Ah Q and Others; Selected Stories of Lusin: Selected Stories of Lusin (Chou-Shu-Jen

by Lu Xun, Chi-chen Wang

English, Chinese (translation)

Genres: Fiction

219 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

Lu Xun (鲁迅) or Lu Hsün (Wade-Giles), was the pen name of Zhou Shuren (September 25, 1881 – October 19, 1936), a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in Vernacular Chinese as well as Classical Chinese, Lu Xun was a novelist, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, and poet. In the 1930s he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai.


For the Traditional Chinese profile: here.
For the Simplified Chinese profile: 鲁迅

Reviews

[Katie Lumsden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed some of these but overall the stories weren't quite for me.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this author following an exercise put to me (and others) by a self-described Chinese scholar named Jenny Mao (sorry to be coy, I don't know them personally). She was asking GoodReaders who had reviewed works by Chinese authors in the summer of 2020 to read and share thoughts on the relative poignancy of five different English translations of Lu Xun's short story "Medicine" (one of which is contained in the present collection). I don't know what ever became of the research, but I certainly enjoyed the exercise and plan to share an edited version of our correspondence (and my analysis) here when I finish this collection, which I selected because it was compiled by the "Medicine" translator I preferred.

I find the philosophy of translation fascinating. In fact, I recently read this interesting collection of articles" on Tom Stoppard's play Indian Ink. The series captures the contradictions and challenges of translation brilliantly, considering its subject was an elaboration of a radio show Stoppard wrote a decade earlier about a fictional poet of the 1920s whose letters were themselves subject to interpretation and elaboration by a modern scholar (whose commentary is presented to the audience as diagetical footnotes). So: comments on comments on comments on the difficulties of perceiving an ever-elusive original. An infinite regress of nested matryushkas and Chinese boxes. Intoxicating. Along those lines, this review owes its inspiration as much to Masha Essen, whose essay on translating Tolstoy is definitely worth your time, as to Jenny Mao. Either way, here's how I navigate the delightful rabbit hole for exploration that sucked up much of my time and attention in 2020.

To start with, Lu comes across as witty and casual. His preface introducing this edition is delightful. However, all the works in this collection seem to follow the same, consistent pattern in this edition riddled with undistracting typos: Lu cuts slices of rural and small-town life in China in the 1910s-1920s with much pathos and occasional, modest glimpses of humor. Here lie the travails and delusions that beset a superstitious, poor peasantry. More tragic than funny, not terribly dramatic, but certainly vivid. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of metaphor and allusive material to underscore these points, so -- especially for those curious about Lu who have greater Chinese cultural literacy -- this book seems as good a starting point as any.

The book's heart and most representative work is The True Story of Ah-Q (gesundheit), a free version of which you can find here. Hsun's novella is a rambling, picaresque slapstick about a poor, drunken bum that spoofs its subjects' primarily by juxtaposing the village idiot's grandiose self-importance against the equally pathetic narrowmindedness of the village inhabitants, for whom "revolution" implies little other than a change of allegiances. These are a people whom Ah Q sees as but simple Weichuang villagers. "Again, when they fried large-headed fish in oil… all added shallot leaves sliced half an inch long, whereas the townspeople added finely shredded shallots…. 'How ridiculous!' But the Weichuang villagers were really ignorant rustics who had never seen fish fried in town!" (a typical passage from p. 72). The story has more depth to it than my superficial summation implies, and compares favorably to John Kennedy Toole's superior A Confederacy of Dunces. Still, the other works in the anthology are fairly similar: eschewing storytelling for evocative descriptions of day-to-day superstition, stagnation, and poverty against a distant backdrop of corrupt and oppressive (when not negligent) bureaucracy. Again, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Of course, I didn't know any of that when I started reading Lu Hsun. Mao had circulated on GoodReads to survey willing participants for a graduate paper (an output I still hope to see). Her stated intent was to further her "study on dissemination of Lu's works in the English world," but the brief she provided was to read multiple translations of a Lu short story and answer a few multiple answer questions. Still, all this made me curious to discover how disparate translators handled the same text, and the extent to which -- assuming in each case a good faith attempt by skilled, bilingual professional(s) -- the translator matters. I present here the results of my encounter as a reader of five translations of Lu's story, Medicine.

Let's start with the basics of any translation exercise: the subject matter of the material being translated. As I understand it, this short story was originally written in 1919. At that time, Lu Hsun was a middle-aged writer with communist sympathies setting pen to paper a mere seven years after Sun Yat-Sen's overthrow of the Manchu state, a time when the consolidation of power was still under way and internal factionalization was rising. Medicine can thus be read in the context of socialist realism and protest, a means of showing a way forward from the oppressions that beset "backward" Chinese villagers toward a new and better day, perhaps even (for Lu) auguring the inevitability of a communist China yet to come.

