun Takami (1907-1965), Futaro Yamada (1922-2001) and other authors.
He began studying Japanese literature after World War II and came to Japan in 1953 to attend Kyoto University. He taught at Columbia University from 1955 to April 2011, spending half of the year in New York and the other half in Tokyo.
In 1962, overcome by the loss of his mother, Keene received a telephone call from Japan telling he had been awarded the Kikuchi Kan Prize for achievements in Japanese culture. It was the first of many awards for his work on Japan.
Keene has written a number of key books on Japanese literature, including the mammoth “Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” The 18-volume series, which discusses works from the “Kojiki” (Record of Ancient Matters), Japan’s oldest extant chronicle, to the novels of Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), took 25 years to complete.
Over the past decade, he has followed up a biography of Emperor Meiji, “Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World,” with a series of lives seeking to shed new light on key Japanese figures.
“I find pleasure in discovering something new (in those people) that other people have not,” he said.
For example, the haiku poet Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902) repeatedly wrote in his essays that he was no good at English, but Keene said documents actually showed that Masaoka was fairly good at the language, getting the second-best English examination scores in his high school class.
The student who topped the class, who later became famous as the novelist Soseki Natsume (1867-1916), was “a genius,” according to Keene.
Keene made up his mind to acquire Japanese citizenship in January 2011, when he was thinking about what he wanted to do with the remainder of his life.
The Great East Japan Earthquake, which devastated northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, subsequently gave that personal decision a broader meaning, he said. Keene’s intellectual curiosity shows no sign of waning as he approaches 90. His next scholarly project is a biography of Hiraga Gennai (1728-1780), a well-known inventor and a student of Western science and technology.
“People have suggested that I take a break,” he said. “But you can learn as long as you live.”
Writer Ryotaro Shiba (1923-1996), who wrote a book with Keene, once wrote: “I have never met a person whose childhood image I can imagine so easily.”
Keene’s eyes shone throughout his interview with The Asahi Shimbun. It was easy to see Shiba’s point.
Excerpts from the interview, which was conducted in Japanese, follow:
* * * Question: What made you decide to obtain Japanese nationality? Answer: It started when I was hospitalized early last year. I was able to take my time and think about the rest of my life, and I realized that there is little time left for me. When I wondered about the last thing I wanted to do, it was to become Japanese. If it had not been for the Great East Japan Earthquake, my obtaining Japanese citizenship would only have made a few columns in the newspapers. But the earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear accident have given my personal wish a special meaning. I have received many letters. They said they were encouraged or impressed by my decision to leave the United States and settle in Japan at a time when many non-Japanese people fled Japan.
Q: You were not happy to hear of foreigners leaving Japan, were you? A: No. In my heart, I was already Japanese. I could not sleep after I watched black waves sweeping the coast. I was worried about what had become of Matsushima (the group of islands in Miyagi Prefecture) and the Chusonji temple (in Iwate Prefecture), both closely associated with the haiku poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Last year, I visited Chusonji and made a speech there. Some people in the audience had lost family members and had their homes washed away. As I spoke, I found my heart filled with empathy for the survivors. I thought I wanted to live with them. It was an awakening experience.
Q: Many Japanese have lost confidence in their country because the path to recovery remains unclear. We wonder why you have gone so far as to obtain Japanese citizenship. A: It is because my real home is here. I write only on things related to Japan. I have not written anything on the United States. In addition to many friends, I have many pleasures outside of work in Japan. Another important factor is that my disposition suits Japan. One example is the courtesy shown in interpersonal relationships. When you buy something, the sales clerk always says, “Thank you.” Americans call each other by their first names or will slap each other’s backs even when they meet for the first time. I am not really comfortable with expressing closeness in such a way. I cannot explain myself well, but I was born with a Japanese aspect. Granted, Japan has lost some of its strong self-confidence, but it has a role to play today that it did not during the height of the asset-inflated economic growth of the late 1980s, when it bought the Rockefeller Center.
Q: What role is that? A: There are many meanings to it. Japan’s reputation in the world shot up after its defeat in World War II. I stayed in Tokyo for about 10 days in December 1945. All that remained were storehouses and chimneys. It was commonly said that it would take more than 50 years for Japan to rebuild itself. I had a different opinion. I thought this country would come back fairly quickly. It may sound strange, but I was confident because of my experience at a barber’s. When I had my face shaved, I did not have the slightest impression that Japan had been at war. If the woman at the barber had harbored ill feelings, she would have been able to slash my throat with her razor. I did not have to worry. I felt that the war had already become a thing of the past in Japan.
Q: Wasn’t that because Japanese are forgetful? A: That experience showed that there are many possibilities in one people. During the war, I was with the Navy and questioned captured Japanese soldiers. I had no resentment toward them. I felt close to them. In the past, Japanese people did incredibly bad things, but it was not that the entire nation was belligerent. There were people who produced beautiful works of art. The experience of war may have changed the Japanese, but the economic miracle that followed changed my view on Japan in every respect. Before the war, it was generally believed that Japanese culture was nothing but an emulation of China’s. Today, no one thinks that. Japan has a wonderful, unique culture. Japanese have earned respect again for continuing to act calmly after experiencing a disaster on the scale of the Great East Japan Earthquake. I do not have the slightest doubt about Japan getting back on its feet.
