The Real Story of Ah-Q (6 page)

Lu Xun: Selected Works
,
4 vols., trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985). A wide-ranging collection of fiction, prose poetry, essays and letters, including selections from the three collections translated in the present volume.

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
,
trans. William Lyell (Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990). Contains translations of Lu Xun’s first short story (‘Nostalgia’) and first two collections of fiction,
Outcry and Hesitation
, together with an informative biographical essay.

Letters between Two: Correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping
,
trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000). An edited collection of the letters exchanged between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping.

Anderson, Marsten,
The Limits of Realism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). A pioneering study of modern Chinese realism, with particularly thought-provoking comments on Lu Xun’s use of the unreliable narrator.

Chou, Eva Shan, ‘Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–23: The Emergence of a Readership’,
The China Quarterly
172 (December 2002), pp. 1042–64. A discussion of the process by which Lu Xun gained his canonical status among contemporary readers.

Daruvala, Susan,
Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). A study of Lu Xun’s brother, with incisive observations about the canonical status of Lu Xun.

Denton, Kirk, ed.,
Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). An anthology of key essays and polemics of modern Chinese literature, including three pieces by Lu Xun and invaluable scholarly introductions by the editor.

Foster, Paul B., ‘The Ironic Inflation of Chinese National Character: Lu Xun’s International Reputation, Romain Rolland’s Critique of “The True Story of Ah Q” and the Nobel Prize’,
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
13.1 (Spring 2001), pp. 140–68.

Goldman, Merle, ed.,
Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). A useful collection of essays on modern Chinese literature, including three articles on Lu Xun.

Hanan, Patrick,
Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Includes an important exploration of Lu Xun’s fictional technique and foreign influences.

Hsia, C. T.,
A History of Modern Chinese Fiction
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). For years after it was first published, the leading critical reference work on twentieth-century Chinese fiction.

Hsia, T. A.,
The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Movement in China
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). A thorough account of, among other things, Lu Xun’s disputes with the literary left wing in the early 1930s.

Leo Ou-fan Lee,
Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). An intellectual biography of the writer.

——, ed.,
Lu Xun and His Legacy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). A key collection of critical essays.

Liu, Lydia,
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), especially Chapter Two. An exploration of the ways in which modern Chinese writers and thinkers translated ideas about modernity, with an interesting discussion of Lu Xun and ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’.

Lyell, William,
Lu Xun’s Vision of Reality
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). A colourful biography of the writer, with detailed discussion of his realist fiction.

McDougall, Bonnie S.,
Love-letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). A highly informative insight into the private thoughts and emotions of Lu Xun and his common-law wife.

—— and Kam, Louie, eds.,
The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
(London: Hurst, 1997). An essential critical reference work on modern Chinese fiction, poetry and drama.

Pollard, David E.,
The True Story of Lu Xun
(Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002). The most recent English-language biography of the writer.

Spence, Jonathan,
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895–1980
(New York: Viking, 1981). A very readable account of modern China’s intellectual and literary revolutionaries, with extensive discussion of Lu Xun.

Wang, David Der-wei,
Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). A wide-ranging survey of representative writers of modern Chinese realism, with an introduction focused on Lu Xun.

Yue, Gang,
The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Features a chapter on Lu Xun and cannibalism.

Consult also the thorough primary and secondary bibliographies on Lu Xun at the online Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, available at
http://mclc.osu.edu/
.

The complete fiction of Lu Xun, as translated here, has been arranged by order of publication of collection, beginning with the stand-alone short story ‘Nostalgia’, and followed by
Outcry, Hesitation
and
Old Stories Retold
. Within each collection, I have followed the author’s original sequencing. Throughout, I have translated from the versions included in the 1982 Renmin wenxue edition of Lu Xun’s
Complete Works
(
Lu Xun quanji
; Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe), as this version is widely accepted as having corrected the errors appearing in earlier editions, and is thoroughly and usefully footnoted by its editors.

In an attempt to enhance the fluency of the text, I have kept use of footnotes and endnotes to a minimum, and where background information that Chinese audiences would take for granted can be unobtrusively and economically worked into the main body of text, I have taken that option. A translation that, without compromising overall linguistic accuracy, avoids extensive interruption by footnotes and endnotes can, I feel, offer a more faithful recreation of the original reading experience than a version whose literal rendering of every point dictates frequent, disrupting consultation of extra references. Where I have judged that a fuller background explanation would be of help, however, I have included this in endnotes; I have used occasional footnotes to gloss specific questions of language.

In a very few places, where the density of cultural-linguistic reference is so great as to make prolonged explanations necessary in the English (such as the disquisition on traditional biography in ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’, and the punning exchange in ‘Taming the Floods’ on Yu’s name and the composition of Chinese ideograms), I have slightly simplified a handful of lines in the original Chinese. I have also on occasion simplified the nomenclature used in the original: where more than one name is given for a single character (in accordance with the Chinese tradition of giving individuals extra, literary pseudonyms), I have tended to use only one name, to reduce readers’ confusion.

Chinese is, of course, very different from English, and to find literary equivalences for Lu Xun’s style and usages has been a constant challenge. One habit of his that has given me regular pause throughout the translation is his frequent, deliberate use of repetition; at times, I have judged that – due to the gap between English and Chinese literary conventions – to recreate a repetition precisely may strike the English reader as uncomfortable and inelegant, and I have therefore occasionally decided to reword. Throughout, I have aspired to produce a version of Lu Xun that tries to explain – to readers beyond the specialist circle of Chinese studies – his canonical status within China, and make a case for regarding him as a creative stylist and thinker whose ideas about literature can transcend the socio-political circumstances in which he wrote.

In Chinese, the surname always precedes the given name: Lu Xun, therefore, has the surname Lu and Xun as his given name; his brother Zhou Zuoren has the surname Zhou and Zuoren as the given name.

According to the Hanyu Pinyin system (used in this translation, except for the surname ‘He’, which I have written as ‘Ho’ to reduce confusion in English), transliterated Chinese is pronounced much as in English, except for the following: