Lu Xun and Devkota: A Quest for Cultural Connectivity

Padma Devkota

           From December 6-7, 2013, Devkota-Lu Xun Academy organized a two-day exhibition on “Lu Xun: Life and Works” in Kathmandu. The purpose of the event was apparently to bring peoples of China and Nepal together by seeking political and cultural connectivity in the writings of two literary giants, each of whom was born at a time of cultural and political transition of their respective nation into modernity. However, in reality, it sought to import and to establish Lu Xun (1881-1936) as an extreme leftist icon while identifying another such icon from within the nation itself. Although from a historical perspective Lu Xun and Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959) belong to two different time periods, both lived through significant political transitions of their respective nation. Both are very powerful and innovative writers who exert a strong influence in the present day literary and cultural world of their respective nation. John Chinnery describes Lu Xun’s influence over the revolutionaries thus:

During the period of his apotheosis by the extreme Left, Lu Xun was transformed into a symbol and his true image as a writer and a human being were suppressed. He was presented as a model revolutionary as conceived by the extreme Left, whose every word was gospel truth, and woe betide anyone whom he had criticized, however slightly. Although his works were among the few dating from the twenties and the thirties which were still available on sale, a rigid interpretation of them was enforced and serious discussion on them was out of the question. (411)

Although not to the same extent, the extreme “progressive” Left in Nepal is seeking to interpret Devkota in a similarly rigid way and to turn him into another communist icon. This explains why leftist critics at home attempt to label Devkota as a progressive poet even as they attempt to show how he is similar to Lu Xun from whom they opt to read only Marxist ideology for cultural reformations at home. My intention in this paper is to conceptualize some differences and similarities between the two poets mostly based on the proceedings of the December Conference.

            The conference focused roughly on the themes of translation, enlightenment and modernism. Poets and writers themselves are often unsurpassed translators of their own work. Laxmi Prasad Devkota translated much literature from and into the Nepali language. If “Lu Xun once likened the services of the translator to Prometheus’ stealing fire on behalf of humankind” (Jon Kowallis Lyrical Lu Xun 16), Devkota has used the Promethean image in several of his works. He himself has often been compared to Prometheus because of his unswerving dedication to the national cause: its freedom, its language and its literature. He was an excellent translator not only of his own poems into English but also those of his contemporaries. He has also translated Shakespeare’s Macbeth and several essays from English into Nepali. The quality of his translations remains unsurpassed because of his poetic sensibility and his mastery over both the mediums of expression. Some of the present younger generation may complain of his language as being nineteenth century English, but they might as well complain of Milton’s or Wordsworth’s English as being outdated. The language of the heart does not expire. Devkota did great pioneering work in the area of transcending linguistic and cultural barriers. He was a polyglot with knowledge of thirteen different languages. After his visit to China in 1953, he started studying Chinese too. Devkota’s exuberant interest in foreign languages and cultures is part of the Nepalese literary modernity, which owes much to the British Romantic Movement on the one hand and a struggle for freedom and democracy on the other. If British Romantic poets are still appreciated in Nepal, it is mainly because of their influence upon Devkota who studied them well and used only what was suitable to the Nepalese soil. This selection and filtering saved the nation from idolatry as is happening at present in the case of Lu Xun. Communists in Nepal, who prefer to use the term progressive instead to describe themselves, find in Lu Xun an ideal which they are trying hard to import as an icon for the purpose of political propaganda. This can only mar the genuine literary essence of Lu Xun in the process if unaided by proper literary scholarship.

However, when people with a political agenda undermine literary giants to find a communist icon in what actually transcends communism, we remain dissatisfied because of a sense of insufficient literary justice having been done to such writers. Populist political emphasis in literary criticism is plainly discomforting because it impinges upon literary territory and attempts to remap it from within so that appreciation of good poetry is dictated by practical reformative results in the real world as if poetry did not have a spiritual dimension. Not that it is wrong to read literature from a political perspective, but one wonders which honest writer has not spoken up against injustice. Let us take an example of Devkota’s verse from The Peasant’s Daughter[i], a song-drama:

Snatch from the landlord this lordship of the earth,

Become the globe itself, farmers, to speak in a single voice.

Legions of the poor on one side, the rich on the other,

with staff in your hands, farmers, scare them only!

