Worlds Elsewhere (72 page)

While Zhu would no doubt have been gratified by this success, it was clear as Zhu Shanggang talked that it had been in some sense his mission. The lack of a serviceable translation of Shakespeare into Chinese was especially keenly felt because Japan, yet again, had got there first: Tsubouchi Shōyō had translated the complete plays and sonnets in 1928.

‘He wrote a letter to my uncle to tell him of this matter,' said Zhu Shanggang. ‘My uncle told him that some Japanese people said that China is a country without culture because they have no Shakespeare translations – so if you can translate Shakespeare into Chinese you will be a national hero.'

Where rival translators had expressed despair at the difficulties (one wrote that ‘the pain caused by translation is no less than that
of delivering a child'), Zhu found the task ennobling. He wrote to Qingru, Zhu Shanggang's mother, that working on
The Tempest
was so absorbing that he failed to notice being bitten by bedbugs. Even the loss of his manuscripts twice over failed to dent his optimism: ‘I am very poor, but I have everything!' Qingru later reported he had said.

Why had Zhu chosen Shakespeare? I asked Zhu Shanggang.

He smiled gently, showing a cemetery of yellowing teeth. ‘Of course he liked many English authors, like Shelley, Wordsworth, and Keats. But he loved Shakespeare: he read the plays more than ten times from beginning to end. Once this task got started, it was a huge project. You cannot stop in the middle and give up.'

I studied the large photograph of Qingru and Zhu that dominated the museum. He looked suave and faintly cocky, almost implausibly youthful, with slicked-back hair; but it was she who held the eye – alert and engaged, with a bright, avid gaze.

It turned out that Zhu Shanggang's mother had a far greater role than advertised. A talented linguist and a published poet, she not only nursed her husband in his frantic final months but edited his manuscripts, negotiating with publishers to ensure that their great life's work would not turn to dust. I didn't possess the linguistic skills to confirm it, but I had a hunch that anyone doing detailed research into the translations credited to Zhu would find Qingru's fingerprints all over them.

In 1947, three years after Zhu's death and once Shanghai was back under Chinese rule following the end of the war, twenty-seven of his translations were published in three volumes. The rest followed in 1954, bringing the total to thirty-one plays out of the thirty-six in the First Folio. The plan was for the remaining texts to be completed as China's contribution to the 400th anniversary in 1964. One of Zhu's colleagues, Yu Erchang, set about the task.

But Mao's officials – or, as I thought, Mao's wife – intervened. By the time Yu Erchang finished his work, it was 1966, the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It became impossible to circulate the translations in China proper. It was not until 1978 that Zhu Shenghao's completed texts were finally published in Beijing, two years after Mao's death and forty-three years after they were started.

In the house, the air was thick with the smell of fresh paint. The museum had recently been restored, but it only served to emphasise how little of Zhu Shenghao remained. In one glass case were his grey cloth boots, worn with age. In another was the battered wicker case
in which he'd hauled his books during the flight from Shanghai. Up a wooden flight of stairs, precipitously narrow, was the desk where he'd done most of the work. Fifteen minutes and we'd seen the lot.

Zhu's precious one-volume copy of Shakespeare was now under lock and key, but the view from his study was intact, over a quiet courtyard of trees, their leaves a vibrant green. Pretending to investigate his torn copies of
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
an American import, and Thomas Hardy, I listened to the sighing of the leaves and the spatter of the rain. The title of the Hardy was
Life's Little Ironies.

After a ceremonious and drawn-out lunch in a local restaurant, we were driven to Jiaxing's central library, where a group of white-gloved female archivists were hovering in an upstairs room. Warily they pulled out a number of small parcels, wrapped in white paper and tied with ribbons like gifts. Inside were exercise books bound with brown parcel paper. Zhu Shanggang carefully teased one open:
The Tempest,
the first play his father had translated. The yellowing pages were as thin as tracing paper.

