It is a considerable pleasure to be able to express my thanks to a number of people whose contributions have helped greatly in bringing this work to completion and endowing it with whatever merit it may have. First, I must mention Agnes Stefanowska, to whom this book is dedicated. She was the supervisor for my doctoral dissertation at Sydney University on Gu Yanwu’s Record of Daily Knowledge, done part-time between 1984 and 1991. She was, however, much more than a supervisor—she was a friend. Every Thursday during the years in question I would slip away (if possible) from my very demanding “other life” for a couple of hours to discuss my translations completed during the previous week but also to enjoy a cup of tea and talk of other things, both personal and general. I missed the meetings very much when the project came to an end and was deeply saddened when I learned of Agnes’s death in 2008 after a short illness. By that time I had retired and moved to Tasmania, but we had kept in touch and in fact had plans to work jointly on the translations with a view to publication by Wild Peony Press, run by Agnes and her close friend Mabel Lee. Sadly, other things got in the way, as they do, and these plans were never realized.
I am also very grateful to my friend and colleague in other projects, Wang Ping, now at the University of New South Wales, who, coming to Australia from China via America, also did her doctoral work at Sydney under Agnes’s supervision. We share the same deep respect and affection for Agnes. Ping has helped greatly by responding with invariably helpful and clarifying comments and suggestions on passages that I found difficult.
I am very indebted to the two reviewers of the original manuscript for Columbia. The first, Thomas Bartlett, a noted authority on Gu Yanwu, made very detailed comments on, and criticisms of, the translations, which helped significantly, as did his more general comments and earlier writings on Gu. The other, anonymous, reviewer made several important suggestions, which were acted upon with benefit.
I would also like to thank Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press for taking the project on in the first place, for her advice during the preparation of the manuscript, and especially for her tolerance in dealing with my sustained impulse to increase the number of translations, thus taking the book beyond what was deemed a desirable length. In reining in the burgeoning manuscript, she invoked the help of Victor Mair, who has been of great help to me in other matters in the past and whose specific suggestions for reduction were very helpful and largely followed. Susan Collis, my partner, has been of great assistance throughout and in many ways. She has, perforce, become very familiar with the writings of Gu Yanwu and has developed something of a liking for the man as he appears from his writings—as indeed I have. Finally, my friend Barry Hill, himself a noted poet, made very helpful specific suggestions on the translated poems.
To all these people I am very grateful, as I am to others, unnamed, who have helped more indirectly. I am particularly happy to be able to acknowledge here my debt to Agnes.