E Inside the History of the World: Syntheses of Literary Form between Prose Poetry and China   LUCAS KLEIN is a father, writer, translator, and associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. He is an associ- ate editor of the book series Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford UP), the author of The Organiza- tion of Distance (Brill, 2018), a coeditor of Chinese Poetry and Translation (Amster- dam, 2019) and the forthcoming Blooms- bury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, and the transla- tor of works by Mang Ke, Li Shangyin, Duo Duo, and Xi Chuan. China, G. W. F. Hegel notoriously said, lies “outside the World’s History” (Philosophy 116). Elsewhere he wrote that poetry can “be translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value, and turned from poetry into prose,” because “ideas and intui- tions are in truth the subject-matter of poetry” (Aesthetics 2: 964). What might these two statements, apparently unrelated, have to do with my twin aims in this article with respect to literary history—to trace a translation-centric history of literature and to argue against the segregation of China from the translation-centered international history of literature? What might Hegel’s two statements have to do with the curious relationship between translation, China, and prose poetry? Take the following stanza by the contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan 西川 (b. 1963), from 曼哈顿乱想 (“Random Manhattan Thoughts”). What informs the translation of such a stanza? 做一个中国人，你肯定没有你的本体论 、 方法论 。 哲学是西方的 概念，源自古希腊 。 你肯定只有一套老掉牙的 、 只能用来哄小孩 的伦理教条 。 黑格尔在《哲学史讲演录》中这样说 。 (108) Being Chinese, you have no ontology or methodology. Philosophy is a western concept, originating in ancient Greece. You just have some toothless old ethical dogma good for nothing but mollifying children. Hegel says so in Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. (109) The stanza mocks Hegel’s Eurocentric denial of the possibility of Chinese philosophy, even as Xi Chuan’s mention of it acknowledges ©  The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America PMLA . (), doi:./S  [ PMLA https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000469 Published online by Cambridge University Press