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3rd June 2019

The power of Armies is a visible thing

William Wordsworth, “The power of Armies is a visible thing”:

The power of Armies is a visible thing,
Formal and circumscribed in time and space;
But who the limits of that power shall trace
Which a brave People into light can bring
Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating
By just revenge inflamed? No foot may chase,
No eye can follow, to a fatal place
That power, that spirit, whether on the wing
Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind
Within its awful caves. — From year to year
Springs this indigenous produce far and near;
No craft this subtle element can bind,
Rising like water from the soil, to find
In every nook a lip that it may cheer.

3rd June 2018

Sad and Strange as in Dark Summer Dawns

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tears, Idle Tears”:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

3rd June 2017

In the dungeon-crypts idly did I stray

Emily Brontë, “The Prisoner”:

In the dungeon-crypts idly did I stray,
Reckless of the lives wasting there away;
“Draw the ponderous bars! open, Warder stern!”
He dared not say me nay — the hinges harshly turn.

“Our guests are darkly lodged,” I whisper’d, gazing through
The vault, whose grated eye showed heaven more gray than blue;
(This was when glad Spring laughed in awaking pride;)
“Ay, darkly lodged enough!” returned my sullen guide.

Then, God forgive my youth; forgive my careless tongue;
I scoffed, as the chill chains on the damp flagstones rung:
“Confined in triple walls, art thou so much to fear,
That we must bind thee down and clench thy fetters here?”

The captive raised her face; it was as soft and mild
As sculptured marble saint, or slumbering unwean’d child;
It was so soft and mild, it was so sweet and fair,
Pain could not trace a line, nor grief a shadow there!

The captive raised her hand and pressed it to her brow;
“I have been struck,” she said, “and I am suffering now;
Yet these are little worth, your bolts and irons strong;
And, were they forged in steel, they could not hold me long.”

Hoarse laughed the jailor grim: “Shall I be won to hear;
Dost think, fond, dreaming wretch, that I shall grant thy prayer?
Or, better still, wilt melt my master’s heart with groans?
Ah! sooner might the sun thaw down these granite stones.

“My master’s voice is low, his aspect bland and kind,
But hard as hardest flint the soul that lurks behind;
And I am rough and rude, yet not more rough to see
Than is the hidden ghost that has its home in me.”

About her lips there played a smile of almost scorn,
“My friend,” she gently said, “you have not heard me mourn;
When you my kindred’s lives, my lost life, can restore,
Then may I weep and sue, — but never, friend, before!

“Still, let my tyrants know, I am not doomed to wear
Year after year in gloom, and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

“He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

“Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears.
When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.

“But, first, a hush of peace — a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

“Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free — its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound,

“Oh I dreadful is the check — intense the agony —
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

“Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald death, the vision is divine!”

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering, turned to go —
We had no further power to work the captive woe:
Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given
A sentence, unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

5th January 2017

On What Really Doesn’t Matter; or, Reasons and Persons in Rudiggore

‘This hallowed volume’

Ruddigore, Act I:

This hallowed volume, composed, if I may believe the title-page, by no less an authority than the wife of a Lord Mayor, has been, through life, my guide and monitor. By its solemn precepts I have learnt to test the moral worth of all who approach me.

‘Within this breast there beats a heart // Whose voice can’t be gainsaid’ (Richard Dauntless; cf. Derek Parfit, On What Matters, pt. I, ‘Reasons’); ‘For duty, duty must be done // The rule applies to every one’ (Richard and Sir Despard Murgatroyd; cf. Parfit, op. cit., pt. II, ‘Principles’); ‘These arguments sound very well, but I can’t help thinking that, if they were reduced to syllogistic form, they wouldn’t hold water.’ (Sir Roderic, Act II; cf. Parfit, op. cit., pt. III, ‘Theories’).

‘If you wish in the world to advance’

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Ruddigore, Act I:

If you wish in the world to advance,
Your merits you’re bound to enhance,
You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, trust me, you haven’t a chance!

‘Gaunt vision, who art thou?’

(Image Credit: Transcribe Bentham, UCL)

Ruddigore, Act II:

Painted emblems of a race,
All accurst in days of yore,
Each from his accustomed place
Steps into the world once more.