Q: You have written biographies of people who lived during times of change, such as Emperor Meiji (1852-1912) and the painter Kazan Watanabe (1793-1841). What do you see in them? A: It is the Japanese flexibility to digest new things and make them their own immediately. Emperor Meiji ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne when he was about 15 years old. In less than six months, he became the first emperor to meet delegates from Western countries. I was surprised to learn how he transformed himself. He ate Western dishes and grew a beard and a mustache, developing into an emperor with perfect composure. I specialize in literature and I am most interested in people. I want to know much more about what Japanese people thought in turbulent times, what they feared and how they changed. That is because I have changed, too, albeit on a different scale. Before I went to college, the only thing I really knew about Japan was that it was opened by Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival. Now, I am using my soul for Japan. It has been a considerable change.
By YOSHIKO SUZUKI/ Staff Writer
Famed Japanologist Keene gets museum in Kashiwazaki
December 05, 2011
By KOJI SHIMIZU / Staff Writer
KASHIWAZAKI, Niigata Prefecture--Along with permanently moving to Japan, renowned Japanese literature researcher Donald Keene has brought the living room and study of his New York home with him, donating it to a museum here as the centerpiece of an exhibit on his work. Keene, 89, visited Kashiwazaki on Dec. 3 to attend a ceremony to donate his vast collection of books and furniture, among other items, to the museum. The 360-square-meter museum, the brainchild of Bourbon Corp., a leading confectionery based in Kashiwazaki, is scheduled to open in autumn 2013. It will be housed on the second floor of the company's training center. The museum will display Keene's donation of about 1,700 books, 300 records and CDs, and 100 pieces of furniture, apart from the living room and study, his base for more than 30 years to bring his study of Japanese literary works to the world. Keene has been living in Tokyo's Kita Ward since September. He decided to acquire Japanese nationality and live in Japan for the rest of his life after the country was hit hard by the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake. In the ceremony on Dec. 3, Keene said he believes the devastated Tohoku region will experience a miracle similar to the one that occurred in Tokyo, which was rebuilt into one of the world's largest cities after it was firebombed into charred rubble during World War II. Keene, a professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York, is known for introducing Japanese literature to the world over the past six decades. Ties between the Japanologist and Kashiwazaki go back to 2007, when Keene proposed an endeavor to revive an ancient puppet play accompanied by the samisen set in the city. Local artists gave the puppet play performance in June 2009, for the first time in 300 years. Bourbon said that Keene's proposal gave hope to the city's residents, who were still reeling from the devastating Niigata Chuetsu-oki Earthquake in 2007.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Donald Keene conducts a lecture last month at Columbia University. (Mari Sakamoto)
NEW YORK--The renowned Japanese literature expert Donald Keene, professor emeritus at Columbia University, is teaching for the last time this spring term. The 88-year-old Keene will step down in late April, bringing to an end a teaching career at Columbia that began in 1955. After concluding his teaching duties, Keene plans to move permanently to Tokyo and fulfill his dream of writing full time. Keene was very concerned following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11. He had made many visits to Chusonji temple in Hiraizumi, Iwate Prefecture, and Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, two of the hardest-hit prefectures in the Tohoku region. "I have had special feelings toward the Tohoku region since I first traveled along the 'Oku no hosomichi' 56 years ago," Keene said. "I lectured for about six months at Tohoku University, and I am acquainted with the priests at Chusonji temple. I am very worried." Keene referred to the classic work of literature written by the haiku master Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), which he translated into English under the title, "The Narrow Road to Oku." While there is high scientific interest now in the United States on how to prevent earthquakes and tsunami, Keene is skeptical about the Western-style conviction in science that believes humans can control natural disasters. "I am a person who has been heavily influenced by Japanese culture," Keene said. "I am moved by the sense of resignation that feels the power held by nature cannot be resisted." In his final term at Columbia, Keene has been lecturing on such Noh songs as "Funabenkei" and "Yuya." His initial encounter with Japanese literature was purely by accident. Having skipped grades in school, Keene entered Columbia University when he was 16. One day, he happened to sit next to a Chinese-American student and started learning kanji from him. Keene was deeply struck by the beauty of kanji. He was also fascinated by the English translation of "The Tale of Genji" that he read when he was 18, and he volunteered to enter the U.S. Navy's Japanese language school. He was surprised to hear about Japanese soldiers fighting to the death at Attu in the Aleutian chain. During the Battle of Okinawa, he searched for Japanese hiding in caves. His days in Qingdao, China, were spent interrogating Japanese prisoners of war. "I saw the dark side of humans," Keene said. "There were Japanese POWs who betrayed their fellow soldiers, and there were U.S. soldiers who duped Japanese POWs into giving up their artwork possessions." Becoming fed up with the interrogations, Keene asked for a discharge. He returned to New York, but he could not find an occupation that interested him. "I resumed my study of Japanese literature because I felt the Japanese language best suited my constitution," he said. Over the course of 70 years of research, he has written more than 40 books. When asked to name his personal top three among all the books he has published, Keene gave the Japanese titles for works that he also wrote in English, a multivolume "History of Japanese Literature" as well as books titled in English as "Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion" and "So Lovely A Country Will Never Perish." "Looking back, what I feel about my life is that it is not me who chose Japan, but Japan who chose me," Keene said. "After retiring from teaching, I will move to Japan and apply for Japanese citizenship. While immersing myself in the Japanese language, I want to devote my time to reading and writing." His first project is to complete a biography of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a haiku poet of the Meiji Era (1868-1912).
Donald Keene’s Latest Japanese Adventure
Scholar Donald Keene, who has dedicated his life to studying Japanese literature, culture and customs, revealed last week that he's following another Japanese tradition: adult adoption.
