Contemporary, Chinese, Poetry: three words that point to three symmetries, between traditional and modern, between Chinese and other languages, and between poets and poetry. I say 'symmetry' and not 'opposition,' because each side of a symmetry must treat the other as the premise of its own existence, and its awareness becomes richer based on the other. These three symmetries also hold three themes important to contemporary Chinese poetry: the creative transformation of the classical Chinese tradition by the contemporary; the linguistic inter-dynamic between Chinese and foreign influence; and the linked questions of 'Why do we write?' (based on our interrogation of the reality we are confronted with), and 'How do we write?' (judged by our aesthetic standards). For the past thirty years, Chinese poetry could be regarded as circling around these three themes.
Trying to depict the poetry of an entire language is difficult. What isn't 'contemporary'? How many different kinds of 'Chinese' are there in the world? So what I want to discuss is one specific cultural landscape: its geography rooted in the complex political realities and experiences of mainland China in the 20th century, especially after 1949; its weather showing the multiple layers of cultural rupture and how they shape people's thoughts; its borders having nothing to do with the actual map, but established by every pen which keeps writing, whichever corner of the world it is in. In the end, this is what we call poetry, the poetry written in a Chinese that has continually experienced the challenge of 'speaking the impossible' after each disaster: this poetry is different from either classical Chinese or imported influences. It’s uniquely itself: Contemporary Chinese Poetry.
I remember very clearly a cold, raining evening in the early spring of 1979, when Gu Cheng and I walked into a lane in Beijing, looking for a particular address. Here it was, a dilapidated doorway in a grey wall, and a dark, messy courtyard that led us into a house where a Gestetner printer stood. This perfectly ordinary place shone with a bright and mysterious light in our eyes, because it was where the editorial department of Jintian (or ‘Today’ magazine) was based, the magazine which gathered together almost all the poets who were discovering a modern Chinese poetry for the first time.
By then, although I'd experienced three years of 'Re-education' - as it was called during the Cultural Revolution, when the young were forced to work in the countryside - I had been writing poetry for some time, but the pre-history of my own writing, my apprenticeship, was far from complete. The question haunted me: what is 'our' poetry? what poem is really worth writing? There was the painful memory of the Cultural Revolution, but this did not necessarily lead to any profound understanding, it could not create meaningful writing. What gave contemporary Chinese poetry life? This question never left me, even when, one year later, Jintian was banned by the government, and, fourteen years later, Gu Cheng committed suicide during his exile in New Zealand.
My writing, our writing, remains part of a process of seeking. What we're looking for is not merely an answer, it is rather the ability to question ourselves deeply.The contemporary Chinese poet cannot help but be a professional questioner, maintaining a constant position of questioning the self and facing up to a constantly-changing world. This tendency could be said to go back like a spiritual link to the first poet named in the history of Chinese poetry, Qu Yuan, who lived about 2300 years ago. His great poem Tian Wen (‘Heavenly Questions’), is built up of two hundred questions proceeding layer by layer, addressing the origins of universal, mythological, historical and political reality but without providing any answers. He already knew the energy of the question is far stronger than that of the answer.
One question which sounds like a joke, but which put us in a hugely awkward situation was: 'Is there a Chinese language?' In other words, do the characters in which our work is written provide us with unique values? Or, alternatively, do they cancel out such values? What I am trying to point to here is the position contemporary Chinese occupies as a language between two 'others'. The first is Western culture, which has latched onto China since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The second is - strange but true - the classical Chinese poetry tradition itself, which must also be seen as an 'other', even though it has lasted for more than three thousand years. Who would dare to describe him or herself as classical Chinese today? When we assume there is a straight line linking classical China directly to the contemporary era, we just fall into an invisible but nonetheless enormous gap. Even most Chinese people are not aware that more than half of the words we speak today are simply not 'Chinese', but loan words from Europe which are derived from Japanese.
Without concepts like Democracy, Science, Human Rights, Law, Politics, Socialism, Capitalism, Materialism, Idealism (these last two were extremely important for Marxism but are totally wrong in Chinese translation) how could we talk about 'China' today? But these words have no link to classical Chinese meanings except for their visual appearance in Chinese characters. Based on this 'Chinese' language, so-called contemporary Chinese Poetry is just a rainbow bridge hanging between two mountain cliffs. Put positively, it’s creative and transcendent; put negatively, it’s broken and shallow. Even 'Anxiety of Influence' is something we thirst for but can't have. To write in a language which is actually younger than American English, but still hope to stand aesthetic judgement by the exquisite standards of classical Chinese poetry is to speak the impossible to a horrifying degree!
