The Magnificent Mandarin - Ruritania's engagement with China

Ruritania's engagement with "The Orient" stretches back to before the "Marauding Mongols" who may have become Magyars in Hungary as early as the eleventh century. The Slavs preceded them with their consonant clusters in earlier "migrations". Marco Polo's travels were transcribed with varying degrees of accuracy into the Ruritanian vernacular languages in the later middle ages and in the nineteenth century, the Oriental Institute was established in Prague.

Many of the region's twentieth century avant garde had more than a passing acquaintance with notions of the Orient. Egon Bondy studied Chinese philosophy from Tao to Mao and wrote extensively on the topic. However, it was his poem "Podivuhodný mandarin" which associated notion of the orient more closely with "underground" or avant garde thinking in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when The Plastic People of The Universe set the poem to music. "Podivuhodný mandarin" is usually translated as "Wonderous Madarin" in English, though the adjective "podivuhodný" can be rendered as "miraculous", "magnificent" or even "admirable".

Bondy's "Podivuhodný mandarin" bears a striking resemblance to the Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin [Marvellous Mandarin]" (1916) which, in turn, was turned into a "one act pantomime ballet" composed by Béla Bartók which premiered in November 1926 in Cologne, Germany. There, it caused a scandal and was subsequently banned on moral grounds.

Béla Bartók's new music fared much better at its launch in Prague however, but the mandarin character remains uncomfortable and his representation says more about those engaging with him than the mandarin himself.

Lengyel's mandarin is a wealthy and exotically-dressed user of prostitutes who ends up murdered by the gang of beggar-pimps. It is an uncomfortable representation describing exploitation in many voices. Bondy's poem is shorter and his mandarin more ambiguous; representing lust and greed, the poem describes the destruction of those seeking to profit from the mandarin. It ends with

...impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin.

Quotes from Bondy's poem and its precursor, Melchoir Lengyel's earlier novella "Csodálatos mandarin", were strangely absent from public forums on the western border of Ruritania two weeks ago when President Xi of China visited Prague.

Those more interested in the Ruritanian Gothic end of world culture than post-colonial criticism could do worse than engaging for a few minutes with those Plastic People from Bohemia and Moravia who turned Bondy's poem into a song in the early 1970s translated by a certain blogger into the English rhyming couplets show below:

Wondrous Mandarin                                                                        
 
Just spread your legs out, open wide                                                     
and swallow that wondrous mandarin inside

Dress yourself in vanity-guilt satin                                          
to feel close to the wondrous mandarin

With your head, dark eyes and blood pounding,                
craving the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin

Many times you’ll just want to give in                                    
because he wasn’t the wondrous mandarin
           
Then at forty, impotent and done in                               
you’ll realize that life is god’s millstone                                                
and not the gorgeous, wondrous mandarin