My Adventure of Working with Jim Crump

MY ADVENTURE OF WORKING WITH JIM CRUMP Shu-chu Wei (Whitman College) It must have been exciting to be a student of Professor Crump, judging from my experience listening to his explanations and interpretations of Yuan drama scripts and their supposed stage presentations. His eyes would brighten up. His hands would move in expressive gestures. And this was not enough. He would stand up from his chair and begin to enact the scene, turning his book-filled office into a stage, all for the purpose of enlivening the dead scripts. With his goatee, his shining eyes, and his nimble movements, he looked exactly like the enchanting Willie Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was instantly fascinated. I was never a student of Professor Crump but my work with him began in 1991, when I had a one-year sabbatical leave from Whitman College. At the same time, the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan graciously offered me office space and the status of visiting research fellow so that I could make use of their library collection to do research on Yuan drama with their Professor Emeritus, Jim Crump. Before I arrived at Ann Arbor I had never met Jim, but was an admirer of his book on Yuan drama, Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan, which inspired my dissertation on a comparative study of Chinese Yuan and English Renaissance theaters. I believed that his book would provide a very different perspective to the scholars in this field in China and Taiwan, most of whom do not read English. Therefore, one of the first things I discussed with him was whether he would like me to translate his book into Chinese. Jim was delighted with the idea, but did not give me an immediate go-ahead. He wanted to see the quality of my translation before agreeing to the project. My first reaction to this condition was a sense of being insulted. It was true that I could not express myself freely and beautifully in English, but Chinese is my native tongue and I had earned numerous awards in Chinese writing since childhood. I even taught English-to-Chinese translation at a university in Taiwan for three years! On second thought, however, I started to see that I was a total stranger to Jim. Why should he entrust his precious book to a stranger? With this realization and without a word of explanation or argument, I agreed to present to him my translation of the first chapter for his evaluation. I believed that deeds, in this case my actual translation, would be more persuasive than empty words. When I presented my Chinese translation of the first chapter to Jim, he explained to me that he could not judge how well I had transmitted his English, especially its light-hearted tone. Therefore, he had to send it to his most trusted ex-student, Professor Perng Ching-Hsi at National Taiwan University. I knew Ching-Hsi, the husband of one of my classmates from the East-West Center in Hawaii and a renowned scholar. I said, surely, to Jim, while telling myself that true gold fears no tests of fire. I was not offended this time—I had been humbled by Jim’s English and discovered that to do justice to his English with comparable Chinese CHINOPERL Papers No. 26 (2005-2006)©2006 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERL Papers No. 26 was a real challenge, my confidence in my Chinese notwithstanding. When I read through his book for ideas, I had not paid enough attention to his English, even though I thoroughly enjoyed his teases on some problematic scholarship. After I started translating it, however, I began to see that he had every right to be proud of his writing and to question the competency of anyone who volunteered to translate it. Years later, having written one of the prefaces to the Chinese version of the book, Ching-Hsi told me with a sense of guilt that he wondered why it never occurred to him to translate his teacher’s book on Yuan drama. Indeed, he would have been the...