Virginia Woolf in China: translation, study, and influence

1 Introduction

The year 2021 coincided with the 80th anniversary of the death of the British writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and 2022 marks the 140th anniversary of her birthday. Woolf is a true master of Western Modern fiction and a precursor of feminist culture and literature, whose influence has cultivated and nourished several generations of the Chinese literati. As to the past century, the nature of the influence and inspiration has Woolf had upon China requires, in turn, a review. Since 1928, when Zhimo Xu, the founding poet of the “Crescent Moon” society, first introduced Woolf to China, the Chinese translation and study of Woolf has lasted for 94 years. Accordingly, this paper will give a careful examination of Woolf’s journey in China by dividing it into several phases so as to illustrate the distinct interpretations of Woolf given by the Chinese literati in different historical periods, which makes it clear that historical changes, political interventions, and cultural requirements have greatly impacted on literary development.

2 During the period of the Republic of China (from 1929 to 1949)

After returning from his second tour of Europe, Zhimo Xu gave a lecture titled “About Girls,” to Suzhou Girls’ High School on December 17, 1928. This lecture was later published in the monthly Crescent Moon (《新月》) (volume 2, issue 8), in 1929. In his discussion of the writing conditions for women in China and abroad, Xu referred to Woolf’s famous book-length essay A room of one’s own, mentioning women’s struggle for their ideal space of writing, and sang praises to the extraordinary achievements gained by Chinese and foreign feminist literature (Xu 1991). Woolf’s argument for personal independence and spiritual freedom is based on women’s economic independence, which, due to historical constrictions, failed to strike a responsive chord in Chinese literary circles, although Xu’s effort, with no doubt, heralded an auspicious beginning of the translation and introduction of Woolf in China.

Jingshen Zhao became one of the earliest Chinese writers and scholars to have noticed Woolf and devoted himself to studying Woolf and actively promoting her to Chinese readers. On August 10, 1929, Zhao composed a paper titled “On British novels in the past 20 years,” which was published in the Short Story Magazine (《小说月报》) (volume 20, issue 8). This paper not only mentions several featured British writers of the stream of consciousness, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, which argues that “Mrs. Woolf is of the same great value as Richardson and Joyce,” but also points out all of them were influenced by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and the French writer Marcel Proust for “all of them are famous psychological novelists […] and are greatly influenced by Chekhov and Proust” (Zhao 1929).

During the 1930s, the cultural exchange between China and the West further fermented, and meanwhile there appeared an initial surge of translating Western Modernist writing into Chinese, among which the focus of the introduction of Woolf was cast upon her experimental technique – stream of consciousness. In September 1932, Crescent Moon (volume 4, issue 1) published Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” which was translated by Gongchao Ye. This was thus far the first Chinese translation of her stream-of-consciousness work. Ye not only initiated the Chinese translation of Woolf but also, in his “Translator’s note,” made some relevant remarks on stream of consciousness as a writing technique and on Woolf’s usage of it. Consequently, Ye became the first scholar in Chinese literary circles to have, both topically and formally, broached the subject of stream-of-consciousness novels.

In October 1933, Woolf published her autobiographical novel, Flush, in Britain. The Chinese magazine, The Secular World (《人世间》), published Shengquan Peng’s review of Flush in April 1934. In December 1935, Pu Shi’s translation of Flush was published by Shanghai Commercial Press as one of “The World’s Classics.” Woolf’s Flush was warmly welcomed and greatly favored by its Chinese readers for its brisk and vivid style and was then re-translated and re-published. In September 1934, Art and Literature Magazine (《文艺月刊》) (volume 6, issue 3) published Cunzhong Fan’s free rendition of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which, being the first introduction of Woolf’s “inner reality” and stream-of-consciousness aesthetics to Chinese literary circles, made it more explicit and palpable for the Chinese readers to appreciate her artistic ideal. Zhilin Bian was also one of the scholars who set about translating Woolf into Chinese during the 1930s. In 1934, Bian’s translations of “The Russian point of view” and “In the Orchard” were published by Ta Kung Pao (《大公报》), which was the oldest active Chinese-language newspaper, co-edited by Zhensheng Zhang and Congwen Shen in Tianjin.

