Perception of "China Today" through Zhao Shuli

Perception of "China Today" through Zhao Shuli (Chinese Classic Writers Overseas)

Zhao Shuli's creation started earlier, and a unique style was formed in the 1930s, but it was not until the publication of "Little Two Black Marriage" in September 1943 that his creation attracted widespread attention in society. In 1946, after the publication of "The Change of Li Jiazhuang", Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Zhou Yang and others gave high praise to Zhao Shuli's creations, and established the literary status of his works. However, due to the limited conditions in the Liberated Areas at that time, the overseas dissemination of Zhao Shuli's works was not really realized until the late 1940s. As a Chinese writer with a worldwide reputation, Zhao Shuli has made the world's readers aware of the earth-shaking changes in Chinese society, especially the peasants in the Liberated Areas, through his works.

It reached its peak in translation in the 1950s

In the 1950s, the overseas dissemination of Zhao Shuli's works was mainly concentrated in Japan, the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States, of which Japan and the Soviet Union were the mainstays.

Due to their special geopolitical relations and cultural ties with China, Japanese scholars have always been keenly observant of the development of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, and have paid more attention to Zhao Shuli's works. Scholars believe that the Japanese scholar Itoko (pen name Xiao Xiao), who has lived in China for many years, was the first to translate Zhao Shuli's works to the Japanese people. In 1948, she translated 8 Zhao Shuli novels, including "The Little Manager". After the 1950s, Ono Shinobu, Takeuchi Yoshi, Shikachi and others also began to translate and study Zhao Shuli's works. According to statistics, from 1952 to 1958, More than 30 kinds of Zhao Shuli works were translated and published in Japan, of which the novels "The Marriage of Little Erhei" and "The Change of Li Jiazhuang" have at least 5 translations each. At the same time, Japan's Zhao Shuli research has also reached a climax.

In 1949, the Soviet sinologist Krivzov first translated Zhao Shuli's novel "The Change of Li Jiazhuang", which was serialized in the magazine "Far East", followed by a single edition published by the Moscow Foreign Literature Publishing House, and the society also published "Zhao Shuli's Novel Collection". Soviet translators who translated Zhao Shuli's works also included Pakhomov, Kotov, Rogov and others. Around 1952, almost all of the works created after Zhao Shuli's "Little Two Black Marriages" and before 1949 were introduced to the Soviet Union, and were affirmed by Soviet scholars as a real "writer of the people", and even some people thought that "in the past 30 years, no writer has surpassed him in describing rural life in China".

In the 1950s, Eastern European countries that also belonged to the socialist camp, such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania and other countries, translated many works of Zhao Shuli, among which many Zhao Shuli research experts emerged, such as the famous Czechoslovak sinologist Pushk.

American journalist Jack Belden mentions Zhao Shuli and his work in the fourth chapter of "China Shakes the World": "I translated three books by Zhao Shuli. The first book is about rural elections, the second is about marriage freedom, and the third is about wartime life in a village," and said that Zhao Shuli "may be the most famous person in the Communist areas besides Mao Zedong and Zhu De." Apparently, the three books translated by Belden are Zhao Shuli's novels "Li Youcai's Words", "Little Erhei Marriage" and "The Change of Li Jiazhuang". The original book "China Shakes the World" was published in 1949, and Dong Dazhong deduced from this that "this year (referring to 1947) is the earliest year he can translate" and "if it is indeed translated and published, then this is the earliest foreign translation of Zhao Zuo.". Scholar Xia Zhiqing mentioned in the preface to the History of Modern Chinese Novels that Zhao Shuli's works were discovered in 1951 while searching for materials in the Yale University Library. This also shows that Zhao Shuli's works began to spread in the United States as late as 1951.

In the 1950s, especially in 1950 and 1951, more than a dozen national translators introduced Zhao Shuli's works every year, including both individual works and Zhao Shuli's collections. Translations are Japanese, Russian, Korean (Korean), Polish, Vietnamese, Czech, French, Hungarian, German, Bulgarian, Thai, Bengali, Esperanto, etc. After 1953, the number of overseas translations of Zhao Shuli's works gradually decreased, especially since the mid-1960s, and there were few new overseas translations.

