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.
[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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment