|
|
Since the Nestorians came into China during the Tang Dynasty, the missionaries have never stopped their work on the Chinese translation of the Bible. The oldest manuscripts we can see today are from the translation work of two Roman Catholic missionaries: Jean Basset (1662-1707) and Louis de Poirot (1735-1813) . The latter used the spoken Mandarin language in the translation. However, their missions refused to publish either man's manuscript, saying there was not enough reverence in their translation styles. As a result of the violent impact of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom revolution in the second half of the 19th century ,the missions working in China finally recognized that the Mandarin Bible was more powerful than the classical Chinese Bible. Thus they began to step up the work of translation and publishing on the Mandarin Bible. The Union Versions of the New Testament and the whole Bible were published in 1905 and in 1919 respectively.The pioneers of the New Culture Movement (around the time of the May 4th Movement in 1919) considered that the spirit of Jesus could help to improve China's national character, and so they introduced and popularized the Bible energetically. Contemporary literary writers also directly used the language style from the Union Version for reference to drive the movement of writing in vernacular Chinese, while taking advantage of Bible stories and the genre. But before long the intellectuals of the May 4th epoch" woke up to the fact that the spirit of Christianity was merely a shape of one fantasy sun for their ambition to save the nation. From this moment they put away this "tool". After the founding of the People s Republic of China, the writers did not enter the field of Christianity any longer because of the then political guidance.The so-called obscure poets appeared in the Chinese literary circles after the end of the Cultural Revolution. They suffered the loss of their ideal and belief during their growing process. In their innermost being they kept the immense disbelief of the whole society. With the Western modernism swarmed into China like a tidal wave, this generation of feckless poets drank from this fountain thirstily. After the suffering and suspicion they no longer took the pragmatic attitude to the Bible as the writers of the " May 4th epoch" . Consequently they developed a love for the Cross. Shu Ting cited Hebrews chapter 11 verse 6 as an inscription for her poem The Last Dirge, expressing the aspiration for the soul' s salvation in it. Gu Cheng had always used the artistic conception of the Kingdom of Heaven to describe his ideality, his love, and his odd life with two "wives" afterwards. His posthumous work Ying Er displays a vast impact from the Bible. And in the novel in which he subconsciously acted as Jesus, he likened his "self-slaughter" to the "crucifying" of both him and Jesus by others.The obscure poet Hai Zi known as bel esprit in Beijing University was also greatly influenced by the Bible. Although he came from the countryside and loved the mother earth deeply, he felt very sad that simplicity and kindness in the countryside were losing with the development of the era. At the same time, however, he felt it difficult to find his position in the flourishing yet indifferent and arrogant urban city. The desolate reality made him feel that he himself was "walking to the end of man's life. Thus the poem became his only spiritual pillar, or rather, his God. He longed"to go up to the Paradise accompanied by his own God of Poetry or Goddess" some day. He used the Bible for reference to construct a huge scripture for his own God of Poetry. Choosing the sun" as the image of the God, he himself acted as the Messiah in the Paradise of Poetry both in his life and in all his compositions, culminating in becoming the sacrificed lamb of his God. |