Transculturating Byronic Poetry
In 1908, Lu Xun published what many would later consider an essential piece of modern Chinese literary criticism, “Moluo shili shuo.” Just two years earlier, in 1906, Lu Xun had dropped out of Sendai Medical School and moved to Tokyo, and began to live
with his younger brother Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) and other peers. While
frequenting gatherings organized around the revolutionary literatus Zhang Taiyan (1868-1936), who was exiled in Japan, Lu Xun began to devote himself in literature in the rapidly modernizing city. He undertook to inaugurate a literary journal called
Xinsheng (Renaissance) in 1906; he also collaborated with Zhou Zuoren to publish
an ambitious two-volume translation of short stories from Russia and Eastern Europe,
entitled Yuwai xiaoshuo ji (Collection of Foreign Fiction, 1909). The
planned journal, however, failed to materialize and the translations sold poorly. Lu Xun
the bulletin published by the Henan branch of the Tongmenghui (The United
League), the Tokyo-based revolutionary organization led by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925). A lengthy treatise “Moluo shili shuo,” which uses a rather convoluted classical style, influenced by that of his mentor Zhang Taiyan, was published in Henan in two installments.
Zhou Shuren , better known as one of his numerous pennames, Lu Xun,
was born into a scholar-official family in Shaoxing in 1881.200 In the changing social
conditions, Lu Xun’s family quickly lost its fortune and he was temporarily raised by a maternal relative’s family. From the age of six, Lu Xun went to a private academy and received orthodox education based on the Confucian classics, but in 1898, at the age of eighteen, he decided to go to the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing to receive the “new
education” (xinxue ). He studied English and German, and was exposed to the latest
works of , among others, Liang Qichao, Yan Fu (1854-1921), and Lin Shu
(1852-1924). After spending four years in Nanjing, Lu Xun was sent on a government scholarship to Japan, where he first spent two years in Tokyo studying Japanese, and then moved to Sendai to study medicine. But after a short two years, Lu Xun quit medical school and moved back to Tokyo, where he started to undertake literary projects, and published several important essays, including “Moluo shili shuo.”
Upon his return to China in 1909, he began teaching physiology and chemistry in the Secondary Normal School in Zhejiang, and later took on several other teaching !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
200 My study of Lu Xun, in general, has been particularly benefitted from the following works: Leo Ou-fan
Lee, Voices from the Iron House; Leo Ou-fan Lee (ed.), Lu Xun and His Legacy; Takeuchi Yoshimi, Ro Jin
nyūmon; Maruo Tsuneki, Ro Jin “jin” to “ki” no kattō; Xudong Zhang, “Zhongguo xiandai zhuyi qiyuan
positions as well as administrative responsibilities in his hometown of Shaoxing. After
the Republican Revolution (1911), Lu Xun was invited by Cai Yuanpei (1868-
1940), a prominent critic and the first Minister of Education of the new Republic, to work for the Ministry of Education in Nanjing, and subsequently followed the government to Beijing in 1912. Though Lu Xun first welcomed the fall of the Qing, he was quickly disappointed by the aftermath of the Revolution, which was plagued with reactionary warlordism and a weak revolutionary party. Depressed, Lu Xun confined himself for several years in a secluded collection and study of old prints and antique materials (metal and steel inscriptions). In 1918, as the manifesto of Literary Revolution was gaining widespread momentum, Lu Xun contributed the seminal short story “Kuangren riji
” (Diary of a Madman) to the journal Xin Qingnian (La Jeunesse). Though
at first rather reluctant, Lu Xun, as a result of this publication, became a pivotal leader of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements in the first decades of the Republican Era. From 1918 to 1926, he published a number of short stories and a collection of prose poems, as well as numerous essays, critical works, and translations; he also edited literary journals, while lecturing on Chinese literary history at Beijing University as well as at other schools.
Lu Xun’s deep despair regarding the crippled political situation in Republican China was aggravated with the March Eighteenth Massacre in 1926, the brutal
suppression, by the Beiyang Government, of an anti-warlord and anti-imperialist demonstration. As Lu Xun had been blacklisted, he fled south: first to Xiamen, then to Guangzhou, and finally, in 1927, to Shanghai, where he would stay until his death in 1936. The anti-Communist massacre in 1927 shocked Lu Xun, definitively distancing
him from the Nationalist Party. In 1930, he became committed to the establishment of the
League of Leftist Writers (Zuoyi zuojia lianmeng ). After his departure
from Beijing, Lu Xun invested most of his creative spirit in the form of “miscellaneous
writing” (zawen ) written mostly in polemical contexts, while also publishing a
number of translations and initiating a movement to promote woodblock printing as a popular art form.
