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The Promethean translator and

cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun's “hard
translation” as a political allegory
a
Pu Wang
a
Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and
Literature , Brandeis University , Waltham , MA , USA
Published online: 11 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: Pu Wang (2013) The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains:
Lu Xun's “hard translation” as a political allegory, Translation Studies, 6:3, 324-338, DOI:
10.1080/14781700.2013.811836

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.811836

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 Translation Studies, 2013
Vol. 6, No. 3, 324–338, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2013.811836

The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun’s

“hard translation” as a political allegory
Pu Wang*

Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature, Brandeis University,
Waltham, MA, USA
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This essay revisits a crucial moment in the modern Chinese history of translation:
Lu Xun’s “hard translation” of Marxist theories in the late 1920s and the ensuing
debate on translation in the early 1930s. It questions the simplistic application
of the paradigm of literalism to the case of “hard translation”, and focuses
instead on the translator’s self-allegorization as a vital rhetorical surplus of Lu
Xun’s translation practice. In particular, this essay scrutinizes Lu Xun’s rewriting
of the Prometheus myth in his response to his critic, Liang Shiqiu. Lu Xun’s
Prometheus is a translator embodying cannibalistic self-torment. I trace the theme
of cannibalism in his other works, and compare the allegory of the cannibalistic
translator to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalism. I argue that it is
within this self-referential rhetoric that “hard translation” becomes a figure of the
translator’s subjectivity and “labor of the negative”.
Keywords: “hard translation”; Lu Xun; Promethean allegory; cannibalism;
political subjectivity; relay translation

A national icon embodying revolutionary enlightenment, spiritual militancy and

literary modernity, Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) is not only “by common consent the
greatest of twentieth-century Chinese writers” (Anderson 1990, 1), but also one of
modern China’s most important translators. A crucial moment in his career was his
practice of “hard translation” and the ensuing debate in the late 1920s and early 1930s
(see, e.g., Lee 1987, 133–150). At the time, the Chinese literary community was
dominated by a series of heated debates on “revolutionary literature” (see Lee 2002;
see also below). A pro-revolution writer, Lu Xun found himself being characterized
as an outdated bourgeois writer by some radical leftist writers (e.g. Li Chuli [1928]
1996, 485–486; Guo Moruo [1928] 1996, 521). As Leo O. Lee summarizes, these
criticisms “compelled [Lu Xun] to undertake a new intellectual task in reading and
translating works of Marxist literary theory […]. Most of his translations of
Lunacharsky and Plekhanov were done in late 1928 and throughout 1929” (1987,
141). In March 1930, Lu Xun published “ ‘Yingyi’ yu ‘wenxue de jiejixing’ ”
“硬译”与“文学的阶级性” (“Hard Translation” and the “Class Nature of Literature”;1
hereafter referred to as the “hard translation” essay). Concluding two years of work
on translation and marking the beginning of his leftist engagement, this long essay
functioned as a counter-attack to the liberal-conservative critic Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋
(1903–87)2, who, in the name of readability, had condemned the “dead” literalness

*Email: pwang@brandeis.edu
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 Translation Studies 325

(Liang 1929a, 1) in Lu Xun’s renderings of writings by Soviet critic Anatoly V.

Lunacharsky (1897–1933).
Although some scholars (e.g. Chan 2004) view this Lu Xun-Liang Shiqiu debate
as an illustrious example of literal vs fluent approaches to translation, my re-
examination aims to show that the significance of Lu Xun’s “hard translation” lies
somewhere else. Rejecting a simplistic application of the theory of literalism, I want
to draw attention to the political allegorization of the revolutionary translator in Lu
Xun’s dense, self-referential rhetoric. By focusing on how he inventively combines the
figure of the Promethean translator with the cannibalistic digestive metaphor,
I contend that it is the translator’s self-negation and self-referential rhetoricity that
creates the revolutionary subjectivity in Lu Xun’s “hard translation”.
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In what follows, I shall first provide an overview of Lu Xun’s career and

