Xiao, Qian

Xiao Qian mentioned in an interview, that Katherine Mansfield was the first foreign author that he read. Working as an apprentice in a publishing house, he was asked to go to the Beijing University Beijing University library to copy a translation of Mansfield's story The young girl by Xu Zhimo printed in Xiao shuo yue bao. He said in the interview, "I think the story I translated was The little girl and it's about a girl who was maltreated by her own father and she watched the family next door, the father playing joyfully with his children so she fell into tears. And that brought my own lonely and painful childhood. So as I copied I ran tears".

Xiao, Qian. Aoni'er. [O'Neill]. [ID D28774].
"Never caring what theme or style is in vogue, O'Neill moves on persistently to create an art of his own. Everything he wrote smells of nothing but O'Neill. Though nearly every one of his plays is realistic in appearance, the basic tone is always romantic. In his plays an inexplicable feeling of poetry is mingled with serious contemplation of life."
Xiao Qian, while praising O'Neill for the grit, seriousness and originality displayed in his dramas, stated explicitly that he did not consider the playwright's view of life acceptable and that those with different social and cultural backgrounds should have their own view of life.

Xiao Qian is Instructor in modern Chinese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 1939 SOAS moved to Cambridge during the Second World War. College. He was invited to give talks on China. The topics included Chinese culture, literature, and the relationship between spiritual China with the industrial West.
1942-1944 Xiao Qian took a graduate degree in English literature at King's College, Cambridge, and started the Chinese news agency Da gong bao in London to report war news from England. He came into contact with the China Campaign Committee, Victor Gollancz (publisher and head of the Left Book Club), Kingsley Martin (editor of the New statesman and nation), Margery Fry (feminist and social activist), Harold Laski (Labour Party theorist) and Arthur Clegg (reporter on foreign affairs for the British Communist Party's organ Daily worker). Xiao became a principal speaker for the Committee.
Xiao Qian war invited twice to stay at E.M. Forster's family home West Hackhurst in Dorking, Surrey.
In his autobiography Xiao Qian notes : "Forster very generously provided materials and support while I was studying his novels at King's College from 1942-1944. He also gave me some of his essays and little booklets that had been published in Egypt and India, but never in Britain."
"A passage to India had been behind my mind ever since we met. To Mr. Forster, China may be a land with a great deal of personal relationship left ; to China, Mr. Forster would be an altogether different westerner, neither pompous like the admirals, nor complascent like the diplomats, nor nagging as the missionaries, nor patrionising like the connoiseurs, but a sensitive, humane, understanding co-man."
After attending a poetry reading by T.S. Eliot, Xiao Qian stated that he did not expect him "to be so affable and unassuming". He described him as being "of medium height and energetic, at first sight he seemed to have just reached middle age. But when he raised his very shortsighted eyes, his wrinkled forehead made him appear an old man. T.S. Eliot's voice is not very resonant, nor did he raise and lower it or pause like an experiences lecturer. Yet in a subtle way his recital brought out meaning in the verse. When each poem ended you felt you had been listing to a fountain flowing under ice".

Xiao Qian notes in his autobiography, that he met E.M. Forster for the first time on 9 May 1941 at the Tagore Memorial Meeting organized by the English PEN Club. He was invited to give a talk and was sitting alongside Forster. Kingsley Martin introduced him to Forster. He was also introduced to H.G. Wells, Stephen Spender and John Lehmann.
Letter from E.M. Forster to Jack Sprott ; 20 Sept. 1941.
"I made two contacts in the PEN [PEN Club's 17th International Congress] – sense Xiao Qian of whom I shall see more."

Friendship and correspondence between E.M. Forster and Xiao Qian.
Lien Wen-shan : According to Xiao, some 80 letters, postcards and telegrams were dispatched from Forster to himself. In response, he wrote long replies back to Forster. A large number of Forster's letters do not survive and almost all of Xiao's letters were destroyed in 1945 and 1946. Forster's letters were destroyed at the beginning of the Cultural revolution in 1966. Only two letters from Xiao to Forster survived.
Their friendship ended abruptly and was scarred by a misunderstanding that was never cleared up. The intervention of the Second World War and the political upheavals in post-war China proved to be too great a disruptive force and made the renewal of their friendship impossible.

