Repository path: workshop/translations/yingyi-jiejixing/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

「硬譯」與「文學的階級性」 §五 — single-pass draft

This is the frozen draft required by R04 §Procedure step 2a, and it is therefore an R06 output in its own right. It is committed before the self-revision begins, so that the R06/R04 pair is real rather than reconstructed. The revised text, the full translator's log covering both passes, and the source and contamination apparatus are on T-yingyi-jiejixing-R04-v1.

• Source: Lu Xun 魯迅, 「硬譯」與「文學的階級性」 ("Hard Translation" and the "Class Character of Literature", March 1930; collected in 《二心集》, 1932), §五 entire. Chinese Wikisource, traditional-character text; stored at ../source-zh-sec5.txt (7 paragraphs, 1,999 non-whitespace characters). Public domain (Lu Xun d. 1936).
• Regime: R06 (lead single-pass). Cost: $0, never ledgered.
• Contamination: suspected pending measurement — this work has a standard English translation (Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, Selected Works of Lu Hsun vol. III, Foreign Languages Press) which is freely reachable, so the gate can be run here and is run on T-yingyi-jiejixing-R04-v1. The declaration on this draft is the conservative prior, not a measurement.
• No published rendering of this passage into any language was consulted. Translated from the Chinese alone. The comparator was downloaded before drafting and located by heading offsets only, per method note (abm); none of its prose was displayed.

§5

Here I can come back to my "hard translation" again.

Thinking it over, this is a question that ought quite properly to follow: since proletarian literature has its weight in propaganda, and propaganda must be understood by the many — then these "hard-translated" and unintelligible theoretical "books from heaven" of yours, what in the end were they translated for? Is it not the same as not translating them?

My answer is: for myself, and for a few people who set up as critics of proletarian literature, and for that part of the readership which is not out for "ease", is not afraid of hard going, and wants to understand something of this theory.

Since the year before last the attacks on me personally have been beyond counting; in every kind of periodical one is fairly sure to see the name "Lu Xun", and the writers' tone, at a rough glance, is mostly that of revolutionary men of letters. But I read a few of the pieces and gradually came to feel that there was too much idle talk in them. The scalpel does not find the seam of the flesh; where the bullet strikes is not a fatal spot. Take the class I belong to: it has not been settled to this day — now it is petty bourgeois, now "bourgeois", sometimes it is promoted to "feudal remnant", and again it is the same thing as an ape (see the "Tokyo Letter" in Creation Monthly); on one occasion the abuse went as far as the colour of my teeth. In a society like this it is entirely possible for a feudal remnant to be in the limelight, but that a feudal remnant should be an ape is explained by no "materialist conception of history" whatever, nor can one find the argument by which yellow teeth are harmful to the proletarian revolution. So I thought: there is too little of this sort of theory available for reference, and that is why everyone is somewhat muddled. Dissecting the enemy and chewing him up cannot at present be avoided; but with a book of anatomy and a book of cookery, and the business done by the book, the structure and the flavour can after all be made rather clearer and rather better. People often compare the Prometheus of the myth to the revolutionary, holding that in stealing fire and giving it to men, and in not repenting though he suffered the tyranny of the Lord of Heaven, his largeness and endurance are just the same. But I stole the fire from another country with the intention of cooking my own flesh, thinking that if the flavour were better the chewers on their side might get more good out of it, and I should not have wasted my carcass either: the starting point is entirely individualism, and mixed into it besides is a petty-townsman extravagance, and the "revenge" of slowly feeling out the scalpel and stabbing it instead into the heart of the dissector. Mr Liang says, "They want revenge!" In fact it is hardly only "they"; there are plenty of such people among the "feudal remnants" too. Still, I am willing to be of some use to society, and what the onlookers see as a result is fire and light all the same. So the first thing I set my hand to was Literary Policy, because it contains the arguments of all the schools. Mr Zheng Boqi now keeps a bookshop and prints the plays of Hauptmann and Lady Gregory; in those days he was still a revolutionary man of letters, and in Literary Life, which he edited, he laughed at my translating this book as an unwillingness to go under, adding that it was a pity someone else had got in first. That translating a book will float a man up, and that being a revolutionary man of letters is as easy as all that — I do not think so. A certain tabloid said that my translating On Art was a "surrender". Yes: surrenders are common enough in the world. But by that time Marshal Cheng Fangwu had long crawled out of his Japanese hot springs and moved into a Paris hotel, so to whom here was allegiance to be pledged? This year the story is different again: in The Pioneer and in Modern Fiction it is called a "change of direction". I have seen those four characters applied in some Japanese magazines to Kataoka Teppei of the earlier Neo-Sensationist school, where it counted as a good name. In fact all this confused talk is still the old complaint of looking only at labels and refusing even to think. Translating a book about proletarian literature is not enough to prove a direction; if the translation is crooked, it is on the contrary enough to do harm. My translations, then, are to be dedicated to these hasty critics of proletarian literature as well, because they are under an obligation not to covet "ease", and to bear the pain of studying these theories.

