4. The Power of Mara Poets, or Mickiewicz’s ‘voice of vengeance’ in China
Chinese writer Lu Xun, photo: WikipediaWhat does Mickiewicz have to do with China? One would think very little, considering the geographical distance and cultural and linguistic barriers. And yet the work and ideals of the Polish poet found their way to the ‘Central Kingdom’ already in the early 20th century. That is, at a time when Mickiewicz wasn’t even translated into Chinese. How was it possible?
The one person responsible for introducing Mickiewicz to Chinese readers, as well as putting him on the pedestal of world literature, was Lu Xun (1881-1936). In 1907, this leading figure of modern Chinese literature and a future classic of Chinese vernacular literature, published an essay called ‘The Power of Mara Poetry’. In it, Lu Xun discussed a streak of European poets, starting with Byron (‘foremost among the poets of the “Satanic school” in England), all of whom, as he believed, ‘possess the original and therefore the most valuable genuine quality of mankind’ and whose work was produced ‘in defiance of Heaven and in repudiation of a vulgar society’. He called them ‘Mara poets’ – mara being Sanskrit word for ‘devil’ – which, however, for Lu Xun was a positive reference as he was ‘vindicating Satan from the Chinese point of view’.
Thus Mickiewicz found himself in Lu Xun’s newly discovered pantheon, where he was joined by other greats like Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, Słowacki and Petofi. But even within this sequence, Mickiewicz’s character and work stood out for the Chinese author. In the chapter about the Polish poet, Lu Xun summarised for his Chinese readers the bard’s biography (emphasising his lost love and imprisonment), gave a brief account of The Forefathers Eve (Part IV was ‘a mordant story of passion… Wertherism in full’) as well as other of Mickiewicz’s works, including Konrad Wallenrod, Grażyna and Pan Tadeusz. In the description the latter he focused on the famous hunting scene from Book 4 (‘Wojski sounded the horn…’), which he concluded:
‘Long after Wojski stopped blowing the horn, those who had heard it felt as if it was still being blown, never to end. But Mickiewicz is the one who will live in the everlasting echoes to his poetry, ever without end’.
Where did Lu Xun learn about Mickiewicz? As Chinese literary scholar Shih-Hsiang Chen claims, Lu Xun was most fluent in the German, English and Scandinavian languages, hence his main sources were likely contemporary histories of European literatures – but also Georg Brandes, a popular Danish critic much enamoured with Poland.
As Shih-Hsiang Chen notes, the image of Mickiewicz is among the most vivid in the book and it is from it that ‘Lu Xun could draw the most effective support for his theory of revolutionary literature’ which was to become his own literary practice. The scholar also notes that ‘the Chinese at the time identified closely with the Poles as an oppressed people’, suffering like the Chinese themselves under the yoke of foreign oppressors.