Dialoguing with the World: Xue Yiwei and His Traveling with Marco Polo

Abstract

This essay introduces the author Xue Yiwei and his Traveling with Marco Polo, a creative collection that dialogues with Invisible Cities by the postmodern Italian writer Italo Calvino. While Calvino imagines a young Marco Polo describing the fantastic sights of fifty-five cities to an aging Kublai Khan, Xue Yiwei joins the conversation and provides a meticulous explication of each one of Calvino’s cities. Furthermore, Traveling with Marco Polo expands the imaginary cityscapes to include oblique commentaries on the past, present, and future of China as well as the profound meditation on the city as a microcosm of our world. The result is a daring literary experiment that is representative of Xue’s oeuvre overall: at once giving a powerful literary representation of modern Chinese history while engaging in dialogue with writers from all over the world.

Notes

1 Xue Yiwei, “Di’erban xuyan” 第二版序言 (Preface to the second edition), in Yu Makeboluo tongxing与马可波罗同行: 读《看不见的城市》 (Traveling with Marco Polo: Reading Invisible Cities) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2015), 1–2. All translations are mine except noted otherwise.

2 Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities), trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972).

3 Xue Yiwei, “Diyiban xuyan” 第一版序言 (Preface to the first edition), in Yu Makeboluo tongxing, 4.

4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and J.P. Eckermann, “Conversations on World Literature,” in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, ed. David Damrosch et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 17–25. Goethe himself apparently tried to learn Chinese several times, though without much success. For an illuminating discussion on the subject, see Martin Kern, “Ends and Beginnings of World Literature,” Poetica 49 (2017/2018), 1–31.

5 Lu Xun 鲁迅, “‘Yingyi’ yu wenxue de jiejixing”‘硬译’与文学的阶级性 (‘Hard Translation’ and the Class Characteristic of Literature), in Selected Works of Lu Hsun, vol. 3, trans. by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), 65–86. The Yangs translate Lu Xun’s neologism as “hard translation,” and Leo Chan has it as “stiff translation.” I prefer Chan’s translation. Chan, “‘Modern Theories of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates, ed. Leo Chan (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004), 15–28.

6 Xue Yiwei, “Makeboluo de huangyan” 马可波罗的谎言 (“Marco Polo’s Lies”), in Wenxue de zuguo 文学的祖国 The Literary Motherland (Beijing: Sanlian, 2015), 137.

7 Xue Yiwei, “Liudong de fangjian” 流动的房间 (The Floating Rooms), in Bei xuanzhong de sheyingshi 被选中的摄影师 The Chosen Photographer (Beijing: Beijing lianhe chuban gongsi, 2019), 33.

8 Xue Yiwei, “Yiyu de migong” 异域的迷宫 (Labyrinths in the Other Place) in Dadi de huibao 大地的回报 (The Return of the Good Earth) (Beijing: Beijing lianhe chuban gongsi, 2019), 153.

9 Xue Yiwei, “Miandui beiwei de shengming” 面对卑微的生命 (Facing the smallness of life), in Xue Yiwei duihua Xue Yiwei: yilei de wenxue zhilu 薛忆沩对话薛忆沩: “异类”的文学之路 (Xue Yiwei in Interview: The Literary Path of Non-Conformist) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2015), 29.

10 Xue, “Miandui beiwei de shengming,” 37.

11 Xue, “Wenxue de zuguo,” 30.

12 This collection of short stories was published in Chinese as Chuzuche siji 出租车司机 (The Taxi Driver, 2013). It was published in English as Shenzheners, trans. Darryl Sterk (Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2016).

13 Xue Yiwei, Baiqiu’en de haizimen 白求恩的孩子们 (Taipei: Hsin-ti wenhua, 2012), trans. Darryl Sterk, Dr. Bethune’s Children (Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2017), 6–7.

14 ‘Li’erwang’ yu 1979‘李尔王’与1979 (“King Lear” and Nineteen Seventy-Nine) (serialized in the journal Zuojia 作家, March to May, 2020).

15 Frye, The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 19.

16 Modena, Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2011), 22, 184.

17 Calvino, Invisible Cities, 63.

18 Xue Yiwei, “Wuqiongda de Xiaoyuyi” 无穷大的《小于一》 (The Infinity of Less Than One), in Wenxue de zuguo, 195.

19 Xue, “Wuqiongda de Xiaoyuyi,” 198.