However, to be horrified is not necessarily a bad thing. Only those who have to start with the impossible can hope to achieve the miraculous. Something interesting happened. In the wasteland of Chinese culture after the Cultural Revolution, the last thirty years of Chinese poetry has created an era that is one of the most quick-witted and exciting in the whole history of Chinese poetry. It is not too much to say 'the most' here because, if we compare it with Li Bai and Du Fu, the great poets of the Tang Dynasty, the beautiful forms they wrote in were the great results of a long evolution, based on generations of poetic explorations over thousands of years. Furthermore, they shared the same rules and critical judgement of poetry with their predecessor and contemporaries. But what we had to face was much more challenging: to create a form for each individual poetic, and to try to build up our own judgement based on a multiplicity of influences, all within a single generation.
The following steps have been completed: we began at the 'Democracy Wall' in Beijing at the end of the 70s, and developed through debate 'Menglong Shi' ('Misty Poetry') at the beginning of the 80s. We established philosophical and poetical depth in the so-called 'Xun Gen' (Roots Literature) - actually a meditation on Chinese history and cultural tradition which took up the whole of the 80s. We developed a Poetry of Exile after 1989's Tiananmen Massacre, and, more recently, a poetry which faces up to today's weird, raucous China where power and money unite. During this time, when the first group of poets are still writing, several 'new generations' have already been born.
We can see three clear stages to the journey: the previous, propagandistic, officially-sanctioned 'Non-Poetry' has been abandoned; the individuality of poets and poetry has been re-built; and healthy and positive debate between different kinds of poetry has spread out to a point where it has become our common understanding. However difficult the situation, a living tradition called 'contemporary Chinese Poetry' has nonetheless been created. It is rooted in each individual’s creative energy, and gathers materials together from no matter where or when. Perhaps T.S. Eliot's title is particularly apt for Chinese poets: we are all 'inventors', and our poems are inventing a new tradition. We had to invent because there was nothing we could simply copy. Perhaps the great Classical poets can smile again, because individual energy has once again become where we stand. Only with this root can thousands of years of Chinese poetry properly be called a tradition, otherwise, it’s just a long-winded past.
In 121AD, Xu Shen, the author of Shuowen Jiezi, the very first Chinese dictionary, defined the meaning of 'poetry' as 'expression of will'. This pointed immediately to the expressionist nature of Chinese poetry. It also explained why there were no epics based on linear narrative in Chinese tradition. Instead, the Chinese achievement was to create a concept of poetic space as a timeless constant and view history in relation to this. This same desire has continued, transforming the Gestetner used by Jintian into countless computers accessed by the young poets of the 21st century. Now, at every minute, poems fly in flocks from all corners of the Chinese language, crossing millions of miles of the internet in seconds.
This makes me think about the role played in Chinese mythology by a mountain in the far west of China, Kunlun. It was well known for its beautiful jade, and was often called 'a Heavenly Jade Ladder' that the holy could use to climb between Earth and Heaven. When I read this description by the great Tang Dynasty poet Li He, 'Jade breaks to pieces and the phoenix cries/Lotus drop their tears while the perfumed orchids smile', I thought that this 'Jade Ladder' might also be a metaphor for contemporary Chinese Poetry. Unlike the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, building work on this tower has never stopped. The Jade Ladder stands on every poet’s desk. We write to climb upon it, and the journey of life between Earth and Heaven is endless.
2.
Language and reality always test each other. In Beijing in early 1988, some young poets including myself set up the Survivor Poets’ Club. The name was chosen to hint at two kinds of death. One was physical: the nightmare of Cultural Revolution was not far behind, and countless ghosts still haunted us. The other was a spiritual death: as some friends gradually came out from the underground and got better known, being published and even visiting foreign countries, we felt that their works had become slippery and shallow. 'Survivors,' we thought, must fight both deaths. At that point, we never thought that a bloody reality was secretly stalking our choice of language. After the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in June 1989, who could dare to say that 'I am not a survivor'?
The Tiananmen massacre shocked the whole world - everywhere, people wept for the dead. But another question came to me: if we were shocked to tears to see the killing for the first time, then what had happened to our memories of previous deaths? Weren’t we also those millions on millions who had died in political disasters like the anti-Rightist ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign in the 1950s, the Great Hunger in 1959-1961, and the Cultural Revolution? If so, what were our tears for? Were we lamenting the dead or betraying them, washing them away? Which is more terrifying: the huge number of the dead or the emptiness of death itself? My tears were for what and who we were forgetting. Thus my poem '1989' ended up with a line all my friends thought must be a misprint: 'this is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year'. Ordinary, yes, and universal, because the destruction was never over.