By Yuko Takeo
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Donald Keene arriving for his permanent relocation to Japan in 2011
Associated Press
Donald Keene, one of the world’s best-known Japanologists, has dedicated his life to studying Japanese literature, culture and customs. Last week, he revealed he’s following another Japanese tradition: adult adoption. Mr. Keene, 90 years old, told an audience in northern Japan that in March he adopted his long-time friend Seiki Uehara, a 62-year-old performer of the shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument. “It felt like the natural course of things,” the former Mr. Uehara—now Seiki Keene—told JRT on Wednesday. The adoption grew out of a friendship that started in 2006, and eventually led to Mr. Uehara’s moving into Mr. Keene’s Tokyo home and helping the older man out with things like keeping his large collection of books organized. Adult adoption is a fairly common practice in Japan, with around a third of all adopted individuals being adults, according to a survey carried out by the Ministry of Justice in 2010, ahead of stricter checks for accepting adoption applications. In 2011, there were 81,600 cases of adoption in Japan. In many cases, adult men are adopted into families in order to carry on the family name—and sometimes business—when there are no male descendants. Mr. Keene, who’s known for books and scholarship introducing Japanese literature to the West—as well as his friendships with many of the Japanese literary giants of the postwar period, has no children or other family. The pair originally came together over a keen interest in kojyoruri, an ancient form of Japanese musical performance. Mr. Uehara had performed in a similar style—jyoruri—for 25 years, as a shamisen player at the Bunraku-za puppet theater, under the stage name of “Tsurusawa Asazo V.” He retired in 1997 and returned to his home prefecture in northern Japan to help his family’s brewery business, but remained passionately interested in the genre. Mr. Keene is known as a leading expert on kojyoruri. In November 2006, Mr. Uehara approached the older man backstage, after a Tokyo talk, to ask whether Mr. Keene would be his mentor on the subject. Mr. Uehara told Mr. Keene he “had no one to seek guidance from,” the younger man told JRT. At the time, Mr. Keene was still teaching at Columbia University, where he’d been for more than half a century, and spending time in the U.S. as well as Japan. But following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Mr. Keene decided to move permanently to Japan and become a Japanese citizen. That’s when he brought up to Mr. Uehara the idea of adoption. “When he’d first mentioned adoption, I thought he was joking,” the junior Mr. Keene says. “But eventually I understood that he was being serious.” Now the younger man helps his adoptive father organize his busy schedule from their apartment in Tokyo, while holding shamisen performances of his own. The older Mr. Keene gained Japanese citizenship in 2012. The pair say their cross-cultural partnership has been smooth so far. The former Mr. Uehara says his family was delighted at the news of his adoption, and that nobody close to Mr. Keene raised objections either. And what does the younger Keene think of his new surname? “I like it a lot,” he told JRT. “I’ve finally managed to get used to it.”
有緣 2016.3.15 在台大圖書館看到 Passionate Journey (A Novel in 165 Woodcuts,1919, Introduction by Thomas Mann) By Frans Masereel , City Lights Books, San Francisco. 郭松棻、李瑜教授贈，2015.09.09
Lost ducks, beatniks, and sex in the storeroom: we kick off a new series exploring iconic bookstores around the world with one of America’s most famous, City Lights Bookstore
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture.Wikipedia
Address: 4519, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
......梅勒於1939年進哈佛大學，不久便成為校刊編輯，曾給他父母寫信，要求替他支付40元會費。畢業後從軍，隨後根據他的戰場經驗寫出一部《裸者與死者》，立時成名。1959年，他把一些零碎文章（多在雜誌發表）結集為一部《自我宣傳》 （ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF），內容潑辣諷刺，甚有趣味，被人稱揚為該年最佳新聞學著作。從此以後，他一共出書30餘種，得過兩次普立策文學獎，一是1968年的《夜間進軍》 （ARMIES OF THE NIGHT），內容有關反越戰大遊行；一是有關一位死囚的《劊子手之歌》 （THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG）。他的書信對像都是英美文壇名人......
A genuine literary event—an illuminating collection of correspondence from one of the most acclaimed American writers of all time
Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific—or more exposed—than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published—most for the first time—in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and, it seems, several lifetimes. Together they form a stunning autobiographical portrait of one of the most original, provocative, and outspoken public intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Compiled by Mailer's authorized biographer, J. Michael Lennon, and organized by decade,Selected Letters of Norman Mailerfeatures the most fascinating of Mailer's missives from 1940 to 2007—letters to his family and friends, to fans and fellow writers (including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth), to political figures from Henry Kissinger to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and to such cultural icons as John Lennon, Marlon Brando, and even Monica Lewinsky.
Here is Mailer the precocious Harvard undergraduate, writing home to his parents for the first time and worrying that his acceptances by literary magazines were “all happening too easy.” Here, too, is Mailer the soldier, confronting the violence of war in the Pacific, which would become the subject of his masterly debut novel, The Naked and the Dead: “[I'm] amazed how casually it fits into . . . daily life, how very unhorrible it all is.” Mailer the international celebrity pledges to William Styron, “I'm going to write every day, and like Lot's Wife I'm consigning myself to a pillar of salt if I dare to look back,” while the 1980s Mailer agonizes over the fallout from his ill-fated friendship with Jack Henry Abbott, the murderer who became his literary protégé. (“The continuation of our relationship was depressing for both of us,” he confesses to Joyce Carol Oates.) At last, he finds domestic—and erotic—bliss in the arms of his sixth wife, Norris Church (“We bounce into each other like sunlight”).
