On the Translation and Introduction of Western Poetry by Protestant Missionaries in Late Qing and Early Republican China by Luo Wenjun (review)

Studies of missionary efforts to bring western learning to China have been flourishing for years. Luo Wenjun adds to this growing body of scholarship by focusing on poetry in western–Chinese cultural transmission. In terms of missionary literature, poetry is a less conspicuous genre than fiction. According to Luo, previous studies of poetry have mostly been brief and sparse, dispersed among historical studies of the missionaries. Although religious sentiment in hymn translations has been explored at length, many important issues still deserve more detailed examination, including translation strategies, literary merit, social context, and ideology. Luo has gathered scattered and obscure materials from numerous periodicals and tracts buried in various archives to furnish this account.

Befitting its title, this book is written in an impartial tone, providing an overview with no overarching metanarrative. Unconstrained by a forced thematic unity, Luo brings together at least three types of inquiry: detailed critical accounts of editions and authorship, stylistic analysis of literary features, and investigation into intellectual or ideological issues within the larger social context. Though one might find this mixed mode of inquiry detrimental to orderly argument, the book is still valuable in its highlighting of engaging issues.

Luo starts with relevant texts in missionary periodicals from the early nineteenth century, such as Eastern Western Monthly Magazine (东西洋考每月统记传), Chinese Serial (遐迩贯珍), and Shanghai Serial (六和丛谈). The early introduction of western poetry took place against a backdrop of a general introduction of western knowledge to China, which was, alongside evangelization, a prominent purpose of these periodicals. Because there was a prevailing sense in China that westerners were uncivilized barbarians, missionaries such as Joseph Edkins and Walter Henry Medhurst went to great lengths to redress this conception by championing the greatness of western civilization. Western poems were notably introduced in this context, and the terminology of traditional Chinese poetics was employed in the discussion. Luo is aware of the tension between missionary societies' ultimate religious goals and the secular terms by which knowledge was introduced, hence he is attentive to the interplay between religious expression and maneuvers of accommodation, as can be seen in his case studies of several poems, including the 1854 translation of a Milton sonnet ("When I Consider How My Light Is Spent," which was also the first English poem translated into Chinese) in the Chinese Serial; Edkins's translation of William Cowper's "Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk" in A Review of the Times, 1879; and Timothy Richard's translation of Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" (1898, published as a tract). All three poems conveyed Christian messages, yet they were nicely rendered to suit classical Chinese poetic patterns, and they also adopted conceptual terms from traditional Chinese thinking.

Such attention to language style appears throughout Luo's study. To choose between adopting either classical or vernacular Chinese was to choose between two different objectives: to appeal to learned society or to uneducated lay believers. Luo foregrounds this issue in his case study of a vernacular translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" by an obscure missionary in 1891, and it reappears prominently in his chapter devoted to the translation of hymns and biblical poetry, which are more directly related to the propagation of Christian faith. In the concluding chapter, this issue acquires even more significance, when Luo considers its relation with the "New Culture Movement" in the 1910s and 1920s, during which vernacular poems first acquired large-scale attention among the literati. The styles of some vernacular hymn translations and Hu Shi's early vernacular poems are strikingly similar. On the question of to what extent missionaries' translations influenced the "vernacular revolution" in China, Luo thinks a definitive answer remains difficult, yet leans towards the view that the influence is limited, since missionary endeavors met with challenges and...