MCLC: Fu Lei, spirit for the ages

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Fu Lei, spirit for the ages
***********************************************************

Source: Caixin (12/27/13):
http://english.caixin.com/2013-12-27/100622857.html

A Spirit for the Ages
The translator and critic Fu Lei was harassed into suicide during the
Cultural Revolution, but his passion for art continues to inspire China's
young people
By Sheila Melvin, Caixin

On a chilly day at the end of October, the cinerary urn that holds the
ashes of Fu Lei – one of 20th century China's great intellectuals – was
moved from a cemetery in Shanghai's Xuhui District to another in Nanhui,
Pudong, where Fu was born. There it was reburied alongside the urn that
holds the earthly remains of Fu's wife and intellectual partner, Zhu
Meifu. 

 
The posthumous reunification of the devoted couple is especially fitting
because they chose not only to live together, but also to die together, by
joint suicide on September 3, 1966. The stone that marks the new tomb is
engraved with a line, written by Fu himself, that is a stellar summation
of his life: "The loneliness of an innocent heart leads to the creation of
a new world." Fu did indeed help to create a new world in China – at least
in the realm of culture – and the impact of his contribution continues to
this day.

 
Fu Lei was born in Shanghai in 1908, grew up in the stimulating turmoil of
the May Fourth era, and went to study in France from 1928-32. While
abroad, he attended classes at the University of Paris and the Louvre
Academy of Fine Arts History, availed himself of the French capital's rich
cultural offerings, and began translating short stories by writers like
Alphonse Daudet from French into Chinese. At some point during his stay,
he came across a copy of Romain Rolland's biography of Beethoven, an
experience that proved seminal to the young Fu. As he described it, "I
burst into tears and suddenly felt as if I had been enlightened by the
divine light and gained the power of rebirth. From that time on, I
wonderfully took heart, which was indeed a great event in my whole life."
Fu henceforward devoted himself to art, music and literature with
single-minded passion and near-unparalleled productivity.

 
Upon returning to China, Fu became a professor of French and art history
at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, which was founded by the artist Liu
Haisu. He wrote Twenty Lectures on World Masterpieces for his classes,
essays later published as a book that introduced a generation to great
works of European art. Fu left his teaching job after only a year to
concentrate on translating. He was thoroughly enamored with the works of
Rolland – who won the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature – and by the heroic,
larger-than-life artists about whom Rolland wrote. He translated Rolland's
biographies of Beethoven, Michelangelo and Tolstoy into Chinese and then
tackled the author's magnum opus, the 10-volume novel Jean-Christophe,
whose fictional hero Rolland described as "Beethoven in the modern world."
Fu's translation of Jean-Christophe was more than a million words and
included extensive prefaces and numerous footnotes in which he explained
European culture – musical, religious, mythological – to his Chinese
readers. (My husband found the work so inspiring that he still has the
copy he read when it was re-issued after the Cultural Revolution.) This,
together with the Beethoven biography, did much to instill the admiration
of Beethoven and love for his music that remains so robust in China.

 
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Fu continued to work
as a freelance translator – the only one in the entire country, according
to the scholar Tian Chuanmao. He concentrated on the works of Honore de
Balzac, who remained acceptable under socialism because he was considered
a "realist" and because Balzac's works had been admired by both Marx and
Engels. Fu developed his own translation style, known simply as the Fu Lei
Style. He compared the act of translating to painting and explained: "What
is sought is not formal resemblance but spiritual resemblance." Fu's way
with words was widely admired and influenced numerous writers. As time
went on and the boundaries allowed to creativity and free expression grew
ever narrower, Fu continued to do things his way. Indeed, the scholars Li
Tuo and Geremie Barme have written of the "Mao style" or "Mao speak" that
was imposed on spoken and written Chinese beginning in the 1950s, part of
an effort not only to standardize the language, but to unify thinking and
expression. But the scholar Nicolai Volland, who analyzed Fu's translation
and re-translation of Balzac's Pere Goriot (from 1946, 1951 and 1963),
argues that Fu resisted this linguistic conformity, continuing to
emphasize rhythm and melody in his prose, to employ classical Chinese
expressions, and thereby effectively "maintained a stylistic alternative
to the officially endorsed mode of writing."