Whether he is reflecting on the Kennedy assassination, assessing the merits of authors from Fitzgerald to Proust, or threatening to pummel William Styron, the brilliant, pugnacious Norman Mailer comes alive again in these letters. The myriad faces of this artist and activist, lover and fighter, public figure and private man, are laid bare in this collection as never before.
Praise for Selected Letters of Norman Mailer “The shards and winks at Mailer's own past that are scattered throughout the letters . . . are so tantalizing. They glitter throughout like unrefined jewels that Mailer took to the grave.”—The New Yorker
“Reading these letters feels like eavesdropping on possibility itself. . . . By the end of the first section of letters . . . it's impossible not to think that Mailer's already done so much, even thought you know just how much is left to come.”—Esquire
“Indispensable . . . a subtle document of an unsubtle man's wit and erudition, even (or especially) when it's wielded as a weapon.”—New York
“[Selected Letters of Norman Mailer has] umpteen pleasures to pluck out and roll between your teeth, like seeds from a pomegranate.”—The New York Times
Norman Mailer was a bigger-than-life personality with a pugnacious, chip-on-the-shoulder ego, as well as all the narcissism that's often found in talented, self-driven artists, and much more. I'm sure ...Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Capybara_99 - www.librarything.com
I am writing this before I make my way through the whole book, because it is a big healthy selection of letters that I intend to dip into and out of for a long while, because the letters are rich and ...Read full review
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner s Song and is the only person to date to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Norman Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
J. Michael Lennon is Norman Mailer s archivist and authorized biographer, and Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University, in Pennsylvania. In addition to being chair of the editorial board of The Mailer Review, he has written or edited several books about and with Mailer, including Norman Mailer: A Double Life, Norman Mailer: Works and Days, and On God: An Uncommon Conversation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and New York, among others. He lives in Westport, Massachusetts.
Joan Mitchell, Hannelore Eckert, Cristina Agnini, Lisa Krug, Astrid Myers
Children
Peter, Tansey, Beckett, Chantal
Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922 – February 21, 2012) was the owner of the publishing house Grove Press, and publisher and editor-in-chief of the magazine Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer. The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment.
Rosset was born and raised in Chicago to a Jewish father, Barnet Rosset, and an Irish Catholic mother, Mary (née Tansey).[1][2][3] He attended the progressive Francis Parker School,[4] where he was best friends with renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Rosset also said that Robert Morss Lovett, the grandfather of Rosset's high school sweetheart, and professor of English at the University of Chicago had been a great influence on him.[4]
Rosset attended Swarthmore College for one year and then enlisted in the army in 1942. It was at Swarthmore that Rosset discovered the work of Henry Miller.
During World War II, he served in the Army Signal Corps as an officer in a photographic company stationed in Kunming, China.[4] In 2002, Rosset exhibited a collection of his War Photographs from his time in China in a New York Gallery. The exhibit included graphic photos of wounded and dead Chiang Kai-shek soldiers.[4]...
Interviewed by Tin House publisher Win McCormack, Rosset talked about publishing Beckett:
I had actually read a little bit of Beckett in transition Magazine and a couple of other places. I was going to the New School. My New School life and the beginnings of Grove crossed over. At the New School, I had professors like Wallace Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz and others, who were very, very important to me. I was doing a great deal of reading and writing papers for them, and one day I read in The New York Times about a play called Waiting for Godot that was going on in Paris. It was a small clip, but it made me very interested. I got hold of it and read it in the French edition. It had something to say to me. Oddly enough, it had a sense of desolation, like Miller, though in its language, its lack of verbiage, it was the opposite of Miller. Still, the sense of a very contemporary lost soul was compelling. I got Wallace Fowlie to read it. His specialty was French literature. His judgment meant a lot to me even though he was so different from me. He was a convert to Catholicism, he was gay, and incredibly intelligent. He read the play and told me that he thought - and this before anybody had really heard about it much - that it would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century. And Sylvia Beach got involved in it somehow. She was a friend and admirer of Beckett. Waiting for Godot just hit something in me. I got what Beckett writing was available and published it. He flew into the web and got trapped. He had been turned down by Simon and Schuster, I found out, much earlier, on an earlier novel.[6]
In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Rosset spoke about the Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn being taken to court for obscenity charges:
We had a case in New York and, of course, he [Miller] wouldn't go to the court. I had lunch with him at a restaurant on sixth Avenue right near here called Alfred's with our lawyer and three or four other people, and then we had to go to court. But he wouldn't go. He'd been summonsed so he was breaking the law by not going. So we went into court, and the District Attorney questioned me and said, "You see that we have a jury here of men and women with children who go to school right near where that book is on sale, near the subway stop. What'd you think they feel to have their children reading this book?" So I took out the book and started reading and the jury started laughing and they thought it was wonderful. I said to them, "If your children got this book and read the whole book you ought to congratulate them." And they loved it, and they refused to convict me of anything. That was a great pleasure. Miller couldn't leave this country until the decision was in, verified and so forth. For at least a year or two years, he couldn't go. It was so funny because they accused me of soliciting him to write the book—write Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn—in Brooklyn, and at that point I was only 8 years old! Miller was a little older than me. It was a specific charge against me that was absurd. I was a pimp supposedly. They didn't even bother to see how ridiculous their charge would look.[7]
The online Evergreen Review features Beat classics as well as debuts of contemporary writers.[8] In 2007, Rosset married Astrid Myers, then-managing editor of the online Evergreen Review. In 2008, Rosset completed writing his autobiography (now published as Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship.[9] He died in 2012 after a double heart valve replacement.[10]
Emma Goldman was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kovno, Russian Empire to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Wikipedia
Clare Carlisle surveys the ‘slippery, often baffling’ writings of a philosopher ‘remarkably sensitive to the perversity, paradoxes and irony of the human condition’
Clare Carlisle surveys the ‘slippery, often baffling’ writings of a philosopher ‘remarkably sensitive to the perversity, paradoxes and irony of the human condition’
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) thought, wrote and lived as both a philosopher and a spiritual seeker. His century saw the growth of modern universities, and an increasing professionalization of intellectual labour. During the 1830s Kierkegaard was a theology student at the University of Copenhagen, where he received a broad education, discovering Romanticism and German Idealism as well as studying Christian theology and biblical exegesis. Yet he criticized academic philosophy as an abstract, overly rationalistic approach to the deep questions that arise from the human condition. In 1835, he wrote in his journal, “I still accept an imperative of knowledge, through which men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what I need to live, a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge”. Displaying the profound influence of Socrates on his intellectual formation, he added that “a man must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else”. His first substantial work, completed in 1840, was his graduate dissertation On the Concept of Irony With Continual Reference to Socrates, and Socrates remained Kierkegaard’s chief philosophical inspiration until his death in Copenhagen’s Royal Hospital at the age of forty-two.
