The Power of Mara Poetry: Mickiewicz’s Voice of Revenge in China

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The Power of Mara Poetry: Mickiewicz’s Voice of Revenge in China

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Influence. Adam Mickiewicz - collage #9. A portrait of Lu Xun (from Wikimedia) was used. Author: Matej Kaniewski for Culture.pl

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The introduction of Mickiewicz to Chinese culture is one man’s doing. This man – who was also responsible for putting Mickiewicz on a pedestal of world literature in the eyes of Chinese readers – was Lu Xun (1881–1936), widely known as the father of contemporary Chinese literature (based on the vernacular) and often described as the most outstanding Chinese writer of the twentieth century.

In 1907 this young author, still at the threshold of his great career, published a long essay called ’On the Power of Mara Poetry’ (Moluo shi li shuo). In this piece, he discussed a group of European poets who, in his opinion, ’possess the original and therefore most valuable genuine quality of mankind’: ’adamant, unbendable, in preserving [their] integrity and holding fast to the truth, never would they curry favour from the crowd by yielding to musty convention. They uttered heroic outcries to arouse their people to new life’.

Among the authors who Lu Xun found particularly deserving was Adam Mickiewicz. The question arises: Where did this Chinese author learn about Mickiewicz, even before his works were translated into Chinese? And also: What could a poet from a faraway European country that had been wiped off the map at the time have had to say to readers from the mighty and ancient culture of China?

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Poetry to the rescue of China

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Lu Xun in a photograph from 1930. Source: Wikimedia

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Lu Xun came across Mickiewicz during his seven-year stay in Japan, where he went to study medicine in 1902. He swiftly abandoned his studies, however, having decided to commit himself to literature.

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Demonic poets of Europe

Lu Xun’s essay concentrates on a group of outstanding European poets inspired by Lord George Byron (‘foremost among the poets of the “satanic school” in England’), all of whom he called the Mara poets. This last word, Sanskrit for ‘demon’, had a very positive ring to Lu Xun. After all, he argued, without the devil’s temptations, humanity would never have been born. As scholar Shih-Hsiang Chen suggests, Lu Xun ‘justified Satan from a Chinese point of view’: he saw the spirit of Mara as a rebellion against the prevailing reality – the ‘demonic’ poets were working for humanity, to free it from the bonds of servitude and ignorance.

Although Li Xun was well aware of the crucial differences between the various poets – apart from Mickiewicz and Byron, the Mara pantheon included Shelley, Pushkin, Lermontov, Słowacki, and Sandor Petőfi – he thought their efforts had a joint purpose:

‘in general, they would not deign to chant soothing, merry tunes [to the nation] in order to be in accord with the common world; for once they should cry at the top of their voice, all who heard them would arise, in defiance of Heaven and in repudiation of vulgar society. And their spirit would deeply move men of the future, endlessly […]’, the author explained.

And so Mickiewicz found himself in the world pantheon of revolutionary poets; yet even in this group, Xun believed he clearly stood out – rising to the ranks of history’s most significant poets. This is particularly interesting in that when Lu Xun published his essay, few in China had heard of Mickiewicz, or of Poland as such. The author himself, given the lack of Chinese translations, drew his knowledge from European literary history books he read in German, English, and the Scandinavian languages (Mickiewicz himself he read, it seems, in Japanese). Another important intermediary was Georg Brandes, a Danish literary critic and the author of popular books about Poland, a great friend to the Poles and promoter of Polish literature in the world.

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The demonic Mickiewicz

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Chinese author Lu Xun in 1936, 11 days before his death. Source: Wikimedia

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In the chapter on the Polish poet, which, experts agree, is practically a panegyric, Lu Xun recounts the bard’s biography (with special focus on his unrequited love and imprisonment by the Tsar), and gives the Chinese reader the contents of the main wo

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The Voice of revenge… & the Xinhai Revolution

Yet the voice of Mickiewicz’s poetry, which Lu Xun decided to make especially audible to the Chinese reader, turns out to be the voice of political revenge. Shih-Hsiang Chen stresses:

[...] It was no longer the voice of Mara against God; it was that of the human rebel hero against the human oppressor. Thus the powerful utterances of the Polish poet now found their echo in Chinese, with the same force and effect to stir the blood against internal and foreign oppression.

