Continued effords have been made to find a common reference, or universal terminology for eastern and western scholars in comparative literature since the very foundation of the ICLA in 1955. An obvious example is the preparation of the International Dictionary of Literary Terms, a world project founded by the ICLA in the sixties under the leadership of Robert Escarpit. Drawing on his personal experience involved with the project, the author analyzes some of the problems confronted by the project and the responses the international community of comparatists has given to these problems. Some suggestions for a better integration of literary studies at the world level are also proposed.

K’ien Long (Chien-lung), emperor of China (1736-1796) was known in Europe by his contemporaries as emperor, a distant legendary figure, but more personally through translations of poems he composed. Father Michel Benoit’s letters (1773-4) describe interesting details of conversations with the emperor while sitting for a portrait. Father Joseph Marie Amiot published in 1870 a volume containing French translations of two of K’ien Long’s poems: one a long piece describing the city of the emporer’s birthplace Moukden, and the other a piece in praise of tea. These pieces appealed to European sensibilities in a number of ways. The first Western writer to K’ien Long at length was Voltaire, who in letters to Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia, compares K’ien Long to them and includes him among ideal rulers following his Enlightenment principles. Voltaire in a number of his own pieces refers to K’ien Long and his poem an Moukden; the emporer’s other poem on tea attracted British writers. Sir William Chambers wrote an oriental gardening and included lines from K’ien Long’s piece on tea. In response to and disagreement with Chambers, Thomas Gray wrote a satirical piece and in a sequel actually devotes eight lines and a footnote to the emperor. Others who wrote about K’ien Long include John Wolcot, Thomas James Mathias, Andre Chenier, Stephen Weston, etc. Although K’ien Long remained by choice personally isolated from Europe and its culture, he still enjoyed a considerable, if fleeting, vogue in the West, where his poetry was translated, quoted and parodied, and where he was compared favorably both to European monarchs and to George Washington.

This essay demonstrates that early sinologists tended to view collections of Chinese poetry as mere social documents, and thus emphasized the poems as sources of information (for example, regarding Chinese attitudes toward filial piety), rather than as works having intrinsic aesthetic and poetic value; this view of Chinese poetry or course influenced the styles of translation. Representative of early (18th-20th century) Western translators are the three French translators-writers, Marquis d’Hervey Saint-Denys (1832-1892), Judith Gautier (1845-1917) and Louis Bouilhet (1822-1869). The first translator, Marquis d’Hervey-Saint-Denys (in his Poesies de l’epoque des Thang, 1862) is presented as an influential example of the extreme type of translator who mechanically gets the meaning, but neglects the unique spirit and stylistics of the work being translated. Judith Gautier (Livre de Jade, 1867) is discussed as an example of a translator who goes in the other direction—one who emphasizes the lyrical quality of Chinese poems (and translates them as “poemes en prose”). The last, Bouilhet (Dernieres Chansons), attempted to adapt Chinese verse forms when writing poetry in French, and also indulged in fanciful etymology a la Pound-Fenellosa. More recent, 20th century, translators such as Waley and Pound showed genuine interest in Chinese poetry qua poetry, and have taken care to render both content and form. It is suggested that poets are perhaps better translators than professional sinologists.

This study argues that Schiller’s essentially romantic essay Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1797) lays the groundwork for postmodernism’s hyperaestheticized concepts of self. It demonstrates the deliberately “contranatural” and “insane” character of Schiller’s “sentimental” or “modern” sensibility, showing that the nonrational concept of the self that this sensibility implies corresponds closely to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s, Jacques Derrida’s and other poststructualist accounts of postmodern personal identity.

Here I propose that the “deconstructive” discourse of Derrida, de Man et al—as well as the Nietzschean/Foucauldian discourse of power relations, Neo-Marxism and New Historicism—are essentially violent, destructive discourses grounded in images of agon, war. Rather, we need now to turn away from this end-of-century “darkness” toward regenerative models of poetic meaning which, like Freud’s “uncanny,” Levi-Strauss’ “mythomorphic” and Frye’s “great codes,” assert the mythopoetic core, the central human meaning (immanent-earthly if not transcendent-heavenly) of poetry. Indeed, our “pre-concepts”—the pre-reflexive, instinctive core meanings/understandings of poems, here illustrated via works by Ammons and Heaney—are presupposed by all the post-structuralist theories.