After the 1970s, until the 21st century, Zhao Shuli and his works continue to attract the attention of Japanese and European and American experts and scholars, including Chinese scholars such as Wang Dewei, Li Oufan, Mao Guoquan, etc., as well as Chinese studies experts and Chinese literature experts, such as Lin Peirui and Ge Haowen in English-speaking countries, and Matsu Kafuya and Sanyaki Garten in Japan. In recent years, Kato Sanyuji has also come to Shanxi many times to visit the place where Zhao Shuli lived, and in January 2019, he published four articles in the "Japan-China Friendship News" to introduce the local rural changes. Some young foreign scholars have also become interested in Zhao Shuli and his works, such as Zhang Yicheng in the United States.

"Novel Zhao Shuli Literature"

Since Zhao Shuli is a typical and directional writer of literature in the Liberated Areas, many overseas translators believe that they can understand the political, social and other aspects of socialist New China from his works. The Japanese scholar Teru Suganai's view is very representative, and he pointed out in "The Characteristics of Zhao Shuli's Literature" that the attention to Zhao Shuli in Japan is inseparable from the attention to the Chinese Communist Party, "People want to understand what the CCP has done, want to understand the CCP's literature, and this interest has turned to Zhao Shuli." Moreover, on this point alone, Zhao Shuli gave us the best answer to this request. Because Zhao Shuli not only has literary lovers, but also has a wide range of readers", "the specific knowledge that cannot be experienced from papers and statistics has begun to be experienced from Zhao Shuli's novels".

As the first socialist country to translate Zhao Shuli's works, Soviet scholars clearly found in Zhao Shuli's works that there was a consistency with their own revolution, as the commentators of the time, Sivitlov and Ukrentief, "He showed us a real picture of china's political, economic and cultural development in the last 15 years (1934-1949). His significance is not only to expose the essence of the Kuomintang's reactionary rule and the astonishing construction power of the Chinese Communist Party, but also to faithfully describe the awakening of the Chinese people and the growth of political power" and "every reader can see and feel the real situation in China today from the author's book." At first, the Western countries represented by the United States were obviously biased in their evaluation of Zhao Shuli and his works, but with the development of the international situation and the increasing frequency of Sino-foreign exchanges, European and American scholars also paid more attention to understanding the life and thoughts of Chinese through Zhao Shuli's works.

In addition to the cognitive function of literature, overseas scholars, represented by the Japanese scholar Takeuchi Yoshi, have also noticed the novelty and uniqueness of Zhao Shuli's works. In his article "Novel Zhao Shuli Literature", he pointed out that "here, Zhao Shuli has a special status, and its nature is different from other so-called people's writers, and even more different from the heritage of modern literature." He clearly put forward the "super-modernity" of Zhao Shuli literature and the double transcendence of "modern literature" and "people's literature". Takeuchi further believes that Zhao Shuli's works "if you chew carefully, you will feel that it is indeed the place where the artistic success of the writer lies, and if you exaggerate slightly, it can be said that the rigor of its structure is even to the point of adding too many words and deleting too few words." Ono pointed out that Zhao Shuli's novel "inherits and develops the tradition of Chinese rap literature and forms a unique form of expression." Perhaps it can be said that the greatest achievement of this writer is to create this form of expression. What he calls "unique forms of expression" mainly refers to creative techniques such as "the clarification of themes, the simplification of descriptions, and the use of folk tales". Even European and American scholars, influenced by Cold War thinking and Western literary standards, have discovered innovations in Zhao Shuli's works in terms of creative narrative based on traditional narratives, unique narrative language and writing styles, and the successful use of "national forms".

In short, the founding of the People's Republic of China is the prerequisite for the rapid dissemination of Zhao Shuli's works internationally, and the unique and novel art forms and diverse ideological connotations are the decisive factors for his works to be disseminated abroad. Zhao Shuli successfully shaped the image of Chinese peasants in the midst of historical changes in the form of modern novels in the form of commentaries, and his works truly integrated into the cultural life of farmers at that time with strong regional cultural color and easy-to-understand language. As Ono points out, Zhao Shuli's portrayal of the unique sense of humor and optimism of Chinese peasants is an important reason why his works are of epoch-making significance in the history of modern Chinese literature and are popular with the Chinese people.

(Author: Duan Wenchang, Executive Director of China Zhao Shuli Research Association, Director of Jincheng City Library)

Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition