Modern Chinese Poetry

By Michel Hockx

In the late 1920s, when Duyvendak jotted down his comments, much of the earlier idolatry was already evaporating, and from the 1930s, modern Chinese poetry reached maturity as the second generation of modern Chinese poets took the stage. Since then, its corpus has grown steadily and evolved: in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and among overseas Chinese communities in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and, since 1978 onwards, has been marked by unprecedented productivity in mainland China, where the so-called Obscure Poetry has played an important part in the emancipation of the individual after the collective nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, and has begun to claim a position in the forefront of the global, poetical avant-garde.
When it comes to the study of modern Chinese poetry, scholars from the Netherlands (following in Duyvendak's footsteps?) have also been in the forefront for quite some time. One of the first book-length studies of modern Chinese poetry was Lloyd Haft's Pien Chih-lin: a study in modern Chinese poetry (Dordrecht: Foris, 1983), while Volume III: The Poem of A Selective Guide to Chinese Literature 1900-1949 (Leiden etc.: Brill, 1989), edited by Haft, is one of the major reference works in the field. Two other Leiden University scholars, Maghiel van Crevel and myself, have done work on the latest and the earliest stages of modern Chinese poetry respectively. Both Van Crevel's Language Shattered: contemporary Chinese poetry and Duoduo (1996) and my A Snowy Morning: eight Chinese poets on the road to modernity (1994) appeared in the CNWS Series of the Leiden Centre for Non-Western Studies.
During the last few decades, the United States has been another important centre for the study of modern Chinese poetry outside China. The first substantial English language anthology of modern Chinese poetry, was compiled by Kai-yu Hsu, who wrote an important historical introduction, and published in New York by Doubleday in 1963. During the 1970s, a first book-length study appeared: Julia Lin's Modern Chinese Poetry: an introduction (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972). During the 1980s, several studies of individual authors were published, and the reappearance of a poetry scene in mainland China has led to the production of a large number of translations. Only in 1991 did the first full-length study of modern and contemporary poetry from mainland China and Taiwan see the light of day: this was Michelle Yeh's Modern Chinese Poetry: theory and practice since 1919 (New Haven: Yale UP), in which a thematic, rather than a chronological, approach is used to map the various roads taken by modern Chinese poets over the past eighty years. A year later, a second book by Michelle Yeh, a volume of translations entitled Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (Yale UP, 1992), was published, definitively establishing Yeh as the leading authority in the field.

Identity and modernity
During the last days of September 1995, Michelle Yeh and I co-hosted a workshop simply called "Modern Chinese Poetry", which brought together a group of outstanding scholars and critics from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, Germany, and The Netherlands. The thirteen papers presented during the Workshop, though each different in its approach and subject matter, can be divided into two groups, corresponding to the two themes that dominated discussions during the workshop: "identity and modernity" and "language and meaning".
Seven papers addressed the first theme, in one way or another. The tone was set on the first day by P.K. Leung's paper "Modern Chinese Poetry in Hong Kong", which generated a lengthy discussion on the cultural identity of Hong Kong poetry. On the second day, I discussed the seemingly contradictory subject of "Modernity in Modern Chinese Poetry" in a paper dealing with recently published love poetry by the 93-year old poet Wang Jingzhi. Bonn University Professor Wolfgang Kubin approached the theme from a different angle, commenting on "The Self-Image of Chinese Poets in the 20th Century" and criticizing the incongruity of this image with the poets' actual behaviour during, for instance, the Cultural Revolution. Michelle Yeh, whose paper was entitled "National Identity and the Avant Garde in Modern Chinese Poetry", presented her views of some recent discussions concerning modern Chinese poetry and poetic theory, especially Stephen Owen's "Duyvendak-like" criticism of the work of the contemporary poet Bei Dao. Yeh put forward the notion of "transculturation" as one way of avoiding the immense problems involved in evaluating the indebtedness of modern Chinese poetry to Western poetry. Taiwanese critic Yang Ze talked about "Modern Chinese Poetry and the Translation of Paradigms", focusing on the prose poetry of Lu Xun, an author who has been all but deified in mainland China, and all but outlawed in Taiwan, so that Yang Ze's presentation provided convincing evidence of the existence of different national identities even within Chinese culture. Professor Iwasa Masaaki of Kyþshþ University, one of Japan's leading authorities on modern Chinese poetry, attempted to describe part of that poetry's identity in terms of a "Light/Darkness Model", concentrating on a typical form of imagery to be found in many 20th century Chinese poems. Finally, the well- known Chinese critic Tang Xiaodu presented a "Reconstruction of the 'Modernity' of New Poetry" by taking a close look at the case of the contemporary poet Yang Lian.

Language and meaning
The remaining six papers were all in their own way related to the subject of "language and meaning". If the theme of identity and modernity was related to the position of Chinese poetry in the world, the second group of papers treated "the world in the poem", discussing all that can be unearthed by taking a close look at the texts itself. Zhang Zao's "Dangerous Travel into Language Landscape", Ouyang Jianghe's "The Sublimation of Contemporary Poetry and Its Limits", and Yu Jian's "Refusing Metaphor: poetry as method" all displayed the Chinese critics' concern about the question of language, its uses in poetry, and the meanings it produces. Yu Jian's "Refusing Metaphor" was especially polemical in this respect, and seemed to reflect a developing of post-modernist tastes and tendencies within contemporary Chinese culture. Maghiel van Crevel presented a meticulous and richly detailed close reading of the lengthy poetry cycle Salute by the Beijing poet Xi Chuan, one of the rising stars of contemporary mainland Chinese poetry, refining on the definition of the notion of "metapoetry" along the way. A similar approach, but with a slight deconstructivist twist, was seized by Peter Hoffmann (Tübingen) in his "Sitting Together With (S)Words: a few remarks on Gu Cheng's Table". Finally, Lloyd Haft impressed all present with his highly original analysis of the structure of modern Chinese sonnets, showing how Chinese poets writing in this Western form adapted some if its formal properties to the Chinese language, inventing new dimensions of rhythm and meaning along the way.
The IIAS Workshop "Modern Chinese Poetry" has proved that the study of modern Chinese poetry is now a well-developed, independent, academic discipline, with its own answers to larger, interdisciplinary questions about literature and culture, based on a corpus of texts that continues to grow in quantity and quality.