“Wild Grass” and “Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk”

Lu Xun's 1920s collections Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk are among the author's most meaningful to Anglophone readers in the present day. Written in a transitional period typified by traumatic political developments, forced migration, and personal upheaval, they take place during a shift in his writing practice away from the short story and toward the sharp, socially engaged zawen short essay. As Lu Xun's writing practice changes, he experiments at the edge of the prose poem (in Wild Grass) and the memoir (in Morning Blossoms) but never inhabits either with full obedience: as he says in the English introduction to Wild Grass, the times are moving too fast to remain in one style for long.The relevance of this period to our own unsettled, transitional time, as well as the layered mysteries of his work, has made Wild Grass, in particular, one of the most researched and discussed works by Lu Xun in recent years. Monographs by Nick Kaldis, Gloria Davies, and Roy Bing Chan and essays by Charles Laughlin, Mabel Lee, Xia Xiaoyu, and myself have all engaged with the collection, creating a truly rich variety of interpretation and debate.1 Prominent among scholars of Wild Grass and other works of Lu Xun's middle and late period has been Eileen J. Cheng, whose monograph Literary Remains focuses on the persistent afterlives and repeatedly staged deaths of traditional culture in Lu Xun's work. She has now brought the field a new translation of Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk in a frankly sumptuous, carefully illustrated edition from Harvard's Belknap Press. The translations are English-only, generously annotated with endnotes, and each of the two collections is accompanied by a twenty-page translator's note that introduces and in some cases explicates Lu Xun's work.Cheng's translation is commendable in part because it has a hermeneutic theory of the text at hand and takes an interpretive position both in its introduction and in its translation: it is animated by an idea. She sees both Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms as driven by philosophical reflection. In Wild Grass, the question is “what does it mean to be human?” (3), and Morning Blossoms reflects on “living . . . as an experience of disillusion, displacement, and being without a home in the world” (104, 107). Both collections ask, in her reading, “whose lives can be mourned and whose cannot” (4). We can see here some of the concerns of her monograph Literary Remains: she opens, as well, each translator's introduction with the translation of a classical poem, both arguing that Lu Xun was drawing his titles from pre-twentieth-century literature and foregrounding the presence of classical poetry in Lu Xun's compositional method. Her emphasis on philosophical reflection draws her attention to the much-discussed question of hope in Lu Xun's work, and she finds both these works, for all their darkness, to contain glimmers of hope for the future (20–21, 125), rereading Lu Xun's formulation of “resisting despair” through Jonathan Lear's concept of “radical hope” (21).With regard to the linguistic layer of the translation, Cheng's style mixes scholarly precision with a colloquial prosaicness. This suits, I think, Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk, which has a chatty, avuncular directness: when she starts the celebrated essay “Professor Fujino” by translating “東京無非是這樣” as “So this is all there was to Tokyo” (201), it feels tonally spot-on and a substantive improvement to the 1976 Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi translation, which was “Tokyo was not so extraordinary after all” (80). This pattern repeats consistently when the two translations are compared. Yang and Yang, in my opinion, saw Lu Xun as a genius and his works as classics: they wanted the English to feel formal, condensed, and precise, and in so doing they sacrificed some of the comedy, self-deprecation, and ease of their version of Dawn Blossoms. Wild Grass is a separate story. Parts of that collection are written in an intense and intensely lyrical mode that suits the Yangs’ near-biblical rhetoric and their condensed style. In the collection's preface, whose title 《題辭》 Cheng translates as “Inscription,” the Yangs translate 我將大笑,我將歌唱 as “I will laugh aloud and sing” in rhythmic iambic trimeter (with an extra unstressed syllable at the outset) that gives a sensation of orderliness that matches the siyan couplet of the original (3); Cheng translates the passage more flatly as “I will laugh, I will sing” (31), whose phrases aren't quite long enough for the English parallelism to give the sense of intentional design that is palpable in the Chinese. In Cheng, 過去的生命已經死亡 is translated as “my past life has met its demise” (31), where the Yangs have the more efficient, affective and accurate “The past life has died” (3). A third alternative is Matt Turner's more experimental 2019 translation, titled Weeds and printed in parallel with the Chinese: for 我将大笑, he has a more complex and subtle rhythm: “I will laugh out loud, I will sing songs.” and for the latter excerpt, he has the clipped “Past life has already died” (2). Both push slightly at the edges of standard English, rendering the lyrical quality of the original into a spiky, contemporary English poetry.2 But for those who want to see the collection as, in Lu Xun's words, a container for his “whole philosophy,” Cheng's translation is a strong choice.Collecting the two books together, even though they are different in style and tone, is in itself an important contribution to Lu Xun studies. As Lu Xun says in the preface to Morning Blossoms, the two collections were produced one after another. They each appeared in different magazines, Wild Grass in Threads of Talk (Yu si 語絲, 1924–1930) and Morning Blossoms in Wilderness Monthly (Mangyuan 莽原, 1925–1927), and their different contexts had a strong influence on their style, but when printed together one can see their deeper common project, an attempt to think through the feelings and experiences that underpinned Lu Xun's revolutionary impulse. May Fourth intellectuals and revolutionaries are often described as having a cohesive modernizing program, a sense of progressive direction; they are not always equally credited with being victims of trauma, of viscerally hating their traditional educations, of feeling frightened of death or fascinated by it. Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms are full of dreams, but they're not always dreams of a future: they're snatches of memories and remembered experience, moments of phantom pain and pleasure. Collecting them together does much more than fill the gap between Julia Lovell's translation of Lu Xun's early-career fiction and Cheng and Kirk Denton's translated collection of his later essays;3 it shows a great artist interrogating his own motives and his own feelings, taking stock of where he comes from and what drives him.The recent trend toward the study of Lu Xun's middle period continues to grow. With these translations of short pieces, which members of the field should assuredly own, it will be possible to add groups of works to modern Chinese literature syllabi, for example, pieces on education (“Kite,” “From the Garden of Myriad Grasses to the Five Flavors Studio,” “Professor Fujino”), some of the many pieces on death, or pieces featuring parents and children (“The Passerby,” “Tremors on the Border of Degradation,” “Father's Illness”). These new translations can support extant teaching (“Father's Illness” makes a fascinating pair with the classic “Medicine”), or the books could be taught in their entirety in support of new conceptual insights. I suspect the availability of these texts will sharpen our collective desire to engage with the collections’ many mysteries, like the intense emphasis on childhood visual culture in Morning Blossoms or its curiously curatorial, sweaty “Afterword.” These translations are a great contribution to the Anglophone study of Lu Xun, which increasingly achieves both depth and breadth.