If you do not falter, the deceitful will cower down. (96)

There is little doubt that the poet here is rousing suppressed farmers to stand up against exploitation and to fight for their rights. However, Devkota’s injunction is not to kill but to “scare them only!” This is very similar to the initial attitude of the revolutionaries against the gentry after the 1911 Manchu Revolution: they did not want to beat dogs that had fallen into the water. This shows a certain nobility and compassion on the part of the Chinese revolutionaries of that period which, for instance, their counterparts of the French Revolution did not possess. This is also what marks the difference between a guerrilla warrior and a compassionate poet. One is moved by anger and revenge, the other by love and kindness. For Nepalese progressive critics, the poetry in the above cited lines is in the call to unite and to fight the enemy, but not in the compassion which goes unnoticed. Yet, Devkota is a poet for whom love is at the center of everything. Throughout his life, Devkota found beauty in what promoted life, security, freedom and happiness of human beings. To him, violence is ugly:

The soul of man, if violence were the law,

Would man destroy and his whole great race kill,

And the brute power, the tooth and claw,

Kill not violence, but his race blood spill.[ii]

                                                            (Bapu Sonnets xvi)

One wonders whether he would have agreed with Lu Xun that a dog that bites a human being should be beaten whether it has fallen into the water or not. However, it goes without saying that poets of this stature do not seek to kill these dogs.

Devkota has been translated into many different languages including Chinese. When Michael Hutt translated into English Devkota’s Muna-Madan, a best-seller in Nepal to this date, it was obvious that he had overlooked certain cultural connotations. Nevertheless, when Liu Xian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences undertook to render Muna-Madan into Chinese, he depended largely on Michael Hutt’s translation of the text. Often the fact that some translations are inaccurate is less significant than the fact that even such translations draw the attention of international readers to the literary work in question. Though poor translations deforest the world, writers themselves have from time to time deforested the world in even more deplorable ways than this.

In the process of translation, things can be lost or gained depending on the skill of the translator and on the uniqueness of the concerned cultures and languages; but, when people complain only about what is probably lost, unpleasant issues can arise. Jon Eugene von Kowallis finds himself in an unpleasant situation where he has to justify academic scholarship against political academics that seeks to resurrect “Nationalist China” (“Issues in Translation” 10). In his paper, he defends himself[iii] against Wu Jun’s accusation that foreigners translate literally because they do not understand Chinese culture like the Chinese nationals do. “I take exception to Wu Jun’s conclusion, says Kowallis, “when she writes: ‘In the final analysis it is much easier for us Chinese to understand and translate Lu Xun’s poetry than for foreign scholars’” (8). To understand, probably yes; to translate, probably no! Academic scholarship shuns such sweeping generalizations, which are characteristic of political academics by which I mean an academic writing with a political agenda. Feminism too has a political agenda, but it is quite different in its approach from that of vulgar Marxism where ideology often tends to override common sense and logic. In this particular case, the issue is one of identity: nationals vs. foreigners. I think this quarrel needs to center on competence. If it does so, it will be obvious that we are all incompetent translators either because we lack a proper understanding of the source language and its culture or a proper mastery of the target language and its culture. We must give Wu Jun the benefit of doubt since there have been instances of bad translations of culture by foreigners. However, many nationals are no better than foreigners when it comes to translation because of their lack of understanding of how the modern idiom of the target language plays an important role in the communication of ideas. We can generally accept that good translation conveys the original meaning as accurately as possible, expresses this meaning in a suitable language, and is readable in the receptor language.

At this point, I would like to digress a little into my own experience of trying to read The Lyrical Lu Xun, which Jon Kowallis has translated painstakingly for the native Anglophone world. At first, I tried reading the poems without the help of the general introduction, the introduction to each poem and the footnotes; but nothing seemed to make sense at all. Proper names were strange and difficult to pronounce. “A Jiangsu doll,” “The Xiang goddess,” “the Realm of Yu,” or even “Qiuanmen Station” were all unfamiliar things and places that were blank spots of the texts in which they occurred. When I came across two lines that seemed to make sense, I underlined them:

Writings worth their weight in dirt,

            wither can one go? (191)