Letter from Alice Forster, mother of E.M. Forster, to Xiao Qian ; 11 January 1942.
"I am so glad you were happy with us. I hope you will come again soon. We all indeed enjoyed your visit. Most kind of you to send me the very interesting 'Dragon Book' and the lotus seeds. We have not opened the box yet but shall do so when Morgan comes back from London."

Letter from E.M. Forster to Xiao Qian ; June, 1942.
Forster arrange a Meeting for Xiao to meet his friends, including Bob Buckingham and Joe Ackerley : "Dinner next Sunday, 14th. Mr. Buckingham has been in since I began this letter. He is coming on Sunday to the flat and we very much wish you could join us in it for an informal meal. I am asking Mr. Ackerl[e]y also. The flat is 9, Arlington Park Mansions, Chiswick, W.4 (Tel : CHI 2407) – close to the Chiswick Empire on Tumham Green. The hour of the meal would be 7.0. Do come if you can – send me a line to West Hackhurst as soon as you can conveniently."
Letter from Xiao Qian to E.M. Forster ; June 12, 1942.
Xiao notes about the dinner : "held at Arlington Mansion, with Bob Buckingham, John Hampson, Joe Ackerl[e]y present. My first night in that enchanting flat, with a rickey table lamp which either refused to be on or insisted on remaining. Mr. Forster cooked a glorious breakfast. .. Before entering the flat, I was taken over the Bridge of Heaven, had my first bird-eye-view of south-western London".

E.M. Forster invited Xiao Qian to a Rede lecture on Virginia Woolf at the British Institute on 5 March 1942. Xiao wrote in his autobiography : "I, for my part, had long been interested in the English novel – I admired Woolf up in her ivory tower but almost worshipped Forster who welcomed the whole world into his books".

Letter from Xiao Qian to W.J.H. Sprott about a talk he planned to give in Nottingham; 12 Oct. 1943.
"I am very curious to know whether there are some people at Nottingham interested in Virginia Woolf's novels, and especially if there are people who have patiently read her and disagreed with her. She is so much a fact of Cambridge, that to discuss her here often ends in collective eulogy. Her reaction to the Midlands, industrial, Lawrentian ought to be very fresh to me (I am doing a book for China next spring on E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf). If you think it possible to gather a handful of people, I would be glad to pose as an ardent fan of Virginia Woolf before them and evoke their vehement antagonism and thereby reap a rich Harvest."

Letter from E.M. Forster to Xiao Qian ; 7 July, 1943.
"I have been considering what you said about poverty and your misery and 'crime' in China. Why am I ashamed to hear of such things ? Not because I am shocked by them, as you suggest, nor because I feel I cannot imagine them, because they emphasise a defect in my mental equipment. For an instant, they become real, then they fall back again into words… It is an extra barrier too to realize that European poverty is nothing to Oriental. I am very glad that you mentioned this subject to me and I hope you will do so again."

Letter from Xiao Qian to E.M. Forster ; 25 Nov. 1943.
"He [D.H. Lawrence] has made me so unhappy, this hairy misanthropist. I have just read one of the dehydrated Lawrence, the Fantasia : he must have been very bitter when writing it. I did enjoy A man who died which even reminded me of the Castle of Kafka. But so many of his characters are mere pegs on which hung all his queer ideas about life and the universe."

Letter from E.M. Forster to Xiao Qian ; 25 Nov. 1943.
Forster had urged Xiao to turn his attention to James Joyce : "never has so much been talked of a person whom so few understand". Xiao himself noted that his copy of Ulysses was nearly black with the notes of meanings of words marked in 1940. He wrote to Forster that he felt the great achievement of Joyce who reconciled "two heterogeneous elements in writing : free flow (of consciousness) and external shape".