Ben Jonson famously claimed of Shakespeare that ‘the players have often mentioned it as an honour … that in his writing (whatsoever he penned), he never blotted out a line'. Zhu really did seem to have barely blotted a line, particularly as his translations progressed – page after page filled with neat rivulets of text in a quick, precise hand.

The Mandarin I had no grasp of, but it was impossible not to admire the density of the work. Dark black characters were scribbled right into the spines of the books, crowding the sides and spilling on to the scrap paper that had been used to bind them. The homemade cover of
Romeo and Juliet
was a page cut from an English-language Shanghai newspaper, including a gory story about a sixteen-year-old apprentice murdering his master with a ‘large butcher's knife' in the German Concession.

I had arrived in Jiaxing sceptical about the claim that Zhu had really translated thirty-one plays in less than two years, but this part of the story seemed to be absolutely true: there was barely time, or paper, for anything else. Thirty-one plays in twenty months – a play every two and a half weeks. Liang Shiqiu's translation, the one Penguin China had their eye on, had taken its author thirty-eight years. By any standards, not only those of a man succumbing to TB, Zhu's was an awesome achievement.

This wasn't to say it was perfect. It was a delicate fact that, while not quite blotted with errors, Zhu's translations – done with a tiny handful of reference books – were creative, and sometimes plain wrong. A few days earlier yet another translator, Yiqun Wang, had taken me line by line through different versions of
Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus,
sorrowfully pointing out places where Zhu had either ignored the primary sense of Shakespeare's lines or apparently misconstrued them, mistaking words and sometimes entire concepts.

I raised the issue as gently as I could. Zhu Shanggang looked unruffled. ‘His only resources were an Oxford English dictionary, a Chinese–English dictionary and Shakespeare's original works. In a letter to my mother, he said he thought about looking at Liang Shiqiu's translations as a point of reference, but found it difficult for him to move on with his own; so from that point on, he was determined not to refer to others' translations.'

How had his father's work survived the Cultural Revolution, when so much else relating to western literature and culture had perished?

His mother had been working as a teacher, he explained; teachers had been especially vulnerable, and despite the fact that she was then in her fifties, she had been sent to do manual labour. In one of the myriad petty cruelties of the system, she had been reassigned as a cleaner in the very school where she had taught.

Zhu smiled, but his eyes were elsewhere. ‘They said the school toilets had never been so clean. But she kept the manuscripts safe in Jiaxing, even though they confiscated the revisions she had made.'

If the government had known she had all these originals, they would have destroyed them too?

‘Of course.'

Since then, there had been yet another switchback turn in ideological direction. Shakespeare was now deemed a symbol of openness and internationalism; it was declared that China should revere both him and Zhu Shenghao. A lavish multiple-volume facsimile edition of the manuscripts had recently been published. And the previous VIP to have come to Jiaxing to look at these pages was none other than Wen Jiabao. He had made the trip soon after returning from his jaunt to Stratford-upon-Avon, presumably eager to see how China had served a writer who ‘must be read up to a hundred times to be fully understood'.

How did it make Zhu Shanggang feel, that the same Communist
Party that had once tried to annihilate everything his father achieved now honoured him as a hero?

Zhu Shanggang smiled wanly. ‘People are different now from back then.'

Before I came to China, I asked a Chinese academic who now teaches in Britain whether I would get anywhere by asking people about the Cultural Revolution. The phone line had gone quiet.

‘Honestly, I am not sure,' she said at last. ‘The subject is still so personal, often painful. You will need to be cautious.'

The opposite had happened. Almost without my trying, stories about the awfulness of those years had tumbled out – the Beijing theatre director in his fifties who remembered watching his
jingju
actor father being paraded in humiliation through their town in full make-up and costume; the
Guardian
colleague who told me about interviewing a man who, as a zealous teenager, had testified against his own mother, testimony that meant she'd been shot.

The day after getting back from Jiaxing I had lunch with yet another theatre director, who, in the middle of a conversation about an
Othello
she had done in the 1990s, said she'd chosen the play because the hero's alienation from society echoed her own feelings about her wild-eyed contemporaries clutching their little red books.

