Auden, W.H.

W.H. Auden and China : general.
2005
Stuart Christie : In China, Auden learned that the best poems often do not survive the journey home. I suggest that Auden's experience in China and Hong Kong ultimately motivates his symbolic disinvestment from all national-colonial allegories, in favor of the rejection of material context entirely, as a more principled basis for the writing of poetry. China serves mainly as an occult imagining against which the poet attempts to locate his increasingly liminal position in nationalist British culture and letters. Auden's sonnets engage with orientalizing and occidentalizing codes that challenge the British canon overtly and covertly, a concert that has at least two effects : first, a reaction against the colonial elite in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Auden was hailed as an emerging talent ; and subsequently, a disorientation in the poetry resulting from the absence of what heretofore had been a coded familiarity of context – the call of homosexual traveling culture. Auden's canonical context was British, and that its ideology trailed him to China is an undeniable fact constituting much of the poet's cross-cultural predicament, what I call his disorientations, once he arrived there. Isherwood and Auden found themselves feted in the bosom of the British colonial establishment in Hong Kong, enjoying comforts in marked contrast to the war of liberation being waged by the Chinese against Japanese aggression just to the north in Guangdong province. In Spain, Auden saw mindless violence fully exercised in the name of nationalist confraternity. On arrival in China, he had no reason not to expect the same practice among the Japanese, Guomindang, and Communist forces. If Spain had occasioned Auden's encounter with the extreme tendencies of political change and disillusioned him, China forced him to reconsider and to affirm the liberal muddle of the ideological middle that E.M. Forster's position had always represented. Auden went to China empty of prejudice, a fact that encompasses equally his relative ignorance of Chinese language and culture as well as his principled willingness to dispense, as best he could, with the received wisdom of the career colonialists. Hong Kong's colonial resituation of Western values evidences, in Auden's case, the globalizing pressure placed on modernist poetry when faced with local mutations beyond the metropolitan ken. The colonial locale has erased the poet's memory of a British past and his Chinese present in equal measure, substituting for it only the eternal 'chatter' of power brokers at work. Without adequate knowledge of Chinese peoples or cultures as subjects, the poet cannot surveil China faithfully, he stalks and then kills it. Alternatively, he risks 'making' the English modernist canon new using Chinese materials, but entirely at the expense of the Chinese context, and again assassinates present truth. Not daring to risk orientalist platitudes shared among Chinese-English brothers as soldiers-in-arms, Auden's poet-assassin threatens the Chinese subject and himself in turn. Auden's rejection of national culture is linked equally to his specific historical context in Hong Kong and China that rendered his 'retour' at once disjunctive and homologous of uniquely colonial frontiers he could not cross, even as a homosexual 'passing through' privileged sites of British masculinity abroad. Auden can no longer simply remint English certainties in the Chinese context and call them a lost signified of oriental fantasy. The sonnets respond by invoking Chinese inscrutability to ward off unwarranted incursions the poet himself represents ; by conceding the universal presumptions of colonialism.
2007
Hugh Haughton : Where Isherwood's prose is personal, circumstantial and documentary, recording the details of their three-month journey as 'amateur war correspondents' in often comit terms. Auden's gnomic verse casts the war into an abstract allegorial idiom with almost no specific geographical, historical or personal indicators.

W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were commissioned by Faber and Faber in London and Random House in New York to write a book about the Far East. The authors decided that their subject would be the war which had been provoked by the Japanese in July with Marshal Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces in China.Isherwood's reportage was to provide a prose commentary on China and its war, while Auden would write about the war parabolically to provide a theory of human violence.

W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left Hong Kong in the Tai-Shan for Guangzhou. "The railway was being bombed, almost daily, by Japanese planes… The river-boats, which were British-owned, had never been bombed at all". In Guangzhou the British Consul General sent a car. They were to stay at Paak Hok Tung, a settlement of American and English missionaries. The next day they visited Mayor Zang Yanfu. The next day they were invited to lunch with Wu Dezhen. The next two days they were wandering about the city.

W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood in Hankou. "This is the real capital of war-time China. All kinds of people live in this town – Chiang Kai-shek, Agnes Smedley, Chou En-lai ; generals, ambassadors, journalists, foreign naval officers, soldiers of fortune, airmen, missionaries, spies… The Consul has offered us the hospitality of a big empty room." They visit Bishop Logan H. Roots.

W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood attended a party with a number of Hankou intellectuals including the poet Mu Mutian who presented them with some verses written in their honor and Tian Shouchang [Tian Han]. Ma Tongna interviewed them for the newspaper Da gong bao.

Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Random House ; London : Faber & Faber, 1939). = Auden, W.H. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Octagon Books, 1972).= Rev. ed. (London : Faber and Faber, 1973). [Enthält : Sonnets from China].[Bericht über die Jahre 1937-1945].

[Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher]. Zai zhan shi : shi si xing lian tis hi bing fu shi jie. W.H. Aodeng zhu ; Zhu Weiji yi. (Shanghai : Shi ge shu dian, 1941). (Shi ge fan yi cong shu ; 2). Übersetzung von Auden, W.H. ; Isherwood, Christopher. Journey to a war. (New York, N.Y. : Random House ; London : Faber & Faber, 1939).
在戰時 : 十四行聯體詩並附詩解

[Auden, W.H.]. Xue shu tu ya : Aodeng qing ti shi ji. Aodeng zhu ; Sang Ki yi ; Qi Bing tu. (Suzhou : Gu wu xuan chu ban she, 2005). Übersetzung von Auden, W.H. Academic graffiti. Illustrated by Filippo Sanjust. (London : Faber and Faber, 1971).
学术涂鸦奧登轻体诗集

Callan, Edward. From Auden : A carnival of intellect (Sonnets from China). In : Critical essays on W.H. Auden. Ed. by George W. Bahlke. (New York, N.Y. : G.K. Hall, 1991). (Critical essays on British literature).

Christie, Stuart. Orienteering : the experimental East in Auden's "Sonnets from China". In : Before and after Suzie : Hong Kong in Western film and literature. Ed. by Thomas Y.T. Luk and James P. Rice. ( Hong Kong : Chinese University Press, 2002).

Haughton, Hugh. Journeys to war : W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and William Empson in China. In : A century of travels in China : critical essays on travel writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. Ed. by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, 2007).

A century of travels in China : critical essays on travel writing from the 1840s to the 1940s. Ed. by Douglas Kerr and Julia Kuehn. (Hong Kong : Hong Kong University Press, 2007).
www.oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=448539.

Brown, Douglas. Sissywood vs. Alleyman : going nose to nose in Shanghai. In : Brady, Anne-Marie; Brown, Douglas, eds. Foreigners and foreign institutions in Republican China. (London : Routledge, 2013). [Betr. W.H. Auden, Christopher Ishgerwood].