Description:
„Yecao (Wild Grass, a.k.a. Weeds), is a 1927 collection of twenty-three prose poems written by Lu Xun (1881–1936), who is China’s foremost writer of the twentieth-century. The poems, written between 1924 and 1926, were first published serially in the journal Threads of Talk from 1924 to 1927. This prose poem collection —a literary masterpiece in the eyes of many— features some of Lu Xun’s most complex and psychologically dense creative works; Lu Xun himself is purported to have said his »entire philosophy is contained in his Yecao«.
Yecao’s generic uniqueness [...] frustrates efforts to locate it within the canon of modern Chinese literature. Yecao also poses interpretive problems for its readers, because of its unprecedented experimental style (i.e., a lack of commensurability with familiar Chinese literary genres, traditional or modern) and the intricacy and variety of the prose poems, which are notable for their emotional intensity, complex paradoxical structures, symbolic density, sometimes-transparent references to contemporary historical events, and overall generic ambiguity. The combination of the above factors has led to this unique and exceptionally creative collection being frequently ignored or, at best, dealt with in a cursory and selective fashion in much of the English-language Lu Xun scholarship.”
(source: www.cambriapress.com)
This painted maquette was designed in 1966 as a book cover for the Hungarian translation of Lu Xun’s poem collection. The design was created by Iván Váradi. He used expressive painting to match the atmosphere of the poems. The background has a special pattern in terrene colours in front of which the dark, oily green, suggestive and harsh lines shape the “wild grass” plant. The design indeed captures a certain wildness.