In the 1940s, the Chinese translation of Woolf’s works included Qingyao Xie’s excerpted translation of To the Lighthouse and Yidai Feng’s translation of “Modern fiction,” the latter of which was published in Central Plains (《中原》) (volume 1, issue 2), a monthly magazine edited by Moruo Guo. In 1947, Hai Wang translated A room of one’s own into Chinese, which was published by Shanghai Culture and Life Publishing House. The pity was, similar to Zhimo Xu’s lecture two decades previously, although this work was among Woolf’s most powerful and influential studies of feminism and literature, it failed to find an echo in the heart of its Chinese readers, and this situation did not change until half a century later.

To sum up, regarding the first wave of Chinese translation of Modernist writing, the translation and introduction of Woolf began with pure artistic interest in the late 1920s and enjoyed a gradual boom in the 1930s. From the end of the 1930s to the end of the 1940s, due to the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945), the national culture was driven by the burning ambition of self-preservation. The intelligentsia, no longer dwelling in their ivory tower of art, devoted themselves to the great War of Resistance. However, the Chinese Civil War followed hard on the heels of the end of the War of Resistance, which then lasted for four years and under whose influence China was divided into two states separately governed by the Kuomintang (KMT) and by the Communist Party of China (CPC). As a result, the volume of Chinese translations of Western literature dwindled greatly, let alone its publication. “As regards the choice of translation, the social and political conditions set the parameters for the Chinese translation of the British literature which, though, showed great predilection for the realistic works. Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw became the key figures in Chinese translation during the 1940s” (Xie and Zha 2004). Nevertheless, Modernist aesthetics which were too far-fetched to be feasible in China’s reality at that time, such as those of Joyce and Woolf, remained at a tangent. Furthermore, the 1930s was a decade of revolution in the whole world, with numerous writers both in Europe and America returning to realistic creation in comparison to which the experimental novels of stream of consciousness were on the wane. All these reasons contributed to the fact that there remained little chance for the Chinese translation and study of Woolf to be furthered during the 1940s.

Until the end of the 1940s, the ideological function of literature and the authorial attitudes on politics and social class were particularly underlined by the left-wing writers – Chinese writing groups whose aesthetic doctrines were grounded upon revolution and Marxism – in the 1930s and by the literary creation of the liberated areas (governed by CPC) in the 1940s, which grew into the mainstay of Chinese literary circles and then prevailed among the literary development in Mainland China after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Modernism of Western literature was, correspondingly, treated as degenerate and corrupt waste from the West which belonged to the antagonistic camp and should receive its due criticism in the era of the Cold War. Likewise, it was a patent tendency that appeared in both the Chinese translation and study of Woolf.

3 New phase and new era (1978–)

At the dawn of the reform and opening-up, a new section – “Forum on Western Modernism” – appeared in the journal Foreign Literature Studies in its fourth volume of 1980. It included 32 influential papers among which there was an article written by established writer Chi Xu and entitled “Modernization and Modernism” (1980) which advanced and enhanced the domestic discussion of the artistic aesthetics of the Western Modernism. In the same year, An anthology of foreign Modernist works, co-edited by Kejia Yuan, Hengxun Dong, and Kelu Zheng, was published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. Divided into four volumes, each containing two parts, this anthology accommodated 11 literary schools and was over 2,600,000 words long and became the precursor of the Chinese translation and publication of Modern literature in the new era.

In this context, multifarious and profound development occurred in the Chinese translation and study of Woolf. In comparison with the arbitrary and unsystematic study made in the period of the Republic of China, the study of Woolf in the new era was all-encompassing, not only embracing a wide range of her works, from short stories, novels, essays, biographies, to literary and aesthetic writings, but also fully exploring the different styles and techniques applied by Woolf in her early and late experimentation with stream of consciousness and examining her theoretical works pertaining to feminine historicism. Since 2000 in particular, the complete works of Woolf have been published by virtue of the productive organization of several authoritative publishing houses’ – People’s Literature Publishing House, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and China Social Sciences Press for instance – and with the help of the joint efforts of a group of translators. What had been already translated into Chinese welcomed new versions of translation and what had not been previously translated were Woolf’s early and late works which, through this overall project of translation and introduction, received due attention.

The ongoing new versions of Chinese translation and the comprehensive review of her life-long achievements in writing undergirded the advanced study of Woolf. Since the mid-1980s, academic papers on Woolf written by Chinese scholars have sprung up in foreign literary journals. In this new millennium, the academic community has made good progress in expanding the research boundaries in which one could roughly sense the shift of focus in China and abroad, as well as the attempts at new critical methods and the application of new theories.

