Modern Chinese Poetry

Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what I call “weak interpretations” and “strong interpretations” and how they play out in the translational alignment of classical and modern Chinese poetry with poetry in English today.

Отчёт о XХIV-XXVI и XXX  семинарах Отдела Китая ИВ РАН "Китай и мир. Традиции и современность" (декабрь 2016; март, апрель, октябрь 2017 г). Доклады М.В. Королькова (налогообложение в раннеимперском Китае), Г.С. Старостина (актуальные вопросы исторической лингвистики и фонологии древнекитайского языка), Ю.А. Дрейзис (современная китайская поэзия), Т.Б. Будаевой (современное состояние китайской традиционной музыкальной драмы) и Т.А. Сафина (новые тенденции в изучении гадательых костей цзягувэнь).
Приношу свои извинения Туяне Баторовне Будаевой за неверное написание её фамилии.

XXIV-XXVI, XXXth Seminars of China Department (Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences) "China and the world. Traditions and modernity", December 2016, March, April, October 2017. Reports of Maxim Korolkov (taxes in early imperial China), Georgiy Starostin (actual questions of hitorical linguistics and phonology of Old Chinese), Yulia Dreizis (contemporary Chinese poetry), Tujana Budaeva (modern situation in Chinese traditional musical drama) and Timur Safin (new tendencies in Oracle bones studies).
My apologizes to Dr. Tujana Budaeva for a wrong spelling of her family name.

Lu Xun and other May Fourth writers like him were present at a unique literary-historical moment: they oversaw and participated in the first writings in a new language, which we now call modern Chinese. Sanwen shi or prose poetry was particularly effective in filling the need of early Republican Chinese poets to dream and invent new a poetics for baihua. Lu Xun in particular cared deeply about the future of language in both its political and aesthetic character. Arguing that Lu Xun used Baudelairean prose poetry as a jumping-off point for his own linguistic creations, this essay rereads his book of prose poetry, Wild Grass, and closely attends to the visual and aural prosody of one of its poems.

Chinese prose poetry can be usefully understood as two sets of works produced in two different historical periods, one before 1949 that includes the May Fourth movement, and one after 1949. Prose poetry before 1949 centers around the revolution against classical poetics, and often deemphasizes or elides investigations of genre; writers after 1949 are far more likely to self-consciously categorize their work as prose poetry, and their poems tend to center around the relationship between poetry and prose. Current literary-historical periodizations, by treating the two periods as contiguous parts of one larger literary history, tend to obscure these differences and can make critical understanding of individual poems much more difficult. A literary periodization that begins in 1949 and proceeds to the present, however, has its own set of drawbacks and challenges; the most ideal critical application of literary-historical periodization treats historical periods as metaphoric comparisons between works, allowing them to be traded in and out of critical contexts, applied multiply and simultaneously, and allowing critics to learn as much from their limitations as from their aptness.

Alba
di Stefano Zamblera
presentazione di Alessandro Ferro
ISBN: 9780244350895

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Cederei (notasi il condizionale) l'onere di commentare questo libro ad altrui incombenze, dal momento che l'amicizia che mi lega al suo autore, non ha mai compreso condizionamenti né condizioni...casomai avrà compreso condimenti, e anche piuttosto saporiti! Ma come sottrarmi alla richiesta pervenutami direttamente dall'autore, mio amico quivi poetante, il cui pelo, conosco in varie sfumature (in Cina il poeta come il calligrfo o il pittore, usava il pennello per  comporre. Pelo in cinese si dice mao毛 = pennello o pelo)
Dunque mi permetto di confondere il lettore con alcune righe che introducano senza un filo logico comprensibile, il pregevole lavoro di cui Stefano ci ha fatto dono...

"Memoria, memoria, che sei tu mai! Tormento, ristoro e tirannia nostra, tu divori i nostri giorni ora per ora, minuto per minuto e ce li rendi poi rinchiusi in un punto, come in un simbolo dell'eternità! Tutto ci togli, tutto ci doni, tutto distruggi, tutto conservi, parli di morte ai vivi e di vita ai sepolti. Oh la memoria dell'umanità è il sole della sapienza, è la fede della giustizia, è lo spettro dell'immortalità, è l'immagine terrena e finita del Dio che non ha fine, e che è dappertutto"


