Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:
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| [a] Digging RF |
Beloit College Mortar Board
I wish to thank the leaders of this year’s Beloit College Mortar Board for inviting me to speak. With an organization so rich in heritage and generations of learning, I find it oddly perfect that a professor who—by his own account—likes to overthink everything…was given an hour to discuss an impossible topic. Scholarship? Good luck with that—this decade.
So let’s get started. The room is reserved until New Year’s Eve…2019. In all seriousness, I do a lot of my thinking on my mountain bike (imagine it as a desk and chair on knobby tires, traversing varied terrain). Ever since I received my topic of “scholarship” several weeks ago, I have been doing a good deal of riding. I haven’t even begun to get to the bottom of this topic, but I have churned up more than a little gravel in getting to some of the issues we’ll discuss.
Just mull it over for now.
Let’s begin with David Roy. Born in 1934, he spent part of his childhood in China (together with his brother, former Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy). When I met him in the late-1980s, he had just begun an ambitious project to translate all 100 chapters of one of China’s greatest narratives, and the inspiration (so attests the author himself) of China’s greatest work of fiction. I took his 金瓶梅 Plum in the GoldenVase seminar in 1988. It lasted for two years, and we read the first forty chapters of Roy’s translation, as well as all of the scholarship in every language…whether we could read it or not…on the work. Professor Roy would come to class with all sorts of Aha! moments (he taught us to treasure these).
One day he said “I’ve got it; I have found the way to convey the pun” at the heart of a particularly untranslatable bit of Chinese text. It goes something like this. There is an idiomatic phrase in Chinese that is curiously fragmented, and only two characters, rather than four. The “meaning” is something like “she’s terrific.” After months of pondering, Roy burst into class saying that he would translate it as “She’s two under four full words.” Think about it.
She's too wonderful for words.
It goes further, though. He published volume one in 1993. He just published volume four a few months ago. No one’s counting, but this work takes some time. Roy always said that he has good genes, and that his mother and father were still living, in their nineties. I kept thinking: “You live in Hyde Park. Please look both ways when you cross the street, even if you are thinking about Chinese puns.”
David Roy’s translation is sublime. It is one of the best renderings of a foreign language ever to be put into English. I am not the only person to say so, either. It is masterful. But that is not what drives Professor Roy to this day. No, it is the footnotes. “The citations will be my legacy” he said more than once. He has handwritten index cards—spanning forty years of reading the text—that have become the endnotes for his translation. He hopes that people will enjoy his translation, and has given enormous effort to making it as accurate and enjoyable as possible. The endnotes will be his legacy, though.
Scholar? Check.
Now, let’s look at Paul Wheatley (1921-1999). He spent World War II in the elite British Royal Air Force (RAF). He received his D.Phil from Oxford in Human Geography after the war, just as the field was dying. He spent a storied career showing why it remained deeply relevant, and contributed powerfully to its reascendance in the twenty-first century. He buried himself in East Asian scholarship, and taught at Berkeley for a decade, where he told me about the Friday afternoon sherry hours in which he, Peter Boodberg, Edward Schafer, and other giants of sinology would sip sherry, nibble cheese and crackers...and speak in reconstructed Tang dynasty (CE 618-906) dialect. This is hard to translate to everyday experience, but it makes chattin' in Latin at the Vatican seem positively puerile by contrast.
He was busy, though; while at Berkeley he published a work that still has no equal—nothing is even close. It has influenced all of my own work in Chinese studies. The Pivot of the Four Quarters ties together elemental themes in geography, cosmology, and history in ways that have influenced two generations of China scholars.
But Wheatley had hardly begun. In the early 1970s, he devoted himself to the Middle East, learning a wide array of languages along the way. I know this well, because I was asked (he was my advisor at the Committee on Social Thought) to give the toast at his retirement party. This was heady stuff, but it turns out that the gift that was given to him—by the faculty, as it turned out—had an Arabic inscription. He politely noted that the Arabic grammar was “somewhat misconstrued,” but that he appreciated the gesture his very Western colleagues had shown. He would continue his work in Arabic, and on the parameters of devotional life, publishing another major work—The Places Where Men Pray Together—just before his death.
Languages? Check. Scholar? Check.
26 October 2011
Part One of Five I wish to thank the leaders of this year’s Beloit College Mortar Board for inviting me to speak. With an organization so rich in heritage and generations of learning, I find it oddly perfect that a professor who—by his own account—likes to overthink everything…was given an hour to discuss an impossible topic. Scholarship? Good luck with that—this decade.
