Ibsen in China, : A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (review)

Transcription

1 Ibsen in China, : A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (review) Wenwei Du China Review International, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: /cri For additional information about this article Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (20 Apr :23 GMT)

2 Reviews 251 pioneered the expansion of the role of government in Chengdu society, especially the role of specialized and professional police. By the time war refugees arrived in what seemed to them an old-fashioned city, a new conception of urban civilization had been grafted onto the old. Alison Dray-Novey Alison Dray-Novey is a professor of history at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland with a research interest in urban social history and city police, especially in Beijing. Kwok-kan Tam. Ibsen in China : A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, x, 263 pp. Hardcover $29.00, ISBN This bibliography is the result of twenty years of research by its author. During this period, Kwok-kan Tam wrote a dissertation and a dozen articles on Ibsen s influence in China, in addition to his publications on other subjects. This is a well-researched and clearly annotated reference book, consisting of a twenty-twopage introduction and a bibliographic text of eight groupings with the following subtitles: (1) Ibsen and the Literary Revolution , (2) Ibsen in the (Post-) May 4th Era , (3) Ibsen in the Romantic Generation , (4) Ibsen in Wartime China , (5) Ibsen and Socialism , (6) Ibsen Beyond Socialism , (7) Chinese Translations and Adaptations of Ibsen s Plays, Poetry and Critical Essays, and (8) Chinese Stage Productions of Ibsen s Plays.The first six sections contain 338 entries for books and articles on Ibsen s influence in different historical periods; the seventh section is a bibliography of fifty-four Chinese translations of Ibsen s works arranged by the publication dates of Ibsen s plays; and the eighth section is a list of twenty-four Chinese stage productions of Ibsen s plays (arranged in the same format as the translation list). There are three appendixes as well: a chronology of Ibsen s plays, a chronology of Chinese translations, and a chronology of Chinese stage productions of Ibsen s plays. The latter two chronologies have the same content as sections 7 and 8 but are arranged differently. This bibliography also includes author/translator, title, title-by-year, and subject indexes. All the Chinese names and titles are written in pinyin and supplied with traditional Chinese characters. Those names habitually written in the Wade-Giles system are also noted with their corresponding

3 252 China Review International: Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2002 pinyin spellings. With both characters and their romanization, the reader can read all the Chinese names, phrases, and sentences fluently and swiftly without any misleading interpretation. The introduction first outlines the historical phases of the politics of Ibsen s reception in Western society (including the Soviet Union). The politics have centered on the reception of Ibsen either as a modern thinker and social reformer or as an artist whether to politicize Ibsen or to aestheticize him (p. 9), as the author puts it. Next, the author applies a similar approach to his introduction on Ibsen s reception in China. He divides the history of China s reception into four major periods: , , , and 1977 to the present. These four phases correspond to the historical divisions in the world reception of Ibsen (p. 12), which the author outlines in the first half of the introduction. The first of these four periods saw China s reception of Ibsen as a social reformer; the second period first witnessed the interpretations of Ibsen with more emphasis on his dramatic innovations than on his social themes and later shifted the interpretive tendency back to the moral-political tradition; the third period was marked by social and artistic interpretations of Ibsen s plays in terms of class struggle; the fourth period, according to the author, has provided Chinese critics an opportunity to analyze Ibsen in the aesthetic-formalist mode. The first three periods of Ibsen s reception are convincingly summarized with substantiated information, and yet the summary of, or the introduction to, the fourth period does not have the same kind of supporting information probably due either to the fact that the fourth period has not yet ended or to the author s wish that the readers themselves find the evidence in bibliographic entries. While the introduction is critically informative on China s reception as compared to the global transcultural reception of Ibsen, it does not explain the author s method and criteria for bibliographic inclusion in the main text. As is the practice of most bibliographers, the author should define the scope and structure of the bibliography or the guidelines under which all the entries are assembled. Without such an explanation, the reader is bound to have some questions such as the ones below. This bibliography contains books and articles in Chinese, English, and Norwegian. So far as the Chinese materials are concerned, the bibliography is fairly exhaustive. Since non-chinese materials are also collected, the reader might question why only English and Norwegian materials are considered while French, German, or Japanese materials are not. How comprehensive is this bibliography in terms of non-chinese materials? Has the author attempted extensive research on all the criticisms written in all languages, or has he only concentrated on Chinese and English publications? (The Norwegian articles collected were all compiled by a single author.) The author needs to explain the scope of his research on this project.

