Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

Hi,

Below is the first half of an opening address given by a Chinese
scholar in English to a group of American visiting scholars at a
symposium held in China around 1980. There has been heated debate in
some Chinese forums about whether this address demonstrates the
author's brilliant command of English or just the opposite. The
biggest controversy has been about the first sentence, which many
think was poorly constructed.

I'd love to hear from you any opinions or comments on it. Thank you
very much.
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Ladies and Gentlemen:

　　Allow me t extend, on behalf of the Chinese academy of social
Sciences, a warm welcome to you to the symposium of American and
Chinese comparatists.

　　This conference, sponsored b the Institute of Foreign Literature and
the Institute of Literature in my Academy in conjunction with the
American Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People’s
Republic of China, is the first ever of its kind held here.

　　Although there always has to be a first time, yet considering the
significance of the present occasion for future SinoAmierican
dialogues on our discipline, we may perhaps flatter ourselves that we
are not only establishing a record, but also, in a modest and
unspectacular way, making history.

　　If we take T.S. Eliot’s remark for what it’s worth, the literary
relationship between the United States and China should be
particularly close. He, so to speak, issued to Ezra Pound a patent of
“the inventor of Chinese poetry of our time”. Once Chinese literature
was “invented”, American scholars with characteristic acumen and
energy have been conscientiously and steadily discovering it. A
similar state of affairs obtains here. early Chinese translators and
writers, in their fashion, “invented” European and American
literature, and our professional students have since set about
industriously discovering it. To all appearances, discovery is a task
for more onerous and arduous. It betrays, I am afraid, Chinese
backwoodsmanship to talk as if there were a hard and fast distinction
between invention and discovery. Now that the Saussurian dictum,
“c’est le point de vue qui cree l’ objet”, has been widely embraced in
the West as an open invitation to invent and intuit in reading and
interpreting literary texts, the distinction between the two has
presumably become one without much difference.