The early Lu Xun’s “conversion” from medicine to literature a few years before he published “Moluo shili shuo” has often drawn critics’ attention, primarily thanks to the 1922 preface to the writer’s first collection of short stories, Nahan (Call to Arms,
1923), where he explains the motive for this transformation. Lu Xun’s dramatic narration of the “lantern slide” incident has been quoted numerous times: the young medical student from China joined his Japanese classmates in watching slides of scenes from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), which the instructor presented in the extra time of the microbiology class, and was shocked to see an image that showed his compatriots apathetically watching an alleged Chinese spy for Russia being decapitated by the Japanese military. “This slide,” Lu Xun says, in one of the most often quoted paragraphs of his work, “convinced me that medical science was not so important after all. … The most important thing, therefore, was to change their [Chinese people’s] spirit; and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I decided to promote a literary movement.”201 With implicit echoes of the Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit, scholars have pointed to this experience of negativity as marking the origin of a
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subjectivity underpinning Chinese cultural modernity.202 Less often explored, however, is the question of how this very subjectivity is articulated, not so much vis-à-vis a single lantern slide, as within the expanding and diverse sea of literary texts that Lu Xun was exposed to in cosmopolitan Tokyo, often through English, German, and Japanese translations.203
Like many of his other contemporary essays, “Moluo shili shuo,” indeed, is a product of extensive transculturation. As Kitaoka Masako has meticulously demonstrated, this essay is a patchwork of references to numerous sources –– in Japanese, English, and German –– on the biographies of modern European and Russian writers as well as literary history.204 Lu Xun chose to discuss “the Satanic School,” originally the pejorative
characterization by Robert Southey (1774-1843) of Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Byron; he
translated this term as “Moluo shipai ,” using a Chinese rendering of the
Sanskrit word mara, the name of the demon that tempted Buddha in Buddhist mythology. He lays out the objective of the essay: “Among all the poets, I shall select all those who
devoted themselves to resistance (fankang ) and action, and thus were not welcomed
in society. I shall thereby record their words, deeds, and thoughts, as well as their schools and influences, starting from their progenitor Byron all the way down to a Magyar
(Hungarian) writer.”205 Lu Xun thus structures his essay around Byron, and discusses, in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
202 Among others, Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions reads this “lantern slide” incident as an origin of
Chinese cultural modernity. See: Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, “Introduction.”
203 Masako Kitaoka, Ro Jin Kyūbō no yume no yukue: Akumaha shijinron kara “Kyōjin nikki” made. See
also: Zhou Zuoren, Zhitang huixianglu, p.145-7.
204 See: Masako Kitaoka, Ro Jin Kyūbō no yume no yukue: Akumaha shijinron kara “Kyōjin nikki” made,
p.33-88.
constellation with the latter, figures such as Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1960), Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, as well as the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Juliusz Słowacki (1809-49), and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812-59) and the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi (1823-49).
In order to characterize the image of Byron that Lu Xun reconstructs as an essential inspiration for Chinese literary modernity, I want to compare it with how the same English poet was featured in Liang Qichao’s political fiction, Xin Zhongguo weilai
ji, which we discussed in Chapter One. Liang Qichao’s well-received Xin Zhongguo weilai ji, written in 1902, may well have been one of the sources that called the young Lu
Xun’s attention to Byron.