The Tiananmen Massacre is therefore an important coordinate for contemporary Chinese poetry. It completed a circle of thinking that started with a question asked about the Cultural Revolution when it ended in 1976: 'Whose fault is this?' This was deepened by our painful introspection throughout the 1980s, contemplating how our history and tradition was rooted inside us, until people’s eyes turned again to the political system that continue to produce this malignant and vicious situation. This line linking cultural research to realistic resistance was very clear. It could be seen as one process followed through three tumultuous periods of time, but it also constituted three levels of complexity within this same question we were asking ourselves, 'Whose fault is this?'. The energy released by Tiananmen allowed an ancient civilization to break through all these layers of historical chaos and finally relocate its root in humanity.
If we go back to the end of 1978, the streets in Beijing were at once both frozen and burning. At the Democracy Wall - a grey-brick wall, little longer than a hundred meters, near the crossroads of Xidan, covered by thousands of pages of hundreds of unofficial magazines - gathered a huge number of victims of the Cultural Revolution from all over the country.
On this wall I read Jintian for the first time: the brightness of Mang Ke, 'the sun rises/sky – that blood-drenched shield'; the cold, sharp words of Bei Dao, 'Disgrace is the disgraced person’s travel pass/nobility is the noble person’s epitaph.' I seemed to smell a fragrance through its oily printed pages: poetry itself - a new language that had abandoned those big and hollow political words, and so shot directly into my heart.
Shortly after that, the underground literary circle floated up to the surface. There was the gloomy voice of Duo Duo, 'the beasts of burden wear the blinkers of cruelty/ from their hindquarters black corpses hang like swollen drums'; the deep thought of Jiang He, 'Every fissure on the earth gradually/infests my face, wrinkles/raise weary waves on my brow' - and Gu Cheng, who whispered in 'Fantasia of Life,' written when he was thirteen years old, 'Sleep! I close both eyes/and the world is nothing to me.'
These poets were barely aware that, without consulting each other, they were creating and following a new poetics: they expressed their own feelings in their own language. Not only with respect to the themes of their poetry but also with regard to the language they were drawing on, they were breaking away from the political propaganda of the officially-sanctioned 'Non-Poetry' style. The early 80s debate about this writing was predicated on a complete misunderstanding - just like its name, Menglong Shi ('Misty Poetry'), which was given by officially-sanctioned reviewers and actually meant 'obscure, vague, incomprehensible’.
The officials called those poets 'anti-tradition', though poets will defend their right to oppose or revise the traditional. But calling them 'incomprehensible' was simply due to the limitations of lopsided and lazy reading. In contrast to official ‘poetry,' filled with slogans containing neither feeling nor meaning - 'Socialism,' 'Capitalism' - 'Misty Poetry' returned to the images of Sun, Moon, Earth, River, Life, Death, Dream: how could this be called 'anti-tradition'? On the contrary, what this poetry precisely did was return to 'Tradition' - at least, to the pure words Classical poetry used.
Within Misty Poetry, there was a meeting between Li Bai and Du Fu on the one hand, whom we learned by heart when we grew up, and, on the other, the hand-copied poems of Baudelaire, Eluard, Lorca and Neruda. They all gathered together and enlightened us throughout the Chinese disaster. Since the inception of our writing, then, we have been inspired by nightmares, a bitter but bright formula that always stirs up poetry.
Jintian was without doubt the most important literary magazine in Chinese literature after 1949. With a total of just nine issues, and running for less than two years life, it performed the Genesis-like act of formally naming contemporary Chinese poetry. It summed up two key points for Chinese writing: the significance of our generation's experiences; and the conception and forms of a poetry which had developed from the linguistic nature of Chinese characters. I say 'experiences' meaning not only political life, because, since Jintian, the whole system of Chinese political language - its way of thinking, as well as its whole system of expression - has been totally abandoned. Both the aching void in our memory and the pain and numbness of life permeated our everyday life, and were therefore retrieved for the purposes of serious poetry. Our poems, published in Jintian, filled with shocking imagery, completed an aesthetic journey via Ezra Pound’s 'Imagism' back to the soul of classical Chinese poetry: as though a modern import-export business, this strange literary journey unfolded like Marco Polo’s, only in the opposite direction!