So let’s get started. The room is reserved until New Year’s Eve…2019. In all seriousness, I do a lot of my thinking on my mountain bike (imagine it as a desk and chair on knobby tires, traversing varied terrain). Ever since I received my topic of “scholarship” several weeks ago, I have been doing a good deal of riding. I haven’t even begun to get to the bottom of this topic, but I have churned up more than a little gravel in getting to some of the issues we’ll discuss.
Scholarship=Creating New Knowledge.
Just mull it over for now.
*** ***
Scholars Let’s begin with David Roy. Born in 1934, he spent part of his childhood in China (together with his brother, former Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy). When I met him in the late-1980s, he had just begun an ambitious project to translate all 100 chapters of one of China’s greatest narratives, and the inspiration (so attests the author himself) of China’s greatest work of fiction. I took his 金瓶梅 Plum in the GoldenVase seminar in 1988. It lasted for two years, and we read the first forty chapters of Roy’s translation, as well as all of the scholarship in every language…whether we could read it or not…on the work. Professor Roy would come to class with all sorts of Aha! moments (he taught us to treasure these).
One day he said “I’ve got it; I have found the way to convey the pun” at the heart of a particularly untranslatable bit of Chinese text. It goes something like this. There is an idiomatic phrase in Chinese that is curiously fragmented, and only two characters, rather than four. The “meaning” is something like “she’s terrific.” After months of pondering, Roy burst into class saying that he would translate it as “She’s two under four full words.” Think about it.
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| [b] Sublime RF |
She's too wonderful for words.
It goes further, though. He published volume one in 1993. He just published volume four a few months ago. No one’s counting, but this work takes some time. Roy always said that he has good genes, and that his mother and father were still living, in their nineties. I kept thinking: “You live in Hyde Park. Please look both ways when you cross the street, even if you are thinking about Chinese puns.”
David Roy’s translation is sublime. It is one of the best renderings of a foreign language ever to be put into English. I am not the only person to say so, either. It is masterful. But that is not what drives Professor Roy to this day. No, it is the footnotes. “The citations will be my legacy” he said more than once. He has handwritten index cards—spanning forty years of reading the text—that have become the endnotes for his translation. He hopes that people will enjoy his translation, and has given enormous effort to making it as accurate and enjoyable as possible. The endnotes will be his legacy, though.
Scholar? Check.
Now, let’s look at Paul Wheatley (1921-1999). He spent World War II in the elite British Royal Air Force (RAF). He received his D.Phil from Oxford in Human Geography after the war, just as the field was dying. He spent a storied career showing why it remained deeply relevant, and contributed powerfully to its reascendance in the twenty-first century. He buried himself in East Asian scholarship, and taught at Berkeley for a decade, where he told me about the Friday afternoon sherry hours in which he, Peter Boodberg, Edward Schafer, and other giants of sinology would sip sherry, nibble cheese and crackers...and speak in reconstructed Tang dynasty (CE 618-906) dialect. This is hard to translate to everyday experience, but it makes chattin' in Latin at the Vatican seem positively puerile by contrast.
 |
| [c] Devotional RF |
He was busy, though; while at Berkeley he published a work that still has no equal—nothing is even close. It has influenced all of my own work in Chinese studies. The Pivot of the Four Quarters ties together elemental themes in geography, cosmology, and history in ways that have influenced two generations of China scholars.
But Wheatley had hardly begun. In the early 1970s, he devoted himself to the Middle East, learning a wide array of languages along the way. I know this well, because I was asked (he was my advisor at the Committee on Social Thought) to give the toast at his retirement party. This was heady stuff, but it turns out that the gift that was given to him—by the faculty, as it turned out—had an Arabic inscription. He politely noted that the Arabic grammar was “somewhat misconstrued,” but that he appreciated the gesture his very Western colleagues had shown. He would continue his work in Arabic, and on the parameters of devotional life, publishing another major work—The Places Where Men Pray Together—just before his death.
Languages? Check. Scholar? Check.
*** ***
And that leads to my first key point. Without scholarship, don’t even bother teaching. You aren’t needed. The two cannot be separated, and scholarship comes first. This may seem uncharacteristically “argumentative” for those of you who have heard me speak before (seeming animosity reserved usually only for MLA or APA citation). Do not get me wrong. If you have encountered a great teacher, s/he is a scholar. It is impossible to be otherwise. Note that I have not mentioned “publishing,” which is related, but not necessarily the same thing as, excellent scholarship. We’ll return to this point at the end.
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
NEXT
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
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| [d] No separation RF |
Part two of the lecture takes the story back to my own foundations. I learned from my parents what scholarship and omnivorous reading was about.
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