Stripped down to essentials, I think the story beats of "Medicine" break down as follows:

(1) One chilly autumn day, Hua Shuan (middle aged? older?) wakes up before dawn, his son coughing in the next room of their house/tea house.
(2) He takes money from his wife, calling out to his son that she will take care of opening the shop.
(3) On the road, he feels both anxious and excited. Dawn breaks.
(4) His progress is interrupted by passing security forces and a sudden crowd assemblage.
(5) As soon as they part the person he meant to meet accosts him holding up a dripping red bread roll. Shuan hesitates, confused and uncertain, and the man takes charge of the swap: "medicine" for money.
(6) Shuan returns home to a shop open and ready for business.
(7) He gives the bun to his wife for ritual preparation. Their son eats it, still hot.
(8) "Uncle" Kang insinuates himself among the usual customers and reveals to all that:
(a) Shuan's son has tuberculosis;
(b) a young, arrogant rebel named Hsia was just captured, beaten, and executed;
(c) Hsia's paternal grand-uncle (his father's uncle) betrayed him to the authorities in exchange for amnesty and the reward money; and
(d) it's therefore lucky for Shuan to come by a fresh, hot, blood-soaked bun.
(9) The next spring, Mother Hua visits her son's fresh grave in the pauper's cemetery outside the city gates.
(10) An old woman (Mother Hsia?) does likewise in the criminal's cemetery directly adjacent.
(11) They are observed by a crow on an overhanging tree branch.
(12) Both are startled by the presence of a garland of red and white flowers on Hsia's grave.
(13) Mother Hsia prays aloud for her son's spirit to show his presence by having the crow fly down and perch atop his gravestone. It does not.
(14) The crow flies away as they are leaving.

It's a simple story enriched by overlapping screens of imagery, allusion, metaphor, and ambiguity. Western readers will benefit from at least three footnotes: one setting the story in the waning days of the (foreign, Manchu) Qing dynasty; a second providing various associations to the character 'Ba' above and beyond the image of emaciated shoulder blades); and a crucial third which invites them to read Hua and Hsia together as Huaxia, thereby allowing the suffering poor (Hua) and dissident (Hsia) to be seen as one people. Other layers will be readable via the shared tropes of literature: how a flickering grease lamp connotes both poverty and life's fragility; the apparent equation of a blood-drenched loaf of bread with a vital heart, its steam reflective of life's breath; the connection between Red-Eye the jailer to the red-piping on the soldiers' uniforms; the further significance of the color red (in the roll and wreath) to communist iconography; the transition of the story from a chilly autumn morning to an unseasonably cold spring day, with the promise of summer to come, the mother's prayers answered by the crow's flight, not to the grave, but at the horizon/distance/audience/future. Finally and irrespective of the author's actual intent, Western audiences may associate Kang's insinuation that he arranged it all -- Hua's silver to Hsia's brother in exchange for Hsia's blood -- with the Christian story of Jesus' betrayal by Judas to the Romans.

Most, if not all of this information is equably conveyed by each of the five translations. (It definitely comes across from a Rashomon-like reading of all five in succession.... or perhaps Sima Qian would be a more apt reference?) At any rate, given all this, what distinguishes the five translations? To figure that out, I thought a side-by-side comparison of choice passages and content might be illustrative. To save space here, I've placed each summation into its own comment field, italicizing those I thought were the 'best' passages, with explanations below.

What distinguishes these translations? Let's start by looking at the choice of tense. Most of the fiction I remember reading growing up was written in the past tense. My wife tells me that the convention has shifted today to favor the present. (I prefer the use of past tense for fiction and present tense for nonfiction essays; I do not know whether this has more to do with familiarity or connotation.) In this case, it seems Lu wrote his story in the present tense. Do we know why? I thought Yao/Snow's translation was awkward, and in this respect, a failure. Lyell solves the tense problem by giving his prose immediacy: artful and no mean feat.