Simply by touching on the surfaces of imagery and sentence structure, Misty Poetry had already opened up the future of Chinese poetics: it had established a creative link enabling the rediscovery of the Chinese poetic tradition, making it a source of inspiration to the present. These ideas excited many young Chinese: the thousand copies of each issue of Jintian were passed a thousand times to still more people, who copied its blue and white cover by hand - wherever it touched, new poets, poetry salons, poetry magazines, and group after group of readers were created. Jintian ended forever the meaningless opposition between official 'Non-Poetry' and poetry: after it, the competition would only be between different kinds of poetry. A real, living tradition had been born.
But the shadow hadn’t really moved away. In 1979, after a struggle for power within the central party apparatus, Deng Xiaoping established complete control, and the Democracy Wall was soon banned. Jintian, through pretending to be 'pure literature', lasted one more year, finally stopping when the police said, 'If the press turns one more time, everyone goes to jail.'
A popular subject at the turn of the 70s and 80s was 'Shanghen Wenxue' or 'Scar Literature’, though blood is still leaking - when did we really recover from the wounds of the Cultural Revolution? In 1983, ‘Anti-Spiritual Pollution,' a centrally-orchestrated mass movement began, and Chinese people watched the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution begin again. As one of the 'sources of pollution', my long poem 'Nuorilang' was criticised nationally, the charges running all the way from 'attacking reality’ by stating that contemporary reality was ‘dark and bloodied,' to showing 'no hope in history'. I still remember today, how one older writer, who had experienced a lot of political troubles, looked at me then. In his eyes, I was someone who had been sentenced to death, or was already dead. Ironically, I had to admit to myself most of the charges were true - in fact, these critics should be called my best readers, because for exactly these reasons 'Nuorilang' became one of the most representative pieces of Roots Literature.
This term 'Roots' was used in the almost exactly opposite sense to the expression used by African Americans. Our root is not in other places, but under our very feet: in the depth of this land and its history. Cultural introspection in the 1980s forced us to question ourselves profoundly: within a political system of lies, is anyone merely a victim? Or are they also part of the persecution? At the very least, our silence was complicit in and subservient to that persecution. There was a crazy magic in this: our painful existence within history had secretly been turned into the pain of a kind of non-time.
We dreamt about moving forward, but woke up again and again in the deepest darkness of history. This was always called 'Revolution,' but it had lost even the most basic virtues of humanity and common sense.
China in the 20th century could be called a nation of cultural nihilists, but was there any understanding we could base on that classical Chinese culture which the country had tried its best to abandon? We had failed to make a modern transformation of our own tradition, what we saw before us was something that could only be called 'Communist Culture' in the sense that it was the worst version of Chinese autocracy hidden beneath Western revolutionary language. With its multiple layers of internal splits, it was completely unqualified to be called 'traditional.' These issues were all being worked through in the depths of poetic thought and language. Our resistance had by now become a resistance to our own self-delusions and inhibitions. By the mid-80s, the energies driving poetry had reached a turning point: from relying on external and collective subjects as some sort of social intravenous drip, it turned to the individuality of poet and of poetry itself.
Thinking of the 80s, we always feel a little homesick. We were lashed by waves of experience - some serious, some energising, some spiritual, some sexual. We counted time in months, even in days. Poetry had been opened up, and restlessly broke through the forbidden zones of politics, the economy, culture and sex. In 1986, a newspaper in Shenzhen – the first city in China to allow joint ventures with western firms - held an 'Exhibition of Modern Chinese Poetry Schools', a total of 84 Schools displayed their own manifestos with poems. They called themselves 'Third Generation', after the 'First Generation' of official Non-Poetry, and the 'Second Generation' of Menglong poets - and they are also known as 'Post-Menglong'.
This huge group of poets displayed very disparate qualities - their slogans were noisy and unclear, but together they outlined a period: contemporary Chinese poetry had transcended its ideological in-fighting, and had already built up aesthetic diversity. The original river of Jintian had created different tributaries which now ran toward different estuaries. The poets’ individual thinking and aesthetic ideas were not only beyond official control, but also refused to be limited by the judgement of Misty Poetry. A synchronic period began, mixing up republished Chinese classics such as 'Songs of the South' ('Chu Ci'), and 'The Complete Tang Dynasty Poetry' (‘Quan Tang Shi’), with the waves of translations that brought Homer, Dante, Yeats, Eliot, Plath, and Dylan Thomas. All this was hybridised, making up the genetic code of Chinese poetry today. Perhaps even we did not fully realise that, if you could take a bird's-eye view of the whole history of Chinese poetry, how colourful and interesting this period would seem.
