阮一峰的网络日志

燕卜荪在中国

以下全文转自Franz Mok's Blog：Boredom Variations Op.13。

50年代在Sheffield Univ.教文学的William Empson教授

在学校图书馆偶然看到这本论文集The Strengths of Shakespeare's Shrew，因是关于我喜爱的Shakespeare的论文，就借了下来。却意外的发现作者Williams Empson(燕卜荪)以前是Shef Univ的文学教授，40年代还在北大教过几年英美文学的,曾经跟George Orwell在BBC是同事，他是主持Chinese这个主题的。有趣。此书后面的关于在中国教书的Memoir有意思，发现自己喜欢看西人描写中国情况的文章。此处摘抄若干。

***'I found that all my students held libreral or leftish view, very vague ones, and on the other hand were very afraid of letting them be kown, chiefly because it would prevent them from getting jobs....I remember in my first term we were reading Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, and the leader of the class came and said'We think we had better not write an essay on Mrs Dalloway, because it might have political implications.'

***'I was rather pleased one year in China when I had a course on modern poetry, The Waste Land and all that, and at the end a student wrote in a most friendly way to explain why he wasn't taking the exam. It wasn't that he couldn't understand The Waste Land, he said, in fact after my lectures the poem was perfectly clear; but it had turned out to be disgusting nonsense, and he had decided to join the engineering department.'

***The Chinese are excessively keen on phonetics, because they have a great variety of dialects; such a great variety that they don't feel any nationalist resistance when they start talking a foreign language, and this makes them good linguists; but also it has been a popular and friendly trick at a dinner party to say exactly what part of China a man comes from by his accent, judging by incredibly tiny details, even while he thinks he is talking standard Mandarin. This is not offensive in China, as it is liable to be in England, because there it is solely a matter of region and not of class.'

*** 这一段对本人比较有意义。'the dragooning of independent thought and the hysteria of the confession meetings and all that...The Attendance at meetings with your colleagues, where they each in turn discussed their past and their state of mind, had to be enormously long, and you might call it a deliberately calculated nagging process...Of course, confessions about embezzlement are a different thing, and easy to believe, I think; the British in China have been saying for years that the Chinese regard 'squeeze'as a matter of course, so it can't be surprising if the Chinese say they believe it themselves and want to have it stopped by a firm effort...I think the Chinese are natural actors anyway, very sensitive to social requirements.

其主要作品是Seven Types of Ambiguity.