Xiao Qian and Maurice by E.M. Forster.
Lien Wen-shan : The most intriguing feature of the correspondence between E.M. Forster and Xiao Qian is their repeated discussions of Forster's novel Maurice. Some of their discussions touch upon issues that Forster had never discussed before with his other British friends and critics. Xiao recalls his reading of Maurice : "He let me read his novel about homosexuality, Maurice, which was locked in a safe and not to be published until a hundred years later". Forster said : "As for my unpublished novel, you are welcome to read it whenever you like. It is almost publishable, but not quite. There is a MS down here if you would car for it at any time." Letter from E.M. Forster to Xiao Qian ; 17 April 1943 : "Shall be interested when we meet what you think of Maurice. It seems to me in retrospect very English, and there is no harm in that, but for the Moment I am tired of what is very English."
Xiao Qian to Forster : "There is no law in China forbidding this more severely than seduction. In Shanghai & Tientsin, there are even such Brothels, who are know as 'rabbitts'. One of the Emperors of ours was known to be fond of 'plucking the flowers in the back garden'. In the Imperial court, there used to be dramatic repertories. The boys playing feminine parts used to be seduced either by their own co-actors or by men in the Forbidden City". "I told him [Forster] the blackmail scene in Maurice should serve as a lesson to all homosexuals, hence, the novel is beautiful. I seem to have told him that the novel (especially the blackmail scene) discourages homosexuality. Hence, I regarded it as healthy, I was shocked by the blackmail scene".
Forster to Xiao Qian : "As you say, one characteristic of Maurice is his maturity. And another is his liking for happiness and his dislike for self-pity. If I had had to end the book sadly or tragically for him, I should not have thought it worth writing. We have in England (as in France) good studies of immaturity, some tiresome self-pitying, some tiresome proclamations of the Cause, and some pornography which, like most pornography, fail to be graphic."

Letter from E.M. Forster to Xiao Qian ; 1 May, 1943.
"It made me sad for I felt that I was too old to 'take on' China, and that, better than Italy (my first love), India, or France, could it have been taken on by me".

Xiao, Qian. The dragon beards versus the blueprints [ID D26358].
Xiao Qian schreibt : "In China, Ibsen is looked upon as a social surgeon rather than as a playwright. In those days, China was so hopelessly ill that she needed a daring doctor capable of prescribing the most desperate remedies. In the midst of the revolt, young Chinese, especialy those who had studies abroad, found sympathizers in Europe. Foremost of these was the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen. His works seemed to express their own resentment against existing society and their passion for revolt. Too excited to bother about the details of his theatrical art, they call to him from their desperate loneliness, 'Beloved teacher, at last we have found you !' He was hailed by coung China as a comrade rebel, a champion of individual rights. Thus an Oriental shrine was built for the Sage from Scandinavia."
"Ibsen's popularity in China between 1917 to 1921 cannot be exaggerated. For a time the theme of a play was crudely interpreted as 'the social problem it dealt with'. Obviously it was also held by our critics as a convenient criterion. Some have accused our moralizing critics of counting the number of fashionable terms like 'hunger' and 'exploitation' amployed by the author before they passed their final verdict as to whether a work was 'solid'. But playwrights themselves also formed a habit of describing their works in terms of 'problems' dealt with."

Xiao, Qian. Pei'er Jinte : yi bu qing suan ge ren zhu yi de shi ju [ID D26256].
Xiao schreibt : "Ibsen is no longer suitable for us, not only because he belonged to far away Northern Europe. Yet as a forerunner of our profession [writers], we cannot deny that he had observed the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out its rotten parts. His weakness lay in the fact that he just attacked the corruptions of society but did not analyse the economic causes. Therefore he recongnized only the existence of the individual, but did not see that there were the masses. He advocated the improvement of the individual, but neber that of the environment. Ibsen was spiritually an anarchist.
Today China has stepped into socialism, in which everything is put under organization and becomes part of a larger syste, from the anarchism of thirty years ago, which produced a spirit of rebellion in favour of individualism.. We have inherited from Ibsen the poisonous idea of perfecting oneself without much care for the others. As for our self-reform, can Ibsen contribute something to compensate the losses he has caused us ? Yes, Ibsen can. He gives us Peer Gynt which has a grander atmosphere, profounder significance and higher artistic accomplishment than A doll's hous and An enemy of the people.