historicize his “hard translation”. Engaging the extant scholarship, I shall emphasize
that the works were all relay translations of Marxist-Soviet literary criticism from
Japanese, thereby forming a mode of “fidelity” different from what is usually
assumed in literal translation. Subsequently, this essay will focus on the allegorical
rhetoric in Lu Xun’s politicization of translation, and scrutinize his rewriting of the
Promethean myth in the “hard translation” essay. In this rewriting, the translator’s
own role is embodied in a Prometheus cooked by the foreign fire of Marxism before
being chewed by the Chinese readers. I shall situate this allegory in a longer
genealogy of modern Prometheanism and then trace the cannibalistic and digestive
metaphors in Lu Xun’s own modernist literary trajectory. Furthermore, the rhetoric
will be compared to the Brazilian theory of translation as cannibalization (see Vieira
1998), in an attempt to draw out the similarities and differences between a leftist
revolutionary discourse of translation and a postcolonial one.
In “The Politics of Translation”, Gayatri Spivak calls for the translator’s
sensitivity to “the rhetoricity of the original” ([1993] 2004, 370). Only by engaging
with such rhetoricity can a translation “hold the agency of the translator and the
demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay” (ibid., 370). According to
Spivak, “rhetoric may be disrupting logic in the matter of the production of an
agent”. In other words, the subjectivity of the translator is not created in the
transference of the meaning, but rather in the “jagged relationship between rhetoric
and logic” (371). Although Spivak deals in particular with the translation of non-
European women’s writing, her characterization of “rhetoricity” as the productive
domain of the potentially political agency has broader relevance to translation
studies. A question then follows: at which site of the rhetoric are traces of the
translator’s political subjectivity to be found? Questioning the translator’s invisibility,
translation theorists today tend to see this labor as creative rather than passive,
and find the translator’s subjectivity inscribed in the very textuality of translations. This
essay, however, will focus on the disruptive rhetoric of the translator’s self-referential
discourse (e.g. translator’s prefaces, postscripts, translator’s notes, responses to critical
comments, or debates about translation). I see the translator’s own “rhetoricity”,
beyond the textuality of translation itself, as a vital surplus of translation practice – vital
in the sense that it disrupts the logic of the invisible translator and thereby makes
possible the figuration of the translator’s subjectivity. In particular, I argue that the
combination of translation, cannibalism and revolution in Lu Xun’s rewriting of the
Prometheus myth offers an allegorical figuring of the political translator. It is in this
disruptive rhetoric, rather than merely in the logic of faithful translation, that “hard
 326 Pu Wang

translation” figures as the necessary torment or “labor of the negative”3 in the remaking
of subjectivity.

The context of “hard translation” and the issue of indirect literalism

Lu Xun played a leading role in the May Fourth New Culture Movement (which
lasted from 1917 to the early 1920s) and became a spiritual leader of the leftist cultural
movement during the 1930s (for details, see Lee 1987). His fame as a creative writer
and cultural critic has unfortunately overshadowed his role as one of the most
important translators in modern China, who left a rich corpus of translations that
actually outnumber his creative writing pieces. Lu Xun’s initial entry into literature
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can in fact be traced to a project of translation that was undertaken as early as 1909, in
which he co-translated with his younger brother Zhou Zuoren4 a series of European
and Russian short stories and novellas. Even on his deathbed, Lu Xun was engaged in
translating Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls into Chinese, leaving it unfinished. Transla-
tion should thus be recognized as a major mode of Lu Xun’s cultural production (see
also Wang 2005). What then was “hard translation”? A crucial moment in this author-
translator’s literary, intellectual and political development, his practice of “hard
translation” of Marxist aesthetic criticism and the ensuing debate took place during
what literary historians call the “Revolutionary Literature Debates” (geming wenxue
lunzheng 革命文学论争; for details, see Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 1981 and
Lee 2002). Between the failure of the Revolution of 1925–27 and the founding of the
Left-Wing Writers’ League in 1930, China’s literary community suffered tremendous
chaos and underwent substantial transformations. The united front of the Nationalist
Party – known in Chinese as the Kuomintang (KMT) or Guomindang (GMD) – and
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) collapsed in 1927. The GMD eventually severed
the coalition and started a nationwide campaign against the communists. In the wake
of the ensuing political crisis, a number of young writers turned further left and
clamored for “revolutionary literature”. In opposition to this leftist fever, conservative-
liberal writers from the Crescent Moon Society5 started to bear the new banner of
“sanity, decency, and freedom of thought” (Crescent Moon Society 1928, 10) while
flirting with the dominant Nationalist Party. These literary debates shortly turned
heated and bitter, with Lu Xun dragged into the vortex. He was ruthlessly criticized by
the young leftist radicals as an obsolete leftover – or a “Don Quixote” – of the
“bourgeois” establishment (see Li Chuli [1928] 1996, 459; Guo Moruo [1928] 1996,
521), and his decision to submerge himself in the work of translation can be seen as a
response to this overwhelming crisis in both revolution and literature. Disillusioned by
“the emptiness in our lofty discussions” (Lu Xun [1930] 1960, 85), Lu Xun turned to
translating Lunacharsky and Plekhanov in 1928 and 1929, explaining: “I translate for
those proletarian critics who pass unduly hasty judgments, because they should not be
afraid of trouble but should be willing to study these theories seriously” (ibid., 83).
Meanwhile, a neologism, yingyi (硬译 “hard translation”), came to the fore,
helping to trigger the Lu Xun-Liang Shiqiu debate and becoming an important
concept-figure in the history of modern Chinese translation. Ying, usually translated
as “hard” in English, signifies an impenetrable or strong quality, and connotes
toughness of an action, or “something achieved with difficulty” (Xinhua zidian 2007,
577). The term “hard translation” was originally coined in early 1929 by Lu Xun
 Translation Studies 327

himself in his “Translator’s Note on Lunacharsky’s ‘The Death of Tolstoy and the
Young Europe’ ”:

