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Aug. 9th, 2021 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pengwernBaseless claims I would need to do a lot more research on but that I'm throwing here for later:
Oscar Wilde's Salome or Green Knight influencing the kiss in Lu Xun's Mei Jianchi/Forging the Swords” (Zhu Jian 铸剑) (1926).
CW for fairytale gore:
(short rundown on Lu Xun: one of the most famous republic era literati and revolutionary writer, the story is a retelling of a mythological story where a swordmaker is inevitably killed by the king he forged a masterblade for bc swords = weapon development, but this guy made two swords and his son has the other as he grows up for his revenge -- only to meet some guy promising to fulfill his revenge if the son will let himself be beheaded, to be taken along with the other sword as a gift to the king. Dark stranger goes to court, promises the king entertainment if he provides a cauldron full of boiling water (cauldrons being significant objects in ancient bronze age culture) and tosses the head in like a little light garnish, whereupon it sings sweetly in the swirling waters; the king approaches and is beheaded by dark stranger, who beheads himself as well so that all three heads spin around in a death match within the boiling vessel. And finally when they all sink to the bottom, spent, the horrified court fishes out fragments that cannot be identified and everything is eventually buried in the same tomb) I read this when I was eight and went @_____@ somehow I am not the most horrified at this story in the collection!
there's a lot of precedent for "let me bring the head of your enemy to you as a token of my sincerity" in cn narratives/history - see all the stuff in the Three Kingdoms era, or even the pre-unification times where some guy will literally say "let me borrow your head" to someone else (apocryphal)
BUT kissing does seems....not...to be a part of it? not so much no homo, even, it's just that kissing isn't a motif in general unlike lays or medieval (european) customs, which is what makes it interesting - I need to compare the description in the story to Salome. Time matches up...? The story is very clearly allegorical, and I see articles talking about how the three dead men represent the oppressed, the rulers, and agitators like Lu Xun himself (the dark stranger introducing himself with a pen name that Lu Xun once used), where nobody makes it out alive _(:з)∠)_
Quote from the story to compare - I don't know if there's some other (western) modernist work also involving kisses that I might be missing as well.
“呵呵!”他一手接剑，一手捏着头发，提起眉间尺的头来，对着那热*的死掉的嘴唇，接吻两次，并且冷冷地尖利地笑。
"Heh!" He took the sword in one hand, grabbed the hair in the other, and lifting Mei Jiancun's head up, kissed twice the warm lips that had died, and coldly and sharply laughed.
...man looking at Lu Xun again it definitely reads....like...more western tinged? In the way his vocab and possibly even sentences are formed. (Classical and vernacular but historical chinese have grammar and other stuff that makes it difficult to translate directly.)
(Side note that there was a hilarious part in Lu Xun's memoirs about him learning English and German:
him learning english: 几乎四整天是英文：“It is a cat。”“Is it a rat？(Almost four whole days of english.)
这回不是It is a cat了，是Der Mann，Die Weib，Das Kind。.(This time it wasn't It is a cat)
*(lit, hot dead lips in YOUR menacing wolf filled forest)
Oscar Wilde's Salome or Green Knight influencing the kiss in Lu Xun's Mei Jianchi/Forging the Swords” (Zhu Jian 铸剑) (1926).
CW for fairytale gore:
(short rundown on Lu Xun: one of the most famous republic era literati and revolutionary writer, the story is a retelling of a mythological story where a swordmaker is inevitably killed by the king he forged a masterblade for bc swords = weapon development, but this guy made two swords and his son has the other as he grows up for his revenge -- only to meet some guy promising to fulfill his revenge if the son will let himself be beheaded, to be taken along with the other sword as a gift to the king. Dark stranger goes to court, promises the king entertainment if he provides a cauldron full of boiling water (cauldrons being significant objects in ancient bronze age culture) and tosses the head in like a little light garnish, whereupon it sings sweetly in the swirling waters; the king approaches and is beheaded by dark stranger, who beheads himself as well so that all three heads spin around in a death match within the boiling vessel. And finally when they all sink to the bottom, spent, the horrified court fishes out fragments that cannot be identified and everything is eventually buried in the same tomb) I read this when I was eight and went @_____@ somehow I am not the most horrified at this story in the collection!
there's a lot of precedent for "let me bring the head of your enemy to you as a token of my sincerity" in cn narratives/history - see all the stuff in the Three Kingdoms era, or even the pre-unification times where some guy will literally say "let me borrow your head" to someone else (apocryphal)
BUT kissing does seems....not...to be a part of it? not so much no homo, even, it's just that kissing isn't a motif in general unlike lays or medieval (european) customs, which is what makes it interesting - I need to compare the description in the story to Salome. Time matches up...? The story is very clearly allegorical, and I see articles talking about how the three dead men represent the oppressed, the rulers, and agitators like Lu Xun himself (the dark stranger introducing himself with a pen name that Lu Xun once used), where nobody makes it out alive _(:з)∠)_
Quote from the story to compare - I don't know if there's some other (western) modernist work also involving kisses that I might be missing as well.