Tam Kwok-kan : Xiao believes that Ibsenism is no longer needed in China, not only because Ibsen was a writer of the last century, but also because he belongs to the faraway Northern Europe, where the society is essentially different from that in China. As a forerunner of literary realism, Ibsen, Xiao said, examined the organization of society with critical eyes and pointed out the roots of its evilness. Xiao believed that Ibsen's weakness lay in the fact that he attacked only the surface corruptions of society and did not analyze their economic causes. He therefore attacked Ibsen for his advocacy of individualism. He thought that Ibsen recognized only the importance of the individual and not of the masses, because Ibsen failed to relate the victimization of the individual to the injustice hidden in the social structure. Xiao claimed that Ibsen's play Peer Gynt should be read as a critique of individualism. According to Xiao Qian, the play is a caricature of selfishness as exemplified in the self-centered Peer Gynt. Xiao asserted that the object of attack throughout Peer Gynt was the idea of individualism.

Xiao, Qian. Yibusheng de Pei'er Jinte [ID D26267].
Tam Kwok-kan : Xiao Qian completely revised his view of the play Peer Gynt and admired it as a remedy for the lack of individuality among the Chinese. In 1949 Xiao Qian thought that Peer Gynt was an attack on individualisms and could serve as a weapon against bourgeois ideas in the intellectual reform movement. In 1978 he read the play from a different perspective. Expressing his contempt of the Gang of Four in 1978 when he completed the Chinese translation of acts one and five of the play. He considered it a ridicule of political opportunists, the play's theme provided a contrast between the human and the devil : "a human being shouls have his own self, have beliefs and principles, and is not opportunistic, whereas a devil does not and will avoid difficulties and yield to temptation. The devil's judgement is purely based on advantages, not on the consideration of what is right and what is wrong". In 1981, Xiao was able to notice that all his previous interpretations of the play and of Ibsen, were very much affected by his personal emotions and political naiveté which, he now thought, was not a correct attitude toward a literary work. Refuting his previous position, Xiao recommended a re-reading of Ibsen in terms of a broader philosophical perspective that could shed light on ideals in life and personal integrity.

Aufführung von Peer Gynt von Henrik Ibsen durch die Zhong yang xi ju xue yuan (Cantral Academy of Drama) in Beijing in der Übersetzung von Xiao Qian unter der Regie von Xu Xiaozhong.
Xu Xiaozhong learned that there was 'another Ibsen' who was unfamiliar to most of the Chinese. The allegorical theme and the spectacular stage effects of the play presented an entirely new Ibsen to China. For fear that the Chinese audience was unable to comprehend such a Western mythological figure, the directors decided to present it in the image of the Chinese legendary animal god Pigsy (Xi you ji). The marriage horse in the original was turned into a traditional Chinese dancing lion

Hsiao, Ch'ien [Xiao, Qian]. China but not Cathay. (London : Pilot Press, 1942).
[Enthält] : The danger of being ancient. The mulberry leaf. A democracy comes of age. 'My home is drowned!'. Women out of the cage. The vernacular versus the classical. Captain of destruction. Mass education and higher learning. Economic reconstruction. 'On the road to Mandalay'. The death of an air ace. Communication: arteries of resistance. Guerilla industries. The news front. When we triumph.

Hsiao, Ch'ien [Xiao, Qian]. The spinners of silk. (London : G. Allen & Unwin, 1944).
[Enthält] : A rainy evening. The spinners of silk. Under the fence of others. Scenes from the Yentang mountain. Chestnuts. When your eaves are low. The captive. The ramshackle car. Galloping legs. Shanghai. The philatelist. Epidemic.

