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October 19, 2005

BA JIN DIES

Chinese novelist Ba Jin has died at 100.

Mr. Ba was widely considered a literary giant in China, a novelist who had inspired generations of writers and whose fame many here said should long ago have earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

With dozens of novels, essays, short stories and translations, Mr. Ba established himself decades ago as one of China's greatest modern writers. Along with Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Lao She, he helped describe and define modern China's awakening and upheaval early in the 20th century.

He achieved fame early, in 1931, with what is regarded as his masterpiece, "Family," a brutal portrayal of a large feudal family's disintegration and demise around the turn of the 20th century.

Posted at 12:28 AM in World Beat |

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Comments

the highway scribe

Hello,

Not to whisk anybody away, but highwayscribery posted on Ba Jin as well today.

Peace

Posted by: the highway scribe | October 19, 2005 at 10:12 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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