Five British Writers, Dozens of Chinese Translators: The British Library's Manuscript Show in Shanghai Is Worth the Trip

"Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures from the British Library" runs at the Shanghai Library from March 15 to April 15.

"Reader, I went to Shanghai…"

Borrowing the cadence of "Reader, I married him," the line the British writer Charlotte Brontë put in the last chapter of Jane Eyre, the British Library's curators opened their introduction to "Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures from the British Library" with that sentence.

The exhibition opened at the Shanghai Library on March 15. In the Charlotte Brontë section you can see the Jane Eyre manuscript itself. The curators deliberately turned it to the final chapter; look carefully through Charlotte's neat round hand and the famous line is there.

The other four manuscripts are drafts of poems from T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats along with his letters on the behavior of cats; a draft of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet to Lord Byron; five original pages of Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers; and D. H. Lawrence's letter to his agent about a plan to publish The Rainbow secretly after the novel was banned.

Shown alongside them are translations of these five writers by dozens of Chinese translators, and the various editions Chinese readers bought and read.

The two libraries' curators want visitors to get two things out of the show: from the manuscripts themselves, a sense of how each writer worked, what kind of person each was, and how a book travels from the writer's desk to its readers; and from the rest of the material, the history of how British literature reached Chinese.

They picked these five writers, and these five manuscripts, to match what the Shanghai Library already holds and to keep the range wide — fiction, letters and poetry drafts.

"The choice of exhibits is tied closely to what the Shanghai Library already has. We hold a signed limited edition of Lawrence, for instance, which we think is wonderful, so of course we chose Lawrence as one of the authors… The Dickens manuscript made a deep impression on me, because the Shanghai Library happens to own a book from Dickens's own library. That matters a great deal — through that one book you can connect a British writer to Shanghai," said Huang Xiangong, director of the Shanghai Library's Historical Documents Center, in an interview.

To bring out that connection, the show adds a few special items.

One is the original inscription the British playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote for the Shanghai dramatist Huang Zuolin. Shaw wrote it on July 10, 1937, three days after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The tone is fervent. After the short exclamation "Arise, China!" Shaw goes on:

"The future of the Eastern world is yours, if you have the perseverance and the courage to take hold of it. The scripture of that future will be Chinese drama. Do not use my plays; make your own."

The letter is displayed with Huang Zuolin's own handwritten translation, set inside the handsome photograph album Shaw had made for him. The cover is trimmed in Morocco goatskin, with the single character Xiao — the Chinese for Shaw — stamped in the middle. Shaw told Huang: "When you go back and put on a production you are happy with, paste the stills in here." Huang valued the gift so much that he never pasted in a single photograph.

There is also Tales from Overseas (《谈瀛小录》), published in Shen Bao in May 1872 — the earliest work of translated fiction in China, taken from the Lilliput section of the British writer Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. And there is a book from Dickens's private library, Narrative of the Second Campaign in China (《中国第二次战役纪行》), with Dickens's bookplate on the inside front cover: a lion holding a Maltese cross.

The exhibition is part of "The British Library in China: Sharing Knowledge and Culture," a three-year cultural exchange program. The library has already staged two manuscript shows in China, with the National Library of China and with the Muxin Art Museum. After Shanghai, it goes to Hong Kong.

If you get to Shanghai before April 15, the show is worth an afternoon. If not, read on — or visit the Chinese-language site the British Library has launched — for more on the exhibition and the five writers.

The Shelley beyond "Ode to the West Wind"

The Shelley line Chinese readers know best is the last one of "Ode to the West Wind": "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

But the draft on show is not that poem. It is the sonnet Shelley wrote to Byron, "Sonnet to Byron" (on the manuscript it is titled simply "To ——"). Alexandra Ault, the British Library curator, calls it "a poem by one Romantic poet to a more famous Romantic poet."

The poem sits on a tiny sheet of paper with trimmed edges. The creases show it was once folded into a square, then tucked into a notebook or carried in a pocket. Shelley's wife Mary Shelley — better known as the author of Frankenstein — kept it first. After copying the poem out, she gave the manuscript to her friend Charlotte Murchison.

