Life philosophy of paradox : Lu Xun's prose poetry Yecao and a comparative analysis of the only three English translations

Abstract

Lu Xun (1881-1936), a renowned writer in twentieth-century China, has been a popular topic in modern Chinese literary history for over one hundred years. Scholars predominantly centered on his fictional works and novels, and only limited research has delved into his essays, pomes and prose.

Yecao, also known as Wild Grass or Weeds, is a 1927 collection of twenty-three prose poems by Lu Xun. These poems were composed between 1924 and 1926 and were initially published sequentially in the journal Threads of Talk from 1924 to 1927. Yecao features its emotionally intense, paradoxical structures and mixed classical and vernacular Chinese language. Despite the significance of Yecao in Lu Xun’s literary corpus and Chinese literary history, no comprehensive study of English translations has been conducted to date. The remaining earliest English version was translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang in 1974; no other English translations appeared in the following forty years until the American poet-translator Matt Turner published his translation in 2019, followed by Eileen J. Cheng’s in 2022.

This thesis consists of five chapters. The first is an introduction that provides a general overview of Lu Xun studies. It also discusses the background of Yecao and why Lu Xun chose this title. Chapter two comprehensively reviews and introduces the research on global Yecao studies. The third chapter analyzes and expounds on the three paradoxical structures in Yecao through a close reading of the texts. Chapter four presents a comparative analysis of the only three English translations of Yecao. The study focuses on how the translators handled the original text’s intricate paradoxical structures and culture-loaded terms. The final chapter concludes with suggestions for future studies.