Seen from the Japanese version, Lunacharsky’s argument is clear and penetrating
enough. Due to my inadequacy as a translator and the limitations inherent in the
Chinese language, I found my translation obscure and uneven, and in many places
very hard to understand. Yet if I were to tear apart those subordinate clauses, the
essential linguistic vigor of the original will be lost. As far as I am concerned, I must
either go on with my hard translation, or produce none at all. My only hope is that
readers will be willing to toughen up and make hard efforts to read through it. (Lu Xun
[1929] 2005b, 338)6

Months later, in his “Translator’s Postscript” to another collection of

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Lunacharsky’s essays, Wenyi yu piping 文艺与批评 (Arts and Criticism), Lu Xun

repeated the above quoted passage. This newly coined phrase came to the attention of
Liang Shiqiu, a Harvard-trained critic and leading member of the Crescent Moon
Society, who transformed it into a stigma of bad or “literal translation” (zhiyi) in his
essay “Lun Lu Xun Xiansheng de ‘Yingyi’ ” 论鲁迅先生的“硬译” (On Mr Lu Xun’s
“Hard Translation”), published in September 1929. Liang linked “hard translation”
with what he believed to be the worst form of literalism, namely “dead translation”
[siyi 死译]. He quotes a definition by Chen Xiying (1896–1970), a long-time critic of
Lu Xun:

[Some translators] not only closely follow the order of words and sentences [in the
originals], but also insist on not adding a single word, or moving a single one forward or
backward. Such a translation is only translation in name, because the work in fact
remains untranslated. Even Zhou Zuoren, a supporter of literal translation, condemns it
as dead translation. (Liang 1929a, 1)

According to Liang, the products of Lu Xun’s “hard translation” are “unintelligible

and obscure” [jianshen 艰深]: “who can understand such bizarre syntax?” (ibid., 3).
Commenting on Philip Lewis’s idea of “abusive fidelity”, Lawrence Venuti points
out that it “clearly entails a rejection of the fluency that dominates contemporary
translation in favor of an opposing strategy that can aptly be called resistancy” (1992,
12). Lu Xun’s own practice, to be sure, belongs to the category of “rejection” and
“resistancy”. Given the importance of the paradigm of literalism in modern
translation theories (see Benjamin [1923] 2004; Berman 1982; Spivak [1993] 2004),
it is tempting to characterize this translation strategy as a “theory of foreignized/
faithful/Europeanized/literalist translation” (Chan 2004, 27). In an overview of
translation theory in modern China, Leo Chan characterizes Lu Xun’s “stiff
translation” (Chan’s translation of yingyi) as an example of “extreme literalism”
(ibid., 18). Reading Lu Xun’s counter-attack on Liang as a defense of literalism,
Chan thus generalizes the Lu Xun-Liang Shiqiu disagreement in terms of the
following dichotomies: literalism vs liberalism, Europeanization vs Sinicization, and
fidelity vs fluency (ibid., 20). Wang Yougui’s book-length study of Lu Xun as a
translator examines the issue of “hard translation” in a larger context of the ideology
of what he calls “Lu Xun Approach” (2005, 139) in translation, and emphasizes Lu
Xun’s effort of “foreignization” for the sake of national liberation (see 169–175).
While seeing the term “hard translation” as “misleading” or even untenable for a
 328 Pu Wang

general “approach” to translation (166), Wang does not show how this term came
into being, and, unfortunately, discusses it separately from Lu Xun’s actual “hard”
renderings of Marxist literary criticism (see 234–242). Similarly, Mark Gamsa
provides an analysis of “hard translation” and “foreignization” in his study of Lu
Xun’s translation of Russian literature. Echoing Wang’s observation, Gamsa argues:
“by the effect of alienation that [Lu Xun] produced, he signaled that acquaintance
with other cultures and with new modes of thought required an effort” (2008, 154).
Because Gamsa’s focus is on literary translation, however, he relates the strategy of
“hard translation” to Lu Xun’s renderings of Mikhail Artsybashev and Nikolai
Gogol, and yet hardly offers adequate discussion of Lu Xun’s renderings of Marxist
theoretical works and the rhetoric in Lu Xun’s defense of “hard translation”. Shuang
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Shen’s (2009) own brilliant reading focuses on the issues of the cultural establishment
and publics in this debate, rather than the textual products of “hard translation”.
So in the extant scholarship, whereas “hard translation” is often generalized as an
overall ideology of translation favoring literalness or foreignness, its specific
historicity of textuality is not fully scrutinized. I would contend that it is necessary
to come back to the original context of “hard translation” and its specific practice in
1928 and 1929, and caution against the use of such concepts as “literalism” or
“Europeanization”. As a matter of fact, all the works of Lu Xun’s “hard translation”
are relay translations from the Japanese translations of Lunacharsky and Plekhanov,
rather than direct translations from Russian. Lu Xun’s practice here should be
recognized as a “strong, forceful translation that values experimentation” (Lewis
2004, 262), but also as offering a different kind of “abusive fidelity”, something one
may call “indirect fidelity”.
Let us turn to the textuality of “hard translation”. In 1929, Lu Xun published his
translation of Lunacharsky’s On Art, based on the Japanese translation done by
Nobori Shomu (1878–1958). In order to show the “dead literalness” in “hard
translation”, Liang picked a passage from Lu Xun’s rendering of this book, which
will suffice to show how the “hard translator” works with the modern Chinese
language:

