Shelley (1905-1937) In China

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the early19th century Romantic poet, exerted a great influence on China’s New Literature as an iconic figure-a fact that has received insufficient attention from academics. This essay studies translations and introductions of Shelley’s poetic oeuvre into Chinese between the years1905and1937and aims to determine with accuracy the poet’s transmission and reception during this time. It is also our aim to explore the protean ways in which this ’Romantic icon’ influenced and inspired the new generation of Chinese writers, from their poems to their personalities.In our Introduction we introduce Shelley and his works, providing background on his poetic canonization in the English speaking world and making clear the process of his introduction to China. In Chapter One we examine translations and introductions to Shelley’s work produced in the late Qing and early Republican period and attempt to gauge the level of understanding towards the poet’s oeuvre and life. Here we take Lu Xun and Su Manshu as our guides-the former regarded Shelley’s ’satanic’as of importance, whereas the latter exerted energy studying the aesthetics behind Shelley’s’philosophy of love’. At the same time, poets from the’Southern Society’began translating Shelley’s work, which despite employing literary Chinese has remained a standard reference tool for future translators. In Chapter Two we look at detail at a ceremony in1922-1924marking the hundredth anniversary of Shelley’s death, again employing two guides as representative figures of analysis-Zhou Zuoren, who put efforts into explaining Shelley’ s ’resistance by non-resistance’, and the Creation Society, which advocated ’putting art into life, and life into art’ as a key idea in their own interpretations. We will also avail ourselves of the opportunity to discuss certain new translations of Shelley’s poems and songs made at this time.In Chapter Three, we look at translations and introductions of Shelley made between the mid-1920’s and mid-1930’s. By the mid-1920’s, Shelley’s love poems and dirges were increasingly important in translation work, and the Crescent Moon society took a leading role in this regard-we examine how this society emphasized Shelley’s purity of art in poetry, rather than any superior ways of thinking therein, the intention being to at the same time emphasize the poetic potential of vernacular Chinese through their translations. Chen Quan’s work, The Psychology of The Poet Shelley made use of newly imported Freudian notions to explore Shelley’s bipolar mental strivings, whilst Sun Xizhen edited The Life of Shelley, which stressed throughout the phenomenon of the poet as’a talent beyond the normal bounds of people, a beautiful angel’. In the1930’s, all interpretative and translation work on Shelley slowly calls off, and we make a detour into discussing the position of another British poet-Lord Byron-in comparison to the position of Shelley during the period in question.In Chapter Four we begin with an analysis of descriptions of Shelley in made in five histories of English literature, two histories of European literature and one history of World literature respectively between1905and1937. The five histories of English literature we discuss in their capacity as a springboard for bringing Shelley into the Chinese poetic imagination. These works operate in tandem with descriptions of Shelley in magazines and newspapers to complete the question of the poet’s establishment in China. Following from this, we examine how Shelley’s perceived values coincided with the desires for freedom and love of the great number of Chinese youths-as Shelley was translated and introduced to the Chinese speaking world, so did he become an effective model for a style of romantic living, a philosophy of life and a value system. Our final chapter starts with the question of whether or not Shelley’s Romanticism counts as a moral question, and follows with a study of four Chinese poets-Guo Moruo, Xu Zhimo, Wu Bi, Yu Gengyu, as individual cases for an investigation for the poet’s study and imitation Shelley across a variety of aspects of life and poetic craft.In our Conclusion we point out the difference between Shelley and other Western poets in their transmission to China-not only was Shelley a pure Romantic in the Chinese imagination during the1920’s and1930’s, but also he can be called a romantic idol in life and literature during the period in question.