When the Survivor Poets’ Club met in 1988, China had a newly restored energy for political and cultural thinking. The second 'Survivors' poetry reading, held in the spring of 1989, could be called a group show of dissident stars, and therefore the 'Survivors' were banned immediately after the Massacre for being, allegedly, among the 'black hands' (party-speak for provocateurs) behind the student movement.
When I was in New Zealand and heard the news that Huang ('Yellow'), my new collection of poems, and my book-length essay, Ren de Zijue ('Awareness of Man'), had been banned and destroyed, I felt as though my poetry had died in my place, and another strange cycle of non-time began as a footnote to this period of poetry. It felt like the same situation had begun again, this time staring cruelly out from the lines I had written shortly before leaving China: 'Every non-person/only arrives home when they can no longer return'.
3.
The Tiananmen Massacre was not a uniquely Chinese incident: within just four months, the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps no-one experienced more complex feelings than the Chinese did on seeing what was happening in Berlin. Before our very eyes, History was flowing in the opposite direction. The day when exiled Eastern European writers returned home was the day we truly began to be in exile. We were on a different and delayed train. But this delay perhaps also meant the issues went deeper. Those Chinese who had been exiled as political dissidents soon felt themselves to be the conscience of dissidents throughout the world. Today, on the one hand, ideological control in China is getting even tighter, while, on the other, a selfish and cynical attitude floods the entire world. Money buys everything, even the principles of Good and Evil, in the mind of big companies' CEOs. The words I used in my poem '1989' - 'a perfectly ordinary year' – became, despite anything we could have done, true. Tears dried. The dead were forgotten. So, where could Chinese poetry go now?
The answer had to be back to Poetry itself. To be inspired by nightmares is still an effective formula. After 1989, a large group of Chinese poets went into exiled or stayed abroad. This meant a huge amount of Chinese poetry was now being written in exile. The exciting thing about this is that a cruel and painful experience made us write much better. Contemporary Chinese poetry reached a higher peak than ever before in the early 90s.
Bei Dao continued to smelt his cool images, 'The moon endlessly rubber-stamps black business'. Duo Duo’s anger got stronger every day, 'I shut the window, and it’s no use/the river flows backwards, and it’s no use'. Gu Cheng’s sudden death in 1993 cut down his unique, sharp, illuminating intuition, 'In fact once the water is hotthe horse has fallen over/the thinnerthe legs the longer and the more fallen-overis it possible not to fall over?' Zhang Zao’s sweetness was mixed up with poison, 'The women take me to the edge of the universe/to eat ashes, ah, the unreal pasture'. Xiao Kaiyu quietly opened up the inside of things, 'Dozens of cows by the field lines, quietly growing meat.'
Exile, as a theme of life and the spirit, is complete now. It is not merely the result of events; it has become all poets’ common form of existence - even an internal quest. Its place in poetry has become clear too. Exile does not provide poetry with an additional value. It has to be transformed into the depths of the language of poetry. Its literary value has to be based on how one writes. This is because a poetry-of-exile does not really exist: there is only poetry. This was what made us suddenly realize that all poets - crossing all places and times - are alive. A long list began with Qu Yuan, Du Fu, Ovid, Dante - but we all belong to the same state with no boundaries, we all have poetry as our 'Unique Mother Tongue'.
Poetry in China echoed the writing produced in exile. After Tiananmen, China appeared to have lost its voice. Friends’ letters were full of words like 'powerlessness,' and 'emptiness'. I was deeply moved by the fact that it was almost the same group of poets from Jintian and 'Surviving Poets Club' who broke the silence first. In 1990, Mang Ke, Tang Xiaodu and others published another un-official magazine, Xiandai Hanshi ('Modern Chinese Poetry') - it even went back to printing with a Gestetner. In its first issue were new poems of mine, all written abroad.
Looking at the familiar names of the editorial committee, feeling the thin, rough paper, I knew there is a line that cannot be broken. It runs through time and space, linking us up no matter where we are. As we entered the present period of economic reform and 'opening to the world', this line became woven into a further network of writers, which in the internet era has become even bigger.Nowadays, the idea of contemporary Chinese poetry is without geographical limit, and private exchanges of our writing is - almost - beyond political control.
