Reorientations

Words: Simon Patton

It’s worth remembering that modern poetry is a recent invention, the consequences of which are still being worked out. In 1926, an Australian poet such as Roderic Quinn was capable of writing lines that today seem as impossible as they are, in terms of world-view, remote: “After a spell of chill, grey weather / (Green, O green, are the feet of spring!) / The heaven is here of flower and feather, / Of wild, red blossom and floating wing.” (“The Golden Yesterday”) Here, apart from the writer’s effusive admiration for the phenomenon of seasonal renewal, poetry is equated with certain dominant formal properties: predictable rhythmic patterning, end rhyme and a slightly ‘elevated’, ornamental diction. It is precisely such conventions, internalized to the point of unconscious reflex, that modernism rejected in favour of linguistic diversity, organic form and a highly mobile, idiosyncratic voice.

China went through a similar rejection of its magnificent classical tradition, a tradition that may be traced back over millennia. In response to the ambiguous threat/challenge of Western culture, as well as the growing discontent towards the declining non-Chinese Qing-dynasty dynasty, the Chinese turned to a new form of writing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Instead of using the traditional language—an ossified style that served the same purpose as Latin did in the West until recent times—an effort was made to create a written language based much more closely on how people actually spoke.

Again, like their Western counterparts, Chinese poets who adopted this revolution in poetic language were faced with a formidable problem, a problem which one critic expressed in the following terms: how do modern poets justify what they write as poetry without the literary and structural features of their traditional verse heritage? Due to historical circumstances, the poets writing in mainland China in the 1920s, 30s and 40s didn’t really need to address this question. Their country was at war, first with the Japanese and then with itself between 1937 and 1949, and virtually all literature was dominated by the needs of propaganda. This trend continued with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949; during the Cultural Revolution (1976-1976) even the pretence of literature’s autonomy was discarded and it became virtually impossible to write anything that did not convey in immediately comprehensible terms a distinct political notion that the reader could grasp. Poetry was abolished.

Contemporary Chinese poetry appeared at the end of the 1970s, with the death of Mao and the gradual re-opening of China to the outside world, ostensibly for political and economic purposes, but also for cultural renewal. The poets who rose to prominence at this time embraced lyricism and individuality. Orthodox critics labelled their work ‘obscure’ because they could extract no clear-cut political program from it; for many readers however it signalled the rebirth of poetry as a distinct form of language that reconnected with emotion and mystery.

In the course of the 1980s, with the growing awareness of the immense richness of Western modern poetry, the emphasis swung towards experimentalism. Writers were interested in seeing how they could incorporate Western –isms into their work, and many strove for a ‘shock of the new’ effect. Groups were formed advocating this or that program. There were surrealists, Dadaists, deconstructionists. In many cases, the thrill of poetic originality was more intense than any sense of quality or true distinctiveness. The crushing of the 1989 June Fourth protest movement brought this round of energetic search to an abrupt close.

In the 1990s, poets tended to operate more on an individual basis, and made a concerted move to put their writing back in touch with the daily realities of a China that was transforming at an incredible pace. Experimentalism took a back seat to a new matter-of-factness. Poets—and I think this is clear in many of the poems translated here—found pleasure in divesting poetry of all its otherness from everyday language. Perhaps too a profound sense of disgust with any kind of idealism (the kind of idealism that had led to the founding of the People’s Republic in the first place) made poets averse to indulging in dreams and hopes about what might be. Poetry spoke to the daily concerns of ordinary people, and in some cases took delight in deflating any sense of aesthetic grandeur or moral rigour, qualities frequently associated with the poetry of the lyricists. It is within the three contemporary tendencies of lyricism, experimentalism and matter-of-factness that many Chinese poets try to compose a distinct voice, a voice inflected with their own particular experiences and concerns.

It would be a lie if I said that the selection presented here in Stylus was in any sense of the word ‘representative’. It is based largely on my own wayward instincts, instincts offset to some extent, I hope, by the sage judgement of Yu Jian, who directed my attention to the work of Yao Feng, Yuxiang and Fang Xianhai (please don’t be put off by the letter ‘x’ in all those names—it’s roughly pronounced like ‘sh’ in English). Better to think of it as a snapshot, a snapshot that includes a few small poems by some big names, alongside a choice of talents still exploring the potentials of their muse.

I should also say a few words about the translations. No English translation can convey much of the extraordinary power of the Chinese script, a script that incorporates a host of stylized pictographic elements and that does not spell out the sound of words as we do in English but combines, in the majority of cases, elements representing one of 214 basic strands of meaning together with another element that approximates the sound of a syllable. Nor have I even attempted to approximate the elusive ‘music’ of the four tones in modern Mandarin. I have focussed my efforts on sense, and on poetic sense where I been able to detect its presence (needless to say, there is much in this regard that I have lacked a sixth sense for). My aim has been to communicate as much of the information content and the less tangible expressive play as possible despite the radical differences between the Chinese and English languages as well as the cultural systems they embody. Mostly, I have been conscientiously cautious, domesticating Chineseness to the expectations of an Australian sensibility, but occasionally—in my handling of the poems of Yao Feng especially—I have tried rough-hand to catch more of the experience of the Chinese poem in its essential otherness. Ideally, an act of translation should be an invitation to English to become something it has never been before, an offer of the possibility for shift, re-orientation, eccentricity. In the translation process, I’ve tried to keep in mind the flamboyant words of Willis Barnstone who, in his Poetics of Translation, wrote that untranslatable lines are natural meadows and yield the best wild herbs. Needless to add, they also provide the most fertile ground for total translation failure, something I hope I have managed, on the whole, to avoid here.