Some poems such as the one beginning with “My soul takes wing so oft in dream” (84) were simple because they expressed general human sentiments. The internal pseudo-rime in the verse above caught my attention at once. In this poem, I even appreciated the agricultural imagery of the wick’s flame being “bean-sized” (84). One does not have to understand everything in a poem to enjoy it. I found “An Offertory for the God of Books” compatible with my temperament. However, the seventh “Untitled” poem in this volume made no sense to me at all until after I had read both the introduction and the footnotes although such footnotes are “increasingly challenged in the post-modern era by those who say they want to produce translations ‘unencumbered by footnotes’” (“Issues in Translating” 6). Postmodernism need not dictate my taste for poetry or how it is served to me. Now, whether lingtai means Spirit Tower or not is for scholars like Kowallis and Wu Jun to debate. As a reader of Lu Xun, the tenth note which reads “lingtai…is used to refer to the mind or the heart in its function as the seat of the intellect” (104) makes sense to me and opens up a vista of plausible interpretation of the poem. What I am driving at is simply that, in the absence of a monolithic truth, an interpretation of a text that is intellectually satisfying has to suffice. And translation, too, is an act of interpretation of the original text. For as long as it does not run away like a beautiful bride, it can remain wedded to scholarship. I never thought of Edward FitzGerald’s rendering of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat as bad poetry on account of its supposed inaccuracies. It has always delighted me.

Translations eventually facilitate comparative studies, which we can predict to be soon forthcoming in so far as Lu Xun and Devkota are concerned. For the present, another theme that appeared in the December Conference was one of Enlightenment. Professor Gao Yangdong’s “Cultural Features Based on the Consciousness of Confession—An Analysis of Lu Xun’s Enlightenment Discourse” deals with the cultural and literary aspects of Lu Xun. The very opening phrase—“Lu Xun’s cultural enlightenment thoughts” (1)—suggests a Chinese Enlightenment as opposed to Enlightenment in Europe of the eighteenth century. While Enlightenment in the West worshipped at the altar of Rationality, it is difficult for me to say at this point in time whether Chinese Enlightenment means anything radically different or lasting outside the life-span of its pioneers: Liang Qichao, Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren. If it does, it has to do also with the introduction of Western science and democracy (5) into a nation devastated by centuries of slavery to the “cannibalism” of a ruling class. It was against such slavish mentality inside China and against threats of Western culture from outside that Lu Xun wanted to guard his nation. If he writes the cultural history of slavery in China in “The Story of Ah Q,” Gao Yangdong claims that Lu Xun “thinks that in some sense the introduction of ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ to China from foreign cultures can be helpful for redemption and treatment for the underdeveloped China” (5). Western science had at least “served as a catalyst in the Meiji era (1867-1912) reforms in Japan” (Lyrical Lu Xun 14) and Lu Xun was hopeful it would do so in China too.

Highlighting Lu Xun’s honesty and sincerity as a writer, Professor Gao finds two voices at work in his writing: that of the narration of enlightenment and that of critical questioning of the enlightenment discourse (6). What is striking about this two-fold voice is that it speaks of Lu Xun’s quest for a strong national identity. While he wishes to welcome the “instrumental rationality” (6) of the West to cure uncritical habits at home, he remains cautious lest it overtake national interests and cultural cause. To fend off such evil, Lu Xun seems to do two things: first, as Gao Yandong says, “he looks into the whole world and human nature from the perspective of an oppressed nation and he provides the human society with introspective experiences” (7) and, second, apparently under the influence of a rich cultural tradition founded on Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, especially the last, he looks at the impermanence of everything including Enlightenment and expresses “great doubts about enlightenment discourse” (6). If the first indicates his national and human concern, the second suggests a transcendental tilt, which I regard as an essential element of great poetry. Lu Xun also transcends the uncritical masses by virtue of his critical competence. As a nationalist, his regret over a history of slavery urges him to help the Chinese emancipate themselves through rational and critical thinking. According to Sun Yi, in his essays Lu Xun “touched on the horror of being enslaved” (“The Heritage” 6). Thus, if science and democracy were instrumentally necessary for China, it had still to be wary of falling from the pan into the fire, of being subjected to slavery of Western Culture. The spirit of struggle against such forms of slavery defines Chinese modernism, says Professor Gao. However, for Lu Xun, modernization of China alone would remain insufficient: “Man cannot live by bread alone” need not be understood as a Christian dictum only. Chinese life, for Lu Xun, was absurd and he needed to struggle against despair knowing that he was just one finite mortal doing the best he could. His strength grew with continued critical questionings and he became more and more concerned with universal human beings.