“呵呵!”他一手接剑，一手捏着头发，提起眉间尺的头来，对着那热*的死掉的嘴唇，接吻两次，并且冷冷地尖利地笑。
"Heh!" He took the sword in one hand, grabbed the hair in the other, and lifting Mei Jiancun's head up, kissed twice the warm lips that had died, and coldly and sharply laughed.
...man looking at Lu Xun again it definitely reads....like...more western tinged? In the way his vocab and possibly even sentences are formed. (Classical and vernacular but historical chinese have grammar and other stuff that makes it difficult to translate directly.)
(Side note that there was a hilarious part in Lu Xun's memoirs about him learning English and German:
him learning english: 几乎四整天是英文：“It is a cat。”“Is it a rat？(Almost four whole days of english.)
这回不是It is a cat了，是Der Mann，Die Weib，Das Kind。.(This time it wasn't It is a cat)
*(lit, hot dead lips in YOUR menacing wolf filled forest)
no subject
Date: 2021-08-09 06:17 pm (UTC)Man, so much for the "dig two graves" theory of revenge.
He took the sword in one hand, grabbed the hair in the other, and lifting Mei Jiancun's head up, kissed twice the warm lips that had died, and coldly and sharply laughed.
I can see why you are wondering about influence from Wilde. That line does not especially echo the language of Salomé's address to the head of Jokanaan, but the gesture is remarkable. The other thing this entire story is really making me think of is early modern English revenge tragedies, which are big into mutilation and grotesquerie—characters get dismembered all over Titus Andronicus, a murder is accomplished via a kiss from a poisoned skull in The Revenger's Tragedy—and generally end with the survivors standing around going ". . . welp." (My favorite shorthand for this trope comes from Adam McNaughtan's "Oor Hamlet": "And Fortinbras, knee-deep in Danes, lived happy ever after.") Hamlet can be considered an unusually classy variant of this genre in that the protagonist just talks chillingly to a skull, he doesn't use it as a prop in his revenge on Claudius. In The Spanish Tragedy, the personification of Revenge is an actual character. You get this sort of stuff from Senecan tragedy, which is like Euripides but with a much higher gore budget.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-10 07:33 am (UTC)I know there's plenty of gore in the terse bamboo strip chronicles from way back when (I've been going through the archives of one person who ported over their lofter history rpf fic of the ~2000 year annals where 42/61 have the major character death tag RIP), but .... that expansion of the interiority of our main character and the pointedly allegorical wolves in the forest, devouring the main character and in turn being devoured in the same way, and the way the prose itself feels like "translationese", if that's a thing in other languages? In the bit of the memoirs where the "Is it a cat" bits of english exercise came from, Lu Xun points out in the next sentence that four days of english/one day of cn lit, where the material remains in the antiquated and outdated register that's been so haplessly ineffectual in the face of modernization, so he's got to be aware of this... ? And going line by line, there are places where it's really easy for me to tip it into english, in ways that...one could find a different way of expressing in chinese? But then since I'm not at all familiar with primary sources from this time, whether it's in the vernacular or not, I also can't make a definitive statement here. He is perfectly good at rendering dialogue of people who feel like regular people in the republic era though.
.
(found a translation in case you want to skim: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/luxun-calltoarms.html#Forging )
Thank you for prompting this ramble \o/ It's fascinating and I really do not have the background to see how to put it together and did not expect to go down this rabbit hole, but I'd probably need to check out 1) contemporary writing in the republic 2) novels and plays of the Ming and Qing 3) stuff available in translation at the time 4) ...Symbolist works? There was a time when I was very fond of Pierrot Lunaire without comprehending it at all XD All those rubies red and royal with gore...
no subject
Date: 2021-08-10 08:48 am (UTC)That is a bit of an attrition rate, yeah.
and the way the prose itself feels like "translationese", if that's a thing in other languages?
I don't see why it shouldn't be. I feel like any language that can be translated into another can bring its rhythms and flavor along with it, even into the independent work of the writer conversant with it. Even now, it happens occasionally to me with Latin or Greek.
found a translation in case you want to skim
WHAT THE FUCK AAAAAAAAAH.
(It reminds me even more of a revenge tragedy now, though. The rat feels like foreshadowing.)
...Symbolist works? There was a time when I was very fond of Pierrot Lunaire without comprehending it at all XD All those rubies red and royal with gore...
I love Pierrot Lunaire! The Symbolists would definitely be worth checking out, if you're already looking at Wilde and if they would have been available to Lu Xun.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-10 01:20 pm (UTC)Was there a notable point in Chinese history when kissing became a Thing at all? I have this vague memory that in ancient Rome there was a specific point at which it started showing up.
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Date: 2021-08-11 03:05 am (UTC)This one eek line about a courtesan is like "her jade arms have cushioned thousands her crimson lips are tasted by ten thousands" but that's the word for taste, not kiss/吻。
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Date: 2021-08-11 05:48 am (UTC)It appears that he also took inspiration for his Diary of a Madman from Gogol as he went to one of those schools (and to medical school in Japan.)