‘Tagore’s Work Gives Chinese Readers Peace Of Mind’
The Telegraph
Calcutta , India
Sunday , June 6 , 2010
( 7days , page 11 )
Chinese scholar Dong YouChen (right) receiving the 'Rabindra Smriti Puroskar 2010' from renowned Bengali prolific writer Sunil Gangopadhay for translating Rabindranath Tagore's novels and short stories in Chinese during the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of the great poet and Nobel Laureate at the Rabindra Sadan in Kolkata on May 9, 2010.
Professor Dong Youchen, who has spent a lifetime researching and translating the works of Rabindranath Tagore into Chinese, won the Rabindra Puraskar this year. Ashis Chakrabarti meets the scholar
Those were dizzy days in Beijing. The Olympics had just ended, leaving the world awestruck at the spectacular shows that China put up and the Chinese riding the crest of a never-before frenzy of nationalistic pride.
But Dong Youchen seemed to care little about the golds that China bagged at the games or the feverish celebrations that gripped every little town and village across the Middle Kingdom. As I entered his home in an apartment block in Beijing’s Haidian district, he hugged me like a long-awaited friend. And as I handed him the packet that I had carried for him all the way from Calcutta, he gloated over it for a long time before his wife reminded him it was time to offer me tea. The packet contained all the nine volumes of Prasanta Kumar Pal’s biography of Rabindranath Tagore.
I remember my first meeting with him in Beijing almost two years back, as I watch Dong Youchen sitting on the dais behind Rabindra Sadan, waiting to receive the West Bengal Bangla Akademi’s Rabindra Puraskar this year — a recognition for his lifelong work of translating Tagore into Chinese. It’s spring in Beijing, the bitter winter of north China just over, but here in Tagore’s city it is the height of summer.
For Professor Dong (or Dong Laoshi, as he is known in Beijing) this evening also marks the height of a long love affair lasting over 60 years. It all started when he had his first encounter with Tagore at his middle school. A Chinese translation of a poem from Gitanjali, compulsory reading in the literature course, was the first spark and the fire keeps burning to this day.
There’s something about Dong’s simple manners, not feigned humility, and his love of discipline and hard work that are typical of rural people from northern China. Even his tall frame, broad forehead and round face show his northern Chinese links.
Like most Chinese of his generation, the rural roots are still strong in Dong’s life and personality.
Born in a peasant family in Jilin, one of the most picturesque provinces of northern China close to the Russian border, he grew up helping his peasant parents in the fields. “I spent most of my early years in the village. The life of Chinese peasants in those days was hard,” he tells me, “but I love the quietude of village life. That’s why I love Santiniketan. What’s more, I’ve learned the value of hard work from the peasants.” But it’s his never-failing smile — like a rustic’s grin — that can charm one as much as his lilting Bengali.
Today he has a reason to smile as perhaps never before in his life, but anyone who has known him knows him to be a man who seems to never cease smiling. And if it is a Bengali he’s meeting, the refrain to almost each sentence is “bhalo to” (that’s good), as he keeps saying it during a dinner, after the function, at Calcutta’s very own Chinatown at Tangra.
But it wasn’t so good when he decided to devote his life to translating and researching Tagore. The first spark from the Gitanjali poem had grown into a mild fire by the time he read a Chinese translation of Tagore’s novel, Noukadubi, while learning Russian and Bengali at Leningrad (now St Petersburg) University in the early 1960s. Noukadubi would be his first translation of a Tagore work, followed by Ghare Baire, Bou Thakuraneer Haat, Rajarshi, Megh Roudra and several books of poems and essays. In 2005, he published a biography of Tagore.
Dong keeps on smiling, but is visibly embarrassed when I ask him why he didn’t come to India (wouldn’t Visva-Bharati have been the obvious place) to learn Bengali. It wasn’t the best of times in India-China relations, he says, without referring to the 1962 war or the build-up to it since 1959. Also, he was — and still is — a member of the Chinese Communist Party and the former Soviet Union was the only foreign country most Chinese could hope to travel to or live in during those years.
But, the good communist that he is, he maintains that China’s love affair with Tagore has nothing to do with politics. “Tagore’s work gives the Chinese readers peace of mind and a spiritual dimension to their own life,” he tells me. Does it have something to do with China’s current rediscovery of Confucius and the present Chinese leadership’s theme song of “harmony”? Dong wouldn’t link the two, “Tagore’s appeal to his Chinese readers has always been deep, but its reach is becoming wider now,” he tells me.
