Ah Q Travels to Europe
Christoph Hein’s Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q (1983) and Dario Fo’s La storia di Qu (2011)
Abstract
This study focuses on the adaptations of the novella “The True Story of Ah Q” by the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936), produced by two important European playwrights, Christoph Hein (b. 1944) and Dario Fo (1926-2016), who ‘translated’ Lu Xun’s famous character respectively into a problematic nihilist (Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q, 1983) and into a revolutionary Chinese Harlequin (La storia di Qu, 1989; 2011). These two plays appropriate the ‘hypotext’ into a new cultural geography, which is neither Chinese nor completely German or Italian, but rather a transcultural space based on the European intellectual tradition of the ‘anarchist’. In this case translation means a thorough transformation and change which allows Lu Xun’s work to ‘live on’ (Fortleben, as in Walter Benjamin’s theory).
Submitted: Feb. 6, 2020 | Accepted: April 17, 2020 | Published June 30, 2020 | Language: en
Keywords Fortleben • Appropriation • Adaptation • Transcultural rewriting • Contact zone
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Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/01/018