Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin: The Confluence of Their Poetic Worlds via Translation

This article deals with the poetry of two prominent writers: Ukrainian poetess Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913) and Chinese poetess Qiu Jin (1875–1907). The diversity of wide fields of self-expression of both poetesses created the grounds for a broad and comprehensive comparison in terms of poetic, thematic, and literary similarities. The article provides a background to the translations of Lesia Ukrainka in China and accounts for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry in China in the light of the poetic world of Qiu Jin. The main aspects of the poetic discourses of Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin are outlined and studied within the core concept of the national heroine in China, formed by Qiu Jin, consisting of key elements important for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s works – revolution, nationalism, and feminism.

Haunting, (In)Visibility, Filiality: Qiu Canzhi (1901–67) and Her Works of Mourning

This article examines the connection between grief and issues of visibility. It focuses on the case of Qiu Jin's daughter Canzhi, who lost her mother to political execution in 1907. Her lifelong efforts at mourning and commemorating her mother illustrate how history was experienced affectively and individually. Negotiating between a traumatic past and a living present, Canzhi created a unique and readily recognizable icon of Qiu Jin. She mobilized the rich discourse of filiality and proved time and again that she was the one most closely resembling her mother, a filial daughter following in her mother's footsteps in forging a new path to modern womanhood.

THE SILENT HALF SPEAKS

It wasn't so long ago that histories of China's rocky transition to modernity featured a small and entirely male cast of characters. In the works of the first generation of American Sinologists, from John King Fairbank to his most famous students such as Joseph Levenson, a few men, from late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to reformers and revolutionaries like Kang Youwei 康有為, Sun Yatsen 孫中山, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, loomed large over the narrative of the Chinese revolution. Into this lacuna Mary Rankin's rediscovery of the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 came as a thunderbolt. Her work opened up the possibility that perhaps the problem wasn't the absence of women in China's revolution but the failure of scholars to look for their contribution. Rankin's 1968 article on “The Tenacity of Tradition,” and her subsequent bookEarly Chinese Revolutionariespaved the way for a far more nuanced and complicated new social history of modern China.