追忆逝水年华

It was a real pleasure in May 1997 to meet Xu Yuan Zhong again and find him to be as exuberant, if not more so, about everything as he had been when we were freshmen together in college almost sixty years ago. We had lost contact with each other in the intervening years and it was only because of my accidental happening upon a recent short article of his in the Tsinghua Alumni News that I finally tracked him down at Peking University. In that freshman year 1938-1939, we were both taking Professor George K. Yeh's English course at the Southwest Associated University in Kunming. The University was absolutely firstrate. Both of us owe much of our later career to what we had learned at that University. But Professor Yeh's course was a disaster: he was not interested in students and was not above practising oneupmanship on us. I do not remember learning anything from him. Probably Xu did not either. After that semester Xu's path and mine diverged, since we were in different colleges — he in the college of literature, I in that of science. I did later audit a class on English poetry, but I do not remember Xu was in that class.

Xu is a prolific author. In his books he made great efforts to translate into English many of the famous poems in the long literary histroy of China. He especially endeavored to endow the translated lines with rich metrical and rhythmic qualities. That this is intrinsically an almost impossible task did not deter him.
How hard he must have labored! And how happy he must have been every time he succeeded in this task, as e.g. when he forged the following:
In spring the river rises as high as the sea,
And with the river's rise the moon uprises bright.
She follows the rolling waves for ten thousand li,
And where the river flows, there overflows her light.
as a translation of the beginning lines of Zhang Ruoxu's great poem A　Moonlit Night on the Spring River. The grandeur of the intricate rhythmic and textual pattern in Zhang's original is so well captured here!
Vanished Springs is Xu's autobiography. It is the autobiography of a poet in three languages: Chinese, English and French. Reading it I realize once more how very different the life of a poet is from that of a scientist. Many years ago T. S. Eliot visited the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and one day at a party in J. R. Oppenheimer's house, Oppenheimer said to him, “In physics, we try to explain to each other what nobody has understood before. In poetry you try to describe to others what everybody has known from the beginning.” I wonder whether that is what Xu meant when he wrote in this autobiography taht “in science 1+1=2, while in art 1+1=3.”