Word: lu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...preferring to translate classical Chinese literature instead," he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, White Tiger. Yang translated works including The Odyssey and Pygmalion into Chinese, and he and his wife collaborated on rendering selections from Sima Qian's Records of the Historian and stories by the 20th century writer Lu Xun into English...
...contrast with Orwell, however, is that Lu Xun threw in his lot with the communists late in life. This meant that he became one of those rare Chinese writers from the pre-1949 era whose stories stayed in print and whose essays remained in textbooks. That special status has also meant that the work of virtually all current Chinese authors owes a debt of some kind to the stories in the Penguin collection. Jiang Rong readily admits, for example, that Wolf Totem was inspired in part by Lu Xun's writings. And though Zhu Wen denies this kind of link...
...Here's why I make that grandiose-sounding claim: Lu Xun is critically regarded as the most accomplished modern writer of the most populous nation on earth, and a grasp of his work is thus extremely useful in forming an understanding of much of humanity. In addition to stories, he wrote poetry, an extended history of Chinese literature and hundreds of essays, including small masterpieces like his eloquent 1926 tirade against the warlord government of the time for gunning down unarmed patriotic student protesters. His stories are wide-ranging in style and subject, from the touchingly nostalgic and straightforward...
...England's George Orwell is another essential writer, and one with whom Lu Xun shares important traits. Each introduced new terms into the political lexicon: Ah-Q-ism (a proclivity for self-delusion) is as readily understood in China as references to Big Brother are elsewhere. Each author spent most of his adult life as an independent thinker of the left, criticizing dogmatism and hypocrisy wherever it appeared on the political spectrum. Each championed plain forms of writing. And each penned an ironic novella about a revolution that claimed to be about changing everything, but ended up altering only...
...Perhaps the most interesting Orwell - Lu Xun parallel concerns 1989's Tiananmen crisis. Audiences outside China, appalled by the government's use of lethal force against the students and the cynical cover-up campaign that followed, found it natural to criticize the Orwellian behavior of China's leadership. In China, it was just as natural for critics of the government to voice their outrage via quotations from Lu Xun's famous essay on the slayings of 1926 - allusions that all educated Chinese recognized as a potent way of saying that the current regime was little better than the hated warlords...