What especially strikes me in Gao Yangdong’s paper is the way he explains Chinese modernism.

The process of desperate struggle and resistance is also the process of free spiritual advancement for liberation of Asian subjectivity from the slavery of western culture. The literature which started to have such spirit of desperate struggles and resistance can be regarded as the starting point of Chinese modern literature. The writer of the paper believes the motivation of such struggle and resistance originates from the dialectical enlightenment way of thinking. (4)

Thus “dialectical enlightenment” with its emphasis on synthesized knowledge defines and demarcates Chinese Enlightenment from European Enlightenment to some extent. Of course, one can always ask how a claim to being scientific might differ from the practice of science. I for one have refused to discard intuition as a source of knowledge and see such intuitive magic-moments behind not only Confucianism and Buddhism but also many scientific inventions and discoveries. But that is beside the point. Chinese literary modernity has the added element of resistance against slavish submission to western culture, that is, uncritical acceptance of foreign influences. This, I believe, is what goes to form and define a modern Chinese experience because no state building is possible without a solid foundation of a strong cultural past.

            From a comparative perspective, what strikes me as being significantly decisive in both Chinese and Nepalese modernity is the entrance of the trickster in the works of Lu Xun and Devkota, a point worth noting. Lu Xun wrote “Diary of a Madman,” which, as Kowallis puts it, is a “denunciation of traditional ethical codes as hypocritical cant formulated by the oppressors to justify a homo homini lupus order that grants the strong license to prey upon the weak” (Lyrical Lu Xun 29). In Devkota’s “The Lunatic,” the first truly confessional poem written in Nepali, the trickster persona accepts accusations of madness labeled against him by the wisecracks of the society while questioning their fundamental values at the same time. In China, it was not Lu Xun but Zhang Taiyan who was “viewed as a madman for his rabidly anti-Manchu stance in his youth, and disparagingly referred to as ‘Zhang the Lunatic’” (Eileen J. Cheng 374). In Nepal, Devkota, an extremely sensitive poet, was regarded as a madman for his eccentricities. These are issues worth detailed examination.

            Modernism in Nepali literature evolves with the poetic growth of Devkota. If the poet helped the national fight for freedom by personally participating in it, political activities within the nation helped him grow as a poet. Hurt by the Rana Government that punished him and his colleagues for trying to open a public library in Kathmandu, he wrote against injustice and harshly criticized all forms of suppression at home, in the society, in the nation and abroad. He exiled himself to Benares, India, to raise his voice against the atrocities of the Rana Regime at home. After the dawn of democracy in 1951, he became a Minister of Education for 118 days. During this period, he helped establish Tribhuvan University, opened schools all over the country and formally established Nepali as the national medium of instruction in Nepal. A great nationalist, his sympathies lay on humanity in general. He rejoiced with the Chinese on their success at freeing themselves from a history of slavery in poems such as “October 1 Celebrations in Peking” and “Sons of China.” He encouraged Algeria to fight against foreign intervention and wrote a sonnet titled “To Algeria” (Bapu 28) in which he says,

Blow all your bugles. Work the oppressor’s doom.

Justice must rule the world. Though now ‘tis gloom

The spring must come, the Country then must bloom.

He was against feudalism, imperialism, suppression of human rights and injustice not just at home but everywhere. The ailments of humanity became his concern. And Nepali language cascaded at his touch, flowed and became the living ocean. People listened when he spoke and they awoke.