SE SI VITE NE AVESSI DUE...TRE...QUATTRO...
Confesso che quando Stefano mi ha chiesto di scrivere due righe come introduzione a questo libro, mi è sorto subito il dubbio se la sua intenzione fosse quella di presentare in forma in qualche modo "critica", il lavoro da lui svolto, analizzandone cioè alcuni punti chiave, con rimandi al testo e slanci colti a carattere erudito, ma per la mia gioia non era questa la sua intenzione.
Non che non mi abbia stuzzicato la possibilità di farlo, anche perché, grazie alla mia nota boria, mi ritengo assai abile in tal genere di operazioni, ma questo mi avrebbe impegnato qualche anno, o magari due, tre, quattro vite intere, viste la mia meticolosità e pignoleria e soprattutto la densità dei contenuti, della struttura, del testo che compongono questo libro.
Allora forse avrei dovuto soltanto fare qualche carezza al mio amico di "kungfu" che voleva rendermi, come nelle moltissime ore passate ad allenarsi insieme, partecipe di questo suo sforzo, apponendo il mio nome è la mia voce tra le pagine di questo libro...?
Beh, io non sapendo né  leggere né scrivere, ho chiesto aiuto alla buon anima del grande professor Gaetano Chiappini (geniale uomo di letteratura tra i maggiori ispanistii e del '900, del quale ho avuto la fortuna e l'onore di essere uno degli ultimi allievi), che mi ha fornito il trucco per raccogliere le idee e far calare la penna, soprattutto per la chiusura di questa mia introduzione.
Ma veniamo al senso della citazione che sopra ho riportato da "Le confessioni di un italiano" di Ippolito Nievo.
La chiave è la memoria.
Considero infatti questo libro un profondo sforzo di memoria.
Uno sforzo che del resto ai miei occhi risulta vano e che non può riuscire nel suo intento.
Ma, Pe.r.ché?
Chi legga queste righe, se conosce Stefano forse saprà che lui, per istinto, agisce in modo irrefrenabile nel bisogno di cancellare se stesso, cancellare il suo vissuto e continuamente ri(S)velarlo attraverso nuove creature, nuovi virgulti forgiati attraverso la memoria ma privi della stessa.
Nel suo agire e nei suoi lavori i contenuti perdono spesso il loro significato, e la memoria diventa pura astrazione, coconcentrandosi nel PUNTO, come in un colpo di spada (in cinese: dian jian 点剑) affondato nel vuoto dell'aria.
Il punto geometrico, il punto all'infinito, il punto che costituisce l'intersezione di piani, ma anche il punto che si frappone frammentando le parole più comuni: pe.r.ché (Domanda a me stesso)
Un punto che in questo libro è presente, compone,  conduce, spezza, genera nuove partenze. Qui, come nella vita, Stefano si dona totalmente all'altro, chiunque esso sia, con i suoi spigoli e le sue sfaccettature, in un afflato di generosità come vittima sacrificale  immolata all'esperienza di se stesso.
Il suo ego si fonde con l'altro da sé, appropriandosene e rigurgitando un altro sé stesso carico di nuove e rinnovate esperienze, per cedersi all'altro in un processo senza fine: come in un ciclo sempre uguale e sempre sorprendentemente diverso, come il bozzolo della seta, come un teatro, come un infinito spettacolo, come l'acchiappino fra la terra e il sole, come una nuova ALBA...ALLA FINE DELLA RECITA

Fei Ming 废名(1901-1969) is an iconic fictionist who had mastered the fusion of Chinese classical literary images with Western modernist writing techniques, a glaring label overshadowing his accomplishments in poetry. This paper looks at Fei Ming's footprint in poetry within the context of the reforming and modernizing process of Chinese poetry in the first half of the 20th century. It offers a particular angle of viewing Fei Ming's undervalued poetic aesthetics, in which he seamlessly reconciled the confrontational forces vacillating the development of Chinese poetry, namely, traditional form versus modern form and Chinese style versus Western style. Specifically, he blended modern philosophy with traditional lyricism to create natural flows of beauty and imbedded the Western symbolist and imagist techniques in forming a unique Chinese poetry style without compromising the sense of coherence. His proposal that new poetry should embrace a poetic "mind" with a prose-like "body" has shaped the making of Chinese modern poetry in its time of need. His equal treatment of the poetic elements of Chinese tradition and Western modern manifests a new interpretation of modernist poetry, a different mentality to approach modernism, and further a distinct paradigm of global modernisms, alternative to the Anglo-American ones.

This article examines the impact of Maghiel van Crevel’s 2008 book Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money by looking at the way it has circulated post-publication, both in a 2017 translation into Chinese by Zhang Xiaohong and in its impact on the study of contemporary Chinese poetry in the English language. It describes the way in which the fieldwork that the monograph represents has created a profusion of connections between poets, scholars, translators, editors, and readers. Because it is structured around a set of acts rather than a set of concepts, this field of connections and relationships has large, ragged margins and is a capacious space for readers and thinkers of many different kinds. The article ends by asking if methods similar to van Crevel’s could be usefully applied to other types of literary reading.

