Қытай әдебиеттанушысы және жазушысы Қянь Чжуншу

Chinese literary scholar and writer

Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998), also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung shu or Dzien Tsoong su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition. He is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged. His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. He also played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life. Qian created a profound theoretical meaning for the three features of motivational nature, empathetic nature, and rational nature of aesthetic emotion for literature by deeply studying questions such as the source of emotion motivation, the ways to express emotion, and the optimal comfort in emotion in writing. He believed that the source of emotion motivation is poems because poems can convey human's emotion. When people transfer their emotion to inanimate objects, they give these objects life, which is the ways to express emotion. Also, Qian insisted that humans cannot express their emotion as they want; instead, they should rationally control their emotion to a certain degree so that they can achieve an optimal appreciation status. NamesTraditional Chinese:錢鍾書Simplified Chinese:钱锺书Pinyin:Qián ZhōngshūWade Giles:Ch'ien Chung shuZi:Zheliang (哲良) Mocun (默存)Hao:Huaiju (槐聚)

Most of what is known about Qian's early life relies on an essay written by his wife Yang Jiang. Born in Wuxi, Qian Zhongshu was the son of Qian Jibo (T: 錢基博, S: 钱基博), a conservative Confucian scholar, landed gentry, and Chinese language professor at Tsinghua, St. John's University, and National Central University (Nanking), respectively. By family tradition, Qian Zhongshu grew up under the care of his eldest uncle, who did not have a son. Qian was initially named Yangxian (仰先 ; "respect the ancients"), with the courtesy name Zheliang (哲良; "sagacious and upright"). However, when he was one year old, in accordance with a tradition of zhuazhou, practiced in many parts of China, he was given a few objects laid out in front of him for his "grabbing"; he grabbed a book. His uncle thusly renamed him Zhongshu, literally "fond of books," while Yangxian became his intimate name. Qian was a rather talkative child. His father later changed his courtesy name to Mocun (默存), literally "to keep silent," in the hope that he would talk less. Both Qian's name and courtesy name forecasted his future life. While he remained talkative when talking about literature with friends, he kept silent most of the time on politics and social activities. Qian was indeed very fond of books. When he was young, his uncle often brought him along to teahouses during the day. There, Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home. At the age of 6, Qian went to Qinshi primary school and stayed home for less than half a year due to illness. At the age of 7, Qian studied in a private school of a relative's family. Due to inconvenience, he quit school a year later and was taught by his uncle. When Qian was 11, he entered the first grade at Donglin Elementary School, and his uncle died this year. He continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions drastically worsened as her family's fortunes dwindled. Under the strict tutelage of his father, Qian mastered classical Chinese. At the age of 14, Qian left home to attend Taowu middle school, an English language missionary school in Suzhou, after being scolded by his father, he studied hard and improved his writing level. One of his few friends was the budding Sinologist and comparatist Achilles Fang. Qian also frequently cut classes, though he more than made up for this in Tsinghua's large library, which he boasted of having "read through." In 1932, he met Yang Jiang, who became a successful playwright and translator. Yang Jiang wrote, "Zhongshu's 'foolishness' could not be contained in books, but just had to gush forth'". Two years after Qian graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933, Qian taught at Kwanghua University in Shanghai and contributed to English language publications such as The China Critic. In 1935, Qian received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to further his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford in Britain. After spending two years at Exeter College, Oxford, he received a Baccalaureus Litterarum (Bachelor of Literature). Shortly after his daughter Qian Yuan (T: 錢瑗, S: 钱瑗) was born in England in 1937, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France. In 1938, he returned to China and was appointed as a full professor at Tsinghua University, which, due to the war, had relocated to Kunming, in Yunnan province and become part of Southwestern United University. In 1939, after Qian returned to Shanghai to visit his relatives, he directly went to Hunan to take care of his sick father and temporarily left Southwestern United University. In 1941, During the Pearl Harbor incident, Qian was temporarily trapped in Shanghai. Qian returned to research, but escaped from social activities. Most of his late life was confined to his reading room. He consciously kept a distance from the mass media and political figures. Readers kept visiting the secluded scholar, and an anecdote goes that Qian when approached by a British admirer, remarked: "Is it necessary for one to know the hen if one loves the eggs it lays?" Qian entered a hospital in 1994, his daughter also became ill in 1995. On March 4, 1997, Qian's daughter died of cancer. On December 19, 1998, Qian died in Beijing.

