Hermann H
esse’s literary works integrate Indian and Chinese thought into the Christian cultural tradition, which is rare among Western writers. Hesse read Chinese classics that had been translated into German and the secular spirit in ancient Chinese philosophy became a fulcrum for Hesse to reflect on the exclusiveness of Christianity. This cultural awareness and his humanistic thought have won him readers all over the world. The question, then, must be: how has China accepted this writer? Adrian Hsia has discussed Hesse’s impact on Chinese-speaking regions including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
1Martin Pfeifer, ed., Hermann Hesses weltweite Wirkung: Internationale Rezeptionsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 234–60. He correctly argued that a Hesse wave appeared in Taiwan, but wrote little about mainland China. My approach considers the reception and impact of Hesse’s works in mainland China, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Chinese writers and online platforms.
It has been a hundred years since Hermann Hesse’s name was first introduced to China. The reception of his works has fluctuated with the changing political situation in China. In the first half of the twentieth century, the first translations of Hesse’s works were promoted by the New Culture Movement.
2Following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty’s imperial system in 1911, progressive Chinese intellectuals launched an ideological liberation movement against the outdated feudal culture, which came to be known as the New Culture Movement. Yanbing Shen (沈雁宾 pseudonym Mao Dun 茅盾, 1896–1981), a famous left-wing writer, first introduced Hesse to Chinese readers in
Fiction Monthly under a pseudonym, “Xizhen” (希真).
3Fiction Monthly (小说月报, 1910–31) was China’s first, largest, and most influential new literature journal. In August 1922, Shen published A. Filippov’s article “New German Literature”
4This article was also published in The Morning Supplement (晨报副刊), a famous progressive literary newspaper in Beijing, from September 15 to 19, 1922, but the translator was different. in the magazine, recommending Hesse as the best of the new writers after the First World War in Germany. The first of Hesse’s works to be translated into Chinese was
Autorenabend (“作家晚会,” The Writers’ Party, 1912), which appeared in the
Modern Literature Review in August 1931.
5Modern Literature Review (现代文学评论) was a monthly magazine founded in Shanghai, that ran for only seven issues between April and October 1931. The short story satirized the vulgarity of civil society and was translated by Keqing Duan (段可情, 1899–1994), who was also a member of the left-wing literary movement and had studied in the Soviet Union.
The first book-length translation of Hesse into Chinese was
Schön ist die Jugend (“青春是美丽的,” Youth, Beautiful Youth), published in 1936, which included another story, “Der Zyklon” (“大旋风,” The Whirlwind), was part of the “World Literary Masterpieces Series.” The translator, who used the pseudonym “Qiwen” (绮纹, meaning “beautiful style”), was not identified until recent years. His real name was Chaolin Zheng (郑超麟, 1901–98),
6Chaolin Zheng was one of the first modern Chinese to go to France to work part-time while studying, and was also one of the eighteen representatives of the “Young Communist Party” composed of Chinese students studying in Paris. In 1923, he was selected to study in the Soviet Union. After returning to China, he participated in the May Thirtieth Movement (1925), as well as the second and third armed uprisings of Shanghai workers in 1927. He was imprisoned in 1929 and 1931, and again in 1952, spending 27 years in prison as a Trotskyite. and he translated
Schön ist die Jugend while in prison.
The war of resistance against Japan from 1937 to 1945 was immediately followed by China’s four-year civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party (1945–49). Although Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, he had only a few short works translated into Chinese during this turbulent period. These works were mainly translated by the scholar Tianxing Shi (史天行).
7Tianxing Shi had a working knowledge of Esperanto and a little Japanese, and had been jailed many times for his participation in student strikes and revolutionary activities. He died in the turmoil during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In 1947, he translated and published three of Hesse’s shorter works from Esperanto in different journals using the name of “Tianxing.”
As we know, Hesse gained great popularity in the USA in the 1960s. Almost at the same time, the Japanese “Hesse craze” took place from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. In Japan, not only did several major publishing houses compete to publish Hesse’s works, but Kenji Takahashi alone translated and published a fourteen-volume Hesse collection (1957–58).
8Neale Cunningham, Hermann Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021), 146. Similarly, in Korea, a five-volume selection of Hesse’s works was published in the 1950s, and in the 1970s: all Hesse’s major works were translated into Korean with the exception of
Die Morgenlandfahrt.
9Cunningham, Hermann Hesse and Japan, 111–12.In contrast, in the first thirty years (1949–79) following the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when Chinese daily life was dominated by various political movements, only one notable translation of Hesse’s works was published. This was a selection of ten lyric poems translated by Chunqi Qian (钱春绮, 1921–2010), a distinguished translator, in his Selected German Poems (“德国诗选,” 上海文艺出版社, 1960). Hesse was the only living poet in the collection.
It was not until the end of 1978, when the Communist Party of China began to reverse its ultra-left policies and gradually accepted new ideas that the era of “reform and opening-up” began in China. This period saw a resurgence of interest in Hesse and a warmer reception of his work, leading to what is referred to as “Hesse’s Spring” during the 1980s.