这意义, 不仅在说, 凡观念形态, 是从现实社会受了那唯一可能的材料, 而这现实社会的

实际形态,则支配着即被组织在里面的思想, 或观念者的直观而已, 在这观念者不能离
去一定的社会底兴味这一层意义上, 观念形态也便是现实社会的所产。 (Lunacharsky
[1929] 2008, 198–199; Liang 1929a, 2–3)

[The meaning is not only that all ideology receives its only possible materials from the
real society, and that the actual forms of the real society governs the thought or the
ideologue’s intuition that is organized within [the real society], but also that in the sense
that the ideologue cannot distance him/herself from certain social interests, ideology is
then the product of the actual society.]

In Nobori’s Japanese version – Lu Xun’s “original” that Liang did not mention – we
read:

それも單にイヂオロギイが現實社會からその唯一可能なる材料を受けて、そしてこ
の現實社會の實際形態がその中に組織されてゐる思想若くはイヂオロギストの直觀
を支配してゐるといふ意味に於てばかクでなく、更にこのイヂオロギストが一定の
社會的興味から離れ去ることが出來ないといふ意味に於いても、イヂオロギイは現
實社會の所產である。 (Lunacharsky [1928] 1947, 15)
 Translation Studies 329

[Moreover, it is not simply in the sense that it receives its only possible materials from the
real society, and that the actual forms of the real society govern the ideologues’ thought
or intuitions organized within [those forms of contemporary society]; but further, in the
sense that these ideologues cannot distance themselves from fixed social interests that
ideology is a product of the actual society.]7

Lu Xun’s translation here is faithful to the vocabulary and sentence structure in

Nobori’s rendering, and awkwardly combines social-scientific neologism with an
overstretched syntax. In the late 1920s, the Marxist vocabulary of guannianxingtai 观
念形态 [ideology] was still something new and shocking for the Chinese reading
public; the complicated syntax with such logical or argumentative markers as “zai …
yiyi shang 在……意义上” [in the sense that …] could be frustrating, too. It is tempting
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to recognize such linguistic tendencies as “Europeanization” (see Chan 2004), but

since Lu Xun was producing a relay translation from Japanese, this is problematic.
Rather, the obscurity comes more from a new way of signification or
argumentation, and a new mode of theoretical thinking that was still foreign to the
Chinese mind, and such long, dense and clumsy sentences, present everywhere in Lu
Xun’s texts of “hard translation”, also make visible the translator’s own experience of
defamiliarization. In his foreword to On Art, Lu Xun noted that Lunacharsky’s work
“involves biology, physiology, psychology, physics, chemistry, philosophy, etc., not
to mention aesthetics and scientific socialism” (Lu Xun [1929] 2005a, 325). Lu Xun
confessed to being “poorly prepared in these fields” and noted that, when translating,
he encountered numerous zhizhi 窒滞 [impasses] (ibid.) for which he had to turn to
three other Japanese sources. However, “some difficulties exist in all these
translations, so it has been my suffering that I cannot penetrate them, and it took
a great deal of painstaking labor only to produce a book that is dense and
convoluted” (325). Evidently, what constitutes fidelity in Lu Xun is something similar
to Walter Benjamin’s Brechtian maxim about translation, namely: “to combine
extreme conscientiousness with utmost brutality” (2002, 251). The translator’s
subjectivity is on the one hand reduced to a zero degree, but on the other becomes
most visible in “hard translation” qua estrangement. The conscientious or even rigid
working on the Soviet-Marxist texts – through Japanese translations rather than
directly from the originals – entails a self-abandonment, but the brutal penetration
into the unfamiliar discursive domains leaves traces of subjectivity on the
denaturalized textuality.
“Hard translation” is therefore a peculiar case of fidelity and linguistic
defamiliarization in relay translation. Lu Xun’s coinage was not to name a new
method of literalism, but rather to signify the painful labor involved in his close
engagement with Marxist theory. Something even more important – that is, how Lu
Xun reworked this disputed concept-figure into a political allegory – remains to be
seen.

