Wielka sztuka niewielkiego narodu: Polska na tle kontaktów literackich Chin z Europą Środkowo-Wschodnią

In 2020, Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog published the Polish version of Chiny i Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia. Historia kontaktów literackich (China and Central and Eastern Europe. The History of Literary Contacts) by Chinese literary scholars: Ding Chao and Song Binghui. The book is part of the series Historia Kontaktów Literackich między Chinami a Zagranicą (The History of China’s Foreign Literary Contacts) which aims to become a comprehensive description of China’s cultural exchange with other countries. Volume 17 is devoted to China’s relationships with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. In this group, Poland occupies one of the central positions due to, among other, a high interest in Polish history among Chinese intellectual elite of the early twentieth century and among the reformers of Chinese literature in that period. The article discusses the sources of the popularity of Polish themes in the formative period of modern Chinese literature and the reception of Polish literature in China today. It also attempts to familiarise the readers with the themes studied by the researchers, the goals they set for themselves and the methods they used to achieve them, and presents the benefits of publishing the book in Polish.

Between Rigor and Reverence. Yu Dafu and His Views on Translation

Despite his prominence in modern Chinese literature and the significant role played by translation in his literary career, Yu Dafu’s (1896-1945) activity as a translation theorist and practitioner remains largely unexplored. Yu translated into Chinese a number of short stories, treatises, and poems by such authors as Wilde, Twain, Sinclair, Nietzsche, and Rousseau; he also devoted several essays to the issue of translation and its practice. Through an analysis of Yu’s theoretical writings, I aim to provide a brief account of his reflections on the subjectivity of the translator, the principles of a desirable translating practice, the relation between translation and original writing, and the cultural significance of translation. By doing so, I wish to highlight the seminal role played by such a reflection in Yu’s artistic career, as well as the specificity of his contribution within the intellectual debate on translation in his time.

The Introduction of Naturalism in China, the Role of Mao Dun and the Debate in the Press

This article presents the introduction of Naturalism in China and its first mentions since the end of the nineteenth century. It examines the main terms of the debate on Naturalism (1920-21), after Mao Dun proposed his translation project of Naturalist and Realist works (1920), and the reflections and notes by some writers-translators on this issue. It is argued that Mao Dun’s translation proposal constitutes the first model of planned literary translation to carry out specific political-cultural projects. It is also argued that Naturalism underwent a process of localisation in China to serve as a tool for making the transition toward a modern Chinese literature.

Literature by Other Mediums: Revisiting Lu Xun's Preface to Outcry

By recounting how Lu Xun 鲁迅 went from studying medicine in Japan to writing for the magazine Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), the preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Outcry, 1923), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, not only presents an origin story of an important author but also contains important clues for understanding modern Chinese literature. This article offers a new reading of that canonical text by focusing on the problem of medium. Synthesizing author biography, media history, and textual analysis, it examines three intermedial references in the preface—the famous lantern slide, the modern periodical, and the recurring notion of outcry. As an autobiographical account, the preface contains narrated events that call for more media-centered analysis, including the “slide incident” (renamed “screen incident”) and Lu Xun's failed experiment with the periodical medium. Reading the preface as an act of narration, this article scrutinizes textual choices such as the confusing word dianying 电影 (film) and the outcry metaphor. The emergence of both modern vernacular literature and Lu Xun as a major literary figure, it is argued, should be historicized in a broader transnational media environment, in which diverse media practices intersected.

On the Horizon of World Literature

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.