100 petits gestes gentils

Résumé : Pour s'entraîner en chinois tout en s'amusant : réviser le lexique et les structures de base ; revoir les points fondamentaux ; se perfectionner et mémoriser les caractères usuels ; s'entraîner à la compréhension et à la production orales ; un rappel des règles d'écriture du chinois ; des pages culturelles pour découvrir les secrets de l'horoscope chinois ; des corrigés complets détachables.

Pour s'entraîner en chinois tout en s'amusant : réviser le lexique et les structures de base ; revoir les points fondamentaux ; se perfectionner et mémoriser les caractères usuels ; s'entraîner à la compréhension et à la production orales ; des pages culturelles pour découvrir les secrets de l'écriture chinoise ; des corrigés complets détachables.

La poésie en Chine est conçue comme ayant un effet direct sur la société, la politique et l?homme. Elle est aussi bien une composante de la vie rituelle qu?une distraction instructive, le pivot de l?enseignement du wen. Dans la Chine antique, la poésie aidait à gouverner l?Empire et orientait l?éducation du peuple : en effet, l'incantation musicale, fondée sur des rythmes régulés et faisant appel à des assonances suggestives, était mise au service de l'éducation, ce que traduit un terme chinois spécifique : shijiao, "l?éducation par la poésie". Le shijiao est ce qui remplace la religion chez les lettrés, et sert à éveiller les gens non cultivés. Encore aujourd?hui, la poésie occupe le premier rang de la littérature chinoise. Les études des spécialistes réunies dans cet ouvrage évoquent aussi bien la poésie ancienne, depuis ses origines, que la poésie moderne, leurs ressemblances et leurs différences. L?une comme l?autre sont une sorte de religion humaniste : l'homme chinois essaie de mettre en poème la spécificité de sa place dans un univers qui l?émerveille par ses signes ineffables, dans la succession des êtres et dans la société, ainsi que les émotions propres aux périodes cruciales de son existence, au travers du fu (narration descriptive), du bi (allégorie) et du xing (similitude).

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart. Lin Kong is a Chinese army doctor trapped in an arranged marriage that embarrasses and repels him. (Shuyu has country ways, a withered face, and most humiliating of all, bound feet.) Nevertheless, he's content with his tidy military life, at least until he falls in love with Manna, a nurse at his hospital. Regulations forbid an army officer to divorce without his wife's consent--until 18 years have passed, that is, after which he is free to marry again. So, year after year Lin asks his wife for his freedom, and year after year he returns from the provincial courthouse: still married, still unable to consummate his relationship with Manna. Nothing feeds love like obstacles placed in its way--right? But Jin's novel answers the question of what might have happened to Romeo and Juliet had their romance been stretched out for several decades. In the initial confusion of his chaste love affair, Lin longs for the peace and quiet of his "old rut." Then killing time becomes its own kind of rut, and in the end, he is forced to conclude that he "waited eighteen years just for the sake of waiting."There's a political allegory here, of course, but it grows naturally from these characters"hearts. Neither Lin nor Manna is especially ideological, and the tumultuous events occurring around them go mostly unnoticed. They meet during a forced military march, and have their first tender moment during an opera about a naval battle. (While the audience shouts,"Down with Japanese Imperialism!"the couple holds hands and gazes dreamily into each other's eyes.) When Lin is in Goose Village one summer, a mutual acquaintance rapes Manna; years later, the rapist appears on a TV report titled"To Get Rich Is Glorious,"after having made thousands in construction. Jin resists hammering ideological ironies like these home, but totalitarianism's effects on Lin are clear: Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others" opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace. Ha Jin himself served in the People's Liberation Army, and in fact left his native country for the U.S. only in 1985. That a non-native speaker can produce English of such translucence and power is truly remarkable--but really, his prose is the least of the miracles here. Improbably, Jin makes an unconsummated 18-year love affair loom as urgent as political terror or war, while history-changing events gain the immediacy of a domestic dilemma. Gracefully phrased, impeccably paced, Waiting is the kind of realist novel you thought was no longer being written. --Mary Park