Lu Xun, in fact, opens his essay with the very motif that led Liang Qichao to quote Byron’s “The Giaour” and “Don Juan” in the political novel: the demise of old civilization. In Liang’s narrative, the fall of Greece to the hands of the Ottoman Empire, from whose shackles the poet calls for Greece’s independence, is analogically paralleled to China’s crippled national situation at the turn of the century. In the novel, the
protagonists Huang Keqiang and Li Qubing are traveling the Liaodong peninsula and the surrounding regions when they happen to hear someone chanting lines from a poem by Byron. On hearing the disembodied voice, Huang Keqiang remarks, “Byron made this poem precisely in order to encourage the Greek people. But as we listen to it today, [I come to think that] it had been, to some extent, as though (xiang ) made for the sake of China.”206 The content of the poem, to be sure, is concerned with the particular historical
circumstances of Greece, but the “pathetic” (chentong ) voice of the chanting carries
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feelings and emotion that echo in the hearts of the Chinese protagonists, who worry about their nation’s fate. Huang Keqiang wonders who is reciting this poem: “Who is this person? He doesn’t recite other poems, but only makes this sound of a fallen country
[wangguo zhi yin ]. He must be someone with a human heart [you xin ren
].”207 Building upon the traditional poetics of zhiyin , or, knowing each other’s hearts through sounds, the narrative stages a drama of serendipitous encounter, where the person reciting the poem turns out to be another hero, named Chen Meng, who is also an enlightened, educated youth –– “a handsome youth of the young China” (“shaonian
Zhongguo de meishaonian ”) –– concerned about the country. Just as the traditional-style song lyrics (ci ) that the protagonists create to the stock tune of
“He xinlang ” earlier in the story functions as a medium for conveying their
emotion to each other, so do the English poems by Byron, which reverberate as “the sound of a fallen country.”
This poetic communication, however, is not an intuitive one. Rather, it depends on cultural knowledge: recognizing the emotional meaning of the poems requires literary cultivation. The mere disembodied voice, indeed, suffices for the protagonist to identify the chanted poem. “Is this not ‘The Giaour’ by Byron?” Li Qubing asks upon hearing it. He even does the trick of pinpointing the stanza number of the recited lines: “This must be the first stanza of the eighty-sixth section of the third canto of that [poem] ‘Don Juan.’”208 The protagonists’ poetic sensitivity is a proof of their erudite knowledge of
English poetry, and that knowledge, within the world of the novel, is interwoven into the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
207 Liang Qichao, Yinbingshi heji: zhuanji, vol.89, p.45. 208 Ibid., vol.89, p.44-45.
matrix of classical literary cultivation, projecting the author’s image of ideal modern intelligence, embodied by the “heroes.”
The narrative thus incorporates and even appropriates Western discourse into traditional cultural capital, and to this end, Liang Qichao’s peculiar idea and practice of translation also contributes. In the story, Byron’s lines are heard chanted “in English,” “to piano accompaniment,” and, accordingly, they are first cited in the narrative in the
English original. The quote is then followed by a Chinese translation in which Liang Qichao adapts “the style of the drama script.” For example, he appends comments equivalent to stage directions in the traditional play-script to the translated stanzas, such
as “Feeling tipsy in the eastern winds [chenzui dongfeng ]” to the part
expressing lamentation over Greece’s fall, and “As though remembering the Peach
Blossom Spring in a dream [ru mengyi taoyuan ]” to the poet’s desperate
wish for Greece’s independence: “I dream’d that Greece might still be free.”209
Reiterating his advocacy of “poetry revolution” (shijie geming ), Liang
comments on his translation.
Though I am not known for poetry, I used to like to advocate a poetic revolution, arguing that the worlds and the styles of Western masters were to be melted and
recast into our poetry [rongzhu zhi yi ru woshi ], and that only
then could a new [poetic] territory be opened. I also argued that it should not be difficult to selectively translate masterpieces of Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron
into the style of the drama script [quben ti ]. Alas! I wish I were so mighty!
This time, I originally tried to translate all the lines of the sixteen stanzas [of “The Isles of Greece”] in “Don Juan,” but because it was too difficult to continue, time was pressing, and tediousness was to be avoided, I only ended up translating the [first] three stanzas. When [the work] appeared in print, I further excised the second stanza, leaving only two. My bitter struggles must be visible. After the translation was done, I was totally unsatisfied, wondering whether I could have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
possibly expressed the original meaning. I believe, however, the translator’s language must not be vainly created between [the original’s] words; rather, it must put priority on the spirit those words convey. Otherwise, the translation will suffer from convolutedness, and cannot be read again as a writing. I heard that during the Six Dynasties and the Tang, the old sages had translated Buddhist sutras by often juxtaposing sections with chapters and changing their orders, chopping and mixing the originals. Good translators must perform like that.210 What Liang Qichao tries to accomplish in this translation, he explains, is to strike a balance between readability and faithfulness. To “melt and recast” “the worlds and the styles of Western masters … into our poetry,” and, more precisely, to use “the style of the play-script” to translate Western masterpieces, are the methods Liang experiments with to resolve this difficult, if universal, dilemma for the translator. But in the context of Xin
Zhongguo weilai ji, the form alters the content: Liang’s nonliteral translation, by bringing
new content to old form, articulates Byron’s poems in terms of a newness within traditional poetics. The fall of the Greek nation, thus, is translated so that it adds a new motif to the classical poetics of “the sound of a fallen country.” If translation of Western literature “revolutionizes” Chinese poetry and opens “a new [poetic] field” for it, it constitutes another moment in the long history of Chinese culture that has always been in transformation, just as in the medieval age, the extensive translation of Buddhist sutras brought about fundamental changes in Chinese culture. The erudite appreciation and skillful chanting of those English poems therefore indicate the protagonist’s exemplary embodiment of this new, “modern” Chinese culture, just as cultivation in traditional poetry had signified exemplary cultural subjectivity in premodern times.