But I am confident that I have committed no deliberate crooked translation. When a passage strikes the sore spot of a critic I do not admire, I smile; when it strikes my own sore spot, I bear the pain; but I will not on any account add or take away — and that too is one of the reasons for keeping to "hard translation" from first to last. Naturally there will always be better translators in the world, able to produce writing that is neither crooked nor "hard" nor "dead", and then my versions will of course be weeded out; I have only to come and fill this space between "nothing at all" and "something better".

But there is still a great deal of paper in the world, while the members of each literary society are few; their ambition is large and their strength thin, and they cannot write over all the paper — so the critic whose office in the society it is to overcome enemies, assist friends and sweep out the alien kinds, seeing others come and scribble over paper, sighs deeply and suffers past bearing from shaking his head and stamping his foot. The Shen Bao of Shanghai has gone so far as to call translators of the social sciences "Ah-Dog and Ah-Cat", and its indignation runs to that. Mr Jiang Guang-Z, whose "position in China's new literature has long been known to all readers", once went to Tokyo to convalesce, and meeting Kurahara Korehito talked of how many translations in Japan were so bad that they were simply harder to read than the originals... whereupon he burst out laughing and said: "...then China's translation world must be still more unaccountable. Lately a great many books in China have been translated from the Japanese; if the Japanese carry over a work of some European country with a little error and a little cutting, and it is translated from the Japanese into Chinese, may one ask whether the work will not have changed half its face?..." (see The Pioneer) This too is an expression of deep dissatisfaction with translation, and above all with relay translation. But Mr Liang at least cited the titles of books and their faults, whereas Mr Jiang merely gave a sweet smile and swept the field clean — which is indeed far more universal. Kurahara Korehito has translated a good many works of literary theory and fiction directly from the Russian, and to me personally he has been of the greatest benefit. I hope China too may have one or two such honest translators from the Russian, who will bring out good books one after another, and not merely swear "Blackguard!" once and reckon the duty of a revolutionary man of letters discharged.

But as things are, Mr Liang Shiqiu does not translate these things; the great man who calls people "Ah-Dog and Ah-Cat" does not translate them either; Mr Jiang, who has studied Russian, would have been the most suitable of all, but unfortunately since his convalescence he has brought out only A Week, and Japan has had two versions of it long since. China once talked a great deal about Darwin and a great deal about Nietzsche, and by the time of the European War gave them both a thorough cursing; but of Darwin's works there is to this day only one translation, and of Nietzsche only half a book, while the scholars and great writers who have studied English and German have had no leisure to attend to it, or have not deigned to, and there it was dropped. So for the time being, I am afraid, there is nothing for it but to let people laugh and abuse, and go on relaying from the Japanese, or take a copy of the original and translate it straight with the Japanese version alongside. I still mean to do this, and hope there will be more people who do, to fill up a little of the emptiness inside the thoroughgoing high talk — because we cannot "burst out laughing" as Mr Jiang did, nor ought we to go on, like Mr Liang, "waiting, waiting, waiting".