Nearly forty years had passed since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and as China had cautiously opened up, a more confessional culture had crept in, albeit firmly one-sided in its revelations (while it was hard to talk about your family being persecuted, it was infinitely harder to admit that you or your relations had been complicit). On the mainland, books, films, TV shows and articles on the subject were still carefully censored, but outside its borders, from Jung Chang's
Wild Swans
on, memoirs and fiction itemising the horrors of China's lost decade had become a publishing sensation. Even in China there were reports that increasing numbers of people were seeking psychotherapy (itself banned under Mao), trying to lay the ghosts of the recent past.

The Party remained uneasy about open debate, but a cynic could see the political advantage of allowing certain carefully edited snapshots to make their way into the public domain. It struck me as not dissimilar
from the impulse behind the propagandistic Elizabethan chroniclers Halle and Holinshed, filleted by Shakespeare for his histories, as they reflected on the carnage that tore Britain apart in the Middle Ages:
See how we are different, how our country is better. Do not endanger this.
Perhaps the Cultural Revolution was China's equivalent of the Tudor Myth, by which Elizabethans attempted to convince themselves that they would never again return to a country so fractiously divided as during the Wars of the Roses.

Digging in the archives at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre one morning, I came across a photograph. It was in black-and-white, of a man leaning against a woman next to an arched doorway, vaguely Italianate. His left arm rested casually above her head, his knee grazing hers; a flirtatious gesture, perhaps a touch protective. Her smile seemed genuinely warm. Both wore Elizabethan garb. One had to peer closely to see they were Chinese: he was wearing an elaborately shaggy wig and what appeared to be a false nose; her make-up had been so thickly applied that her face looked as flour-white as the organza shawl around her shoulders.

I checked with the archivist: it was a production of
Much Ado About Nothing
from 1979 staged here in Shanghai. The couple were Beatrice and Benedick, played by actors called Zhu Xijuan and Jiao Huang. So this was what Shakespeare in the ‘original sauce' looked like, with Chinese actors trying to erase every trace of their ethnic identity.

But what really caught me was that the actors, and for that matter their costumes, looked suspiciously familiar. I was sure I'd seen them earlier.

I dug back through the albums and slid out one I'd flicked through a few minutes before. These photographs were much smaller and more roughly shot, but it was clear they depicted the same production of
Much Ado About Nothing.
One by one I scrutinised the images. The masked ball; the ill-fated lovers Hero and Claudio at the altar; the denunciation scene, in which Hero is accused of sleeping with another man: all were the same. Even the sets – a bucolic panorama studded with Tuscan pines, an Italianate palazzo swathed with ornate wall hangings – looked identical.

But these photos were from 1961, not 1979. I laid both albums carefully on the table, side by side, and found the rival photos of Beatrice and Benedick; him in front of her, the doorway, her smiling. The couple were Zhu and Jiao, no question. Their poses were almost identical, as
were their clothes. They were twins, the only real difference being the age of the photographs. Eighteen years apart.

In London or New York, shows were always transferring between different theatres, or being revived a year or two later. But such pauses were generally brief; and even Agatha Christie's
The Mousetrap,
which has theoretically been running uninterruptedly since 1952, had changed its cast and creative team so often that it was like the proverbial shovel that stays the same despite five new handles and twenty-eight new blades.

Why stage the same
Much Ado About Nothing
with what seemed to be an identical cast, eighteen years later? I reached for my books. The answer haunted all those conversations I'd had: the Cultural Revolution.

In the Dramatic Arts Centre café, I pieced together the story, which had been written about by the theatre historians Li Ruru and Alexa Huang.
The Much Ado About Nothing
I'd been looking at was indeed the same show, though in its original form it was even older: it dated from 1957, and had been created during the period when China and the USSR were intimate siblings. A well-regarded Soviet director, Yevgeniya Konstantinova Lipkovskaya, was part of a cultural delegation sent out from Leningrad to help set up the Shanghai Theatre Academy. She had stayed two years and directed two productions;
Much Ado About Nothing
was the second. Her cast were students. The translation was Zhu Shenghao's.