Worlds Elsewhere (68 page)

Like all alchemy, however, it wasn't as easy as it looked. Strict governmental rules meant that official publishers, over 400 of them, were state-owned. Foreign houses were not allowed to publish in their own right, necessitating complicated deals with a Chinese publisher for each and every title.

That was before you started on censorship. Despite profligate piracy, armies of Chinese bureaucrats policed the internet, broadcasting, press and publishing. It was a byzantine system, Lusby explained: publishers employed their own censors, following guidelines provided by the General Administration of Press and Publication, which furthermore had the power to demand cuts or halt publication entirely. The Chinese edition of Khaled Hosseini's
The Kite Runner
had been doctored to remove criticism of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Chinese authors who wrote on sensitive topics faced pressure to edit, with the threat of losing the right to publish ever again.

Looking for an opening, Penguin had hit upon something its rivals
couldn't match: Eng Lit. British writers were highly valued in China, ‘classic' works above all. The company had made its English backlist, over 1,000 titles, available for import, and would soon have 50 Penguin Classics in translation. The fact that the books were essentially uncensorable was a major plus.

‘You know our highest-selling import?
Nineteen Eighty-Four.'

Really? The censors didn't have a problem with Orwellian dystopia?

Lusby arched an eyebrow. ‘It's a classic, and it's not seen as about China, it's about Russia, so it's OK. If it's not written as critique, then it's not interpreted as critique. They're pretty literal.'

Western classics also offered a priceless and seductive USP: foreignness. As recently as the 1970s it was forbidden for anyone outside the Party elite to read literature from abroad, but since the rules had been relaxed, Chinese readers – as in Lin Shu's day – had proved themselves voracious consumers of anything and everything in translation: established favourites such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Dickens, but also J. K. Rowling, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Dan Brown. And not only in translation: the autobiography of Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United, had become a shock bestseller the previous autumn, even before it was translated into Chinese.

Where did all this leave Shakespeare? Lusby handed me over to two young Chinese colleagues, publisher Wang Jianqi and marketing associate Liu Yunqian. Somewhere between Dickens and Man United, seemed to be the answer.

Wang ran through the current situation. Penguin had a valuable Shakespeare backlist centred on the popular paperback New Penguin Shakespeare playtexts, first published in the UK in the late 1960s and extensively reprinted. Imported into China, these sold decently, along with a few works of criticism. Although Penguin didn't themselves publish a translation of the Lambs'
Tales from Shakespeare
in this territory, the book was still very much in print: new editions had been published as recently as 2004 and 2008.

Translation, Wang explained, was the golden egg. The number of Chinese people who could read English well was still small, perhaps 1 per cent of the population, and fewer still could cope with Shakespeare in the original, even if they had learned the odd passage at school. To be in with a chance of decent sales, you had to put Shakespeare into Mandarin.

Penguin were exploring the possibility of publishing fresh versions of not one but two separate translations of the complete works in 2016. The first was by a translator called Zhu Shenghao, who had rendered a large number of the plays in the 1930s and 1940s in versions that were now China's most popular. The second – if they could negotiate the rights – would use the newer and more precise translations by the renowned scholar Liang Shiqiu. ‘They have different feelings,' Wang explained. ‘Readers can choose the original translation, or the imaginative one.'

In the meantime, Wang and Liu were doing their best to marketise the Bard. A display of historic Penguin editions was touring trade conventions and publishing fairs in different Chinese cities, advertising the publisher's rich Shakespearian heritage. Here in Beijing they were working hard on a strategy to support the 2016 project.

‘Everyone is the player of your own life,' Liu said. ‘This is the idea we are working on.'

They walked me through the plan – multimedia happenings both on- and offline, reader discussions, public events. The challenge was that Shakespeare was perceived as both old and difficult to read, so they'd come up with an ingenious solution: making Shakespeare into a luxury product, like imported Scotch or Range Rovers.

‘I think in China the best way to talk about Shakespeare is as a lifestyle,' Wang said.

A
lifestyle
?

She blinked rapidly. ‘As Chinese people want to be more international, they want to have something to talk about with westerners. This is our message: for this reason you'd better read Shakespeare. It will benefit your social networking, and your lifestyle.'

They were brainstorming a media campaign. Chinese celebrities would be invited to choose a favourite play. A big-name lawyer could talk about
King Lear
and why it illustrated the need to set up a legally watertight will (a major issue in China, where the rise in the number of people owning property had put huge pressure on the country's vague inheritance laws). A famous property developer might talk about
Romeo and Juliet …

‘We want to say that for the money you spend on a cup of coffee you could buy the greatest love story,' Wang said.

How about a TV chef talking about
Titus Andronicus
? A drinks magnate on Falstaff? A female lawyer on
Merchant of Venice
?

Wang and Liu looked at me doubtfully, uncertain whether I was being facetious. I wasn't entirely sure myself.

‘It will depend on the resources,' Wang said slowly. ‘If there is a big production of a play, this can help us very much.' A wistful look came into her eyes. ‘If there is something like
Downton Abbey
for Shakespeare …'

This was yet another prestige UK import. Seen by an estimated 160 million Chinese viewers (with many more watching pirated DVDs or downloads), Julian Fellowes's lumbering period saga appeared to have displaced Sherlock Holmesian fog – or even the royal family – as the vital symbol of Britain in Asia.

‘Yes,' said Wang. ‘Something like this television series would be very good.'

