Mao called Lu Xun a ‘modern Chinese saint’ and, over 130 years later, he remains one of the nation’s best-loved writers. Wild Grass is a collection of 23 prose poems written between 1924 and 1927, as China teetered on the cusp of national revolution. Between the lines of this graceful anthology, contemporary tensions still bubble.

Themes swing dramatically between passion and corruption, hardship and salvation, and misery and beauty; all framed within the routine lives of everyday people. The result is an elegant portrait of China in the grip of growing pains; but also of Lu Xun, the political thinker and the man.

The most interesting passages are masked accounts of Lu’s bloodiest memories: the Duan Qirui government firing at unarmed demonstrators (in ‘Amid Pale Bloodstains’); or conflicts between the warlords of the Chihli cliques, after which Lu was forced to leave Beijing (in ‘The Awakening’).

Although Lu was confined to using analogy and ambiguous language to slip past the censors, the words still stir. For example, when referring to embittered youths in ‘The Awakening’, he writes: ‘The spirits are roughened by the onslaught of wind and dust, for their’s is the spirit of man, a spirit I love.’

Wild Grass is not Lu Xun’s first, or by any means most important work, but it does represent a turning point; after 1927 his work became markedly more melancholy. This collection has all the rawness of an exposed nerve, allowing it to do that rare thing among historical anthologies: make its lessons relevant to today. Lu Xun described his poems as ‘simply occasional reflections’. Those who agree should look again.