After the initial encounter at the Independence Hall, the protagonist Tōkai Sanshi meets the two women again by chance in Valley Forge, and is invited to their secluded residence. Upon learning that they are expatriates from Spain and Ireland, Yūran and Kōren, Sanshi reveals his background as a native of Aizu and identifies himself as a “loyal subject of the fallen country.” In the Japanese original, the Chinese hero Hankei, who has disguised himself as a servant at the house, listens to their conversations and discloses his true identity as a loyalist of the Ming Dynasty. These four men and women then forge a transnational solidarity as individuals who have lost their home countries, and worry about the fates of their nations from abroad. Compared by the narrator to the
great fifth-century Chinese poet Tao Yuanming’s (365?-471) archi-image of
utopia, “peach blossom spring” (tao hua yuan ), this serendipitous gathering in the
Philadelphia suburbs is lead to a climactic banquet where the protagonists exchange improvised poems in classical Chinese. In the poetry exchange, they strengthen their bonds by virtue of cultural identity; though from different nations, they are equally subjects who exemplify shared cultural values, namely aesthetic taste and traditional morality. Their virtue, then, becomes the core of their struggles against the modern politics of power represented by imperialism. The subsequent volumes of Chance Meetings relate the story of their political struggles against the imperial powers, namely England and France, staged in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. While fueled by the utopian imagination, their endeavor is in reality confronted with one difficulty after
another; the chance meeting in Philadelphia is repeatedly recalled in nostalgic tones as an ideal moment, serving as the matrix of the whole story.
The translator Liang Qichao faithfully rendered the whole banquet scene into Chinese, except that he removed the Chinese protagonist Hankei entirely from this crucial part, and moved his first appearance to the very end of the gathering. The
exclusion of Hankei from this key scene indicates that the translator, while replicating the traditional cultural values structuralizing the narrative, took issue with the original’s imagination about the modern Chinese subjectivity that exemplifies those values.
As the heroes and heroines share their moral and political emotions as “loyal subjects” of the ruined countries, Sanshi invites them to a poetry exchange, remarking, “Someone in the past said, ‘The good time and the beautiful landscape, the appreciative minds and the joyful matters: these four things are rarely found complete.’” This quaint comment is indeed a reference to the towering fifth-century poet Xie Lingyun’s
(385-433) well-known “preface” to his own series of poems called “Ni Wei taizi
Yezhong ji ” (Imitating the Poems of the Wei Crown Prince’s Gathering
at Ye). Liang Qichao’s translation renders the Japanese text to make it a verbatim quote from Xie Lingyun’s piece. This poetry series consists of eight poems, each composed in
the imitated voice of a poet active during the Jian’an era (196-220), some two
centuries before Xie Lingyun’s time. By “imitating” the styles of the Jian’an poets, who pioneered classical poetry in five syllable lines, Xie Lingyun imagined the poetry gathering at Ye as the archetypal scene for poetic composition, thereby contributing to the historicizing and canonizing of the tradition of classical poetry, which the fifth-
century poet prominently practiced himself. Prefaced by the allusion to Xie Lingyun’s “preface,” the subsequent poetry exchange in Shiba Shirō’s novel can be considered, if you will, as a further imitation of Xie Lingyun’s “imitation.” This gesture of allusion enables the Japanese novel to inherit the tradition of classical poetry, which Xie Lingyun played a significant part in developing in fifth-century southern China, and which had been trans-regionally passed on through centuries down to nineteenth-century Japan. In this sense, just like the imaginary poets from the Jian’an era that Xie Lingyun created in his “imitation,” the fictional characters in Chance Meetings become practitioners of this transnational lyrical tradition.
The poetry exchange in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia suburbs articulates the modern world in the traditional poetic language. The poem attributed to the Irish heroine, for instance, draws on the traditional poetics known as “the merging of situation
and emotion” (qing jing xiang rong ), and thus weaves the poet’s ethical-
political feelings into the background of the joyful banquet. Ling Qichao’s translation transcribes this poem verbatim.
In this pristine night I met with good friends; Under the flowers I poured flavorful wine. Spring wild geese fly back to the north; Afar, the hazy trees appear dark. Falling flowers break apart in the wind; Dancing and carpeting the garden.
