Marguerite Yourcenar, "How Wang-Fo Was Saved" (trans. Alberto Manguel) (Belgium)

It’s December 25. Welcome to the final installment of the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Marguerite Yourcenar’s story, “How Wang-Fo Was Saved”:

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known for her marvelous Memoirs of Hadrian in which she recaptures, with both a poet’s and a historian’s eye, the life of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Less known are her Oriental Tales, stories set in the Near and Far East, a few based on traditional legends and folktales. According to Yourcenar, the story of the painter Wang-Fo and his disciple is her own invention, though inspired by a  Chinese Taoist classic. Scholars, however, have pointed out that Yourcenar seems to have taken her inspiration from a collection of Japanese tales collected and retold by the nineteenth-century Greek-Irish scholar Lafcadio Hearn. Whatever the source, the story is certainly Yourcenar’s in its depiction of the work of an artist, the relationship of a teacher with his disciple, and the ability of art to confront the unjust demands of those in power.

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