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Arthur Cooper: The Other Greek Jul. 13th, 2019|10:42 am

dooora
Today students of China primarily know the name of Arthur Cooper (1916–1988) because of his translations of Tang poetry, first published in Penguin Classics in 1973 but in print to this day. It is less known, however, that his involvement with Chinese was the result of his having served as a codebreaker during World War II and its aftermath and that it was decoding Japanese military messages that led him to a deep appreciation of Chinese writing and poetry, which eventually grew into a passion of a lifetime. Even though he had not received proper academic training, he devoted many years of his life to studying and analysing the Chinese script and kept up extensive correspondence with leading sinologists in Britain and other parts of the world. Partly inspired by his profession, he developed an unconventional theory regarding the composition and origin of Chinese characters. He only published minor notes on this research and his main contributions were going to be two larger monographs that in the end never came out. Fortunately, the typescript of one of them survived and it formed the basis for the present book. Cooper’s views are largely independent of, and at times conflicting with, current scholarly interpretations of the history of the Chinese script but in some sense this is what makes them interesting, offering us a novel and in some sense untainted perspective of an “outsider”.

Pērn Nīderlandes karaliskā izdevniecība Brill, kas jau vairākus gadsimtus citstarp orientējas uz orientāliem krastiem un rūnām, izdevusi karalisku sējumu The Other Greek. Tas ir izcils vademēkums katram, kuru interesē handzi, kandži, kanas vai kaut kokakōlas kannas.

Indeed, Cooper is at his best when connecting the language and cultural background of Chinese poems written hundreds or thousands of years ago with our own world. He does not view the poems and other texts as exotic relics of a long-gone civilisation but tries to bring them into our own sphere of experience, relating them to examples from our own culture and history. Thus he likens the development of new metres during the Tang, which may have taken place under the influence of new types of music from Central Asia, to the problems of translating Italian opera into English.This is also how the Chinese name for Coca Cola comes up in the discussion of the first line of the Taoist classic Laozi 老子. At the same time, he refers to the literary tradition and precedents of the poems only briefly, even though the role of these would have been enormous in a literary culture such as that of China. If anything, he prefers to emphasise the innovations and new ways of expression that originate from outside influences or from contemporary spoken language.
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Human memory works through associations and The Other Greek is indeed a massive web of associations.
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