Qian lived in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945, which was then under Japanese occupation. Many of his works were written or published during this chaotic period of time. A collection of short essays, Written in the Margins of Life (Traditional: 寫在人生邊上, Simplified: 写在人生边上) was published in 1941. Human, Beast, Ghost (T: 人‧獸‧鬼, S: 人‧兽‧鬼), a collection of short stories, mostly satiric, was published in 1946. His most celebrated work Fortress Besieged (T: 圍城, S: 围城) appeared in 1947, but not until 1980s that it receives more attention. On the Art of Poetry (T: 談藝錄, S: 谈艺录), written in classical Chinese, was published in 1948. Besides rendering Mao Zedong's selected works into English, Qian was appointed to produce an anthology of poetry of the Song dynasty when he was working in the Institute of Literary Studies. The Selected and Annotated Song Dynasty Poetry (T: 宋詩選注, S: 宋诗选注) was published in 1958. Despite Qian's quoting the chairman, and his selecting a considerable number of poems that reflect class struggle, the work was criticized for not being Marxist enough. The work was praised highly by the overseas critics, though, especially for its introduction and footnotes. In a new preface for the anthology written in 1988, Qian said that the work was an embarrassing compromise between his personal taste and the prevailing academic atmosphere. Seven Pieces Patched Together (T: 七綴集, S: 七缀集), a collection of seven pieces of literary criticism written (and revised) over years in vernacular Chinese, was published in 1984, and has been translated by Duncan Campbell as Patchwork: Seven Essays on Art and Literature. This collection includes the famous essay "Lin Shu's Translation" (T: 林紓的翻譯, S: 林纾的翻译). Qian's magnum opus is the five volume Guan Zhui Bian (T: 管錐編, S: 管锥编), literally the Pipe Awl Collection, translated into English as Limited Views. Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid 1990s, it is an extensive collection of notes and short essays on poetics, semiotics, literary history and related topics written in classical Chinese. Qian's command of the cultural traditions of classical and modern Chinese, ancient Greek (in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross cultural allusions. He took a range of Chinese classical texts as the basis of this work, including the I Ching, Classic of Poetry, Verses of Chu, The Commentary of Tso, Records of the Grand Historian, Tao Te Ching, Lieh tzu, Jiaoshi Yilin, Extensive Records of the T'ai p'ing Era and the Complete Prose of the Pre Tang Dynasties (T: 全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文, S: 全上古三代秦汉三国六朝文). Broadly familiar with the Western history of ideas, Qian shed new lights on the Chinese classical texts by comparing them with Western works, showing their likeness, or more often their apparent likeness and essential differences. Qian Zhongshu is one of the best known Chinese authors in the Western world. Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish. It represents an alternative strand of modernism, which has
long remained hidden and unexamined in the history of modern Chinese literature. "Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts" has been translated into English, French, and Italian. Besides being one of the great masters of written vernacular Chinese in the 20th century, Qian was also one of the last authors to produce substantial works in classical Chinese. Some regard his choice of writing Guan Zhui Bian (Limited Views) in classical Chinese as a challenge to the assertion that classical Chinese is incompatible with modern and Western ideas, an assertion often heard during the May Fourth Movement. Ronald Egan argues that the work contains an implicit negative commentary on the Cultural Revolution.

A 13 volume edition of Works of Qian Zhongshu (Traditional: 錢鍾書集, Simplified: 钱锺书集/钱钟书集) was published in 2001 by the Joint Publishing, a hard covered deluxe edition, in contrast to all of Qian's works published during his lifetime which are cheap paperbacks. The publisher claimed that the edition had been proofread by many experts. One of the most valuable parts of the edition which demonstrating Qian's writing ability while blending humor and irony, titled Marginalias on the Marginalias of Life (T: 寫在人生邊上的邊上, S: 写在人生边上的边上), is a collection of Qian's writings previously scattered in periodicals, magazines and other books. The writings collected there are, however, arranged without any visible order. Other posthumous publications of Qian's works have drawn harsh criticism. The official writing of Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi began in 1982. In the following ten years, Qian invested a lot of energy to make extensive and in depth Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi. The 10 volume Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi (T: 宋詩紀事補正, S:宋诗纪事补正), published in 2003, was criticized as a shoddy publication. Liaoning People's Publishing House published Qian Zhongshu's ''Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi in 2003. A facsimile of Qian's holograph (known as 宋詩紀事補訂(手稿影印本) in Chinese) has been published in 2005, by another publisher. The facsimiles of parts of Qian's notebooks appeared in 2004, and have similarly drawn criticism on account of blatant inadvertency. In 2005, a collection of Qian's English works was published. Again, it was lashed for its editorial incompetence. The Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan) has, per an agreement with Yang Jiang, begun publishing photoreproductions of Qian Zhongshu's reading notes, totaling several score volumes in both Chinese and foreign languages.

Qian Zhongshu. A Portrait by Kong Kai Ming at Portrait Gallery of Chinese Writers (Hong Kong Baptist University Library).