While sharing the theme of the demise and rebirth of an old civilization, Liang Qichao and Lu Xun engage with the English poet in strikingly contrasting ways. If Liang !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Qichao’s literature interprets Byronic poetry in terms of exemplarity in the imagined totality of “modern culture,” Lu Xun’s treatise “Moluo shili shuo” interprets it as a
singular event with universal significance.
Whereas Liang Qichao’s political novel features Byron’s poems as a voice exemplifying the intelligence, sensibility, and morality that the modern subject needs to have in order to save the nation from civilizational decline, Lu Xun’s treatise gives a crucial characterization to Byron’s poetry as “the voice of the heart” (xinsheng ). Only “the voice of the heart,” as Lu Xun conceptualizes it, survives the fall of an old civilization, smashing the sense of “desolation” (xiaotiao ) present “on the last pages” of “the cultural history of an old country.”211 Poets with this “new voice” (xinsheng ), as Lu Xun argues:
… will not produce harmonious sounds that cater to the society. When they move their mouth and emit their voice, those who listen to them will rise up to fight with the heavens and refuse vulgarity; their spirit will continue to move the hearts of the future generations, persisting forever.212
The poet’s “voice of the heart” embodies a modern agency capable of turning the course of history, just like Byron’s “sound of a fallen country” in Liang Qichao’s fiction; but the aesthetic conceptions of those reconstructed poetic voices are fundamentally different.
Lu Xun conceptualizes the essence of Byronic poetry against what he calls “the sociological understanding of poetry.” This idea, according to Lu Xun, “foregrounds the correspondence between writing and morality,” “[suggesting] that the essence of poetry is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
211 Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji, vol.1, p.65. 212 Ibid., vol.1, p.68.
idealistic sincerity (cheng ). What is that ‘sincerity’? It means that the poet’s thought and emotion correspond to the universal idea of humanity.” As such, true poetry would then “naturally” correspond to morality, which “gives poetry life and makes it eternal.”213 While using the concept of “sincerity” (cheng) with Confucian connotations, Lu Xun specifically relates this idea to the moralistic criticism practiced in the British literary establishment represented by the poet laureate Robert Southey. This idea founds poetry upon a “universal idea of humanity” and morality, and assumes that there is a “natural” way for poetry to be also moral. Without such an ethical basis, poetry “would perish.” As Lu Xun strikingly claims, it was the French Revolution that put an end, overnight, to “this dreamy consciousness of the past,” particularly in countries like “Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece.” As he continues:
Only England remained relatively stable. But there was some antagonism between the upper and lower strata of the society, sometimes producing dissatisfaction; thus, at that very moment, the poet Byron was born. Before then, people like Walter Scott [1771-1832] had produced moderate and realistic works that well conformed to traditional religious morality. But Byron overcame traditional norms and directly expressed what he believed; his writing always included strength, resistance, destruction, or challenge. How could this not make the moderates anxious? Thus they called him “Satan.”214
Lu Xun characterizes Byron in general terms as an anti-moralistic poet who defies cultural norms; but he does so by underlining the particular historical significance of Byron’s defiance, by situating his poetic engagement within the context of the
contemporary social and cultural norms in England. As Lu Xun implies, those norms had already lost their relevance in the post-French Revolution world. Byronic Romanticism !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
213 Ibid., vol.1, p.74-75. 214 Ibid., vol.1, p.75.
violated moral standards that were considered the “universal” grounds of poetic creation;