On What Matters

Ruddigore, Act II:

Robin. My eyes are fully open to my awful situation –
I shall go at once to Roderic and make him an oration.
I shall tell him I’ve recovered my forgotten moral senses,
And I don’t care twopence-halfpenny for any consequences.
Now I do not want to perish by the sword or by the dagger,
But a martyr may indulge a little pardonable swagger,
And a word or two of compliment my vanity would flatter,
But I’ve got to die tomorrow, so it really doesn’t matter!

Margaret. If were not a little mad and generally silly
I should give you my advice upon the subject, willy-nilly;
I should show you in a moment how to grapple with the question,
And you’d really be astonished at the force of my suggestion.
On the subject I shall write you a most valuable letter,
Full of excellent suggestions when I feel a little better,
But at present I’m afraid I am as mad as any hatter,
So I’ll keep ’em to myself, for my opinion doesn’t matter!

Despard. If I had been so lucky as to have a steady brother
Who could talk to me as we are talking now to one another –
Who could give me good advice when he discovered I was erring
(Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring),
My existence would have made a rather interesting idyll,
And I might have lived and died a very decent indiwiddle.
This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter
Isn’t generally heard, and if it is it doesn’t matter!

3rd June 2016

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints

John Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all th’ Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

30th April 2016

On Brexit

“He is an Englishman!”

H.M.S. Pinafore, Act II

That he is an Englishman!
For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an!

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 72:

William [of Orange] once confided to an aide that, had he lived in the 1550s, when Habsburgs were threatening to become dominant, he would have been “as much as a Frenchman as he was now a Spaniard”¹⁷ — a precursor of Winston Churchill’s reply in 1930s to the charge that he was anti-German: “If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and anti-French.”¹⁸

17. G.C. Gibbs, “The Revolution in Foreign Policy” in Geoffrey Holmes, ed. Britain After the Glorious Revolution, 1689 — 1714 (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 61.

18. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, The Second World War, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948) p. 208.

18th November 2015

“受攻讦的记号”

伏尔泰讥 Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan (1709 – 1784)译经:

Savez-vous pourquoi Jérémie
A tant pleuré durant sa vie ?
C’est qu’en prophète il prédisait
Qu’un jour Lefranc le traduirait.

Beuchot 註:

Dans un Éloge de M. de La Marche, par M. L. F., qui est dans le Nécrologe des Hommes célèbres de France, année 1770, on attribue à La Marche ce distique contre la traduction des Lamentations de Jérémie par feu l’abbé Cotin

Le triste Jérémie avec raison pleurait,
Prévoyant bien qu’un jour Cotin le traduirait.

M. Breghot du Lut, dans les Archives historiques et statistiques du département du Rhône, tome XIV, page 91, pense que M. L. F., auteur de l’Eloge de La Marche, pourrait bien être Lefranc de Pompignan, et que les vers aussi pourraient bien être, non de La Marche, mais de l’auteur de son Eloge, c’est-à-dire de Lefranc lui-même. Cette ingénieuse conjecture me semble très-probable. Comme le remarque M. Breghot, c’était de la part de Lefranc une manière adroite de détourner l’épigramme que d’en faire soupçonner l’auteur de plagiat.

Mais j’ai bien d’autres doutes. Le quatrième vers présente, dans quelques impressions, une variante remarquable. On y lit

Que Baculard le traduirait.

Baculard d’Arnaud publia en effet les Lamentations de Jérémie, odes sacrées, 1732, in-4°. qui ont eu plusieurs éditions; et dans les Poésies sacrées de Lefranc de Pompignan, il ne se trouve point de traductions de Jérémie; il y en a de Joël, d’Abdias, de Nahum et d’Habacuc.

J’ai vainement cherché dans les éditions de Voltaire, données de son vivant, le quatrain sur la traduction de Jérémie. Il me parait difficile qu’il ait été fait contre Lefranc; il est probable au contraire qu’il l’a été contre Baculard, qui, en 1750, s’était fort mal conduit envers Voltaire (voyez la lettre à d’Argental, du 15 mars 1751).
C’est auprès des pièces de 1760 que les éditeurs de Kehl ont placé cette épigramme c’était une conséquence de la version qu’ils avaient adoptée. Il se peut que, lors des plaisanteries dont Lefranc fut l’objet en 1760, on ait rajeuni l’épigramme contre Baculard d’Arnaud, qui, si elle porte sur Baculard, doit être de 1752.