Attention should firstly be paid to the phenomenon that many monographs have been gradually translated and published in China which concern the examination of the Bloomsbury Group and of the relation between the University of Cambridge, which was germane to the members of the “Bloomsbury Group,” and Chinese modern culture and literature. In 2006, Jiangsu Education Publishing House published a series of monographs (three books) on the cultural life of the Bloomsbury Group, including Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell’s Bloomsbury and S. P. Rosenbaum’s The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of memoirs and commentary (which is divided into two volumes in its translated publication in China). These translated monographs offer a detailed portrayal of the Bloomsbury Group centering around Woolf. In 2008, Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House published American scholar Patricia Laurence’s Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China, which, through the meaningful relationship between Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell and the modern Chinese female writer Shuhua Ling, examines the implicit relation between the writers of the Bloomsbury Group and the Chinese writers of the “Crescent Moon school.” This is a profound study whose comparison between English and Chinese literature is grounded upon the framework of the international development of Modernism.

Secondly, as a well-cultivated woman of letters, Woolf is spiritually bound with the European tradition of literature, which includes her native British literature and her beloved Greek, Russian, and French literature. In this regard, the examination of how Woolf inherits and renovates the literary tradition of Europe becomes instrumental in understanding her importance in the development of European novels. Lin Hao, in her substantial paper “A study of Virginia Woolf in terms of aestheticism” (2006), scrutinizes the relationship between Woolf and the British tradition of literature. In Hao’s argument, Woolf’s distinctive aesthetic tendency makes her special to modern novelists because “aestheticism serves as one of the sources for Woolf in her fiction writing that is characterized by modernity and postmodernity and in her critical theories” (Hao 2006: 37). By revealing the connections between Woolf and the heralds of aestheticism (including John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde) and by comparing the theories of “modern fiction” with the literary doctrines of aestheticism, Hao attempts to unravel how aestheticism influenced Woolf’s Modern aesthetics.

Thirdly, with the rise of postcolonial studies and cultural studies, the discussion concerning the relationship between the East and the West and imagination of the exotic restarts with respect to British writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century. On a personal level, Woolf had relatives and friends who died in war, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, had once been a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service under British colonial rule. Woolf herself suffered greatly under the bombardment of Nazi air force and was exposed to racial persecution from Nazis because of her Jewish husband. All these experiences make it possible to discuss Woolf’s stand on the ideas of the British Empire and war. Chinese scholars, in turn, take interest in the internal connection between Woolf’s views on the British Empire, war, and women. In the twenty-first century in particular, comparative studies regularly focus on Woolf and other writers, with some scholars emphatically relating Woolf to the Chinese writers of stream of consciousness and Chinese female writers. For instance, some scholars have set Woolf side by side with Doris Lessing with respect to “the androgynous ideal” and “the space of writing” (Ji and Han 2004: 125) in order to draw a parallel between them. Other scholars, in a similar vein, have measured Joyce’s “epiphany” against Woolf’s “moments of being” (Jiang 2001: 14).

Fourthly and lastly, Chinese scholars, in advancing their study, become aware of the fact that Woolf’s notion of “modern fiction” and her writing practice were deeply influenced by two members of the Bloomsbury Group – the art critic Roger Fry, with his formal aesthetics, and Clive Bell, with his “significant form.” Other members of the Bloomsbury Group maintained their artistic exploration in harmonious relation with Woolf’s experimental novels, including Woolf’s elder sister Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant – both of whom were post-impressionist painters. Therefore, the current trends in the study of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in China occur in the following two aspects. On the one hand, Chinese scholars try to chart the history of Woolf’s aesthetic characteristics according to the artistic taste and atmosphere cultivated by the Bloomsbury Group, whose members advocated formal aesthetics and visual art. Some scholars, on the other hand, try to inquire into the formative influence of Eastern aesthetics on modern Western formal aesthetics by resorting to the translation, introduction, interpretation, and application of Chinese classical art principles made possible by Arthur Waley, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Woolf, etc.

4 Woolf’s influence on contemporary Chinese feminist literature

Since the 1980s, Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, who are honored as two pioneers in the study of Western feminist culture, have found favor with Chinese readers with the flourishing of Chinese feminist culture. Woolf’s view on feminist culture reverberates with contemporary Chinese feminist writers through the re-translation and re-publication of her representative works, such as A room of one’s own, Three guineas, Women and writing, “Professions for women,” and so forth. Woolf’s influence is manifested in several perspectives. Firstly, it gives vent to the silenced history and the reality of women. Secondly, the plight of women’s writing is fully examined. Thirdly, harmony between the two sexes has become a goal to achieve. Many feminist writers share a deep and special kind of emotion with Woolf, including Ran Chen (陈染), Kun Xu (徐坤), and Xiaobin Xu (徐晓斌), to name but a few.