That may well sound curious if one recalls the hostility of many Chinese intellectuals, especially those sympathetic to Left wing politics and the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, during Tagore’s first visit to China in 1924. Some of these critics distributed leaflets criticising Tagore’s “spiritualism” and “Orientalism” during several of his lectures and even forced him to cancel part of his programme in Beijing.
Lu Xun, whom the Left wing intellectuals claimed as China’s “first modern man of letters” was among these critics. Guo Moruo, the revolutionary romantic poet, dismissed Tagore’s advocacy of a “spiritual” life and non-violence saying, “The materialistic approach is the only way to solve the problems of the world… Unprincipled propaganda of non-violence is the strongest poison for the current times. It is already a shield for the propertied class and a chain to the proletariat”. Tagore’s vision of a return to “spiritual values” and his emphasis on the “Oriental culture”, were, to them, like the preaching of Confucian culture which defended political oppression by the rich and social curses like the binding of women’s feet.
I tell him that communists in Bengal too had once debunked Tagore as a “bourgeois” poet. But then, he knows how the Indian Reds have changed their views of Tagore, as of so many other things. And, he knows of the present chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, being a communist and a Tagore admirer at the same time.
He admits that some Chinese comrades of another time had made the same mistake, attributing it largely to the Chinese readers’ and intellectuals’ unfamiliarity with Tagore’s work in 1924. He is quick, however, to add that the Chinese party had “shown great respect to Tagore for a long time”.
History tells you he is right. Unknown to most people in India or Bengal, the first translator of Tagore into Chinese was Chen Duxiu, the first general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Chen translated four poems from Gitanjali from English into Chinese in 1915, six years before the party was founded in 1921.
He recalls that the Chinese government and the party celebrated Tagore’s birth centenary with a great deal of importance. “The Chinese government published 10 volumes of Tagore’s work in Chinese. On May 7, 1961, the People’s Daily, the party organ, published a supplement on Tagore,” says Dong. It’s another story that because of the Sino-Indian tension of the time, Jawaharlal Nehru asked Tagore’s biographer, Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, not to go to Beijing to attend the celebrations there. Mukhopadhyay, who had been invited to the celebrations in both Beijing and Moscow, went to the latter, thanks to the changing relations between India, China and the then Soviet Union. Just as India’s relations with China had reached a crisis point at the time, the two communist countries too were close to the coming collapse of their camaraderie.
Did Mao Zedong, who himself was a poet of sorts, ever talk or write about Tagore? The 73-year-old Chinese professor pauses for a moment, “No, I don’t know of Mao saying or writing anything on Tagore. But you know Zhou Enlai visited Santiniketan and wrote effusive comments on the poet in the visitor’s book.”
It wasn’t just the official celebrations and promotion of Tagore translations that made the Indian poet such a presence on the Chinese intellectual horizon. Dong recalls works on Tagore by well-known Chinese scholars such as Ji Xianlin, the Indologist who was awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the Indian government some years ago, Wang Xinchuan, the philosopher, and others in the 1960s.
But the present inspires him more than the past. His grin returns to light up his face as we change track to the present status of Tagore studies in China. He names scholars like Tang Renhu, Jiang Jinkui and Wei Liming of Peking University, Yu Rongyu of Shenzhen University, where Dong taught for many years before moving to the Centre for South Asia Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University. “Shenzhen is like Calcutta — it has very hot and long summers,” he says, pointing to his sweat-soaked kurta, a gift from a Bengali friend.
He has only two weeks left before going back to Beijing, but he has to visit Santiniketan and the Bankim Library at Naihati (he has also translated several novels by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay such as Indira, Rajsingha, Krishnakanter Will and Chandrasekhar).
Back home, though, the biggest of his love affairs with Tagore awaits him. He is the chief editor of a massive project of translating the complete works of Tagore in 24 volumes, which means over 200 books of poems, fiction, plays, essays, memoirs, letters, diaries, et al. There are 17 translators and Tagore scholars involved in the project.
“It’s a huge challenge. All the translators have other jobs and are involved in it for their love of Tagore. As for me, it’s a sort of a climax of a life dedicated to Tagore. Nothing will make me happier than to be able to do it.”
(From left) Zhong Shaoli, Bai Kaiyuan, Shi Jingwu and Dong Youchen, part of the 17-member translation team working on the complete works of Tagore.
Dong YouChen (R) receiving the 'Rabindra Smriti Puroskar 2010' from writer Sunil Gangopadhay