 
Fu Lei's passion for music remained a driving force throughout his life.
His wife was an accomplished classical pianist and they raised their
oldest son, Fu Cong (Fou Ts'ong) to become a pianist, too. Fu oversaw his
son's many daily hours of practice, punishing the child for lack of
diligence and ultimately pulling him out of school. He hired tutors to
teach Fu Cong math and English, and educated him in the Chinese classics
himself, focusing on narrative and pastoral poetry. When his son left for
Poland to participate in a piano competition, Fu Lei wrote, "He knows that
he has taken only the first step in a rich limitless world of artistic
opportunity. My hope for him – as I told him before he left for Poland –
is this: 'You must first of all be a man, then an artist, then a musician
and lastly a pianist.'" Fu Cong went on to win a prize in the 1955 Chopin
Competition – an astounding feat for a Chinese pianist of that era – and
stayed in Poland to study. Fu Lei then began to write a series of 200
letters to his son, filled with his thoughts on life, and emphasizing the
need to remain humble and innocent in service of great art.

 
Fu Lei devoted his life to art but could not escape politics. In 1957 he
was declared a "rightist." His son feared the same fate and opted not to
come home, leaving Warsaw for London and eventually becoming a British
citizen. Premier Zhou Enlai enabled Fu to continue corresponding with his
son, and there was even a phone call or two, but the family would never
again be reunited. Fu Lei persisted in his translations, perfecting them
late into the night, writing with ink and brush in the study he called
Strong Wind and Swift Rain. But the brutal harassment and public
humiliation that he and Zhu Meifu were subjected to by Red Guards in the
early months of the Cultural Revolution proved too much and the couple
hung themselves from the metal grill door frames of their bedroom with
(according to Claire Roberts) lengths of hand-woven cotton cloth from
Pudong. The ever meticulous and honest Fu left a package on his desk that
included rent for September, payment for the housekeeper and a list of
borrowed items that needed to be returned to friends.

 
Fu was posthumously rehabilitated in 1979 and his oldest son returned home
to join his younger brother, Fu Min, in laying their parents' ashes to
rest. Fu's letters were collected and collated by Fu Min and published in
1981 as the Fu Lei Family Letters. The  book has sold well over a million
copies and motivated generations of young people with its determined
idealism, devotion to art and profound expressions of parental love that
are perhaps best described as "the Fu Lei Spirit." Though the injustice
done to Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu is heart-rending, Fu's passionate devotion to
art, unyielding perfectionism and faith in humanity can serve as
inspiration to us all. As he wrote in his translator's notes to
Jean-Christophe, "It's not a lack of darkness that makes the  day bright
and it's not a lack of fear that makes one a hero. A hero fights with fear
all the time … When you know that other people are suffering too, you will
feel less pain and your faith will be reborn from desperation."

 
The best-selling novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai
Sijie, was partly inspired by Fu Lei's translations of Balzac. The
narrator of the book is sustained through his Cultural Revolution exile by
Fu's Balzac, and when he meets a doctor similarly inspired, he finds
himself sobbing. Wondering why, he decides, "It was hearing the name of
Fu Lei, Balzac's translator – someone I had never even met. It is hard to
imagine a more moving tribute to the gift bestowed by an intellectual on
mankind."

 
Fu Lei's perfectionism led him to re-translate many works that had already
been published and to criticize his own work regularly. Describing his
1944 translation of Pere Goriot, he wrote that it "does not contain major
errors … but the dialogues are stiff and dull, the tone gets stuck up, it
still bears the smell of New Literature, and rhythm and melody didn't
receive due attention, not to speak of the artistic blend of the work as a
whole. Now I have spent three months and made a new translation, polished
it several times, but I am still not entirely satisfied."