The remaining spring will be over in a blink; No way to hold back the running time. But my arms are too weak to hold a halberd; So my deep-seated anger vainly engenders hatred.
The enemies of my country have not been completely washed away;
As my emotion becomes sorrowful, the sounds of the strings speed up;
And they echo with my indignant words.52
A retrospective gaze in the opening couplet commemorates the fortuitous encounter and the cheerful banquet with the friends. Then the poet’s perspective, invited by the image of flying birds, shifts from time to space, visualizing the late-spring landscape extending to the limits of the sight. But this perspective brings in the sense of time to the banquet’s utopian timelessness. As if in slow motion, it flashes the moment when the winds break the falling flowers into petals on which they have enjoyed the gathering. The passing of time is thus inscribed in the heart of the timeless joy: indeed, “[n]o way to hold back the running time.” The intrusion of temporality, followed by the contrasting images of the floating petals and the arms too heavy to carry, awakens the poet to the reality as an Irish expatriate. Suddenly, the uncertain future looms. Alienated by the absence of agency, the political emotions only linger within the mind, losing voice. In the penultimate couplet, then, the inexpressible emotions (“Deep-seated anger thus vainly engenders hatred”) are articulated in the voice of the illustrious third-century Chinese poet Cao Zhi (192- 232) from the Jian’an era, who is also imitated in Xie Lingyun’s above-discussed
compilation, “Ni Wei taizi Yezhong ji.” The penultimate couplet, indeed, is an adaptation of a couplet from one of Cao Zhi’s “Miscellaneous Poems”: “The enemies of my country are truly persistent; / I have indulged myself in the idea of giving away my head” (guo chou liang bu sai / gan xin si sang yuan / ).53 In the closing
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52 Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū,p.85. Qing yi bao 6, reprint, vol.1, p.384.
lines, which are a quote from the same Cao Zhi poem, the poet’s emotions echo the music. Given an old poetic voice, the modern poet’s emotions are thus sewn back into the
perpetual economy of lyrical communication. By means of the classical poetics of
“merging of the situation and the emotion,” therefore, this fictional poem creates a poetic movement that translates modern emotions back into the lyrical tradition.
During this poetry exchange, the protagonists recite in unison the French national anthem La Marseillaise, yet in a translation that renders the whole lyrics into seven- syllable line verse, another standard prosody of classical Chinese poetry. Responding to
the chanting, Sanshi and Hankei then recite the fourth of “Gushi shijiu shou ”
(The Nineteen Old Poems), a canonical collection of classical poems anthologized in the sixth-century Wen xuan.54 The wildly anachronistic echoing of “Gushi shijiu shou” with
La Marseillaise not so much opens up a certain hybrid literary space, as illuminates this novel’s narratological structure, which articulates the modern historical world in the old literary language. Resisting the world order that tolerates imperialist encroachment, the protagonists of the fiction, to be sure, embody nationalism, as it is typically expressed in the French national anthem. However, the actual content of their nationalism, even though it is rooted in the historical experiences of Spain, Ireland, Japan, and China, does not have anything to do with certain particular values proper to these nations. Paradoxical as it may sound, the characters in Shiba Shirō’s fictional world can become nationalist subjects precisely by virtue of believing in and practicing certain “universal” moral and aesthetic values. Their subjectivities, therefore, exemplify the “universal” cultural values, where the “universality” is defined by the regional universality that those old values had
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54 See: Shiba Shirō, Kajin no kigū, p.80-3. In the Chinese translation, Hankei’s voice is replaced by
in premodern East Asia. The poetic movement of Shiba Shirō’s narrative enfolds the totality of the modern historical world within this “universal” cultural sphere. Unlike in modern cultural politics, an identity in the world described in Shiba Shirō’s novel is not conditional on the recognition by the universalist West as a certain “particularity”; instead, it is formed as an exemplarity in a universalist cultural tradition. In the modern dialectics of the universal and the particular, the universal is appropriated by a privileged subject, the West, and a difference from it defines a particular identity, while in the novel’s imagined world, the universal is embodied by traditional cultural values that, de jure, anyone can uphold and exemplify, and that cultural exemplarity constitutes a subject’s identity.55
Inheriting the same trans-regional cultural tradition, Liang Qichao succeeded in reproducing this same narratological structure in the Chinese text. Just like the
multinational protagonists in the story, the author and the translator, as well as their intended audiences in late-nineteenth-century Japan and China, shared the literary tradition, and it is precisely due to this “chance meeting” that the protagonists in the translated story could equally exist as exemplary subjects. The translation, however, removes the Chinese protagonist from the entire scene of the Valley Forge gathering, erasing his lyrical voice. This translational decision, in fact, is the result of a remarkable wavering. The fourth issue of Qing yi bao (published on January 22, 1899) indeed carried a faithful translation of the scene where Hankei, disclosing his true identity as a Ming
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55 This system exhibits a striking similarity to what Hannah Arendt regards as the chief concept of Kant’s
aesthetics: “exemplary validity.” According to Arendt, aesthetic experience –– the judgment of beauty –– is the “exemplar [that] is and remains a particular that in its particularity reveals the generality that otherwise could not be defined.” See: Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, p.76-7. It could be extremely productive to compare Shiba Shirō’s and Liang Qichao’s engagement with the “universal” cultural values and Arendt’s interpretation of Kantian aesthetics and political philosophy. This, however, is the subject of another study.
