Literary Transfers between „Peripheries”: Henryk Sienkiewicz’s The Lighthouse Keeper and the Mediating Role of the Center in the Circulation of Literary Works

Abstract

The article considers literary transfers between peripheral regions of the world literary map via analysis of the translations into classical Chinese of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s short story The Lighthouse Keeper and Adam Mickiewicz’s Invocation from his epic poem Master Thaddeus by the brothers Zhou Zuoren and Zhou Shuren, best known by his pen name Lu Xun. The description of the plot of Sienkiewicz’s story, with its mapping of the trajectory of Mickiewicz’s poem from its nostalgic Polish setting to a remote island in Central America, turns out to mirror the literary transfers between peripheries that the short story itself took from Poland to the Far East. In considering this circulation of literary works and the poetic transfer between peripheries, the mediating role of the center as conceived of by P. Casanova and F. Moretti is reassessed.