| NOTA |
(★)(1.Every now and then there is a book that has something to say to readers generation after generation. ´Saikontan´is such a book, for it goes straight to the heart of things. Composed around four hundred years ago in late-Ming China, this work seems to have left the merest of ripples on the vast sea of Chinese literature. When it was introduced into neighboring Japan in the early nineteenth century, however, fate smiled and the work has enjoyed a quiet but steady popularity ever since. Published first by the scholarly Maeda family in their prosperous fief on the Sea of Japan, it has been reprinted innumerable times since, and is widely read even today by such people as the managers and entrepreneurs of our computerized, robotized, post-industrial society. The 357 short selctions written in the poetic diction called parallel prose are, in a sense, a guide to aesthetics. Whether it is a matter of looking at correct human behavior, appreciating literary or artistic accomplishment, savoring food or drink, or relating to nature, the author is telling us how we can appraise and enjoy. he eclectically draws on Confucianism, Taoism and Ch´an [Zen] Buddhism for his penetrating and often aphoristic viewpoint, and his particular slant is that the simple is closest to the truth and, very often, the prelude to a step forward should be a step backward. Hung´s writing is remarkable on two counts : it reflects a deep familiarity with his country´s millenia-old literary and philosophical heritage, and it is marked by continual freshness and lucidity. It has here been adapted to free verse to better convey the asymmetrical balance, counterpoint and succinctness of the original. 2.Hung Ying-ming, whose original name seems to have been Hung Tzu-ch´eng, flourished around the late sixteenth century. Since he receives no mention in Ming biographical or historical records, virtually nothing is known about his personal circumstances or official life. It is surmised that he was a man of deep erudition, that he might possibly at one time have been a scholar-official, and that at the time he wrote the present work, he may have been living as a recluse, a scholar-bum so to speak, in the valley of the lower Yangtze River.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
印刷用ページ