The translator’s self-allegorization: Rewriting the Promethean myth

The essay “ ‘Hard Translation’ and the ‘Class Nature of Literature’ ” has long been
considered “a most significant text” (Lee 1987, 141) – in terms of both modern
Chinese translation theory and Lu Xun’s decisive turn to leftist politics. For those
commentators concerned with the section dealing with the “class nature of literature”,
 330 Pu Wang

this essay “was the first declaration of principles Lu Xun made after his two-year
immersion in translating Soviet Marxist works” (ibid.). For those who are
preoccupied with the issue of “hard translation”, it is a forceful defense of literalism;
as Chan comments, “The fact that [in this essay] Lu Xun resorts to a variety of
arguments (political, aesthetic, linguistic) to justify his method only shows an
irrational obsession with literalism on his part” (Chan 2004, 19). By the same token,
Gamsa’s reading of Lu Xun’s essay reaches a characterization of Lu Xun’s “harsh”
persona and psyche – a “mixture of public defiance and inner vulnerability” (Gamsa
2008, 154). Soon after Lu Xun published his vehement response to Liang’s criticism,
Liang retorted furiously that his opponent had lumped together the translation issue
and the political issue, which, Liang believed, were “totally unrelated” (Liang 1929c,
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1). But in what sense did Lu Xun bring these two issues together? This juxtaposition
of translation and revolutionary politics should be the point of departure for our
further inquiry. Whereas some critics may still find Lu Xun’s political justification of
translation “irrational”, my argument is that the true intersection of translation and
politics lies precisely at the level of rhetoric rather than logic.
The translator’s self-dramatization reflects Lu Xun’s unique understanding of his
own conversion to Marxism. Notably, it was in this “hard translation” debate that Lu
Xun, for the first time, identified himself with the proletarian revolutionary cause:

It seems that another question should be asked here: if […] propaganda must be
intelligible to the masses, then, why do you make these “hard” and obscure translations
of theoretical “occult books” [tian shu 天书]? So your labor is wasted?

My answer: I translate for myself, for a few who consider themselves proletarian
critics, and for some readers who want to understand these theories and are not out for
“pleasure” or afraid of difficulties. (Lu Xun [1930] 1960, 81–82, English translation
modified by me; for the Chinese original, see Lu Xun [1930] 2005, 213)

This is not a simple political identification, but rather amounts to a nuanced or

even poignant gesture of self-positioning. The mention of “proletarian critics” still
contains his double discontent. On the one hand, charged with hostility, the
word “proletarian” reminds Lu Xun’s readers of Liang’s earlier definition of
“proletariat” as “the lowest class who served the state […] only by having children”
(Liang 1929b, 3). On the other, the phrase “proletarian critics” refers also to the self-
proclaimed “proletarian critics” who did little in translation and went astray in
creating only “lofty discussions”. The importance of “hard translation” to a new
political subjectivity is therefore based on the exclusion of both left and right
“laziness”. Politicized in this way, the term then stands for the exclusive labor of self-
transformation (“for myself”), and yet, paradoxically, class solidarity can be fulfilled
through this labor.
Lu Xun thus takes a decisive step of self-allegorization and offers his rewriting of
the Prometheus myth:

Then I feel that such theory [of the proletarian revolution that has been translated into
Chinese] is too little to provide a frame of reference, and as a result everyone’s mind is
more or less confused. To chew and anatomize the enemy now seems inevitable, but
if we have a book of anatomy and a book of cuisine to guide our practice, then
the structure [for anatomy] and the taste [for chewing] can be clearer and better.
People like to compare Prometheus, the legendary figure in the Greek mythology, to
 Translation Studies 331

revolutionaries, believing that the magnanimity and forbearance, which Prometheus

showed when he was punished by Zeus but remained unrepentant for stealing fire for
man, are the same [as that of a revolutionary]. But I stole fire from foreign countries only
with the intention of cooking my own flesh, in the hope that if I find the taste agreeable,
it would benefit more to those who chew [my flesh], and the consumption of my body
would not prove in vain. (Lu Xun [1930] 1960, 82, translation modified; for the Chinese
original, see Lu Xun [1930] 2005, 213–214)

This sudden and powerful figuration of Prometheus reveals a crucial intersection

of translation and revolution. Leo Lee sees Lu Xun’s “Promethean metaphor” as “a
summation of his revolutionary endeavor”; “the image – in fact, self-image – of a
revolutionary is profoundly tragic because it embodies the ultimate meaning of
sacrifice not only as public martyrdom but also as an act of self-torment” (1987,
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189). While stressing sacrifice as a major theme of Lu Xun’s whole career, Lee leaves
aside the issue of translation. Interpreting the same passage, Shen underscores that
“[t]he analogy of the self-sacrificial translator with the figure of the martyr links
translation with revolution on the one hand and expresses a wish to destabilize the
translator on the other” (2009, 104). However, Shen’s reading does not have space to
deal with the long genealogy of the Promethean allegory, and pays no attention to
the theme of cannibalism that Lu Xun adds to the Promethean archetype. In my
view, Lu Xun’s combination of translation, revolution and cannibalism demands
closer examination.
It is necessary, first of all, to situate Lu Xun’s allegory as a unique moment in a
long tradition of the archetype. Broadly speaking, the myth of Prometheus, as rooted
in Greek mythology and dramatized by Aeschylus, can be read as a symbolic
narrative about the transformation of Nature into Culture through the theft of fire
and a rebellion against the gods; thematically, it pertains to ideas of cultivation,
sacrifice and striving. More importantly, Prometheus has been transformed into a
modern archetype of human enlightenment or revolt in modern European culture;
Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound are two prime
examples. This archetype also proves crucial to Marxism: Lesyek Kolakowski (1981,
412) argues that Marx’s thought is dominated by “Prometheanism”; Leonard Wessell
(1984) traces the mythopoetic origins of Marxism and finds that Prometheus is the
“root metaphor” of Marxism; and Wessell also reminds us that the young Marx once
wrote that “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical
calendar” (see Wessell 1984, 65).
One thing that has escaped the attention of the commentators of “hard
translation” is that Lu Xun’s Promethean myth actually refers to Lunacharsky’s
work. It is worth mentioning that according to Lunacharsky’s theory, a tragedy
transforms “horror” and “suffering” into an aesthetic experience (see Lunacharsky
[1929] 2008, 231). In fact, in “Art and Life,” an essay included in On Art, he quotes at
length from Goethe’s “Prometheus”, including the following lines:

