Simon Leys

Navigator Between Worlds

Philippe Paquet

• Publisher: La Trobe University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781925435566
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Biographien

An award-winning biography of one of the greats. Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014.Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People's Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC's Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).Philippe Paquet is a Belgian journalist and sinologist. He was president of the Society of Editors of La Libre Belgique from 1997 to 2007. He is a lecturer at the Free University of Brussels and at the Higher Institute of Translators and Interpreters. For La Libre Belgique he covers China and the United States. His previous biography, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: A Century of Chinese History, won numerous literary prizes.

Endnotes

PROLOGUE

1 Simon Leys, ‘Victor Hugo’, in The Hall of Uselessness, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011, p. 60. This essay first appeared in the New York Review of Books, 17 December 1998, then in The Angel and the Octopus: Collected Essays 1983–1998, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999.

2 In an editorial published the day after the sinologist’s death, the Australian rightly highlighted the fact that Pierre Ryckmans approached whatever he was studying ‘as a scholar, but also with something of the wonder of a child’. See ‘Dragon Slayer Guided by Beauty’, Australian, 13 August 2014.

3 Li Bai, ‘Thoughts on a Still Night’. The poem is one Ryckmans himself studied when he began learning Chinese, as is revealed in an exercise book of his that his brother Jean-Marie has kept.

4 Leys, ‘Victor Hugo’, op. cit., p. 59.

5 See, for instance, ‘Zhongxi huihua jiben yuanze zhi bijiao jiqi jiechu guocheng’ (A comparison between the fundamental principles of Chinese and Western painting) or ‘Chengxiang qihou de yinxiangpai’ (A study of impressionism). These articles were published in 1963 and 1964 respectively in Hong Kong university journals.

6 Pierre Ryckmans writing as Li Keman, Xiao yu de xingfu (The Happiness of Small Fry), Shanghai: Wenyi chubanshe, 2014.

7 Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007, pp. 7–8.

8 Leys didn’t welcome the present biographical project without some misgivings: ‘I don’t think the subject is interesting enough. Honestly. I hope my little books can be of a certain interest (I wouldn’t publish them otherwise). But myself as a person … No, I can’t see it.’ (Letter to the author, 26 November 2010; the emphasis is Leys’s.)

9 Nicolas Cavaillès, ‘Préface’, in Émile Cioran, Œuvres, Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 2011, p. xi.

10 Pierre Mertens, ‘Réception de Simon Leys. Séance publique du 30 mai 1992’, Brussels: ARLLFB, pp. 1–2; available online at: www.arllfb.be.

11 Ryckmans, ‘La Chine comme anti-Egypte’, Revue des Deux Mondes, September 2013, p. 127. Leys developed this approach in his introduction to With Stendhal, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010, p. 3.

12 The historical existence of Confucius is not contested, but the dates of his birth and death (551–479 BC) are uncertain.

13 Leys, ‘An Introduction to Confucius’, in The Hall of Uselessness, op. cit., p. 274. This study was the subject of a paper given at the 4 November 1995 sitting of the ARLLFB. It then served as an introduction to the English translation of The Analects of Confucius.

14 Ryckmans, ‘Introduction du traducteur’, in Les Entretiens de Confucius, Paris: Gallimard, ‘Connaissance de l’Orient’, 1987, p. 7.

15 For an outline of the extremely different interpretations of certain passages in the Analects, see the review, ‘What Confucius Said’, which the American sinologist Jonathan Spence did of Simon Leys’s English translation – ‘clear and elegant’ – in the New York Review of Books, 10 April 1997.

16 Ryckmans, ‘Introduction du traducteur’, op. cit., p. 8

17 Jacques Gernet, ‘The Analects of Confucius by Simon Leys (Les Entretiens de Confucius, par Pierre Ryckmans)’, T’oung Pao, 2nd series, vol. 85, nos 4–5, 1999, pp. 438, 440–441.

18 (René) Étiemble, in Leys, Les Entretiens de Confucius, op. cit., back cover. Kong Zi is the Chinese name for Confucius.

19 Quoted in M. Van Nieuwenborgh, ‘La Chine ne se résignera jamais à respecter les droits de l’homme’, Le Vif–L’Express, 9 May 2008.

20 Anne Cheng, ‘The Analects of Confucius by Simon Leys’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 62, no. 2, 1999, p. 387. Leys, for his part, considered Anne Cheng’s French translation of the Analects (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981, reprinted in the ‘Points’ collection) to be ‘one of the most serious’, but thought that ‘the wording could be improved’ (interview with the author, Canberra, 28 March 2014).

21 Alice W. Cheng, ‘Translating and Interpreting the Analects of Confucius’, Review of Politics, vol. 62, no. 3, Summer 2000, p. 577.

22 Leys, ‘An Introduction to Confucius’, op. cit., pp. 271–272.

23 ibid., p. 276.

24 ibid., p. 276.

25 Claude Roy, ‘Confucius rajeuni’, Le Monde, 27 November 1987.

26 Leys, ‘Foreword’, in The Analects of Confucius, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, p. xi. Leys attacked Arthur Waley’s well-known translation for containing ‘some rather flagrant mistakes and several debatable interpretations’ but found it ‘written in an admirable English’, whereas the translation of D.C. Lau, ‘more reliable philologically’, gave the impression of being ‘composed on a computer, by a computer’. (Leys, ‘The Experience of Literary Translation’, in The Hall of Uselessness, op. cit.,...