ABSTRACT
In China, the early twentieth century coincided with an enthusiastic adaptation of the Western literary canon. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) played a crucial role in exporting the Romantic triad—nature, sentimental love, and suicide—to the East. In the preface to his Werther translation and his own poetry, Guo Moruo, the ringleader of the Creation Society (founded in Tokyo in 1921), demonstrates how malleable Western Romanticism is when it morphs into something else. The most pronounced difference arises in the translator’s discussion of pantheism, a concept which he insists is congenial to Zhuangzian thought; here, the moment of self-realisation coincides with the annihilation of the ego. While Guo undergoes a Marxist transformation later, he stays true to his own brand of Zhuangzian Romanticism by emphasising the poet’s subservient role in the revolutionary cause.