Moving on, two classic translation challenges are what to do with names and idiomatic speech. Many proper names have clear etymological derivatives to professional roles, relationships, or places of origin (Miller, Smith, Ander's Son, de Souza, etc.). Likewise, idioms are phrases that over time come to take on meanings which can be quite different from those of their individual words. Ironically, in either case literal translation can sow confusion in a reader's mind. Wherever the primary purpose of a word is to serve as a label, phonemic replication is the best choice. Lyell accomplishes this by placing "mantou" in italics. I understood that to be a specific type of roll, and it's usage lent verisimilitude and exoticism to his text. By contrast, his choice to render the protagonist literally as "Big Bolt" came across as clumsy, and for two reasons. First, because "Big Bolt" implies a nickname more than a name -- and an unusual one at that which feels at odds with it's appearance throughout Lu's story -- and second, because the word "bolt" itself carries multiple meanings in English, with the association to electricity (e.g., thunderbolt, lightning bolt) being stronger than the one that indicates a door latch. Worst of all, the fully analogous word in English with 'bolt' that unequivocally means a thrown-rod locking mechanism is "deadbolt." If Lu was intentionally reaching for this pun, my guess is that most people would regard it as excessively labored. Better left behind. Of the five, I thought Kennedy's name translations best balanced function with meaning. Yang's depersonalizes the wife (who needs to exist as an independent character for the last section of the story). Each has a different but equally effective approach to identifying the name of the festival, which carries little impact on the narrative. Lovell's names are a bit too generic. Yao's are all over the place.

Lyell's translation has a few other strengths relative to the others akin to his choice to use "mantou" for the blood-steeped bread. Lyell softens Lu's heavy-handed reference to Qiu Jin, by translating the appearance of the intersection as little more than a weathered, semi-legible milestone. His is also the only one of the five that clearly communicates the point of Kang's mockery: it's pathetic that Red-Eye sides with young Hsia's oppressors. This is a particularly challenging idiomatic passage that none of the other translators could solve. Points for pedanticism. Alas, Lyell goes overboard with his footnotes; I think the Western reader only needs three, possibly four: ba, executioner, and Hua/Xia; the Qiu Jin reference is nice but of lesser importance since Lu's intent comes across without being hit over the head with it.

One last comment -- the import of the reference to the "barkless dogs" in the story is not at all clear. Stray dogs are evocative of rural poverty in general, but a dog that doesn't bark is worthy of note in Western literature. Arthur Conan Doyle's "curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" is now so famous, the phrase itself has become idiomatic (try searching "curious incident" in GoodReads and see how many titles surface). Perhaps Lu hoped to allude to Doyle for the purpose of implying Hua was, in his commonplace poverty, a kindred spirit to stray dogs? If so, that would be a pretty big reach from the literal familiarity Sherlock Holmes deduced. Kennedy, Yang, and Lyell each offset the dogs against their bark by use of the word "but." Lyell and Kennedy emphasize how unusual is this silence: "not one" barks. For Yao/Snow, they are just local color. Lovell just finesses the problem. The dogs pass. Whatever.

Culturally-specific references are a core challenge to would-be translators. Should translators treat language-specific idioms literally and word for word; by turning a culturally-specific expression like "may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground," to something more generic or vulgar, like "eat sh*t;" or by using cultural cognates (to turn a mantou from a steamed bun into a brioche or hamburger bun)? In terms of effectiveness, this is probably an empirical question: I would certainly like to see a table of popular translations from the past 5 years of books on the NY Times bestseller list (or Amazon, or Ali Baba, or any equivalent compilation of fiction sales) coded for the authenticity of translation.

Here's my style guide. Translate proverbs and slang using appropriate vernacular. Failing that, translate them into plain language, as we do with the Eastern European insult about growing like an onion. Introduce the first appearance in a text of culturally-loaded words (words specific to context and/or culture like 'mantou' and 'Qing Ming Festival') with a parenthetical or footnote (e.g., 'steamed bun' and 'springtime festival when people attend to their relatives' graves'). Thereafter, use the transliteration alone. Translate words common to the English language, like "rice," directly. Translate and preferably place nicknames in quotes; transliterate proper names. Thus: Old Shuan, "Uncle" Kang, Mama Hua. In dialogue, translation should follow relevance to minimize reader confusion. So, Shuan's father should remain as Old Shuan, unless parallel usage is nondisruptive (e.g., Mama and Papa Hua, or 'the boy and his father'). Present words for which ideograms serve as visual puns as-is, including a direct translation in a parenthetical, and offering deeper layers -- if crucial to understanding -- in a footnote or endnote. Thus, "ba," 八 (fortune, literally the number 8). Proper names that should be common knowledge (Qing Dynasty), should be presented as-is and explained, if at all, in a prologue, glossary, footnote, or afterword.

I hope my rules follow clarity. As to aesthetics, I doubt you can translate a work well unless you have at least some affinity for its underlying ideas in addition to how those might best be expressed in the target language. If you have that sympathy, are you really going to want to bastardize the material hoping to spur sales? Translators should always make their best efforts to communicate the essence of the original. Nuances and corrections are best left to footnotes.