Who helped me
Against the Titans’ arrogance?
Who rescued me from death,
From slavery?
Did not my holy and glowing heart,
Unaided, accomplish all? And did it not, young and good,
 332 Pu Wang

Cheated, glow thankfulness

For its safety to him, to the sleeper above? […]

Here I sit, forming men

In my image,
A race to resemble me: To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad –
And never to heed you,
Like me! (Goethe 1983, 29, 31)8

In line with the modern revival of the Prometheus myth, Lunacharsky cites this poem
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to repudiate the religious transcendental world and reinforce an aspiration for

human dignity. Recycling similar themes and figures, Lu Xun’s later rewriting of
Prometheus then also forms a dialogue with his own translation of Lunacharsky, and
locates himself within a long genealogy of modern Prometheanism. As a new figure in
this tradition, the corporeality of the Promethean translator marks the ultimate
allegorization of “hard translation”.

The cannibalistic torment in translation: Subjectivity and negativity

Lu Xun transforms the Promethean archetype into a “grotesque sublime” that
combines translation with cannibalism, and accordingly his Prometheus is a
translator bound by self-imposed cannibalistic torment. What is dominant is the
cannibalistic preparing and digestion of translation: cooking, tasting and chewing.
Cannibalism is in fact a recurrent theme in Lu Xun’s writings: its haunting existence
can be traced back to Diary of a Madman (狂人日記, 1918), coincidentally the first
Chinese short story written in the modern vernacular. In this story, the delusional
protagonist comes to realize that the traditional Chinese value system forms a
seamless network of “people eating people”:

I read that history very carefully for the most of the night, and finally I began to make
out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase:
EAT PEOPLE! (Lu Xun 1990, 32)

The narrator is also tormented by his own paranoid thought that he has
unintentionally participated in the eating of others, including his own sister. In a
famous reading of this work, Fredric Jameson treats the plot of cannibalism as a
“national allegory”:

Lu Xun’s proposition is that the people of this great maimed and retarded, disintegrating
China of the late and post-imperial period, his fellow citizens, are “literally” cannibals
[…]. It is […] a social and historical nightmare, a vision of the horror of life specifically
grasped through History itself. (1986, 71)

Therefore, Lu Xun’s mobilization of the “oral stage” as the “whole bodily question of
eating, of ingestion, devoration, incorporation” (ibid., 72) is always already a
dramatization of sociopolitical suffering of one kind or another.
 Translation Studies 333

This “unspeakable, unnameable inner feeling” (ibid., 71) is given a nightmarish

poetic twist in Lu Xun’s prose poem, “The Epitaph” (墓碣文). The poetic “I” in this
modernist text encounters his own grave and reads out his own epitaph:

I tore out my heart to eat it, wanting to know its true taste. But the pain was so
agonizing, how could I tell its taste?

When the pain subsided I savoured the heart slowly. But since by then it was stale,
how could I know its true taste? (Lu Xun [1927] 2003, 80, 82)

Rooted in this literary trajectory, Lu Xun’s cannibalization of translation further

complicates this crisis of subjectivity. Yet what is the allegorical linkage between
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cannibalism and translation? He adds the motif of cannibalism to his allegorization of