All philosophers ask questions, but Socrates’ questions were peculiar, designed to produce confusion rather than answers. While everyone else in ancient Athens was, as Kierkegaard put it, “fully assured of their humanity, sure that they knew what it is to be a human being”, Socrates devoted himself to the question, What does it mean to be human? From this question flowed many others: What is justice?What is courage? Where does our knowledge come from? Cultured Athenians had ready answers to these questions, but Socrates’ inquiries led in a new direction, away from what the world recognized as wisdom, and towards a higher truth. Kierkegaard also found a critique of worldly wisdom in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “I did not come with lofty words or human wisdom (sophia) as I proclaimed to you the mystery of God”, Paul wrote to these Greeks: “I came to you in weakness and much fear and trembling”. Paul urged the Christians in first-century Corinth – a city where, as in ancient Athens, many philosophers and rhetoricians peddled their pedagogic wares – to rest their faith “not on human wisdom but on the power of God”.
Inspired by these examples, Kierkegaard interrogated the assumptions of his own cultured contemporaries in nineteenth-century Denmark. They too appeared “fully assured of their humanity”, and Kierkegaard perceived that they were also, as citizens of a Lutheran nation and members of the Danish State Church, too secure in their Christian identity. In order to challenge the spiritual complacency of his age, Kierkegaard forged a new philosophical style – while other thinkers deduced propositions and built systems, he created satirical, elusive, undogmatic, lyrical, soul-searching, unsystematic works which eventually earned him a reputation as the “father of existentialism”. These works influenced some of the most significant philosophers of the last century, including Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Ludwig Wittgenstein. During Kierkegaard’s lifetime, however, the feminist writer Fredrica Bremer aptly described him as a “philosopher of the heart”. His extraordinary writing was rooted in the urgent inward drama of being human, eschewing the more objective, systematic efforts to understand the natural world and global history that characterized nineteenth-century philosophy and science.
Kierkegaard’s first book, Either/Or (1843) was – and probably still is – best-known for its provocative “Seducer’s Diary”. This fictional work chronicles the pursuit of a young woman, Cordelia, through the streets and lanes of Copenhagen; the Seducer lures Cordelia into a weird psychological courtship, then ambiguously ends the affair, leaving her heartborken. “I am intoxicated by the thought that she is in my power . . . now she is going to learn what a powerful force love is”, the character declares gleefully. Readers were scandalized by his immorality, yet the book was a bestseller and was critically acclaimed as well as denounced. Less notoriously, the book ends with a rousing sermon that distils the spirit of Kierkegaardian philosophy:
Perhaps my voice does not have enough power and intensity; perhaps it cannot penetrate into your innermost thought – Oh, but ask yourself, ask yourself with the solemn uncertainty with which you would turn to someone who you knew could determine your life’s happiness with a single word, ask yourself even more earnestly – because in very truth it is a matter of salvation. Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it – and yet, only with the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you – for only the truth that edifies you is true for you.
This idea of edification – meaning spiritual empowerment, inward deepening, “strengthening in the inner being” – was central to Kierkegaard’s authorship. He learned from Romantic authors to experiment with a variety of literary genres in order to edify his readers. At the same time, he saw it as his peculiar, Socratic task to make life, and especially spiritual life, more difficult for his fellow-Christians. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) Kierkegaard described a philosopher in his early thirties – a figure very much like himself – sitting in the Frederiksberg Gardens, smoking a cigar and meditating on his place in the world:
You are getting on, I said to myself, and becoming an old man without being anything . . . Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to make life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing.
He reflected that spiritual life was also being made easier by philosophical systems that elucidated the Christian faith, and demonstrated its moral value to society. “And what are you doing?” he asked himself –
Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community.