4 Reviews 253 A reader would also expect the author to explain the structure of the main text of the bibliography. By looking at the table of contents, the reader notices that the first six sections of the main bibliography are arranged according to the different historical periods. Why are there six periods instead of the four periods that the author categorizes in the introduction? Sections 1 and 2 correspond to the first period, and sections 3 and 4 cover the time of the second period, while sections 5 and 6 match the third and fourth periods, respectively. Readers may be puzzled as to why the first two periods are further divided into two sub-periods. It would perhaps be more valid and convenient as well as logical if the whole history of China s reception of Ibsen were divided into six periods as arranged in the main text of the bibliography instead of the four periods that the author outlines in the introduction. If, however, the four-period division better describes the whole history of Ibsen s reception in China, the same scheme for historical division should be applied to the main text of the bibliography for the sake of consistency. Another question concerns the relation between this division of the historical periods based on the social events on mainland China and the inclusion of the materials about Ibsen in Hong Kong and Taiwan. For example, the section titled Ibsen and Socialism includes eight articles published in Taiwan (entries 5.04, 5.05, 5.06, 5.08, 5.11, 5.20, 5. 27, and 5.32) whose content has nothing to do with the Socialist reception or interpretation of Ibsen. It would have been more accurate to create a separate section to include materials on Ibsen s reception in Taiwan and Hong Kong after 1949 instead of providing explanations in each of these entries under the category of Ibsen and Socialism. An explanation as to the guidelines under which materials are included in each section is also needed even though the reader can discern its system by carefully examining all entries. For example, section 1 is titled Ibsen and the Literary Revolution The seventy-three entries (books and articles of criticism, play adaptations, and synopses) in this section were published in different decades: thirteen of them were written in the period from 1908 to 1919, two in the 1920s, one in the 1940s, seven in the 1950s, three in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, thirty-four in the 1980s, and five in the 1990s. By reading the author s annotation under each entry, the reader finds that, regardless of their respective publishing dates, these articles and books all concern China s reception of Ibsen in the period from 1908 to They are arranged alphabetically according to the authors names. The same format is applied to sections 2 through 5 with the exception of the misplacement of a few entries (e.g., entry 6.02 should be placed in section 5 instead of section 6 because the article written by Ah Ying in 1956 could not discuss Ibsen s reception in the period from 1977 to 1997; entry 6.37, The Earliest Modern Drama in China, should be in section 1 instead of section 6, although the article was published in 1982). Since all the Chinese titles are translated into

5 254 China Review International: Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2002 English, why aren t the Norwegian titles? Although the Norwegian title Ibsen in Kina. En bibliografi (entry 1.11) can easily be understood by the English-speaking reader as Ibsen in China: a bibliography, titles such as Et kinesisk syn pa Ibsen. Hu Shi og Ibsens betydning for liberale strominger in Kina (entry 1.09) cannot be directly comprehended without the English translation ( A Chinese view of Ibsen: Hu Shi and Ibsen s importance for liberal trends in China ). Furthermore, the reader has no way to determine what materials were selectively excluded. An explanation of the criteria for inclusion and exclusion would be a great help to the reader/researcher in the process of using this bibliography. Once readers are familiar with the scope and structure of this bibliography, they will find it very useful in a variety of ways. A bibliography is not meant to be read from cover to cover, yet the reader/researcher who is seriously interested in the general subject indicated by the book title will find it rewarding to read the entire body of this bibliography, which is itself a comprehensive collection of firsthand Chinese materials on Ibsen. The author s annotations range from three lines to over fifty lines in length. Most annotations introduce the content of their entries, describe the circumstances under which they were written, and offer the author s own point of view on various subjects. With the aid of the author s informative annotations, this useful sourcebook provides the reader/researcher with an opportunity to become acquainted with the historical development of both the Chinese scholarship on Ibsen and China s reception of Ibsen. By extension, the bibliography is also a reference tool for the study of Western influence on Chinese theater, modern Chinese culture, and modern Chinese intellectuals. More specifically, it can be consulted through a number of significant subject indexes such as modern Chinese drama (thirty-five entries), the May Fourth Movement (twenty entries), the Chinese women s movement (thirty-five entries), and Lu Xun (seventeen entries). One can also combine a cluster of related subject indexes such as feminism, gender, marriage, women s movement, Bing Xin, and Jiang Qing for a common topic. Besides the thematic approaches, historical periods can be focuses of consultation as well. The Chronology of Chinese Translations and Adaptations of Ibsen s Plays, the Chronology of Chinese Stage Productions of Ibsen s Plays, and the Title Index by Year constitute convenient tools for research on specific time periods. One can easily identify, from this book, all the translations, adaptations, performances, and scholarship produced in a certain period. For instance, if one wants to know how Ibsen was treated during the Cultural Revolution ( ), one will find at a glance that three translations and twenty-two pieces of scholarship were published with no performance in this period. By further reading these twenty-five entries, one can conclude that only three pieces were published in the People s Republic of China, and the other materials were produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas. The three PRC pieces were

6 Reviews 255 English translations of Lu Xun s early essays related to Ibsen in the September 1973 issue of Chinese Literature. Furthermore, the combination of section 7 on translations, section 8 on productions, the Title Index, and the Subject Index together provides a comprehensive tool for research on the reception of Ibsen s individual plays in China. There are, for example, more than ninety cross-references for A Doll s House concerning its translations, adaptations, performances, criticism, and influence in China. As for most Chinese productions of Ibsen s plays, readers would not find complete detailed information such as the exact dates, place, director, and cast of a particular performance and its specific reviews, as they would expect to find about a theatrical production in the West. This does not indicate any lapse in the author s research effort, but it is mostly due to the fact that it is not customary in the Chinese theater culture to keep accurate records and promote formal theater reviews. In fact, the author remarkably gathered pieces of useful information largely by sifting through the personal recollections of theater people who had been involved with individual productions. The author s extended annotations in section 8 can serve as retrospective theater reviews. The reader/researcher can use the information provided as useful leads for further investigation for specific purposes. Accessible by a variety of approaches, this annotated bibliography is bound to provide more ways of consultation for various reference purposes. It is an impressive contribution to the study of Ibsen in China. Wenwei Du Wenwei Du is an associate professor of Chinese at Vassar College; he specializes in studies of Sino-Western comparative drama, traditional Chinese theater, and other forms of the Chinese performing arts.