Spring, 1940. Kunming, China. At Southwestern Associated, or Lianda, China's premier wartime university, students take a post-lunch break. The first air raid siren went off before lunch. Now students wait for the second siren that will indicate the planes are fast approaching. In the meantime they read and listen. What does an air raid sound like? Sirens? Yes. Explosions? Almost certainly. But as written into the poetry of wartime Kunming, it also sounds like guitars and the radio, English poetry and chatting. It sounds like car horns, children crying and breathing. It sounds like silence, thinking, listening. What were the effects of air raids on the sensorium? How did the sonic intensity of air warfare, joined with the very real danger of the events themselves, provoke an existential crisis within those who experienced them? In this paper I explore these questions through close readings of two poems written in Kunming during the first half of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945).

“This bold triangulation of six Chinese, Russian, and American poets advances lively current debates about global literature by exploring encounters that challenge the old binarisms and chart possibilities of literary singularities for a future poetics. Edmond’s shrewd account of literary crossings in post-Cold War history helps us imagine how we can experience the challenge of new literary configurations.”
—Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, author of The Literary in Theory, Structuralist Poetics, and On Deconstruction

“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder

“Jacob Edmond addresses what he calls ‘forms of textual strangeness’ across contemporary poems of beautiful complexity and staying power. This theoretically astute book challenges us to read with a keener eye and to recognize how much poetry can tell us about political catastrophes, national dislocations, and promises of cultural renewal.”
—Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, author of Commemorating Pushkin and Distant Pleasures

“One of this book’s secrets: it is, above all, a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular after deconstruction. What is it possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual? As an antidote to these dichotomies, A Common Strangeness gives us triangles, operating in varied scales. Edmond’s analysis of poets from the US, Russia, and China allows him to shed new light on the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that drive the aesthetics of globalization today. Overlapping, Edmond’s philosophical and linguistic triangles become hexagons, enneagons, dodecagons. These multiplying shapes provide fertile new ground for anyone interested in comparative poetics after 1989.”
––Eric Hayot, Penn State University, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin and Chinese Dreams

“Edmond differs from most scholars who make a point of crossing national and linguistic boundaries to speak of a new ‘world literature’ in that he deals with non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone writers and can give close readings of the former as well as the latter because he knows their languages and the histories of their literatures. The fact that he applies this knowledge to a number of representative poems makes his study unique. . . . He makes significant contributions in the areas of literary history, textual analysis, and a theory of comparative literature that ‘negates commensurability in favor of superimposition, encounter, and touch.’”
—Michael Heim, University of California, Los Angeles

“Ultimately the readings support an interpretation of Benjamin as authority for interpreting the experience of globalization, or ‘common strangeness’ as that experience appears in poetry. The close readings are . . . also very worthwhile in the context of critical discussion of world literature.”
—Edward M. Gunn, Cornell University, author of Rendering the Regional and Rewriting Chinese""

Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes the answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, and by studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry.

Author Nick Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s.

Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.

This paper interprets the technique of Lu Xun's 1927 collection Wild Grass through the lens of the literary hint. It finds that past readings of the book have either psychologized and philosophized the collection (Leo Lee, Nick Kaldis) or emphasized its relationship to real political events (Frederic Jameson, Sun Yushi). On the basis of Lu Xun's preface to an unpublished English-language edition of the text, this essay sees these two traditions as independent layers in a literary hint, one designed simultaneously to create a mood accessible by all and to encourage activism in a specific subset of readers. The essay closely reads the poem "Such a Fighter," and closes with an afterword on the continued relevance of the literary hint in the restricted environment of contemporary mainland Chinese literature.

This course presents a survey of the most important movements and developments in modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. We begin by studying Chinese New Poetry, which emerged during the Literary Revolution (1917-1922) that was a key component of the May Fourth Movement. We then trace the modernist masters of the 20th century, seeking to delineate what precisely “modernism” means, and how Chinese poets engendered unique forms of Chinese poetic modernism. Throughout, we will consider these themes and important questions: Why is poetry in particular so fundamentally important to Chinese literature, culture, and history? How do modern and contemporary poets remain connected and indebted to classical Chinese poetics and thought, even while they are also strongly influenced by Western texts and ideas? What role does poetry play in the 20th century, a time that was marked by the arrival of modernity, revolution, as well as the experience of trauma on a large scale? Can we hear the voices of women poets, and how are they distinct from their male peers? And finally, how does the art of poetry intersect with calligraphy, visual art, photography, film, and other forms of media in oftentimes remarkable and revealing ways?