By Robert Powers

A new English-language translation of the complete fiction works of Lu Xun (1881-1936) was released at a book launch party held in Zhongshan Park Wednesday night. Zhou Lingfei, Lu Xun's grandson, and Jo Lusby, head of Penguin China, gave toasts to the legacy of one of modern China's most important intellectual figures.

"We share the same DNA, we look alike and were both born in the year of the snake," said Zhou, standing next a portrait of his mustached grandfather. "Lu Xun was more like a human, and not a solider like the newspapers used to say he was."

Lusby said it took four years to put the collection of translated works together, and that Penguin was thrilled to have secured Julia Lovell to do the translations found in The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China. Julia Lovell is an author of several books about China and has translated the works of many contemporary Chinese writers. She lives in London.

"My fundamental principle was fidelity to the original," Lovell said in an interview with the Global Times. "I tried to recreate a native speaker's reading experience."

The collection's featured novella-length story about a lowly, uneducated peasant, The Real Story of Ah-Q, is widely considered to be a masterpiece of Chinese literature.

"Ah-Q is Lu Xun's most extended denunciation of what he saw as the flawed 'Chinese national character,'" said Lovell. "You can still see Lu Xun's paradoxical brand of nationalism in China today. The country is supposedly fully resurgent, yet even its elites remain eager for foreign approval and acknowledgement."

Lovell said that the circumstances surrounding Lu Xun's complicated legacy can be compared to that of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who was commandeered by Soviet authorities before his death.

"After Lu Xun's death, the Communist Party adopted the writer as a prestigious mascot for their Revolution, in many ways distorting his actual legacy in Chinese literature," she said.

"Lu Xun maintained a passionate seriousness of purpose toward the business of think-ing and writing critically about China, and that definitely deserves to be remembered and emulated today, both inside and outside China," said Lovell.