Among those remaining in China, Mang Ke continued directly from Jintian to complete a very rare case of self-renewal through his long philosophical poem, 'Timeless Time'. Yan Li deployed his powerful imagination to create a recognisable style based in metropolitan speech. The 'Post-Menglong' or 'Third Generation' of 1980s poets became the main force. Zhai Yongming, who had become known as the 'Chinese Plath’ because of her famous early sequences, 'Woman,' and 'Jing An Village', after two years of silence spent in New York, shone out in a series of new poems that deepened her work in the narrative mode, while maintaining the energy of her earlier writing. Xi Chuan, initially a representative figure among student poets, combined the roles of poet, scholar and translator, and let the perceptual strength of his poetry erupt within more philosophical reflections. Yu Jian has always been loyal to his 'poetry motherland and mother tongue' of Yunnan province, but with ' Zero File', a long political poem which has affiliations with conceptual art, threw out metaphor under the slogan of 'anti-metaphor'. Ouyang Jianghe, another talented poet who produces poems with his right hand and theories with his left, is always the brass in the poetic orchestra. Other outstanding figures include Bai Hua, Chen Dongdong, Zang Di, Yang Xiaobin, Sun Wenbo, Meng Lang, Wang Xiaoni, Zhong Ming - all post-Menglong poets who gained their followers and critics among the younger poets born in the 1970s and 80s.
Some claim poetry has been marginalised, submerged beneath the commercial China of the 21st century, but if you are a good diver, then you will find a huge population of poets, as well as hundreds of serious poetry websites - in fact, the ocean is bottomless, with countless hidden channels. What’s important here is not the number of poets, but the depth of thought.
Today, 'China' is a huge question mark. It no longer asks us about the choice between different ideologies as during the Cold War, but about what we should be and do in the choice-less situation individuals face under full-blown Capitalism. Shortly after the Tiananmen Massacre, Ouyang Jianghe pointed out that 'a profound break' had happened. Soon, this idea was developed by Tang Xiaodu, perhaps the most important critic of poetry in China since the 80s: he argued that contemporary Chinese poetry moved into a period of 'a poetics of the individual'.
This meant each poet had to construct his or her own individual system of philosophy and aesthetics, including their attitude toward the social and spiritual reality in which they found themselves, toward their mature concept of poetry, and toward the 'tradition' that had to be rewritten for each poet’s work, leading ultimately to the form and language each poet settled on for every poem. Here, the term 'individual' was intended to point out the differences between poets, while 'poetics' indicated a complete system that could be challenged by others.
At this point, an argument I put forward comes into play: every Chinese poem must be both conceptual and experimental. Every collection of poems is a project of thinking and art. We must find the inner necessity linking our poetics to our choice of form, and push the writing until it becomes a journey. Therefore no-one is permitted by that choice to repeat the same strategy, or, to put this more extremely, even when we think we are renewing the tradition, we are actually obliged to start again from zero. This is the only way to deal with the heavy political pressure, the complexity of language sources, and the incomplete cultural environment of recent and contemporary China. Seen from this point of view, the noisy debates which spring up among Chinese poets, like, for instance the one in 1999-2001 about the discourses of 'intellectual writing' and 'daily speech,' all miss the point, because there is no forbidden zone in language, the only real question is how you use it.
Achieving a perspective from which we can look back on 20th Century poetics, with their emphasis on seeking new forms, is a painful experience for Chinese poets. Following a new fashion only to return to an inferior old mode is an often-repeated game. The aim of a poetics of the individual is to avoid this strategy, and build up instead the links between the ancient and the new: to seek so deep an understanding of the issues facing us that a new form of expression cannot help but be created. This is how poetry renews itself.
The idea of a poetics of the individual, then, has returned to the starting point of our writing: to express our own feeling in our own language. Here it becomes necessary to introduce three elements which run through all contemporary Chinese poets’ thought: a new understanding of Chinese characters; a re-interpretation of the classical Chinese poetry tradition; and the creation of a unique, multi-dimensional and global mode of writing.
I have pointed out elsewhere that Chinese characters are not only a writing tool, but represent a special medium of thought. This particular way of thinking is based on a unique linguistic structure, which illuminates the concepts and forms of contemporary Chinese poetry. Every character is a multi-layered unit of the visual, the aural and the conceptual. The visual imagery sits on the surface, an implicit sound-tone lies beneath that, and then there is an abstract layer of grammar behind both. In particular, the unchanging Chinese verb, where form is not marked for tense, means it is always wrong (and an over-simplification) to think about the language in only one tense. In this way, Chinese characters are both concrete and abstract, physical and metaphysical, and should be considered as diachronic in reality, and synchronic when they transform that reality into a written text. This philosophical interstice between space and time, I would argue, is quite unique. I believe this was the motivation behind the ancient Chinese philosopher Laozi’s saying: 'The Tao which can be talked about is not the real Tao.'
