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H-ASIA April 3, 2007 Mencken's Declaration of Independence (further comment) ****************************************************************** From: Vincent K Pollard <pollard@hawaii.edu> Dear Colleagues, I thank Editor Ryan Dunch's for posting the URL to the 1923 edition of Mencken's paraphrase -- or if one prefers, bowdlerization -- of the Declaration of Independence. So, how did contemporaneous Chinese readers of the Chinese translation of the 1923 edition of the Declaration of Independence actually react to Lin's translation? Is there any evidence on the topic? Like almost a dozen other declarations of war by the United States, the Declaration of Independence is a legislative document. Most importantly, the 2nd Continental Congress's Declaration of Independence in 1776 formally declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain. Were Chinese readers of the 1923 translation aware that they were reading a declaration of war? Is there any chance that Mencken's irony blurred, elided and obscured that essential point? Whenever I teach "Introduction to American Politics," my students are asked to paraphrase the run-on, compound-complex sentences of the Declaration of Independence and two or three _Federalist Papers_ by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in contemporary American English. While Mencken's attempt to breath life into a document written 231 years ago is interesting, I have to wonder if, in trying to do something interesting and useful, Mencken ended up merely being obscure. On the U.S. Congress's longstanding capitualtion to presidential war making, consider Brien Hallett is a leading authority. See Professor Hallett's document-based analysis in his dissertation-related book _The Lost Art of Declaring War_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Hallett is also Director of the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Vincent K Pollard University of Hawai'i at Manoa http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pollard/ ************************************************************************* To post to H-ASIA simply send your message to: <H-ASIA@h-net.msu.edu> For holidays or short absences send post to: <listserv@h-net.msu.edu> with message: SET H-ASIA NOMAIL Upon return, send post with message SET H-ASIA MAIL H-ASIA WEB HOMEPAGE URL: http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/
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