Zhou Zuoren and the Uses of Ancient Greek Mythology in Modern China

• Autores: Wei Zhang
• Localización: International journal of the classical tradition, ISSN 1073-0508, Vol. 22, Nº 1, 2015, págs. 100-115
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), one of the foremost essayists in modern China, produced many exquisite Chinese translations of ancient Greek mythology and literature, as well as numerous essays on various aspects of ancient Greek culture. Making use of this rich body of work hitherto rarely explored, this essay addresses the following questions: what uses does a culture such as China, which has been essentially non-mythological in its long tradition, make of Greek mythology? What relevance does Greek mythology have at the two critical moments in modern Chinese history that Zhou lived through, i.e. the May-Fourth movement and its aftermath, and the post-1949 era up to the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’? I approach these questions from two interrelated points of view: myth and knowledge and myth and literature. I argue that Zhou’s uses of Greek mythology formed an integral part of a cultural project aimed at defending free thought, which, as Zhou perceptively foresaw, was to be destroyed at the hands of self-claimed “progressive” intellectuals. This reassessment of Zhou’s thought via his life-long work in Greek mythology not only offers a better understanding of his aesthetics and cultural criticism, but also opens up a new perspective to the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern Chinese intellectual history.

    Two trends are converging in the study of western classics as currently practised in China. First, many Chinese classical scholars are reevaluating the relevance of ancient Graeco-Roman studies to contemporary China. Faced with the profound impact that the study of modern European and American culture has had on modern Chinese culture, they hold that the study of Graeco-Roman antiquity may produce more meaningful comparisons with the Chinese tradition. These scholars maintain that in order to come to grips with the cultural relevance of classical studies, we have to look at the whole period of modern China in which these studies emerged, were interrupted, re-started and resumed to the present day, which is roughly speaking the twentieth century. We have to take this period as the terrain in which to explore a spectrum of different possibilities. Here, Chinese classical scholars encounter the second trend coming from a new direction in classical studies. In the past few decades, reception studies of Greek and Roman antiquity have expanded their scope from the past and present of the West to other cultures around the globe, reaching perhaps its outermost fringe—modern China.1 How have ancient Greek and Roman texts, artifacts, images and ideas been adapted and reconfigured through a complex process of cultural interaction, and what impact has this process had on a culture such as modern China, which derives from a completely different classical tradition? These two trends generate two cultural perspectives: the one from the inside demands that Graeco-Roman studies be relevant to modern China, and the other one from the outside aims to evaluate the impact of these studies on modern China. These perspectives may be joined in a productive way, -if we find individual cases where the reception of some aspect of Graeco-Roman culture has incorporated itself into Chinese culture. To put it more precisely, we look at the thought of individuals, who are influenced by a process of cultural interaction, where Western classical texts and ideas meet indigenous Chinese resources, pointing to a possible fusion of horizons in the future. One of these individuals is the subject of this study, Zhou Zuoren, the foremost translator of ancient Greek literature modern China has yet seen.

    Zhou, who lived from 1885 to 1967, produced exquisite Chinese translations of ancient Greek literature (many of them accompanied by elaborate notes) and numerous essays on various aspects of ancient Greek culture throughout his long literary career of more than 60 years. Standing out from this huge literary output is Greek mythology, which Zhou was the first translator to introduce into China in a fairly systematic attempt to convey its vitality, complexity and relevance. From his earliest attempts in 1907 to translate Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang’s fantasy novel World’s Desire (based on the myth of Odysseus’ final journey) into classical Chinese as a student in Japan to his first translation of Apollodorus’ Library in the 1930s and the translation of W. H. D. Rouse’s popular Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece in the 1940s, until the painstaking translation of the tragedies of Euripides and the dialogues of Lucian that took up the last 15 years of his life, Greek myth and myth-related literature occupied a central position in Zhou’s encounter with and reception of Greek culture.

    This engagement with Greek mythology was not the pastime of a self-entertaining literatus, but a highly self-conscious attempt at cultural integration. The many facets that this engagement opens up compel us to ask the following questions and perhaps to abandon some preconceptions. What use does a culture such as China, which has been essentially non-mythical in its long tradition, make of Greek mythology? What relevance does Greek mythology have at the two critical moments in modern Chinese history through which Zhou lived, that is, the May-Fourth movement and its aftermath, and the post-1949 era up to the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’? This study is a first attempt to approach these questions from two interrelated points of view: myth and knowledge and myth and literature. I suggest that Zhou’s uses of Greek mythology formed an integral part of a cultural project that endeavoured to champion and give voice to free thought, which, as Zhou perceptively foresaw, was being destroyed at the hands of his contemporary intellectuals.

    In a ground-breaking monograph on Zhou Zuoren, Susan Daruvala shows how Zhou constructed an alternative response to modernity by probing into traditional Chinese resources, especially aesthetic concepts, the essay form and literary history.2 She argues cogently that Zhou deployed these resources to challenge the dominant May-Fourth discourse of nation-building by promoting instead the values of the individual and the local. However, Daruvala leaves the other half of Zhou’s work, namely the translation and interpretation of Western and Japanese literature almost untouched, which, in terms of the amount of output, stands on a par with the work of Zhou the essayist.3 It is the contention of my study that this half, if viewed in the overall framework of Zhou’s thought, must be taken more seriously than has been previously done.4 It not only complements the other half, which is so eloquently presented by Daruvala, but also revises the total picture of Zhou’s ‘alternative response to modernity’. Simply put, what Zhou envisioned was a fusion of the two halves, not a replacement of western influences by indigenous resources. This reassessment of Zhou’s thought via his life-long work on Greek mythology not only provides a better understanding of his aesthetics and cultural criticism, but also opens up a new perspective to the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in modern Chinese intellectual history, with potential repercussions on contemporary China.