Kierkegaard wrote these words not long after he was cruelly caricatured in several issues of Copenhagen’s satirical weekly The Corsair. For several weeks in 1846, Peter Klaestrup’s cartoons mocked Kierkegaard’s precious, imperious attitude to the reading public while exaggerating his thin legs and hunched back; more darkly, some images referenced his failed engagement to Regine Olsen several years earlier, presenting him as at once exploitative and unmanly. Even Kierkegaard’s most devoted readers find that his commitment to deepening the difficulty of being human produced a slippery, often baffling series of writings, stubbornly resistant to summary and paraphrase, since so much is compressed between their lines. Within many of these texts, different narrative voices perform conflicts between life-views, with no clear resolution; they exhibit errors and misunderstandings as often as they proclaim truths. For Kierkegaard, the work of philosophy was not a swift trade in ready-to-wear ideas, but the production of deep spiritual effects that would penetrate his readers’ hearts, and change them.
His career as a philosopher was inseparable from his own change of heart: when he ended his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, Regine was devastated and Kierkegaard’s reputation was in tatters. “It was an insulting break, which not only called forth curiosity and gossip but also absolutely required that every decent person take the side of the injured party . . . here at home harsh judgements were unanimously voiced against him. Disapproval, anger, and shame were as strong among those closest to him as anywhere”, one of his nephews later recalled. The engagement was a fork in Kierkegaard’s path through life; as he hinted in his weird semi-autobiographical philosophical novella Repetition (1843), breaking up with Regine made him into an author. Instead of becoming a family man and a professional theologian or pastor in the Danish State Church – in short, an upstanding bourgeois citizen – he travelled to Berlin to pursue his philosophical studies, and began to write Either/Or.
This rambling, witty, extraordinarily sophisticated work drew directly on Kierkegaard’s personal experience to explore three different attitudes to life and love: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Put very simply, the aesthetic Seducer, who pursues his own pleasure, loves only himself; the ethical person, represented by a married judge, loves another human being, namely his wife; the religious person loves God, who is the ground of all his human relationships. Through these three characters Kierkegaard probed the philosophical and religious significance of marriage, the issue that had been the turning-point in his own life. At the same time, Either/Or was a polemical book. It undermined the fashionable Hegelian ideas of Kierkegaard’s rival Hans Lassen Martensen, a successful professor of theology, and also subtly criticized the homely ethical Christianity taught by Bishop Mynster, the head of the Danish Church.
In the wake of Kierkegaard’s broken engagement, Either/Or asked whether there can be a higher calling that justifies causing suffering to others and breaking with ethical norms. In other words, is there any claim on human beings beyond the moral law? (Kant and Hegel had both offered interpretations of Christianity based on the principle that there is not, though they had different accounts of morality.) In Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard pursued this question further by means of an experimental “dialectical lyric” on the biblical story of Abraham’s journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son Isaac. From this famous work – now a staple of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum – emerged an account of religious faith which emphasized its grave ethical stakes and high personal cost. Living in relation to God, argued Kierkegaard, risks “the distress, the anxiety” of being misunderstood and shunned by other people. “Knights of faith” like Abraham (and also Mary, the mother of Jesus) were not heroes in any worldly sense, though they came to be viewed as exemplars by later generations, once history had proved their sacrifices worthwhile.
Yet Kierkegaard also criticized the other-worldly, ascetic, life-denying form of religion, represented most visibly in the renunciations of monks and hermits, which Friedrich Nietzsche would excoriate a few decades later. Fear and Trembling depicts a “knight of faith” who performs a miraculous “double movement”: he renounces the world and then returns to it, receiving it back as a gift from God. This movement echoes both Abraham’s journey up and down Mount Moriah, and the Socratic philosopher’s ascent from and return to the dark cave of ordinary social life. Kierkegaard’s preferred spiritual archetype, however, is a ballet dancer, who leaps up away from the Earth (towards God) then descends just as gracefully, finding her balance in the world. “To be able to fall down in such a way that the same moment it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk – that only the knight of faith can do”, he wrote in Fear and Trembling.
Monasticism and marriage are two thematic poles in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religious life – two imaginative possibilities, neither of which he could live out himself. Denmark’s monasteries were dissolved following the Reformation; though Kierkegaard’s reasons for refusing to marry Regine remain ambiguous, it seems clear that the difficulty lay with marriage itself, rather than Regine, whom Kierkegaard continued to love, albeit in a rather idiosyncratic manner. As an historical figure, Kierkegaard is an interesting counterpoint to Martin Luther, who, unusually, was both a monk and a married man (though not at the same time). Indeed, one of the most significant consequences of Luther’s Reformation was a shift from monasticism to marriage as the primary model of Christian life, exemplified by Luther’s own life-choices. Kierkegaard obsessively explored both these possibilities through his writing: several of his works are attributed to pseudonyms who are monks or hermits, while his cast of characters includes faithful husbands who reflect on their marriages, and fiancés who break their engagements. While he also investigated traditional metaphysical topics, such as time, change and personal identity, it is striking that he was most gripped by questions about how to live in the world – summed up, for him, in the dilemma between marriage and monasticism. We now call these “existential questions”; we probably owe the very concepts of an existential question, and an existential crisis, to Kierkegaard, although existentialism did not emerge as a recognizable philosophical movement until the mid-twentieth century.
