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Millions of Chinese know the works of this Hungarian poet by heart – video
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There was a cult in China at the beginning of the 20th century around Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi because of his poems about national freedom and modernizing the country. This is why one of his most favourite works, Szabadság, szerelem (Freedom and love), is still in the Chinese school-books.
Hungary was an example for modernization
“Freedom and love
Are dear to me;
My life I give,
Sweet love, for thee,
Yet love I give
For liberty.”
translated by William N. Loew.
This poem is still very popular among the citizens of the Asian superpower, millions of Chinese learn it by heart during their school years – reported hvg.hu. The news portal managed to talk with one of them, Li Chen, who is the European chairman of the One belt, one road initiative and translates Petőfi in his free time. He plans to
publish 170 of his poems in Chinese this year
for the 170th anniversary of the poet’s birth.
He graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he studied Hungarian and told that Petőfi had many Chinese translators in the last century, but most of them committed many mistakes.
According to Zsuzsanna Csibra, a sinologue at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Petőfi’s career in China started at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century. The cause is quite simple taking into consideration that Petőfi was (and still is) the most well-known poet of the Hungarian revolution and freedom fight of 1848-49. When the idea of
modernizing feudal China
was born around these years, they not only regarded Great-Britain and France as an example but also the small nations of Central- and Eastern-Europe and among them, Hungary.