ßBased on characters, then, Chinese poetry focusses on Humanity’s timeless situation, and its forms, including both classic and contemporary, are therefore constructed spaces that, equally, have developed from the nature of the characters. We are still learning this, and trying to enable the poetical characters and notional words to work together. One way of measuring this might be that, the more precise the imagery, the more energised the music and the more the meaning appears deep and rich, the greater sensitivity and awareness about the language a given poet therefore possesses. Chinese characters are the very foundation of our creative link with the masterpieces of the classical tradition.
The experimental nature of contemporary Chinese poetry cannot just be directed toward the future, it must also be open to the past. In a Chinese context, sometimes the strangest and most experimental piece is actually an exquisite and decadent Neo-Classical Poem! Apart from Pound’s brief engagement with its imagery, the ancient Chinese poetic tradition has almost never been re-examined by modern thought. What Pound did was very inspiring: he rediscovered this collective tradition by an act of individual understanding. His example opened a huge field of investigation for contemporary Chinese poetry. For example, what enlightenment can we gain from the most exquisite form of 7-syllable regulated verse (Tang shi) from the Tang Dynasty? This combined great craft with philosophical understanding: visually, antithesis and parallelism build a pair of lines which mirrored each other, character by character and word by word. Musically, the tone-based metrical patterns provided an implicit ‘melody’ - these actually form a system of rules by which we can judge the poets' ability.
The eight line structure becomes a portable universe, in which the differing perspectives in the different lines combines the multiple, evenly-moving layers into a whole. Time flows inside of this space, making it alive. Generations of poets have lost themselves in their engagement with this form. How can the concept of being out-of-date have meaning in relation to such a way of thinking? In fact, classical Chinese poetry was never conceived of within a logic of evolution, it always created in 'Concentric Circles,' which include contemporary writing. These ripples bring different worlds into contact with each other. Philosophically and aesthetically, classical Chinese poetry remains the best reference for our writing. It is still an effective source of thought for us today, deepening our present understanding.
The global is our only context now. There is no longer a simple division into East and West. Our success outside China is measured in commercial terms, and is cheap. As a response to such a context a poetics of the individual must test its unique value system against all dimensions, and not only against the West. This process of authentication can only work when Chinese Poetry takes part in discussion and debate with other languages, traditions and poetries. In short, it does not mean anything to talk about internationalism unless this is built up between those deep local spaces which poets create inside their imaginations.
In recent years, we have been holding a series of deep one-to-one exchanges between Chinese and English-speaking poets, and also with Japanese, Arabic and Indian writers. Typically these take a form like the 'Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival,' the first poetry festival between Chinese and English writers, which took place from 2007 to 2008. This was rooted in poet-to-poet translation, then went on to very intense discussions intended to establish shared grounds and concerns. Beyond these private discussions there were also public events, and the whole project was recorded, with this documentation providing a foundation for future dialogue. This is what I call an 'extreme exchange' - I think we should learn to love the word 'extreme': if the original is an extreme piece of writing, it challenges the translator to produce an extreme translation, and this leads on to truly exciting dialogues between the different cultures.
4.
Jade Ladder is exactly this kind of extreme book. This selection of over 60 poets and more than 200 poems, including a number of long poems and sequences, is not only a gathering of the best of Chinese poetry in the last thirty years, but also a map of thought. It attempts to present a complete picture of the complex and exciting events which have been unfolding in contemporary China, and locate this in the depths of its poetry. To read it should be like taking a pulse in Chinese medicine, and the pulse of poetry is linked to every development in language, society, thought and culture in China. Every poem is like a leaf, growing from the branches of the poets' nervous systems, which in themselves touch a richer soil, right down to the depths of ore and magma. The Jade Ladder, then, is still Kunlun Mountain, standing at the centre of Universe; and whoever reads this book is climbing between earth and heaven.
This means that the works selected for this anthology were judged as poetry, and according to the quality of the language, without admitting any other standard, regardless of the fame any given poem may have accrued because it was banned or its author imprisoned, or because it dealt with a politically correct subject matter, whether that be exile, sexuality or political or other minorities. If it is indeed to be a project of thinking and art, poetry must embody its thought in its forms, not just discuss an idea. The particular concept, structure, form, language, sentence and words in a poem constitute its thought. I want to add to Mallarmé’s concept of 'pure poetry', to say, pure poetry does not exist, but we must therefore write every poem as though it were pure poetry. Even the most private love poem, the sharpest political poem, are led to a deep understanding of existence by their individual expression. Therefore those works which were weaker as poems, but were once 'well-known' because of their social context, are not included here: between historic and poetic value, the editors of this anthology stand unambiguously on the side of the poem. Our motivation is simple: we are watched by Qu Yuan and Du Fu, and when did these great poets throw their works into the ring without great care? They would never attempt the kind of games with images that happen today, in which it becomes too easy to make the poem too obscure. In this anthology, we hope to rebuild the formal values of poetry. If Russian poets treat Pushkin as their point of origin, and if American poets need to sign a contract with Whitman, then contemporary Chinese poets must remember the thousands of great masters running all the way back to 2300 years ago when Qu Yuan appeared. They stand among us, outside time, staring at our pens.