“hard translation” in such a decisive way that the plot of self-torment is linked to the
attainment of truly revolutionary consciousness. In Lu Xun, the metaphor of the
digestions of Marxism overshadows the original spatial metaphor of the relocation of
fire-knowledge in the Prometheus myth. Not only is the “foreignness” of the fire
emphasized, but fire is also reworked, through Lu Xun’s association, into a metaphor
of cooking. Cooking one’s own body with the foreign fire and tasting one’s own
cooked flesh is evidently an allegorical scenario of meticulous self-criticism and self-
dissemination. This obviously corresponds as well to Lu Xun’s own experience of
translating Marxist literary theory, which forms a negation of his early intellectual
formation rooted in “bourgeois” enlightenment. The figural language of torment thus
indicates that a revolutionary consciousness should result from the “labor of the
negative”.
The image of Prometheus being chewed by others also has a twofold meaning
in its appeal to an imaginary readership of the revolutionary masses. On the one
hand, the translator-intellectuals and the reader-revolutionaries reach a psycho-
analytically symbolic intimacy with one another through the act of “chewing”.
In contrast to the horrifying fable in Diary of A Madman, a cannibalistic sacrifice
in the case of “hard translation” is no longer in vain, since the devouring of the
translator’s flesh assists the reader’s digestion of Marxism. On the other
hand, however, the translator’s body (or the texts of “hard translation”) is
bound to be consumed – superseded in a dialectical sense – in the process of
revolution.
Here, this cannibalistic vision reminds us of the Brazilian theories of translation
as cannibalization. In a study of the “digestive metaphor in Brazil”, Else Vieira
shows how

Antropofagia has developed into a very specific national experimentalism, a poetics of

translation, an ideological operation as well as a critical discourse theorizing the relation
between Brazil and external influences, increasingly moving away from essentialist
confrontations towards a bilateral appropriation of sources and the contamination of
colonial/hegemonic univocality. (1998, 95)

In this sense, cannibalism is a postcolonial vision of cultural incorporation. It

originated in the indigenous culture and colonial history, but it is now turned into a
powerful discursive device for the purpose of overcoming the inferior status of the
influence receiver or the enlightened.
 334 Pu Wang

Thus Vieira goes on to state:

Cannibalism is a metaphor actually drawn from the natives’ ritual whereby feeding from
someone or drinking someone’s blood, as they did to their totemic “tapir”, was a means
of absorbing the other’s strength, a pointer to the very project of the Anthropophagy
group: not to deny foreign influences or nourishment, but to absorb and transform them
by the addition of autochthonous input. (Ibid., 98)

Needless to say, the taboo of cannibalism was associated with Brazil’s colonial history
and its repressive effect on society and culture. The avant-garde mobilization of this
cannibalistic vision has been an attempt to reverse that repressive history and disrupt the
hierarchy of the original source and the imitation, of the donor and receiver. So
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translation becomes a cannibalistic “transfusion of blood”. Vieira draws our attention to

Haroldo de Campos’s “daemonization of translation apparent in the ‘bad savage’s’
nourishment from Goethe in the act of translating him” (ibid., 106).
A somewhat similar digestive metaphor also dominates Lu Xun’s Promethean
allegory. In both cases, the rhetoric of digestion overshadows or subverts the spatial
metaphor of relocation that is common in the discourses of both Promethean
enlightenment and translation. However, Lu Xun’s cannibalistic translation also
exhibits decisive differences from that of the Brazilian avant-garde. Two related
points are crucial here. Firstly, Lu Xun’s vision of translational nourishment is more
violent and convoluted. While in de Campos the receiving culture should be the
primary agency of cannibalistic eating and digestion, in Lu Xun it is the translator’s
body or the textuality of “hard translation” that is to be eaten and digested – not
once, but twice, first by himself and then by the masses. This doubled sadomaso-
chistic scene seems to be absent in the Brazilian case. Secondly, whereas for de
Campos the European “sources” are the flesh and blood that we can consume for
revitalization, the foreign influence in Lu Xun is accepted as the Promethean fire that
we can use to cook the translator’s body and to transform or re-cultivate one’s own
consciousness. The result of such a “culinary” operation remains to be “tasted” and
tested. In other words, Marxism is appropriated as a necessary trial for the painful
revolutionary transformation of Chinese culture.
To sum up: whereas cannibalism provides a powerful metaphor for the
postcolonial cultural politics in Brazil, the theme of self-cannibalization in Lu Xun
is a radical allegory for the revolutionary politics in a non-Western civilization. In his
cannibalistic rhetoric in general, the obsession with the horrible fate of an old China
in modern times and its revolutionary prospect is unmistakably persistent. In his
fiction, every individual is both a victim and an accomplice in a man-eating-man
traditional society; in his prose poetry, a subjectivity caught up between the old and
the new becomes a psychoanalytical nightmare of self-discovery and self-hatred; and
in his allegorization of “hard translation”, the emphasis is on the self-critical reception
of a foreign fire (Marxism) which, paradoxically, is meaningful only when it forces a
negation or critique of the translating culture. Unlike de Campos’s vision, Lu Xun’s
cannibalistic translation is not intended for a subversive transcreation and
transtextualization that take both the foreign and the indigenous as nourishment.
But neither is Lu Xun’s Promethean myth a simple-minded ideal of enlightenment
with modern/Western thought as the enlightening source, and China as the
enlightened. The sadomasochistic and sacrificial scenario of being cooked (by the
 Translation Studies 335

foreign), being tasted (by the translator himself) and being chewed (by the readers or
by the potentially revolutionary masses) dramatizes Lu Xun’s view of the politics of
translation in a non-Western context – as we can see in the following schema:

