Gems of Chinese Literature/Su Tung-P‘o-A Sound Critic

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Gems of Chinese Literature (1922)
translated by Herbert Allen Giles

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SU TUNG-P‘O.

a.d. 1036-1101

[An almost universal genius, like Ou-yang Hsiu, this writer is even a greater favourite with the Chinese literary public. Under his hands, the language of which China is so proud may be said to have reached perfection of finish, of art concealed. In subtlety of reasoning, in the lucid expression of abstractions, such as in English too often elude the faculty of the tongue, Su Tung-P‘o is an unrivalled master. On behalf of his honoured manes I desire to note my protest against the words of Mr. Baber, recently spoken at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, and stating that “the Chinese language is incompetent to express the subtleties of theological reasoning, just as it is inadequate to represent the nomenclature of European science.” I am not aware that the nomenclature of European science can be adequately represented even in the English language; at any rate, there can be no comparison between the expression of terms and of ideas, and I take it the doctrine of the Trinity itself is not more difficult of comprehension than the theory of “self abstraction beyond the limits of an external world,” so closely reasoned out by Chuang Tzŭ. If Mr. Baber merely means that the gentlemen entrusted with the task have proved themselves so far quite incompetent to express in Chinese the subtleties of theological reasoning, then I am with him to the death.

There is one more point in regard to which I should be glad to cleanse the stuffed bosoms of some from a certain perilous stuff―the belief that Chinese sentences are frequently open to two and even more interpretations. No theory could well be more mischievous than this. It tends to make a student readily satisfied with anything he can get out of an obscure paragraph rather than push on laboriously through the dark passages of thought until the real sense begins to glimmer ahead, and finally to shine brightly upon him. I wish to place it on record, as my opinion, after the arduous task of translation now lying completed before me, that the written language of China is hardly more ambiguous than English; and that an ordinary Chinese sentence, written without malice aforethought, can have but one meaning, though it may often appear at the first blush to have several. There are exceptions, of course; but the rule remains unchanged. I have frequently been trapped myself, and may be again; trapped into satisfaction with a given rendering which I subsequently discovered to be wrong, and which I could then feel to be grammatically wrong though I had previously accepted it as right. The fault in such cases, I venture to suggest, should be sought for outside the text. (I leave this to stand as it stood in 1884, merely suggesting that it is the extreme difficulty of the book-language which is mistaken for ambiguity.)

To revert to the subject of this note, Su Tung-P‘o shared the fate of most Chinese statesmen of the T'ang and Sung dynasties. He was banished to a distant post. In 1235 he was honoured with a niche in the Confucian temple, but his tablet was removed in 1845. After six hundred years he might well have been left there in peace.]

Su Tung-P‘o1524178Gems of Chinese Literature — A Sound Critic1922Herbert Allen Giles

In Ssŭch‘uan there lived a retired scholar, named Tu. He was very fond of calligraphy and painting, and possessed a large and valuable collection. Among the rest was a painting of oxen by Tai Sung, which he regarded as exceptionally precious, and kept in an embroidered case on a jade-mounted roller. One day he put his treasures out to sun, and it chanced that a herdboy saw them. Clapping his hands and laughing loudly, the herdboy shouted out, “Look at the bulls fighting! Bulls trust to their horns, and keep their tails between their legs, but here they are fighting with their tails cocked up in the air; that's wrong!” Mr. Tu smiled, and acknowledged the justice of the criticism. So truly does the old saying run: For ploughing, go to a ploughman; for weaving, to a servant-maid.