The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War caught the immediate attention of a great number of Chinese intellectuals who thus devoted themselves to national salvation. They found the European war literature, especially the Russian-Soviet literature, an important source of inspiration for the Pro-war audience and the ideal nutrition for their own patriotic war-narratives. Previous studies have largely demonstrated the significance of the Chinese Anti-Japanese war literature, mainly written by left-wing writers, and its contribution to the construction of national identity. However, there is little discussion of Chinese modernists’ attachment to the leftist ideology and their contribution to the war-resistance literature. A large portion of Chinese modernists’ criticism and translations of European war literature concerning the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, the Polish-Soviet War, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War and the Great Patriotic War in the particular historical context of China has been overlooked, thus making it a missing chapter in the study of both the Chinese Anti-Japanese war literature and the modernist literature.
This project aims at carrying out research in the Chinese modernists’ reading, criticism, translation and reinterpretation of the European war literature from the transcultural and trans-historical perspective respectively. It will focus on three major Chinese modernist “writers-translators-editors,” namely Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng and Dai Wangshu who introduced and translated over 200 works in the European war literature from five countries and in four languages. By examining their criticism and translations, this project will examine how they reinterpret the war literature written by European writers from different political views, including those of humanists and pacifists (e.g. Romain Rolland), socialists (e.g. Henri Barbusse), anti-fascists (e.g. Heinrich Mann), communists (e.g. Rafael Alberti, Pyotr Pavlenko, Yuri Libedinsky) and fellow-traveler writers (e.g. Vsevolod Ivanov). It will also investigate how they use the translation of the war literature to fulfil their purposes in the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Hong Kong, a movement that struggled to survive under the immense pressure from the pro-Japanese “Peace Movement” and the severe political censorship imposed by the British colonial government.
This project will bring forward an important but long-neglected chapter for the study of the Chinese Anti-Japanese war literature and shed new light on the relation between the study and the European ideological trends. It will extend the research scope to cover the Chinese reception of the European war literature and its literary and political ideas by adding the contribution from modernist writers. It will also deepen our understanding of the transcultural and hybrid nature of the Chinese literary modernity in time of war.
