Boccaccio and his Chinese Contemporaries

Abstract

The essay printed here was destined for a collection of Czech studies of linguistic and cultural questions in the Far East. The title of the volume was “A World Behind the Bars of Characters”; what we had in mind was a strange state of affairs. Apart from what we know from our own experience, we know the world, especially in the past, only through the medium of written characters. On the other hand we often feel in the course of this cognition that instead of being a window, the medium has become a barrier between us and the reality we are trying to get to know, rather than something to bring it nearer. How often, gazing at the fascinating Chinese or Japanese characters written or printed on the page before us, have we wondered what they really meant, what human experience had brought them forth, what the man was like who was talking through them, or who was talked of in them. And too often there was no answer or only a partial and twisted one.