Lu Xun's 魯迅 (1881–1936) early classical-style essays are concerned with issues in the history and philosophy of science, as well as literature, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics during an era in which China went through profound cultural changes. Part of their significance also lies in the way they provide us with an unabashed glimpse at what Lu Xun, who was to become China's most important writer of the twentieth century, set out to accomplish with his intended literary career. They first appeared in the Chinese expatriate journal Henan 河南 (Ho-nan, 1907–8). Although they are products of his last student years in Japan, the fact that he chose to include the two longest of them at the very front of his 1926 anthology Fen 墳 (The Grave) indicates that he considered the views expressed therein neither too immature nor too dated to reprint at the height of his career as a creative writer. In fact, he suggests in his preface to Fen that one of his reasons for doing so was that the poets and causes treated there had, ironically, taken on an increased relevance for China in the years “after the founding of the republic.” Over the years since they were written, the content and style of these essays have been the subject of considerable scholarly scrutiny, but this has drawn out divergent views. Scholars in Japan have done an admirable job of tracing down the sources of some of the essays, although their interpretation was not without controversy there. Chinese scholars have first discounted, then eschewed, then annotated, and finally extolled them as harbingers of a new poetics or a profound meditation on unresolved issues still facing China. Westerners, by and large, give them a degree of primacy, but from different perspectives and to different degrees. This article examines the reception of these essays internationally, recontextualizing it within the historical factors that contributed to and molded it.
Japanese Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo kz 7l•: 3 has recently called Lu Xun %k 3 "The greatest writer Asia produced in the 20th century."l This is yet another reason to hope he will soon break out of what Margery Sabin has termed "the closed world of Chinese studies."2 Whether Chinese studies is a closed world, or the outside world chooses to maintain a closed attitude toward "Chinese studies," the importance of expert translation in the whole enterprise of getting the West to take Chinese literature seriously seems, finally, on the verge of being recognized. With this six-volume publication, Wolfgang Kubin has established himself as a principal player in this worldwide undertaking. The attractive set of red, cloth-bound volumes he has produced (along with his students and colleagues) contains an all-new German translation of selected works by Lu Xun (1881-1936), a number of which have never been published before in English or French, including some of Lu Xun's early essays in wenyan 3C. 1 written in 1907-1908 during the period of the author's stay in Japan, which Xu Guozhang once referred to as Lu Xun's Lehrjahre. The first five volumes contain complete translations of all the pieces in: I Nahan ("Applaus"/ Applause), II Panghuang ,q t ("Zwischenzeiten Zwischenwelten"/ Between times, between worlds), III Zhaohua xishi qj~ $ 4$ ("Blumen der Friihe am Abend gelesen"/ Flowers of the morning read in the evening), IV Gushi xinbian j& ~ ~ fr ("Altes, frisch verpackt"/ Old things newly packaged), the essays in the collection in volume V Fen fj ("Das Totenmal"/ The monument to the dead) and, in the sixth volume entitled "Das trunkene Land" (The drunken land), Lu Xun's poems in the classical and vernacular, selected reminiscences, plus an afterword by Wolfgang Kubin. Thanks to the determination of Professor Kubin, and a sizeable number of his students and colleagues, aside from the Japanese Rojin zenshu , Ik $ [Complete works of Lu Xun] (Tokyo: Gakken, 1986), this is now the most complete edition of Lu Xun's works in any foreign language. Regrettably, however, it omits all of his essays after 1925, a loss which can be partially made up by directing readers who are confined to the Western languages to consult volumes 2-4 of the Yangs' four-volume translation.3 William A. Lyell's newer one
That American academic publishers within a short time have put out three monographs this substantial on Lu Xun (1881–1936), often referred to as the founder of modern Chinese literature, is indicative of a new enthusiasm for Lu Xun in the United States and elsewhere in the West. In Japan, South Korea, and of course the People's Republic of China, the study of Lu Xun has been an academic enterprise of considerable standing for some time already. Not that American scholars have failed to make substantial contributions to Lu Xun studies in the past, but such contributions have been relatively far between. Fortunately, there is little overlap between these three exciting new studies.
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