So again, what makes a "good" translation? This presumably depends on the intentionality and translatability of the author's choice. Should a translator follow the author or contemporary convention, and which of these five translations, if any, gets it "right"? Personally, I think the translator's job is to convey the affect the author hoped the original would present to an average Chinese reader at the time of publication. Translator preferences may be distinct from those of readers; what readers want is, I think less relevant to what makes for an effective translation. First and foremost, I would expect readers to want from a translation what they want from any book, namely an encounter with a good story. I'm sure I would probably feel a little cheated after the fact to discover that the translation I enjoyed had in fact been watered down or altered in some significant way from the original -- I might even feel condescended to or misled -- but really, even if my first encounter with a book I liked proved to have come from an "inauthentic" translation, I'd still be left having enjoyed the work. I mean, the general consensus is that the King James version of the Bible was a woefully inaccurate translation, but it remains acclaimed as great poetry in its own right. It's still in print; people still buy it.

Somewhat analogously, consider how many adaptations of Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's work there are floating around in film and television. Are moviegoers seeking authenticity, contemporary relevance, or just resonance in general? I suspect it depends on the audience. To digress further, theater is a living art. (Most good) playwrights expect their works to evolve through the efforts of each new production to realize them. Accents, line readings, blocking, costumes, and sets all change regardless of whether any modifications are made to the dialogue itself. Which of these is rightly regarded as the most "authentic" version? [Remainder of review in comments]

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5*

'Now he saw eyes more terrible even than the wolf's: dull yet penetrating eyes that, having devoured his words, still seemed eager to devour something behind his flesh and blood.'

Loved loved loved 'The New Year's Sacrifice', 'Regret for the Past', 'Forging the Swords' and 'My Old Home'. A lot of these stories become really tedious when you read them back to back but, as separate entities, they carry strong messages alongside beautiful motifs of the moon, eyes, birds etc.

[Ostrava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lu Xun's early work is considered to be a cornerstone of modern literature. And yet, his most famous short story, and the one that was included in the Bokkluben reading guide, is something of a rehash of Gogol's short story of the same name. Does this justify his reverence not just in China, but in all of Asia?

Well... yes. I imagine it's the case. It radically changed the drive of literary conversation of an entire nation, challenged both language and culture in one single creative movement and drove it all with a critique towards the prison of the old.

But it doesn't exactly feel like that either. In A Madman's Diary, Lu Xun walks a thin line between the critique and a more ambiguous and therefor, open challenge towards the "prison". A challenge towards a perception of love and a social drive motivated by greed and power, which were influenced by his then premature political views. It is an allegory, but it's also... a bit more. Like a good tale by Kafka, a superficial reading is a wasteful one.

But the best story by Lu Xun has to be AQ. This one is a tale deeply troubled by the mentality of success of his hometown, which is also written in such a manner than most people should be able to understand, regardless of your disconnect with Chinese culture (which is my case). Who knows, maybe by the end you might even learn a few things on China, or at least, what China means to people like Lu Xun. AQ is a very defined character, with clear flaws and... well not much else, but deep down, a human being like the rest of us, influenced by his pals on what to aspire, however, without the tools for improvement (incapacity to read, no one to rely on as he has no family members, or friends, or a clique...). You could read it as a critique of the old prison too of course, and of traditionalism, Chinese nationalism, and so on... but yeah, you would have to know about it to make such a statement. I have no relation to China, so my comments on it would be ridiculously unwelcome. I'm very sure that the story can be enjoyed without that sort of reading though.

Come to think of it, this is the only Chinese work in the list. So, the Red Chamber didn't make the cut? Well... I'm sure somebody is pissed off about it. Not that these things matter but...I find it odd that people would vote for the Chinese short story as opposed to the Chinese novel.

I guess size isn't everything after all...

[Luca Caristo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure if this is the right version but idc. For FASS I read diary of a madman. I liked Lu Xun, I feel like he’s similar to me; he was a science student but appreciated literature and realised instead of curing biological disease he could cure the maladies of his era. Anyway. The short stories are fire — I love how blunt he is, as with all translated texts, whether it’s intentional or a product of translation, I don’t care because it’s good and the results are what matters. Some stories went over my head, but who cares, I still enjoyed them. Maturing is realising we are all Ah Q. The best story was the one in the Tavern, Hair was also good

[Moses · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lu Xun is a giant of Chinese literature, but it all feels extremely utilitarian. The first book in the collection was the first time he ever wrote a short story, and it shows. The best stuff in the book is his retellings of well known fairytales and mythology, which he put a fun twist on, but by and large it's sort of meh. I think these stories are difficult to grok as an American in the 21st century, completely bereft of context.