Hsiao, Ch'ien [Xiao, Qian]. Die Seidenraupen. Einzig autorisierte Übertragung von Joseph Kalmer. (Herrliberg-Zürich : Bühl-Verlag, 1947).
[Enthält] : Ein regnerischer Abend. Die Seidenraupen. Hinter anderer Leute Zaun. Die Bekehrung. Kastanien. Wenn dein Dach Schanghai. Der Briefmarkensammler. Die Seuche.

[Fielding, Henry]. Da wei ren Jiangnaisheng Wei'erde zhuan : [book IV]. Xiao Qian ; Pan Jiaxun jiao. In : Yi wen ; vol. 10 (1954). Übersetzung von Fielding, Henry. The life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the great. Book IV. In : Fielding, Henry. Miscellanies. Vol. 1-3. (London : A. Millar, 1743)..
大偉人江奈生 • 魏尔德傳

Siao, Ts'ien [Xiao, Qian]. Leur terre, ils l'ont gagnée. Trad. de Paul Jamati. (Paris : Les éditeurs français réunis, 1954). Übersetzung von Xiao, Qian. Tu di hui lao jia. (Shanghai : Bing ming chu ban she, 1951).
土地回老家

[Hasek, Jaroslav]. Hao bing Shuaike. Ya Haxiede zhu ; Yue Lada chat tu ; Xiao Qian yi. (Beijing : Ren min wen xue chu ban she, 1956). Übersetzung von Hasek, Jaroslav. Osudy dobrého vojáka Svejka za svetové války. Vol. 1-6. (Praha : K. Synek, 1926-1927). = Hasek, Jaroslav. Der brave Soldat Schwejk : seine Abenteuer in 17 Bildern. Nach Jaroslav Haschek von Max Brod und Hans Reimann. (Berlin : Verlag "Die Schmiede", 1928).
好兵帅克

[Shakespeare, William]. Shashibiya xi ju gu shi ji. Cha'ersi Lanmu, Mali Lanmu gai xie ; Xiao Qian yi. (Beijing : Zhongguo qing nian chu ban she, 1956). Übersetzung von Lamb, Charles. Tales from Shakespeare : designed for the use of young persons. Vol. 1-2. (London : Printed for Thomas Hodgkins at the Juvenile Library, 1807).
莎士比亚戏剧故事集

[Fielding, Henry]. Da wei ren Jiangnaisheng Wei'erde zhuan. Hengli Fei'erding zhu ; Xiao Qian yi ; Pan Jiaxun jiao. (Beijing : Zuo jia chu ban she, 1956). Übersetzung von Fielding, Henry. The life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the great. In : Fielding, Henry. Miscellanies. Vol. 1-3. (London : A. Millar, 1743).
大偉人江奈生 • 魏尔德傳

[Michel, Henri]. Di er ci shi jie da zhan. Hengli Mixie'er zhu ; Jiu Ren, Lu Peiwen, Liu Youlan yi ; Xiao Qian, Yu Gan jiao. Vol. 1-2. (Beijing : Shang wu yin shu guan, 1980-1981). Übersetzung von Michel, Henri. La seconde guerre mondiale. T. 1-2. (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1968-1969). (Peuples et civilisations ; 21).
第二次世界大战 /

[Ibsen, Henrik]. Pei’er Jinte. Xiao Qian yi. In : Shi jie wen xue ; no 3 (1978). = [Ibsen, Henrik]. Pei'er Jinte : wu mu san shi ba chang shi ju. Henglike Yibusheng zhu ; Xiao Qian yi. (Chengdu : Sichuan ren min chu ban she, 1983). Übersetzung von Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt : et dramatisk digt. (Kjobenhavn : Gyldendal, 1867). = Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt : ein dramatisches Gedicht. (Berlin : Bloch, 1867). = Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt : a dramatic poem. (London : W. Scott, 1890). [Uraufführung Christiania-Theate, Oslo 1876 ; Erste Übersetzung von Peer Gynt].
培尔金特 : 五幕三十八场诗剧

Lien, Wen-shan. A passage from China : an archival study of the correspondence and friendship between E.M. Forster and Hsiao Ch'ien. In : EurAmerica ; vol. 32, no 1 (2002). [Xiao Qian].
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