Li's bracing and insightful book Don Quixote in the Context of Modern Chinese Culture explores the Chinese reception of Cervantes's masterpiece from the appearance of its first Chinese translation in 1904 to 1978 in relation to the evolution of modern Chinese culture. It is appropriate for her study to focus on this period, as in this period dominated by literary instrumentalism, Chinese culture had the most profound influence on the translations and interpretations of Don Quixote. The chapters are well organized and very informative. There is much to commend in the author's method of combining historical analysis with cultural analysis. Li is intent on mapping the shaping factors that bore upon Don Quixote's Chinese reception. Another notable strength of the book is that translation is given ample attention. Li is particularly strong on the new meanings generated by the vitalizing process of translation.
Chapter 2 explores the reception of Don Quixote from 1904 to the New Culture Movement (1915–23), a period dominated by reformist culture. Particularly impressive is Li's examination of Lin Shu's widely influential translation. By transforming Quixote and Sancho into self-serving, opportunistic partisans, Li observes perceptively, the socially minded Lin Shu satirized the toxic partisanship of the early Republican era.
Chapter 3 turns to the period 1915–49, which was dominated by revolutionary culture. Li's treatment of the critical reception of Don Quixote forms the most intriguing part of the chapter. As she shows, Quixotic perseverance became the analytic focus in the 1920s. New Culturalists such as Zhou Zuoren and Zheng Zhenduo presented Quixote as an indomitable hero unafraid of failure. Such perceptions, Li argues cogently, imply a concern for the pessimism and depression that pervaded the intellectual world after the decline of the New Culture Movement. In the late 1920s, the novel was appropriated by Marxist converts to attack the standard bearer for the New Culture Movement. They mocked Lu Xun for his outdated ideas by dubbing him “the Chinese Don Quixote” or “Don Lu Xun” (116). Li offers a persuasive explanation of why Chinese translations of the Spanish novel in the 1930s focused on the first part. The story of an indomitable Quixote in part 1, she suggests, was more in tune with the cultural needs of revolutionary China than that of a Quixote who abandons his aspirations and converts to religion in part 2.
Chapter 4 probes the reception of Don Quixote from 1949 to the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a period dominated by what the author calls integrating culture. This period of Quixote criticism was dominated by class analysis and Soviet critical models. It was generally regarded as a progressive realist novel critical of the feudal ruling class and sympathetic to the oppressed masses. Meng Fu's interpretation of Don Quixote exemplifies the influence of left-deviating ideology on literary criticism. He claimed that it was the masses who created Don Quixote and Cervantes merely fleshed it out. “Meng's giving credit to the masses for artistic creation,” Li notes insightfully, “was consistent with the internal logic of the Great Leap Forward in literature and the arts” (145).
Chapter 5 investigates Don Quixote's reception from 1966 to the watershed moment of 1978. It is rather problematic, however, to describe the culture that governed this period of Quixote translation as liberalizing culture. In a decade dominated by ultra-left ideology and the Gang of Four's cultural autocracy, all translations of Western literature—which was condemned as poisonous weeds—could only be done clandestinely. Despite the rebellious gesture of underground creations and translations, they were not liberalizing in any sense of the word. That being said, this chapter is to be commended for yielding some fascinating insights into Yang Jiang's engagement with Don Quixote. Li offers an incisive analysis of Yang's motivation for taking the political risk of secretly translating the novel. According to Li, Yang sought to “draw from Quixote the moral strength to sustain herself through her persecution during the Cultural Revolution . . . and to vent her frustration and sorrow by recounting Quixote's tragic story” (174). The immediate success of Yang's translation in the late 1970s, Li argues persuasively, can be attributed to the fact that it satisfied Chinese readers’ need for narratives of individual suffering and introspection. Reading about the literary hero's tragic life enabled them to “release their long-suppressed painful emotions” (201).
One area where the book might have gone further would have been in exploring the creative reception of Don Quixote in China. The limitations notwithstanding, this richly researched and compellingly argued book is a valuable addition to the study of Don Quixote's global repercussions. It is no small achievement to have succeeded in accounting for the sociopolitical and cultural motivations behind all translating, reading, and critical practices.