In the corridor on the way out I saw evidence of a previous marketing wheeze – a bicycle painted a jolly shade of red and covered with Penguin branding. It was a Flying Pigeon, Beijing's traditional bicycle, thought by some to be the bestselling vehicle of all time. Its design was ripped off from a 1930s British model: a cautionary mascot for a foreign company trying to get ahead in Asia.

As I passed, I patted the saddle. The bike looked as though it would go far.

257 … 272 … 284 … 293

The red numbers on the screen at the end of the carriage flickered and wavered, finally settling at 300 km/h. Outside the window, the scenery had dissolved from a series of identifiable scenes to a soothing and meaningless blur. The noise was barely louder than a hum, like the air conditioning in an expensive hotel.

Eyes pricking with tiredness, I watched Beijing being dragged soundlessly away. Above were tendrils of cloud, pale mauve, slipping across a bleached sky. It looked like a smoggy day ahead. Not real blue; Beijing blue.

I was on the 0700
G101,
the first train of the day to Shanghai. The line had only been open a few years, part of China's headlong sprint into the twenty-first century. At the behest of the go-getting minister
of railways, Liu Zhijun (known as ‘Lunatic Liu'), some 9,000 miles of high-speed track had been laid in the last decade, more than the rest of the world combined. Even when two high-speed trains crashed in Zhejiang province in July 2011, killing forty and resulting in Liu's high-speed ejection from office, the pace barely slowed.

The line I was travelling had opened that same year. The government boasted that the project had used twice as much concrete as the Three Gorges Dam. In 2004, travelling between the two cities took fourteen hours-plus; this morning, I was due in to Hongqiao station at 12.37. The swiftest trains did the journey in four hours forty-eight minutes.

Unable to look out of the window without feeling seriously dizzy, I returned to my notes. I had been interested to hear that Penguin's plans included two separate editions of Shakespeare's complete works in Chinese: Liang Shiqiu's, published in the late 1960s, and the ‘original', by Zhu Shenghao, who came from the city I was heading for, Shanghai. I wanted to find out more about Zhu. Both his life and his life's work seemed to say much not just about Shakespeare, but about China's turbulent history in the twentieth century.

Zhu had been born in Jiaxing, a town just outside Shanghai, in 1912, the same year the Republic of China was founded. Raised in a middle-class family, he went to the prestigious Zhejiang University, studying Chinese literature and, like many of his peers, developing a keen concern for China's cultural reformation. After graduating in 1933, he moved into Shanghai and got a job with a publishing company.

After the success of Tian Han's
Hamlet
in 1922, something of a translation boom had followed, with versions of the plays already familiar to Chinese readers, such as
The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew,
As
You Like It
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
all being redone in the late 1920s, this time with reference to Shakespeare's texts. In literary circles, the next step began to seem urgent: translating the complete works into Mandarin. In 1930, a committee of scholars was set up to address the issue, paid for by American aid money, but struggled to get itself organised. Egged on by his family and his university tutor, Zhu decided to beat the greybeards at their own game. He would do the whole lot himself.

In its way, the project was not dissimilar from the high-speed-rail boom of the 2000s: a way for China to prove that it was the equal of the world. In spring 1935, at the age of twenty-three, Zhu began
preparatory work on
The Tempest,
setting himself the Lunatic Liu-style deadline of translating all thirty-six plays in the First Folio in two years. It was an impossible task, but he nonetheless made impressive progress, translating eight texts in the first year.

His timing, however, was desperately unlucky. In July 1937, China was plunged into war with Japan. Just a month after the declaration of hostilities, Shanghai, a plump and attractive target only 500 miles across the East China Sea, came under attack. Fleeing the Japanese advance, Zhu was forced to abandon the substantial library of texts and critical studies he had acquired. Far worse, the translations he'd completed were destroyed when the publisher went up in flames. Undeterred, Zhu seized his one-volume edition of the complete works and a dictionary and found new accommodation, determined to continue his task.

In 1938, he took a job with a newspaper agency, writing anti-Japanese articles during the day and continuing his translations by night. Leading what he later called a ‘vagabond's life', he laboriously managed to retranslate the plays he had already done, but in December 1941 Japanese forces swept into the International Settlement. This time, his manuscripts were in the newspaper building. Again, his work was lost.

In 1942, by now married to his university sweetheart, Song Qingru, Zhu devoted himself wholeheartedly to Shakespeare. He and his new wife moved back to Jiaxing and into her family home. Salvaging what manuscripts he could, Zhu redid the comedies for a third time and started work on the remaining texts. Despite poverty and mounting ill-health, he managed to finish a remarkable thirty-one plays in the following twenty months before succumbing to tuberculosis in December 1944, two acts through
Henry V.

According to his widow, Zhu said, ‘Had I known I would not rise again after this illness, I would have exerted all my efforts to complete this translation.' Seven decades on, his versions are still regarded as favourites, endlessly praised for their ‘poetic' and ‘timelessly Chinese' qualities.

Zhu's story was reported in every book I had read about Shakespeare in China and had often been recirculated by the domestic media. Obviously, irresistibly, it was a David and Goliath tale – a heroic solo effort completed (or very nearly completed) in the face of near-insurmountable odds. It had, too, a strong strain of nationalism; it seemed entirely to the point that Zhu had been a passionate patriot
who nobly continued his work despite the depredations of the Japanese.

But was it really true? From the fragments I had gathered, it seemed there was now some kind of museum to Zhu in Jiaxing. The city was only an hour or two outside Shanghai, and I was hopeful that a contact at a university would be able to help. I'd promised to call him as soon as I arrived.