Dynasty loyalist, makes his first appearance in the story. But in the following fifth issue (published on February 1, 1899), that part was completely retranslated, removing the Chinese hero. Then after the whole sequence of the gathering, Hankei finally appears in the seventh issue (published on March 2, 1899) when the banquet is just over and the protagonists part from each other. Here is how the Chinese translation renders that scene:
Then, [Sanshi] was politely shaking hands [with the ladies] and was about to leave, when Yūran plucked a branch of white rose and stuck it in his collar, saying, ‘Sir, even though this flower withers, let us not abandon each other.’ Smiling, Sanshi replied, ‘I am one who takes care of flowers. I just wonder if you, the flower that speaks words, won’t fly away to someone else’s home.’ Turning her face away with a smile, Yūran sent off Sanshi for a long time. Hankei was a man of ambition from China. Indignant at the world and loathing the society, he had secluded himself in the wilderness. He had been a best friend of Sanshi; they had visited each other very often. He had also long heard about Yūran and Kōren. On the occasion of Sanshi’s trip [to their residence] that time, he had earlier made an appointment with Sanshi to meet where the boat was moored. By then, Hankei had already been waiting for a long time at the riverside. As they greeted each other upon leaving, Sanshi boarded the boat. The two ladies said, ‘Please take care, sir.’ Taking his hat off, Sanshi replied, ‘We shall see each other again.’56 In the passage rather awkwardly appended to the romantic separation of Sanshi and Yūran (wave-underlined part), Hankei’s identity is altered from a Ming Dynast loyalist to an ambiguous one: “a man of ambition from China.” Sanshi and Hankei, who strike up friendship “by chance” in the original, become long-term friends; Hankei, moreover, is said to have already known about Sanshi’s visit to the residence, which in the Japanese version happens only because Sanshi re-encounters the two ladies “by chance.” In the translation, not only is the identity of the Chinese character obscured and his lyrical voice erased, but he is also disengaged form the core structure of this narrative: “chance
meetings.”
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56Qing yi bao 7, reprint, vol.1, p.444.
Hankei’s equivocal existence in the translated story is not so much indicative of some intentional decision on the part of the translator, as the latter’s indecisiveness about the identity of the Chinese subject. Shiba Shirō imagined that in addition to a loyalist of the Aizu domain, a Spanish legitimist, and an Irish nationalist, a Ming Dynasty loyalist would constitute an exemplary subject who practices traditional cultural values in the modern world. But Liang Qichao, while faithfully transposing this transnational solidarity into Chinese, left undecided the identity of the Chinese subject who takes part in the political community of cultural heroes and heroines. Even though Hankei, both in the original and the translation, acts as an exemplary hero in the epic struggles following the Valley Forge gathering, the translated “Hankei” exists in that story as an empty signifier, merely fulfilling that assigned role in the narrative, without being given a clear
subjectivity. By translating Chance Meetings, therefore, Liang Qichao left to a new imagination different from that of the Japanese author’s the question of what Chinese subject would become an exemplary hero who can put into practice the traditional cultural values in the modern world. This disagreement, therefore, suggests that the relationship between the Japanese original and the Chinese translation should be
articulated as the one between different exemplarities in the common “universal” cultural tradition, rather than the one between different national particularities.