"The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is...

"The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us."
— Harold Bloom

Is he right? What would you include in a Chinese canon?

Four Great Novels.
I would then stop and go back to the West.

What a trite and banal answer. Have you even read the four classics?

Tang poetry.

I have. They're good, the poetry is good, but Chinese literature is vulnerable because Mandarin will never be the langua franca unless they literally dominate the world, it's something you have to be born into, for the most part.

Additionally, it's the Chinese whom are being influenced by western lit - no thanks to Mao.

>Chinese literature is vulnerable because Mandarin will never be the langua franca unless they literally dominate the world
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. German literature is quite robust, indeed Goethe has been regarded as the Napoleon of literature within his own lifetime, while Germany never quite had the dominating influence of either France or Britain.

>rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us.

pretty sure bloom can't speak chinese. what makes him qualified to say this?

The few Chinese texts I've read in translation have an awkward stilted prose style. Five Spice Street, for example, while good is hampered by its translation

Translations from Chinese to Western languages are basically impossible, our cultures are just too different.

But it does seem to me that LARPing Westerners are much more interested in Chinese culture than the Chinese themselves.

Mandarin is shit for reading Tang and Song's poetry but OK for the four great novels

German isn't nearly as difficult to learn as Chinese, and still, Germany's literary tradition is much poorer than that of France and England, only really starting in the late 18th century.

>Let me catch a selfie with you, 97 year old man!

Everyone capable of smiling in this epoch should be killed for being complicit in it

>Mandarin will never be the langua franca
Well it is for China so you can almost guarantee there will e Mandrin lit even amongst the dozens of Chinese languages as well as of writers from the diaspora

>unless they literally dominate the world
Oh you mean worldwide? Well shit Veeky Forums I guess we were all wasting our time learning another language other than English :)

What kind of fucked logic is that? And what does that have to do with reading the translations if you do think learning other than the top ten world languages is a waste of time?

gunpowder. faggot.

i don't get the joke. why would you be in the Chinese canon with gunpowder? is it a play on "cannon"? but why would you be in the cannon?

This was taken at an interview between these two people. Guy to the left didn't just randomly encounter H. Boolahoom and snap a quick-one with the man...

Mo Yan is pretty good. especially Red Sorghum.

Bei Dao is a really good poet. He is one of the Misty poets, who are all worth checking out.

Shen Congwen is quite good. Check out Bordertown and The Long River.

I mostly read modern Chinese novels in their original language (guess my nationality) so for the modern era it would be:

Lu Xun
Xu Zhimo
Lao She
Ba Jin
Hu Shih
Arguably Yu Hua
And
Fundamentals are the Four Great Novels and the Four Books and Five Classics, the Chinese equivalent of start with the Greeks.

I have only read fragments of Chinese poetry, which is a pretty wide term itself ranging from the Song ci to fu, so some other guys here probably have a better idea than I.

Like what though, only a small glimpse of the pristine quality of Chinese literature is accessible through the lens of Western translations.

Can an honorable a wise laoshi tell me of the basics of Chinese literature? Is it more poetic and flowery like Japanese literature or is it more focused on stories? I really love Romance of the Three Kingdoms but I want to know more about Chinese literature in general

What do you think about Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry?

the premise was mandarin ever over-taking western lit as a dominate literary tradition

I'm not sure what you, or are talking about. I never said learning another language was not worth it...???

>what's this?
>um a selfie
>w-hwattt?

OH, I see. You think I'm OP. I'm not OP, I was just talking to whomever I quoted.

Not my fault this chan has no user IDs.

>what's this?
>um a selfie
>sh-shen maaa? chingy ching chong chang.

i'm chinese so i'm allowed to be racist about this.

>Translations often bleed the quality of the work as prose is often unique to its language

Shocking.

His Chinese friends help him out?

>guess my nationality
Tajik?

I don't think he's right. Heidegger had no problems incorporating Laozi into his philosophy.

You might say that people who use Chinese or Indian philosophy in their own philosophy will axiomatically misconstrue it, but that sounds racist to me honestly.

I find it hard to believe a sufficiently smart Chinese or Japanese person has a problem understanding Socratic reasoning for example?

So why should it be any different the other way around?

>(guess my nationality)

Chinese as a language is unsuited to literature or even sophisticated thinking in general.