Mickiewicz (like Juliusz Słowacki) was, for Lu Xun, a poet of anger and vengeance. Xun invokes Forefathers’ Eve Part III, in particular. Quoting and paraphrasing the prison songs of the Philomaths, he teases out notes of resistance and revenge. ’All the flowers of the poetry of vengeance, we might say, are gathered here’, he writes.

As Chen demonstrates, the political context of these statements was the heated social climate of an epoch on the threshold of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911–12. The result was the overthrow of the Emperor (Qing Dynasty), as China entered the republican era.

‘So in the uproar which was to shake the nation in that year of cataclysm, in the outcry for vengeance against the oppressors, one might hear the borrowed voice from Mickiewicz reverberate, too,’ Chen argues.

Scholars agree that the essay ‘On the Power of Mara Poetry’ – and especially the formula and tasks for lyric poetry it contained – exerted a major influence on the shape of the modern Chinese poetry. According to Chen, ‘Li Xun's essay […] in which Mickiewicz stood out so prominently, heralded a new epoch of Chinese literature, in which the Polonophile spirit continued to grow. The new Chinese literature, taking shape since the beginning of the vernacular movement of 1917, necessarily had to be militant. It not only had to battle against old literary forms and style; it had also to rise against old social systems, moral conventions, and bigotry’.

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Mickiewicz, Polish literature and the ‘New Culture Movement’...

As Chen stresses, Li Xun’s portrait of Mickiewicz is among the most vivid in the essay, and from him ‘Lu Xun could draw the most effective support for his theory of revolutionary literature’. This, in turn, was to be part of his own artistic practice as well. Lu Xun was a modern artist, with a socially-committed approach to literature (he described village peasants, poverty, and backwardness with exceptional realism), who substantially revolutionised Chinese literature. He himself stood at the forefront of the ‘New Culture Movement’, which ploughed through Chinese culture at the turn of the 1920s and 30s.

We might add that Mickiewicz and Polish literature played also a vital role in the later translations and journalism of Lu Xun and his brother, Zhou Zuoren. The latter translated many works of Polish literature (including Sienkiewicz, Konopnicka, Prus and Żeromski). These translations published in a magazine edited by Lu Xun, would play an important role in shaping the new Chinese literature. Lu Xun himself considered even translating Reymont’s The Peasants and Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword into Chinese. Modern-day Sinologists point to connections between his novel-writing and the work of Sienkiewicz.

For these Chinese promoters of Polish literature, their interest went beyond the disquieting historical analogies between Poland’s tragic political fate (the partitions) and the situation in China, which was increasingly dependent on foreign powers after the First Opium War (1842). Shih-Hsiang Chen writes: ‘the Chinese at the time identified closely with the Poles as an oppressed people’. The interest in Polish literature, Li Yinan suggests, ‘was deeply rooted in the shared desire for revolt, revolution, patriotism, revenge’, and ‘many attributes of Polish literature match the main postulates of the New Culture Movement and its aesthetic premises outlined by Lu Xun’.

Perhaps the best summary of Mickiewicz’s career in China as a patriotic writer of the revolution might be found in the 1929 publication of the first translation of Lu Xun’s favourite Mickiewicz work, ‘Ode to Youth’.

Lu Xun himself continued his fight for the social goals of the new Chinese literature, ‘“attacking and exposing any and all demagoguery and authoritarianism that rose after the Chinese revolution. Thus he acted with fidelity in Mara’s role until his death in 1936..’

Author: Mikołaj Gliński, October 2023. Translated by Soren Gauger.

Sources: Shih-Hsiang Chen, ‘Polish Literature in China and Mickiewicz as Mara Poet’, in Adam Mickiewicz in World Literature, 1956; Li Yinan, Literatura polska w twórczości chińskiego pisarza Lu Xuna; Li Yinan, Recepcja literatury polskiej w Chinach. Wybrane zagadnienia, 2015; Joanna Krenz, Oświęcim, tani chleb i ziemniaki w ranach. Polska oczami chińskich poetów, 2019.

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