Interpreting Lu Xun

Abstract

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