            It is not possible to introduce Devkota sufficiently within the scope of this paper. So, let us now return once more to the December Conference and very briefly touch upon the theme of aesthetic connections between Lu Xun and Devkota, which I will examine on the basis of Sun Yi’s paper, “The Heritage of Lu Xun and Dostoyevsky,” even though it was only meant to be presented at the conference. Discussing the balance between Lu Xun’s “reverence for scientific rationality” (3) and his “aesthetic judgment” (3), Sun Yi makes a very astute observation: “Even at those moments of turning leftist, Lu Xun managed to maintain his vigilance against rigid dogmas” (3). Fanaticism and dogmatism are two of the greatest sins of mankind whether they appear in religion, politics or culture. Like Devkota, Lu Xun also seems to have lived more in his heart than in his head for sensory experience meant a great deal to him, although this did not mean allowing the brain to rust. All sense perception was filtered through the heart before it reached the brain in the case of Devkota whose moral conscience never wilted throughout his life. Talking of Lu Xun, Sun Yi observes:

The indifference and barriers characterize human communication and people take for granted hurting one another. Very painfully, Lu Xun pointed out that those cases represent the very irrationality of human existence and it is truly a great difficulty for human beings to be freed from such miserable conditions. (5)

Today we not only relish news of rape, abuse, torture, murders and even accidents, we also take all these for granted, thanks to the daily newspapers which would not sell without such news. Yet, far beyond our modern attraction to evil, there is deep within each human heart a sense of the sublime—either the absence of cruelty and benevolence in the innermost recesses of our soul as Sun Yi says (2) or a sort of a fusion of the Good and the diabolically Evil in a Zizekian sense—which Lu Xun discovered in Dostoevsky’s writing and found out that “the author was a spiritual traitor” (Sun Yi 2). “All the confines imposed by the traditions were disrupted, revealing a new figure dancing on the highlands of spirituality” (2). In his own case, perhaps Lu Xun experienced the abject in the context of the “emptiness of enlightenment” (8) as Gao Yandong puts it. Struggling against hope, he was a brave man. For Devkota, there was something even more than a Zizekian sublime to fall back upon: human will had at least a choice between the Good and the “diabolical” Evil. It chose the True, the Beautiful and the ever Delightful and called it “the Good.” I understand that Lu Xun did not share Devkota’s faith “in the existence of a human spirit, a non-material inner personality embodied in the physical frame” (“The Philosophy”). Yet, this is exactly the difference that draws us closer to one another even if it is out of mere curiosity. We would like to see more of such aesthetic connectivity between writers of China and Nepal.

Works Cited

Cheng, Eileen J. “Records of a Minor Historian: Lu Xun on Zhang Taiyan.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7.3 (September 2013): 367-395.

Chinnery, John. “Lu Xun and Contemporary Chinese Literature.” The China Quarterly 91 (September 1982): 411-423.

Devkota, Laxmi Prasad. Bapu and Other Sonnets. Kathmandu: Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota Study and Research Centre, 2006.

---. Krishi-Vala. Kathmandu: Mahakavi Devkota Smarak Samiti, 2021 B.S. [1964 A.D.]

---. “The Philosophy of Silence and Inaction.” mss. Personal collection.

Kowallis, Jon Eugene von. “Issues in Translating and Interpreting Lu Xun’s Classical-style Poetry.” Paper presented at the Devkota-Lu Xun Conference in Kathmandu, December 2013.

---. The Lyrical Lu Xun: A Study of His Classical-Style Verse. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996.

---. “Translating Lu Xun’s Māra: Determining the ‘Source’ Text, the ‘Spirit’ versus ‘Letter’ Dilemma and Other Philosophical Conundrums.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7.3 (September 2013): 422-440.

Yangdong, Gao. “Cultural Features Based on the Consciousness of Confession—An Analysis of Lu Xun’s Enlightenment Discourse.” Paper presented at the Devkota-Lu Xun Conference in Kathmandu, December 2013.

Yi, Sun. “The Heritage of Lu Xun and Dostoyevsky.” Paper written for the Devkota-Lu Xun Conference in Kathmandu, December 2013. 

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[i] The Nepali title is Krishi-Bala. Krishi means related to farming or agriculture. Bala means a young, adolescent girl or daughter. It also means an ear of corn or a seed-pod. This pun is difficult to translate in the title of this work. The cited verse is my translation with emphasis added.

[ii] Poet Devkota wrote these sonnets originally in English.

[iii] Kowallis has given translation much serious thought and clearly outlines his translation concepts in this paper. Many of his thoughtful considerations regarding the difficulties of translating Lu Xun are also discussed and exemplified in “Translating Lu Xun’s Māra.”