Then, at a Sotheby's sale on December 16, 1931, it passed to the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig. In 1986 Zweig's trustees gave the manuscript, with the rest of his collection, to the British Library — which is why it can hang here at all.

In 1908 Lu Xun published an essay on Shelley, On the Power of Mara Poetry (《摩罗诗力说》), in Henan, a magazine put out by Chinese students in Japan. He signed it Lingfei. The whole thing is in classical Chinese; word for word in modern Chinese the title would read "On the power of demon-like poetry." He made it long on purpose — he had heard the editors of Henan liked long articles, and longer meant a bigger fee. It became one of the most important essays of its time.

Shelley's poetry first circulated in China through two translators, Su Manshu and Guo Moruo, whose methods could hardly have been further apart.

Su Manshu preferred classical verse forms. He turned Shelley's short poem "Winter" into a five-character old-style poem that reads like the work of an ancient Chinese poet. Guo Moruo wrote in the vernacular. He translated "Ode to the West Wind," but his free verse broke the terza rima Shelley had built the poem on, and with it the original's strict music.

How Jane Eyre got published

Publisher after publisher turned down the semi-autobiographical Jane Eyre before it appeared in 1847. To make the book easier for publishers and readers to swallow — and to stop people who knew her from matching characters and incidents to real life — Charlotte Brontë withheld her own name and used a man's: Currer Bell.

In August 1847 the manuscript reached Smith, Elder & Co., then a publishing house nobody had heard of. George Smith loved the story and had it in print two months later.

The original manuscript is thick, three volumes in all; the third is the one on show. It went to the printers Stewart and Murray, where compositors broke it into chapters, picked out the type and set the novel. So lean in: on the left of the displayed page you can find inky fingerprints, and on the right a faint pencilled word, "Swindell" — presumably the man who printed that page.

"Brontë's writing life began with this manuscript. The publisher had no reputation before it, and became famous after Jane Eyre. The manuscript shows you that the author was not fighting alone, not shut in a room writing by herself, but working back and forth with her publisher. You can see, in the physical object, the whole passage from first draft to wide circulation," Ault said.

The book's Chinese career had its own detours.

Zhou Shoujuan translated it first, under the title Light Restored (《重光记》), in Heartstrings (《心弦》), published by Shanghai's Dadong Book Company in July 1925. Zhou belonged to the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School and wrote romances. Heartstrings was the fourth volume of a romance series called "Our Lovers," collecting his condensed or excerpted translations of Western love stories.

Zhou called Jane Eyre "surely one of the very greatest romance novels," but his "great" stayed inside his school's terms: a love story and nothing more. His manner of translating was just as characteristic. Charlotte Brontë came out as "Jialü Bailangdie," and Jane Eyre as "Yanhen Yi'er."

Only in September 1936, when Li Jiye's complete retranslation from the original, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (《简爱自传》), was published by Shanghai's Life Bookstore, did Chinese readers get a fuller view of Jane Eyre and of the British society she moved in. The book included Charlotte Brontë's preface to the second edition, which recorded the attacks and slurs the British establishment aimed at the novel, and her reply to them.

Charles Dickens, writing at speed

Dickens's manuscripts, scrawled and dense with crossings-out and revisions, were the bane of printing-house workers. The Pickwick Papers pages on show prove it.

He wrote fast and revised as he went, partly because the book first came out in instalments. Between 1836 and 1837, the adventures of Pickwick and the club he founded appeared monthly in 19 parts. Only when the serial finished in 1837 were the stories gathered into a single novel.

"What makes this manuscript interesting is that you see not only the story as Dickens wrote it, but also what the people who handled the manuscript — the printers, say — thought of it… The manuscript was printed as a serial, and only when the serial was complete did a bound novel exist. So you can follow the whole route of the work, from manuscript to instalments to novel," Ault said in an interview.

