CHINESE POET WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: LuXun

The First One we will meet is LuXun from China

Is there enough room in the Bucket for one--  poet --who changed the world? 
I start with LuXun because he is the one who is most distant from me--not just in time but in his place and his destiny. 
This man who wanted to be a doctor turned to poetry as a way to better heal the pain in his country.  He is a very subtle poet.

Subtlety is the mark of a great poet in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditions.  So he disguises his meanings and he hides in symbolism. The difficulty of  anyone being certain of his meaning acted as a safeguard in a country that is ruled by despots and Emperors --there can be some  mortal danger if your objections ring out too clearly.

AND YET---and yet the  suffering people must know that you speak for them and that you are their champion. So that is a hard trick to pull off. 

 LuXun approached writing through the Short Story and there he made a revolutionary innovation.  He used the vernacular form of Chinese when he wrote--he used  the  words that people used in daily life and that  made his work accessible to his readers. He also loved the visual  that can communicate with out words and he  promoted a certain kind of Chinese  woodblock that could depict the suffering of the people.

AS a poet he  even delineated his work as in the Classical Style or in the Modern Style. This would help his readers to know how much ambiguity or clarity they could hope to find.
But one thing that he was always clear about--his own love for China and his  mastery of the older forms.

I wanted to  put LuXun first in my poetry workshop but I found it difficult to find translations of his work online. So I ordered a  book of his poems from AMAZON from a third party seller. 

Yesterday the slim volume appeared in Pawtucket entitled 
LuXun Selected Poems.  It  had his portrait on the cover and  was a Chinese  Book printed in China. To my delight I found an old sales slip used as a book mark that showed that someone in China had purchased this book with  four others in 2003.

I was glad to have an authentic version in my hands and not one  that showed the  bias of the Cold War. Scholars have been able to present LuXun's  achievement  more fully since the end of the Cold War.  They praise his style and also his psychological  insights.

I am going to pick one poem for us to read and  talk about.

As I  start to read through the volume I am stopped by another  small red book mark; it  brings my attention to a poem that  blows me away.

AN INSCRIPTION FOR THE SANYI  STUPA

My first reaction: this is too coded and  mysterious for me--I am not sure I know exactly what a stupa is.

Then I read the opening inscription and my heart breaks---
"The Sanyi Stupa was built to hold the bones of a pigeon once left alive in Sanyi Lane, Zhabei, Shanghai. In Japan such stupas are made by the peasants."
I could not make this up! 
A stupa for a dead pigeon!  
If you have read my  blog entry on "Birds in the Bucket" about my brief and intense  friendship with a pigeon I called SMOKEY, you may recall that  with neighborhood children I made a stupa of piled stones for his grave site. And  we did that sort of instinctively before we knew the name for it. A STUPA IN PAWTUCKET

Here is the text of Lu Xun's poem.  Here is his inscription:

When thunder and raging fires were slaughtering mankind
Amid the ruins survived a starving pigeon
One of great heart that took it from the ashes,
Later to build for it an Eastern tomb.
When the bird's spirit wakes it carries stones;
Warriors stand firm to stem the flood together.
After we two brothers have endured a kalpa
We shall meet smiling and our hate shall die.

QUESTION--WHAT IS A KALPA??
A Kalpa is an aeon, a length of time in which a universe can come into being,  thrive, destroy itself, and leave a long period of nothing  behind.  It is the APOCALYPSE

So in this poem the poet imagines that the spirit of the dead pigeon when he awakes will carry stones to help those who are still fighting to stand firm.
Eventually, the men who are fighting will meet and will see that they have more in common.  They will see the Brotherhood of Humanity--what connects us is eternal and will withstand  any tests that time brings to us. The pigeon will even join in the struggle and  this shows the solidarity of all sentient beings.