In 1844 Kierkegaard turned away from the theme of romantic love to write two ground-breaking theological works: Philosophical Fragmentsand The Concept of Anxiety. Unlike his earlier published books, these are academic treatises. Philosophical Fragments argues that the Church’s teaching that the eternal God became incarnate in the historical Jesus is an “absolute paradox”, which human reason cannot penetrate. Faced with this doctrine, our rational minds must either reject it, or surrender before it. Here again, Kierkegaard offered a philosophical polemic against his contemporaries who sought to rationalize Christian faith, either by marshalling historical evidence in support of the Incarnation, or by showing that it made logical sense. In the Concept of Anxiety his analysis is more recognizably “existential”, though the subject of this treatise is the doctrine of original sin. Contrary to the orthodox position, taught by Augustine, that human beings inherit sinfulness biologically from Adam, who himself fell into sin through his free choice to disobey God, Kierkegaard suggested that every sin, like Adam’s first sin, arises in freedom. Displaying acute psychological insight, he argued that anxiety is a ubiquitous response to our consciousness of our own freedom – and that sin constantly re-emerges in our attempts to flee from this anxiety.
Kierkegaard returned to the story of his broken engagement in the voluminous Stages on Life’s Way (1845), which reprised the complex literary strategies as well as the subject-matter of Either/Or. He was a compulsive writer, though he agonized about publishing his works; more large books quickly followed, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Works of Love (1847), and Christian Discourses(1848). Among the most significant in its lasting impact is The Sickness Unto Death (1849), a philosophical diagnostic manual for lost souls. This book explores in detail the spiritual condition of despair, defined as losing oneself through turning away from God. Here Kierkegaard argued that human beings are not just bodies and minds, but spiritual beings, related to a higher power – yet we all face the task of becoming ourselves. “Becoming oneself” is a slippery and perhaps paradoxical idea: for Kierkegaard, it means consciously living out one’s dependence on God; becoming aware of this reality instead of denying it, and therefore being true to it:
There is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as a self – or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware in the deepest sense that there is a God and that he, he himself, exists before this God – an infinite benefaction that is never to be gained except through despair.
Most people, Kierkegaard observed, lose themselves in this world without even realizing it, and without anyone else noticing. Indeed, this spiritual carelessness can appear to be the ease of a happy, successful life:
Just by losing himself in this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, for making a great success in the world. Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinite movements; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin. He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.
According to Kierkegaard, despair is a blessing, for it is the sign of a human being’s connection to God, his highest possibility. Yet it is also a curse, for the depth of the human soul is measured by the intensity of its suffering. This ambivalent analysis is typical of Kierkegaard’s philosophical gestalt: he was remarkably sensitive to the perversity, paradoxes and irony of the human condition.
All these ideas – about anxiety and despair, the Incarnation and original sin, faith and ethics – deeply influenced philosophy and theology through the twentieth century, and they continue to be debated today. Perhaps even more significant, however, is Kierkegaard’s distinctive philosophical style, reflecting the way his intellectual work drew directly from his personal experience. We glimpse the extraordinary power of his thinking in a heartfelt letter from an unknown reader, who wrote to him in 1851 after hearing him deliver a sermon in the Citadel Church by Copenhagen’s harbour – one of a handful of occasions on which he preached in a church. “From the very outset when you began to publish your pseudonymous works”, this woman wrote:
I have pricked up my ears and listened lest I should miss any sound, even the faintest, of these magnificent harmonies, for everything resounded in my heart. This was what needed to be said – here I found answers to all my questions; nothing was omitted of that which interested me most profoundly . . . . I doubt that there is a single string in the human heart that you do not know how to pluck, any recess that you have not penetrated . . . I am never lonely, even when I am by myself for long periods of time, provided only that I have the company of these books, for they are, of all books, those that most closely resemble the company of a living person.
1979年，中共首度准許美國媒體在北京成立分社，《紐約時報》派包德甫（Fox Butterfield）、《時代》周刊則派白禮博（Richard Bernstein）出任特派員。包德甫後來寫了一本《苦海餘生》，賣得非常好，發了一筆財。調回國內後，曾任波士頓分社主任，有次報導強暴案透露受害者身分，備受抨擊，以及其他紕漏，從此消聲匿跡。白禮博在1982年出版《來自地心》，談他在中國所見所聞，銷路則不如《苦海餘生》。(改行) CHINA: ALIVE IN THE BITTER SEA by Fox Butterfield Times Books; 468 pages; $19.95 At a 1979 White House banquet honoring China's Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Shirley MacLaine enthusiastically recalled a trip to the ...
RICHARD BERNSTEIN著 From the Center of the Earth: The Search for the Truth About China (1982)
"Mao’s own sincerity is deeply questionable. In Yenan after his negotiation with Chiang ended, Mao oversaw the CCP’s propaganda, which advertised the CCP as the party of peace, and he continued to move his troops as fast as possible into Manchuria. The Eighth Route Army had blocked all the ports except for Qinwangdao. In mid-November, Lin Biao occupied Changchun, one of the cities that the Soviets had designated as an airlift destination for government forces. The Soviets, always eager, they said, not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, did nothing to stop this from happening." -- Richard Bernstein, China 1945
In China 1945, Richard Bernstein tells the incredible story of the sea change that took place during that year—brilliantly analyzing its far-reaching components and colorful characters, from diplomats John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service to Time journalist, Henry Luce; in addition to Mao and his intractable counterpart, Chiang Kai-shek, and the indispensable Zhou Enlai. A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines American power coming face-to-face with a formidable Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations. References
After allowing stirrings of protest, the government turns tough The charges ring disturbingly of the past: "Brazenly opposing the party's leadership, deviating from the orbit of socialism, desiring and envying the decadent, bourgeois way of life in the West." These and similar superheated phrases appearing in the Chinese press these days recall the years when ...