As with Jane Eyre, the first Chinese Pickwick, A Comic History of Travel (《旅行笑史》), also passed through Mandarin Duck and Butterfly hands: three translators, Li Changkuan, Chen Xiaodie and his father Chen Xu (a well-known writer of that school), produced it together for Zhonghua Book Company in 1918. The volume is thin, because they translated only the first nineteen chapters and cut a great deal more on the grounds that it had nothing to do with the main plot.

What they did not cut was the comedy, which they often spiced up until it was broader than the original. Playing up incident and fun was common in the early Dickens translations — a fair sample of the "popular literary taste" of the day.

Lin Shu, the celebrated translator, produced Chinese versions of several major Dickens novels. He knew no foreign language himself. Each time he worked with his partner Wei Yi, who read the text aloud in Chinese while Lin shaped and polished the prose. Lin rated Dickens very highly — above the other two writers he had translated, Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas fils — and put him on a level with Zuo Qiuming, Sima Qian, Ban Gu and Han Yu.

D. H. Lawrence fights back

On November 29, 1915, D. H. Lawrence wrote to his London agent, James Brand Pinker. He was talking with friends, he said, about printing and publishing The Rainbow privately, by subscription.

About two weeks earlier the novel — which follows three generations of an English family from 1840 to 1905 — had been tried for its explicit sexual content and banned from sale in Britain; booksellers were ordered to destroy their stock.

His more famous later novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, met the same fate for the same sort of reason. First published in 1928, it could not be published legally in Britain until 1960.

The first Chinese Lady Chatterley's Lover was translated by Rao Shuyi and brought out under his own name in 1936. The print run was tiny, just 2,000 copies; they were snapped up at once and pirated editions multiplied.

Rao's complete translation is a good one. He stayed close to the original, and said he had not translated the novel to give people something diverting to read, but because he admired the seriousness of Lawrence's thinking and the literary worth of the book. Lawrence's aim, he argued, was to strip the mystery that respectable society had wrapped around sex — "to take what the body needs most, needs most deeply, as the starting point, and through the touch of a great tenderness bring forth a new morality, a new society, a new life."

T. S. Eliot, cat person

The Eliot who wrote The Waste Land and the Eliot who wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats hardly seem like the same man. The first is dead serious, the second funny and lovable. Probably because he really did like children and cats.

One letter on show catches that playfulness exactly. The day he wrote to his friend Polly Tandy happened to be February 13, 1940, the eve of Valentine's Day. So on the notepaper he used for his reviews for the literary magazine Criterion, he pencilled a few hearts and a man pierced by Cupid's arrow.

In the same letter he shared a fragment of a poem about Grizabella, a glamour cat past her prime. "It is a sad tale," he wrote, "and even rather horrid." Worried that the poem was too "upsetting" for young readers, he left "Grizabella" out of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats when it finally appeared in 1939.

Years after his death, his wife Valerie showed the fragments to the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. In 1981 Webber made the musical Cats, in which Grizabella became a leading part.

The letters on show, exchanged with the family of the marine biologist and broadcaster Geoffrey Tandy, are full of offhand lines of a kind Eliot rarely wrote. On how to keep a cat, he offered this: "When a cat has decided on you… there is nothing to be done." He kept a good many himself.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats began as verses for the children of Eliot's friends and for his own godchildren; more than a dozen cats appear in it, each with a name and a personality of its own. Before publication its main readers were the children of his publisher, Geoffrey Faber.

The Waste Land made Eliot's reputation. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was his best seller.

Eliot reached Chinese readers largely through one outstanding translator, Zhao Luorui. In 1935, while taking her master's degree at Tsinghua University's Institute of Foreign Literature, she made a trial translation of the first section of The Waste Land. The next year, at Dai Wangshu's invitation, she translated the whole poem together with Eliot's own notes, and in 1937 published the first complete Chinese Waste Land.

They met once, in July 1946 at the Harvard Club. To thank her for the translation, Eliot gave her a signed copy of his poems, writing on the flyleaf: "Signed for Zhao Luorui."

The cover image and all images in the text are provided by the British Library; the banner shows the British Library building and its forecourt (© British Library Board), and the tall cover image is from Jane Eyre (the BBC version), from Douban.