Reviewed by: Talking Literature: Essays on Chinese and Biblical Writings and Their Interaction ed. by Raoul David Findeisen and Martin Slobodník Chloë Starr (bio) Raoul David Findeisen and Martin Slobodník, eds. Talking Literature: Essays on Chinese and Biblical Writings and Their Interaction. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. xxxiv, 271 pp. Paperback €64.00, isbn 978-3-447-10115-8. As Marián Gálik comments in his introductory essay to the volume Talking Literature, the Slovak-Austrian symposium on which the volume is based followed the Confucian ideal of 以文會友以友輔仁 (“to share culture with friends and in this way to improve our humanity”). The theme and setting are key: the volume celebrates, and perpetuates, the Chinese trope of a gathering of friends and shared literary appreciation and dialogue. This is not a student-oriented volume, although students could gain much from its premise, but a volume for readers who enjoy intellectual pursuits for their own sake, who appreciate the art of reading and delighting in the serendipity of joining disparate ideas and creating new sparks of meaning. It is difficult to place the volume either in strictly academic terms or as a commercial venture, and so it celebrates also those who would defend such activities. Foremost among these are the “Seven Elders” to whom the volume is dedicated (Irene Eber, Věnceslava Hrdličková, Oldřich Švarný, Tang Yijie, Yan Jiayan, Yue Daiyun, and Gálik himself), five of whom also have essays in the volume. The seven Sinological elders are the subject of Gálik’s introductory essay, and each appears with a full-page photograph and brief biography. The celebration of the venerable is not an arbitrary accolade: as Raoul David Findeisen’s introduction elucidates, the theme of the volume is “mediation,” both intellectual and pragmatic, and each of the seven has in their lives and writings engaged in mediation between texts and cultures. It would be difficult to describe all seventeen essays individually in a short review, but the editors have grouped them into coherent sets: two on traditional philosophy and religion; three on traditional literature; five on Bible, Christianity, and intercultural studies; and seven on modern Chinese literature and linguistics. Like a teahouse performance, the essays are mainly short, disparate pieces. The [End Page 42] point of the forced eclecticism is surely the unexpected resonances between and across texts, but the subtitle does not quite align with the contents, and readers expecting the entire volume to focus on the interactions between Chinese and biblical writings may be disappointed. The West may be evoked, however, where Christianity is not: the first two essays, on the construction of “Chinese philosophy” and an Aristotelian reading of Gongsun Long, offer studies of interpretation and mediation, even if religion is tangential. Tang Yijie’s opening essay offers a helpful summary of the trajectory of Chinese studies of philosophy as a Western-inspired discipline of the early twentieth century, with its divergence from canonical studies or jingxue and emphasis on systematized knowledge over realized virtues. (The tangent intersects the religious here: Chinese philosophy is, for Tang, akin to a spiritual pursuit “where body and mind, the exterior and the interior, are in harmony.”) Tang is open about the difficulties of creating a new Chinese philosophy where Western philosophy is already so well absorbed; his comments would make useful reading for President Xi Jinping in his recent drive to eliminate Western values from Chinese education. Jana Benická and Miloš Hubina’s essay on Gongsun Long likewise shows how an Aristotelian reading of the text diminishes a perceived distance between Chinese and Western readings, because separating the subject and attribute by drawing attention to them is, they argue, more similar to “Western” container-content or substance-attribute distinctions than Buddhist denials of substance. The five essays that address the Bible and intercultural studies form a consistent core to the volume. Monica Romano’s overview of persistent problems in Bible translation and their solutions, including in particular the terms for each person of the Trinity, provides a useful summary of historical translation issues and complements the individual studies of Irene Eber, Lihi Yariv-Laor, and Findeisen. These three essays show, by choice examples and careful...