Hu seems to displace Hua, as the Gang of Four trial ends The case of the missing Chairman seemed all but solved by default last week after a New Year's tea party in Peking's Great Hall of the People. The reception, televised to the Chinese people, was held by the Communist Party's Central Committee and ...
After many delays, the "evildoers "finally enter the dock The long parade of limousines and buses knifed through Peking's wintry smog just before 3 p.m. As police and soldiers kept away curious bystanders, sober-faced men and women emerged from the cars, strode through the gates of the public security compound at No. 1 Zhengyi (Justice) ...
Mao's widow defiantly refuses to cooperate and confess She stood at the witness stand, leaning with studied casualness against the wooden railing, and fixed her partly contemptuous, partly resigned gaze on the panel of judges in front of her. The courtroom was silent. Then, with klieg lights glaring, onetime Actress Jiang Qing gave the most ...
THE EXECUTION OF MAYOR YIN AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION by Chen Jo-hsi; Indiana University Press; 220 pages; $8.95 One of the losses of recent history is that during the long reign of Mao Tse-tung China produced almost no literature worthy of its tradition. Good living writers were silenced. Bookstores carried ...
CHINESE SHADOWS by Simon Leys Viking; 220 pages; $10 An old Chinese tale tells about a tyrannical prime minister of the 3rd century B.C. who assembled his courtier to test their loyalty. He had a deer brough before them and proclaimed it a horse. Those who imprudently disagreed paid the price of calling a horse ...
A REVOLUTION IS NOT A DINNER PARTY: A FEAST OF IMAGES OF THE MAOIST TRANSFORMATION OF CHINA by RICHARD H. SOLOMON 199 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday. $9.95. This ingenious attempt to explain the mysteries of Chinese politics to Western readers has two unusual features. First, Richard Solomon, a China analyst with the National Security Council, and ...
COURTS OF TERROR: SOVIET CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND JEWISH EMIGRATION by TELFORD TAYLOR 187 pages. Knopf. $6.95. $1.95 paperback. Alexander Feldman from Kiev was sentenced to 3½ years in a Soviet labor camp. The charge: knocking a cake out of a woman's hands and addressing her obscenely. Pinkhas Pinkhasov, a carpenter from Derbent, received a term ...
THE WIND WILL NOT SUBSIDE: YEARS IN REVOLUTIONARY CHINA, 1964-1969 by DAVID MILTON and NANCY DALL MILTON 397 pages. Pantheon. $1 5. "I am alone with the masses, waiting," confided Mao Tse-tung to Andre Malraux in 1965. The "Great Helmsman" did not wait long. Within months he had launched the century's most idiosyncratic social upheaval: ...
THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY: Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity by JOHN MURRAY CUDDIHY 272 pages. Basic Books. $11.95. John Murray Cuddihy calls this jag ged meditation a "midrash." The metaphor is apt, for like a Talmudic exegesis, the book is a learned commentary on "sacred" texts, in this case those of the ...
CHINA PERCEIVED: IMAGES AND POLICIES IN CHINESE-AMERICAN RELATIONS by JOHN K. FAIRBANK 245 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $7.95. Nobody in the West has done more to clear up the mystery of China than John K. Fairbank, professor of Chinese history at Harvard. His latest book, a collection of 17 essays written between 1946 and 1974, ...
THE CHINA HANDS: AMERICA'S FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS AND WHAT BEFELL THEM by EJ. KAHN JR. 337 pages. Viking. $12.95. Americans are once again half in love with China. Senators now vie for invitations to Peking. Tourism to the People's Republic has gone from privilege to fad. Chinoiserie is the rage of the boutique. Indeed, in ...
FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH: THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINA by Richard Bernstein Little, Brown; 260 pages; $15.95 CHINA: ALIVE IN THE BITTER SEA by Fox Butterfield Times Books; 468 pages; $19.95 At a 1979 White House banquet honoring China's Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Shirley MacLaine enthusiastically recalled a trip to the ...
For Correspondent Richard Bernstein, stationed for two years in TIME's Hong Kong bureau, reporting on Teng Hsiaop'ing and his travels across the U.S. (see NATION and PRESS) proved especially dramatic and exciting. "It was a high point for any reporter who has covered China in the past," says Bernstein. "There was an unreal quality in ...
1979年，中共首度准許美國媒體在北京成立分社，《紐約時報》派包德甫（Fox Butterfield）、《時代》周刊則派白禮博（Richard Bernstein）出任特派員。包德甫後來寫了一本《苦海餘生》，賣得非常好，發了一筆財。調回國內後，曾任波士頓分社主任，有次報導強暴案透露受害者身分，備受抨擊，以及其他紕漏，從此消聲匿跡。白禮博在1982年出版《來自地心》，談他在中國所見所聞，銷路則不如《苦海餘生》。(改行) CHINA: ALIVE IN THE BITTER SEA by Fox Butterfield Times Books; 468 pages; $19.95 At a 1979 White House banquet honoring China's Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, Shirley MacLaine enthusiastically recalled a trip to the ...
資訊爆炸的時代裡，碎片式的資訊催促人即時反應，許多評論因此少掉了縱深，只能斤斤計較眼前睫毛遠，而無法燭照前後。1982年，包德甫（Fox Butterfield）在他的新書《苦海餘生》（China:Alive in the Bitter Sea）最後篇章的這一段話，35年之後讀來，彷彿黑暗裡的點點閃光，刺激著閱讀者的視神經。