署名 M. L. F. 氏挽 Ignace Hugary de la Marche-Courmont (1728 – 1768)时, 提及 La Marche 曾讽刺 Cotin 译耶利米, 与伏尔泰句相似. Beuchot 引 Breghot du Lut 说, 怀疑祭文为 Lefranc 所作, 以嫁祸于人.

但 Lefranc 之 Poésies sacrées 只有约珥、俄巴底亚、那鸿、哈巴谷四小先知, 而未见耶利米. 有更早的异文讥 Baculard d’Arnaud 译«耶利米哀歌». Baculard 曾受伏尔泰赏识, 后与伏尔泰翻脸. Lefranc 於 1760 年当选法兰西学院院士时因攻击百科全书派, 遭致伏尔泰等人嘲讽围攻. 故应是此后才由 Baculard 改为 Lefranc.

12th November 2015

La croix de l’Aigle ?

Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. I, ch. 12, § 78 n. 1:

Irenaeus (about 170) regards the faces of the cherubim (man, lion, ox, eagle) as “images of the life and work of the Son of God,” and assigns the man to Matthew, and the ox to Luke, but the eagle to Mark and the lion to John (Adv. Haer., III. 11, 8, ed. Stieren I. 469 sq.). Afterwards the signs of Mark and John were properly exchanged. So by Jerome (d. 419) in his Com. on Ezekiel and other passages. I quote from the Prologus to his Comment. in Ev. Matthaei (Opera, vol. VII., p. 19, ed. Migne): “Haec igitur quatuor Evangelia multo ante praedicta, Ezechielis quoque volumen probat, in quo prima visio ita contexitur: ‘Et in medio sicut similitudo quatuor animalium: et vultus eorum facies hominis, et facies leonis, et facies vituli, et facies aquilae’ (Ezech. 1:5 et 10). Prima hominis facies Matthaeum significat, qui quasi de homine exorsus est scribere: ‘Liber generationis Jesu Christi, filii David, filii Abraham’ (Matth. 1). Secunda, Marcum, in quo [al. qua] vox leonis in eremo rugientis auditur: ‘Vox clamantis in deserto [al. eremo], Parate viam Domini, rectas facile semitas ejus’ (Marc. 1:3). Tertia, vituli, quae evangelistam Lucam a Zacharia sacerdote sumpsisse initium praefigurat. Quarta, Joannem evangelistam, qui assumptis pennis aquilae, et ad altiora festinans, de Verbo Dei disputat.

Augustin (De Consens. Evang., Lib. I., c. 6, in Migne’s ed. of the Opera, tom. III., 1046) assigns the lion to Matthew, the man to Mark (whom he wrongly regarded as an abbreviator of Matthew), the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John, because “he soars as an eagle above the clouds of human infirmity, and gazes on the light of immutable truth with most keen and steady eyes of the heart.” In another place (Tract. XXXVI. in Joh. Ev., c. 8, § 1) Augustin says: “The other three Evangelists walked as it were on earth with our Lord as man (tamquam cum homine Domino in terra ambulabant) and said but little of his divinity. But John, as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, opened his treatise, so to speak, with a peal of thunder …. To the sublimity of this beginning all the rest corresponds, and he speaks of our Lord’s divinity as no other.” He calls the evangelic quaternion “the fourfold car of the Lord, upon which he rides throughout the world and subdues the nations to his easy yoke.” Pseudo-Athanasius (Synopsis Script.) assigns the man to Matthew, the ox to Mark, the lion to Luke. These variations in the application of the emblems reveal the defects of the analogy. The man might as well (with Lange) be assigned to Luke’s Gospel of humanity as the sacrificial ox. But Jerome’s distribution of the symbols prevailed and was represented in poetry by Sedulius in the fifth century.

29th August 2015

On Liu Cixin’s Hugo Award

Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem (tr. Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2014), the first volume of a trilogy-series, was chosen this year’s Hugo Award Best Novel, a prestigious honour in the science fiction genre. Following recent controversies that divided the sci-fi community, this year’s selection process for the award became a battlefield where one side dubbed Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) advocating for a more inclusive culture towards minority groups, provoked campaigns from opposing factions, the Puppies. Liu’s award was announced on 22 August in Spokane, Washington, amidst sweeping ‘No Award’ votes.