Marxism/fire/the foreign
cooking ↓ (negativity)
The body of “hard translation”-Prometheus-the translator
chewing ↑ (negativity)
The reader – an emerging figure of the revolutionary masses

The political in Lu Xun’s “hard translation” lies in this necessary negativity in the
formation of revolutionary subjectivity.
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Conclusion: The digestive metaphor of “residues” [zhazi 渣滓]

Commenting on a 1931 letter that Lu Xun wrote to his close friend and political ally, Qu
Qiubai (1899–1935), Shen argues that for Lu Xun,“[t]he translator […] lives in perpetual
contradiction, embodying both life (‘a parent’) and death (‘a martyr’). Similarly, the
labor of the translator is generative and dynamic while refusing permanence and fixity”
(2009, 107). Another metaphor can be found on the side of “death” in this letter – that is,
that of of the “residue”. Lu Xun insists on his method of “hard translation”, which is
supposed to invite the masses to chew the translations and experience their “bitterness”.
The “residues” from the indigestion will be left aside: “on the one hand, we should
introduce as much as possible, and on the other, we should digest as much as possible
[…]. Let the residues (zhazi) be left behind” (Lu Xun [1931] 2005, 392).
With the metaphoric of eating and digesting the foreignness, these “residues” are
nothing but a negative surplus of the new language and revolutionary agency in the
making. On this note we can conclude our discussion: Lu Xun’s practice of a rigid
translation method in his relay translations not only elicits the issue of literalness,
fidelity and foreignization, but also produces a textual surplus of politicization and
allegorization, which, as we have seen, poses challenges to our conventional views of
translation history and theory. Dealing with the politics of translation, Spivak argues
that in the “rhetoricity” one can find “the selvedges of the language-textile” ([1993]
2004, 370) and “the production of an agent” (ibid., 371). It is in the self-referential
rhetoric of Lu Xun’s allegorization of “hard translation” that the translator becomes
visible and a selvedge of subjectivity unfolds. Such a political-allegorical rhetoric
embodies the “labor of the negative” – rather than the facilitation – in the making of
revolutionary subjectivity.

Acknowledgement
I would like to dedicate this article to Professor Richard Sieburth, with whose encouragement I
wrote its earliest version in 2007.

Notes
1. The title of this important essay is hard to translate into English in its own right. For the
meaning of yingyi 硬译, see later discussions. The phrase wenxue de jieji xing 文学的阶级性
refers to a central topic of Chinese intellectuals’ debates over revolution and literature
 336 Pu Wang

during the late 1920s, and, following the example of Leo Lee (1987), I translate it here as
“the class nature of literature” (Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, two pioneering translators
of Lu Xun’s works into English, translated the phrase as “the class character of literature”;
see Lu Xun [1930] 1960). By the thesis of “the class nature of literature,” the leftists of that
period meant that all literature, along with its aesthetic essence, is conditioned or
determined by the social dynamic of class and class struggle (see Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences 1981). In contrast, their opponents such as Liang Shiqiu (1929b) denied the
social-historical nature of literature, believing that literature represents universal humanity
and has nothing to do with social class. Though this phrase sounds idiosyncratic in English,
“the class nature of literature” should be recognized here as a code name of the Marxist view
of literature as social and historical existence.
2. Liang Shiqiu (1903–87) was a modern Chinese critic who studied at Harvard University and
was under the influence of Irving Babbitt. He was a major member of the Crescent Moon
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Society (Xinyue she; for details, see note 4 below).

3. I borrow the famous phrase “labor of the negative” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
([1807] 1977, 10).
4. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Lu Xun’s younger brother, was also a towering cultural figure in
modern Chinese history. He was a leading essayist and intellectual from the late 1910s
through the 1940s, and also worked as a prominent translator, collaborating with Lu Xun
on a number of projects. Zhou Zuoren’s political attitude, however, was different from his
brother’s.
5. The Crescent Moon Society was a modern Chinese literary group active from 1923 through
the early 1930s. It was composed primarily of Western-educated, liberal-minded and anti-
leftist intellectuals and poets, who published the magazine Crescent (Xinyue), founded in
1928.
6. Translations of the Chinese citations in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated.
7. I would like here to acknowledge Dr Philip J. Kaffen, who helped me work on this Japanese
passage, and Satoru Hashimoto, who supported me in gaining access to the reference.
8. For Lunacharsky’s citation of this poem, also see Lunacharsky [1928] 1947, 181–183;
Lunacharsky [1929] 2008, 267–269.

Note on contributor
Pu Wang (王璞) is assistant professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Brandeis University
(Waltham, Massachusetts, USA), having received his PhD in Comparative Literature at New
York University in 2012. His dissertation explores the lifework of Guo Moruo (1892–1978),
and includes a comprehensive study of Guo’s translation of Goethe’s Faust into Chinese. Wang
has published scholarly essays in both Chinese and English, in journals such as Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture and Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, and is currently working on a
book manuscript about Guo Moruo, translation and revolutionary romanticism.

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