At the beginning of the reform and opening-up, the author Xinxin Zhang (张辛欣) published her own first writings – Where Did I Miss You? (a short story,《我在哪里错过了你?》) and On the Same Horizon (a novel,《在同一地平线上》). These take women as their narrative subject and the language is pregnant with tension and anxiety so as to present the throbbing schizophrenia experienced by contemporary feminist intellectuals who remain in a tug-of-war between the sexual role imposed by a strait-laced society and their own awakening self-awareness. Through these women narrators’ subjectified expression, Zhang’s writings intend to reveal the extreme agony and constant struggle of those women who are swinging between their ideal of romance and their self-preservation, which can be treated, without doubt, as an early response to Woolf’s call for “a room of one’s own” in the Chinese context of contemporary feminist literature.

In Kun Xu’s view, Woolf’s “room” is registered as a symbol whose great significance is metaphorical (see, e.g., Kun Xu, “Shuangdiao”); it embodies all the social prejudice that a woman may suffer because of her sex, which permeates all aspects of culture where sexual prejudice is inexorably branded into seemingly neutral language. Xu’s short stories “Goddamned Football” (《狗日的足球》) and “Reunion at Mount Liang” (《相聚梁山泊》) are tours de force in reflecting women’s anxiety in reality, since they are unable to make their voices heard. In another short story, The Kitchen (《厨房》), which won the National Excellent Short Story Award of the second Lu Xun Literary Prize, the female protagonist (Zhizi), who graduates from a top university, flees from the “kitchen,” and makes a big splash in the pond of commerce, suddenly “wants to return to the kitchen”: “And now here she is back again, back of her own accord. Willingly and impetuously, she stood tall and walked into this man’s kitchen with no qualms” (Xu 2001: 3). Xu, accordingly, ruminates over the grave problem of how to transplant “a room of one’s own” into the current reality of China with respect to the Chinese culture.

Ran Chen, however, advances a sound argument, based on “the androgynous ideal,” that sexual consciousness should be transcended. In her essay “A winder’s dream awakened by firecrackers” (《炮竹炸碎冬梦》), Chen argues that

[…] in A room of one’s own, Woolf once quoted from Samuel Taylor Coleridge that “a great mind must be androgynous.” As far as I am concerned, this statement suggests, for one thing, that if a writer wants to give direct expression to his/her feeling and thought in a consummate and complete fashion, (s)he should render the male force in spiritual harmony with the female force. For another, I suppose, it also indicates that if there is anyone of a powerful and strong personality, (s)he should never treat the essence of the other in the light of sexual difference. Once someone is fully appreciated, this person should be sexless. Simply taking this person as a man or woman proves nothing but naïveté. (Chen 1996: 80–81)

Chen’s argument insists that one should not be confined within a monosexual perspective. Instead, the two sexes should be reconciled so as to have a better understanding of humankind through the lens of general humanity. This statement can be taken as the native assimilation and response to Woolf’s “androgynous ideal” in China. Chen, in insisting that sexual consciousness should be transcended, not only notices the close connection between sexual harmony and writerly creativity, but also explores the possibility of great personality which has already transcended sexual reconciliation underpinned by sexual awareness. With the further development of feminism, it grows all the more revealing in that the ingrained and ossified notion of dichotomy does serious harm to the human ideal of the harmonious development of two sexes. In addition, the intermediate and realistic significance cherished by Woolf’s “androgynous ideal” attracts a greater deal of attention than ever. Nevertheless, this ideal has never been a stranger to its Chinese readers, because in Daoism there is a great affinity between these two doctrines where yin and yang are always already in oneness. Even in traditional Chinese medicine, the dialectic fusion of yin and yang also proffers a similar teaching to Woolf’s ideal.

In sum, although this overview is taken through such limited perspectives that it remains far from being complete, it still shows the trends and peculiarities of Chinese studies of Woolf in the new era, especially in this new millennium. It is through the critical review of the translation, study, and influence of Woolf in China since the twentieth century that the readers are able to garner a rough idea of the uneven development of the modern transformation of Chinese literature. The reform and opening-up have created agreeable politico-cultural conditions that enable a healthy boost to literature and academic study.