The Puppies may have lost, but the SJWs have little to celebrate. Liu Cixin, the winner emerging from the hostilities, hardly appreciates, if he does not disdain, the standard of political correctness that is current in the modern-day western societies. Liu’s anti-liberal attitudes have unfortunately escaped the notice of his admirers, if not lost in translation. Efforts were made by his English translators, Ken Liu and Joel Martisen, to adapt the Three Body trilogy into a more acceptable gender neutral language. Gratuitous mentions of characters’ sex in the original text were redacted. Liu revealed that he had been requested by the editors of the English edition to revise more than 1000 passages that would have been too blatantly sexist.

Reviewers critical to Liu often complain about his style that tends to tell not to show, which is never more true than when he expresses his crude view on humanity and the world. He spells out his outlook in terms of the ‘cosmic sociology,’ according to which the civilizations in the universe, however sophisticated, are always in the Hobbesian state of nature, in a war of all against all. The interstellar pursuit of Lebensraum is thus justified by the postulation of the ‘second law of cosmic sociology’ which recapitulates Malthus’s dismal theory.

An alien invasion is imminent in Dark Forest, the second book in the trilogy. The ‘Wallfacer Program’ is launched to develop strategies against the invasion. Liu overrates Sun Tzu’s canny Art of War, and laments the decline of deception and trickery in modern strategic thinking. As Lawrence Freedman notes, ‘in the face of strong and coherent adversary, clever mind games could take you only so far.’ Thinly stretched beyond his ‘smattering of elemental strategy,’ Liu couldn’t help but to draw inspirations from Mao’s callous trivialization of human lives and readiness to lose half of his country’s population to a nuclear annihilation.

Liu repeatedly invokes human life as the highest ethic principle or the foundation of morality in debates over the strategies. However, the human life that Liu refers to means little more than its mere survival. In Angel Era, one of Liu’s stories yet to be translated, he champions the the genetic modification of famine-stricken African nations into herbivores, as the technological solution to the continent’s problem of food supply. ‘Being fed is the foundation of human civilization!’ proclaims the protagonist who could pass for a Chinese government’s mouthpiece routinely defending the country’s human rights record by resorting to emphasis on the right to survival as the most fundamental human rights. To stop the engineering of human mutation, the UN responded by authorizing an international force on a humanitarian mission, or in Liu’s portrayal, a self-rightous crusade driven by western-centric morals against the ‘self-determination’ of the African people. The genetically modified super-humans finally prevail over the humanity. Being hopeful of a brave new era, the author concludes the story.

Liu’s views are cynical, and characteristically so in totalitarian societies where he came from. Such cynicism was described by the Soviet dissident Valentin Turchin in an interview with Hedrick Smith:

Homo Sovieticus is like the prostitute who believes that all women are whores because she is. Soviet man believes that the whole world is divided into parties and that every man is a member of one party or another, and there is no real honesty. No one stands for the truth. And if anyone says he is above Party and is trying to speak the truth alone, he is lying.

16th July 2015

Le Tarikh Khozideh cité par d’Herbelot

Barthélémy d’Herbelot 著 Bibliothèque orientale 所引 Tarikh Khozideh 与波斯文 The Ta’ríkh-i-guzída : or, “Select history” of Hamdu’lláh Mustawfí-i-Qazwíní, ed. & tr. Edward G. Browne (E. J. Brill — Luzac, 1910, 1913) 不符. (参见 25 Apr., 9 Dec. 2013)

Sir William Ouseley, “Observations on some extraordinary Anecdotes concerning Alexander; and on the Eastern Origin of several Fictions popular in different Languages of Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. I, part II, p. 21f. n 29 (15 Nov. 1826):

²⁹ D’Herbelôt, in his Bibliothèque Orientate, gives an outline of this story, (art. Homai.) which he appears to have chiefly taken from the Lubb at’touaríkh (لبّ التواريخ), and some other epitomes of Persian history; but the Taríkh Guzídeh, he says, does not mention this queen :—“Le Tarikh Cozideh ou Montekheb ne fait aucune mention de cette reine dans la dynastie des Caianides.” I find, however, that my two copies of the Guzídeh commemorate queen Humái (هماي) in an article from which the Lubb at’touaríkh appears to have borrowed hole sentences. D’Herbelot strangely expresses by Cozideh (as above) or by Khozideh (as under the article Tarikh) that word which the Persians write ݣزیده and pronounce Guzídeh signifying “chosen,” or “select.” Muntekheb (منتخب) used in the same sense is a title given to the Arabic and Turkish translations of the Guzídeh. (See Bibl. Orient, in Taríkh Khozideh.)