This principle is demonstrated by the three stages of editing this book: the selection of the poems; the translation process; and its structural design. Three stages and one principle: to maintain high standards by taking no short cuts.
When selecting the poems, we didn’t choose a work because of convenience, because it had already been translated or was easy to translate. We went back to the original Chinese, and selected what qualified from there. Both classical Chinese poetry and world poetry formed our standard, to judge whether or not the poem is unique. This was like a 'tower built downward': there was no existing model, we had to take a bird’s-eye view on all these poets. The sheer quantity was the first difficulty. Luckily myself and Qin Xiaoyu, the Chinese assistant editor of the anthology, are both insiders and outsiders. He and I are two authors of contemporary Chinese poetry who, at the same time, also try to be its reviewers and examiners. Since 1989, I've been living aboard, and this distance is one necessary prerequisite for clear judgement. Qin Xiaoyu lives in China, in the eye of the whirlpool of contemporary poetry, and is one of the most exciting poetry critics born since the 1970s. Our map was therefore drawn up by both memory and reality.
This principle of editing is in itself a classical reference: 300 Tang Poems, the best-known anthology of Tang poetry, edited around 1763 by Sun Zhu, selected only those poems written in the most exquisite forms, and no exception was made even for the great Du Fu. The difficulty of translation was rarely considered during this initial selection - sometimes, near-untranslatability was even seen by the editors as a proof of originality, and rather than a reason to exclude a piece, was taken as a good reason for it to be included.
We collectively agreed there must be creativity in the translation process. The poem in translation should reflect its original nature, making the original and the translation 'two trees grown from the same root.' Their differences are external, their cores identical, whether at the levels of concept, form or linguistic energy, or in the more difficult areas of music and rhythm, normally thought to be near-impossible to translate. Translation is, simultaneously, loss and gain within one process, and what is lost from the Chinese will, we hope, be balanced by gains in the English. Our target here was to bring Pound’s profound power of discovery and invention into harmony with Arthur Waley’s fluency of expression.
The structure of the book is one of its most distinctive aspects. We do not simply list all the poems by a given poet under her or his name, but separate them into different sections of the anthology as if into different territories of a map. There are six different 'provinces', almost six smaller anthologies, each based on a different mode. This separation into six modes makes each poet’s different area of focus clear, and helps to locate him or her on the map of contemporary Chinese Poetry.
Contemporary Chinese poetry can reasonably be called a miracle, because it illustrates the huge energy produced by a transformation of the whole of Chinese culture, an extremely complex blend of fission and growth. Even though poetry may be said to have cooled down now from the white heat of the 1980s, it's certainly the case that there is a bewildering diversity of choices in today's society. This pace of change and huge diversity means that the influences of both classical Chinese poetry and foreign literature can be described as the 'other', while at the same time they can also be seen as materials waiting to be selected in an act of self-creation. Contemporary Chinese poetry is, therefore, nothing other than a world poetry written in Chinese, and its effectiveness can only be assessed by a global readership.
This means there is no comparative standard of “Chinese-ness” that we can hide behind. The century-long debate about whether Chinese or Western culture should be the main source of modern Chinese thought has ended in this: our source can only be the individual who is capable of continually questioning more and more deeply. Based on this principle, anything, no matter which culture it comes from, can be selected and used. Was this the vision of Tang Dynasty poetry, or of Pound’s Cantos? I would say it was and indeed it still is. The globalisation of poetry is the only opposition to that self-centredness, cynicism and unprincipled attitudinising which pollutes our nature and our hearts today.
Poetry functions like a central question-mark, it runs vertically through the axes of time and space, and poets create in concentric circles around it, their poetics constantly and necessarily expanded by recurrent acts of spiritual betrayal. One action is required of us all: to lay claim to the jade ladder standing in the vast depths of the human heart, and through writing poetry transcend ourselves.
二零一七年第三期