This essay shows that the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno was much closer to the thought of the Oriental world than is generally believed. This influence is expressed in Unamuno’s interest in Origami—the Japanese art of paper-folding. The author argues that these paper figures and the very concept of paper (as manifest Japanese folk customs) are associated with Unamuno’s basic philosophical preoccupation, death, and with the question of a Creator and the Creator’s purpose (paralleling our purpose as creators of paper figures); the making of paper birds was, then, for Unamuno a reenactment of creation. Further evidence that Unamuno was significantly influenced by Oriental philosophy is found in the fact that his personal library contained quite a lot of books on Japanese and Indian (Hindu and Buddhist) philosophy. Also, Schopenhauer (who was himself much influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism) had a great impact on Unamuno’s thinking. As concrete examples of similarities in Eastern thought and Unamuno, the author mentions the interest in paradox shared by both Unamuno and Zen, and the fact that both Buddhism and Unamuno take their starting point from the inner person. The essay concludes cautiously that while it is certainly true that not all of Unamuno’s work may have been influenced by Oriental thought, at least some of his work was so influenced, such that a consideration of a relationship between Unamuno and Oriental thought should be pursued further.

In this essay I explore the influence of Chinese poetic language and techniques on four Latin American writers, and also consider the Eurocentric distortion or underestimation of this influence. The Mexican poet Tablada, influenced more by Chinese language than by Apollinaire’s typographic experimentations, employed an “ideogrammic” technique and introduced Haiku to Latin American poetry. The Nicaraguan Dario was not (as in the Eurocentric view) a poet of superficial, exotic chinoiserie; rather, he has a profoundly synthetic world-view fusing Hindu, Buddhist, Greek and Christian philosophies. While the Cuban Casal’s orientalism was also not taken seriously, his poems display a deep understanding of Japanese and oriental culture. And the Mexican Octavio Paz believes in the Asiatic origin of the native American, which explains his deeply rooted orientalism, the fundamental “opposition and affinity” in his imagery between two elements, Chinese and American. Although Western ignorance of oriental culture has driven us to diminish the importance of oriental elements in our poetry, a period of greater sensitivity to these elements is now beginning.

Here I take Pound’s reflection “On His Own Face in a Glass” as the basis for a reflection on some modern and post-modern revisions of the classical “mimetic” and Romantic “‘creative’ models. Whereas Abrams sees the Romantics as giving priority to the originary light (“lamp”) of creation over the classical “‘mirror” that reflects a transcendent reality, Pound sees the eternal as itself transient and the mirrors of phenomenal reality as vitally expressive. While Krieger distinguishes a poem’s inward-reflecting “mirrors” (objectivism) from its “windows” onto reality, Culler, for whom free origination is still a version of imitation, claims we never get beyond the “mirrors and lamps” of signifying language. But Pound’s “scintillating beauty” of the mirror-world, of pure specularity is perhaps the most playful and subtle of all these views of light-mirror relationship.

This essay presents evidence that comparison of translations is a fruitful way of teaching Chinese-English comparative literature to undergraduates. After highlighting the strengths of the comparative literature program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the author uses “Reader Response” theory and the late James J.Y. Liu’s distinction between “naturalization” (tuming Chinese into English) and “barbarization” (twisting English so it becomes Chinese), to examine several undergraduate compositions critiquing various translations of a Chinese poem. Based on his 10 years of experience, the author advises teachers, students, and translators to take a middle-of-the-road approach between “naturalization” and “barbarization” on the one hand, and between the historical and theoretical approaches to translation on the other.

Here I discuss the dialogue that takes place between my Chinese university students and myself (their teacher) as we study the images of China presented in a series of Western literary texts. Our first problem is to distinguish between the Chinese image in the mind of an individual (author), the image in the collective thinking of a group (society, culture) and the media image. Then historical and cultural relativism come into play: we must be aware of the historical reality at the time of occurrence of an image which now seems “unreal,” and of the truth to Westerners of an image which may seem fantastic or distorted to Chinese (and vice versa). These are the sorts of modalities I discuss with my students as we analyze texts, and both sides in this East-West “dialogue” gain a deeper understanding: we become more conscious of one another’s underlying cultural presuppositions, the lenses through which we view (our images of) one another.