DOCSLIB.ORG

Jiuge: a Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Jiuge: a Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System Zhipeng Guo1∗ , Xiaoyuan Yi1∗, Maosong Sun1y , Wenhao Li1, Cheng Yang1, Jiannan Liang1, Huimin Chen1, Yuhui Zhang1, Ruoyu Li2 1Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China State Key Lab on Intelligent Technology and Systems, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 26ESTATES PTE LTD, Singapore Abstract Zhang et al., 2017; Yi et al., 2017). Besides the research value of exploring human writing mech- Research on the automatic generation of po- anism and computer creativity, these models and etry, the treasure of human culture, has lasted for decades. Most existing systems, however, systems could also benefit electronic entertain- are merely model-oriented, which input some ment, advertisement, and poetry education. user-specified keywords and directly complete However, the recently released Chinese poetry the generation process in one pass, with lit- generation systems are mainly model-oriented, tle user participation. We believe that the which take some user inputs and directly complete machine, being a collaborator or an assistant, the generation in one pass, resulting in poor user should not replace human beings in poetic cre- participation. Moreover, these systems generate ation. Therefore, we proposed Jiuge, a human- machine collaborative Chinese classical po- poetry in fewer styles and genres, and provide lim- etry generation system. Unlike previous sys- ited options for users. For example, the Daoxi- tems, Jiuge allows users to revise the unsatis- angju system1 requires the user to determine the fied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. rhyme, which creates a barrier for beginners. The According to the revision, the poem will be dy- Oude system2 simplifies the user’s choices and namically updated and regenerated. After the only allows the input of a few options and genres. revision and modification procedure, the user The Microsoft Quatrain3 provides limited candi- can write a satisfying poem together with Ji- dates of a theme and each line, but it only supports uge system collaboratively. Besides, Jiuge can accept multi-modal inputs, such as keywords, the generation of quatrains. plain text or images. By exposing the options Due to the lack of user participation, the above of poetry genres, styles and revision modes, Ji- systems are mainly designed for entertainment. uge, acting as a professional assistant, allows We argue that the leading role in literary creation constant and active participation of users in should not be a machine, or at least not only a ma- poetic creation. chine, because it is difficult for machines to handle 1 Introduction the complex expressions of one’s emotion and the use of images in poetic creation. Language is one of the most important forms of Rather than completely replace humans, a better human intelligence, among different genres, po- way is to utilize the system to assist human cre- etry is a beautiful, poetic and artistic genre which ation. The human-machine collaboration mech- expresses one’s emotions and ideas with relatively anism in Jiuge system can not only improve the fewer words. Across various countries, nationali- emotions and semantics of generated poems but ties, and cultures, poetry is always fascinating, im- also guide and teach beginners to understand the pacting profoundly on the development of human poetic creation process. civilization. In summary, the contributions of our Jiuge sys- Recently, researchers have worked on automatic tem are as follows: poetry generation. Meanwhile, neural networks have proven to be powerful on this task (Zhang • Multi-modal input. Jiuge can accept multi- and Lapata, 2014; Wang et al., 2016; Yan, 2016; 1http://www.poeming.com/web/ ∗ indicates equal contribution 2https://crl.ptopenlab.com:8800/poem/index y Corresponding author: M.Sun([email protected]) 3http://duilian.msra.cn/jueju/ 25 Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 25–30 Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. c 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics Collaborative Revision Module Keywords: plane, blue sky Plain Text: There is a plane in the blue sky. Automatic Reference Recommendation Revision Modes Picture: Static/Local Dynamic/Global Dynamic The swan goose is flying outside the clouds. Extract Expand The heavy mist almost make the Main Framework Transform ferry invisible. Keywords: fly, blue sky, swan goose, vast Working Memory Model The vast road has extended to Pattern Checking thousands of miles away. Genere Control Re-Ranking Unsupervised Style Control It's so remote that it seems like it reaches the sky. Quatrain, Acrostic, Iambic Genre: Acrostic Poetry Generation Style: Standard, Sadness about seasons, … Input Preprocessing Module Generation Model Postprocessing Model Final Poetry Figure 1: The architecture of Jiuge system. modal input such as keywords, plain text, and and removes the ones that do not conform to struc- even images. For modern concepts in the in- tural and phonological requirements. At last, the put, Jiuge utilizes a knowledge graph to map collaborative revision module interacts with the them into relevant keywords in classical Chi- user and dynamically updates the draft for several nese poetry. times according to the user’s revision, to collabo- ratively create a satisfying poem. • Various styles and genres. Unlike previous We detail each module in the following parts. systems, Jiuge provides more than twenty op- tions of genre and ten options of style, and 2.2 Input Preprocessing Module can generate more diverse poems. Keyword Extraction. Jiuge allows multi-modal input to meet the needs of generating poetry ac- • Human-machine collaboration . Jiuge sup- cording to keywords, tweets or photos. ports human-machine collaborative and inter- For plain text, we first use THULAC4 (Li and active generation. The user can revise the un- Sun, 2009) to conduct Chinese word segmentation satisfied parts of a generated poem. In terms and compute the importance r(w) of each word w: of the revision, Jiuge will dynamically update and re-generate the poem. During this pro- r(w)=[α∗ti(w)+(1−α)∗tr(w)]; (1) cess, Jiuge also offers candidate words and where ti(w) and tr(w) are the TF-IDF (Term human-authored poetry as references for be- Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) value ginners. and TextRank (Mihalcea and Tarau, 2004) score 2 Architecture calculated with the whole poetry corpus respec- tively. α is a hyper-parameter to balance the 2.1 Overview weights of ti(w) and tr(w). Afterwards, we se- We show the overall architecture of Jiuge system lect top K words with the highest scores. in Fig.1, which mainly consists of four modules: For each image, we use the Aliyun image recog- 5 1) input preprocessing, 2) generation, 3) postpro- nition tool , which gives the names of five rec- cessing and 4) collaborative revision. Given the ognized objects with corresponding probability user-specified genre, style, and inputs (keywords, s(w). Then we select top K words with the high- plain text or images), the preprocessing module est s(w) · r(w). extracts several keywords from the inputs and then Keyword Mapping. The extracted or recog- conducts keyword expansion to introduce richer nized keywords could be some modern concepts, information. Jiuge also transforms the words in such as airplane and refrigerator. Since these modern concepts, which are incompatible with words never occur in the classical poetry corpus, classical Chinese poetry (written in ancient Chi- the generation module will take them as a UNK nese language), such as refrigerator and airplane, symbol and generate totally irrelevant poems. to appropriate relevant ones, e.g., airplane ! fly. To address this problem, we build a Poetry With these preprocessed keywords, the generation Knowledge Graph (PKG) from Wikipedia data, module generates a poem draft. The postprocess- 4http://thulac.thunlp.org/ ing module re-ranks the candidates of each line 5https://ai.aliyun.com/image 26 PKG PWCG (fly) (egret) ! = 0.33 !"#$% = 25.3 (airplane) (fly) ! = 0.08 !"#$% = 27.1 ! = 0.13 !"#$% = 20.7 (wing) (swan goose) (wind) (butterfly) (a) (b) Figure 2: (a) A sampled subgraph of PKG. (b) A sam- pled subgraph of PWCG. which contains 616; 360 entities and 5; 102; 192 relations. 40; 276 of these entities occur in our po- Figure 3: The simplified structure of the working mem- etry corpus. Before keywords extension and selec- ory model, which mainly comprise an encoder, a de- tion, we first use PKG to map the modern concepts coder and there memory components. xi is the i-th line and x is the j-word in the i-th line. Please refer to (Yi to its most relevant entities in poetry, to guarantee i;j et al., 2018b) for more details. both quality and relevance of generated poems. For a modern concept word wi, we score its ory model (Yi et al., 2018b), which takes at most each neighbor word wj by: K preprocessed keywords as input. The encoder maps each word or line into vector representa- N p(wj ) g(wj )=tfwiki(wj jwi) · log( ) · arctan( ); 1+df(wj ) τ tions, and the decoder generates each line word- (2) by-word. The topic memory stores keywords ex- where tfwiki(wjjwi) is the term frequency of wj plicitly and independently, which can learn a flex- in the Wikipedia article of wi, df(wj) is the num- ible order and form of keywords expression. The ber of Wikipedia articles containing wj, N is the history memory and local memory are dynami- number of Wikipedia articles, and p(wj) is the cally read and written to improve the context co- word frequency counted in all articles. We give an herence of generated poems. example of mapping the modern word “airplane” Genere Control. Chinese classical poetry in- in Fig.2(a). volves various genres, and each genre strictly de- Keyword Extension.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Characteristics of Chinese Poetic-Musical Creations
    Characteristics of Chinese Poetic-Musical Creations Yan GENG1 Abstract: The present study intoduces a series of characteristics related to Chinese poetry. It shows that, together with rhythmical structure and intonation (which has a crucial role in conveying meaning), an additional, fundamental aspect of Chinese poetry lies in the latent, pictorial effect of the writing. Various genres and forms of Chinese poetry are touched upon, as well as a series of figures of speech, themes (nature, love, sadness, mythology etc.) and symbols (particularly of vegetal and animal origin), which are frequently encountered in the poems. Key-words: rhythm, intonation, system of tones, rhyme, system of writing, figures of speech 1. Introduction In his Advanced Music Theory course, &RQVWDQWLQ 5kSă VKRZV WKDW ³we can differentiate between two levels of the phenomenon of rhythm: the first, a general philosophical one, meaning, within the context of music, the ensemble of movements perceived, thus the macrostructural level; the second, the micro-VWUXFWXUH ZKHUH UK\WKP PHDQV GXUDWLRQV « LQWHQVLWLHVDQGWHPSR « 0RUHRYHUZHFDQVD\WKDWUK\WKPGRHVQRWH[LVWEXWUDWKHUMXVW the succession of sounds in time [does].´2 Studies on rhythm, carried out by ethno- musicology researchers, can guide us to its genesis. A first fact that these studies point towards is the indissoluble unity of the birth process of artistic creation: poetry, music (rhythm-melody) and dance, which manifested syncretically for a very lengthy period of time. These aspects are not singular or characteristic for just one culture, as it appears that they have manifested everywhere from the very beginning of mankind. There is proof both in Chinese culture, as well as in ancient Romanian culture, that certifies the existence of a syncretic development of the arts and language.
    [Show full text]
  • The Reception and Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in English
    NCUE Journal of Humanities Vol. 6, pp. 47-64 September, 2012 The Reception and Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in English Chia-hui Liao∗ Abstract Translation and reception are inseparable. Translation helps disseminate foreign literature in the target system. An evident example is Ezra Pound’s translation based on the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bo’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” which has been anthologised in Anglophone literature. Through a diachronic survey of the translation of classical Chinese poetry in English, the current paper places emphasis on the interaction between the translation and the target socio-cultural context. It attempts to stress that translation occurs in a context—a translated work is not autonomous and isolated from the literary, cultural, social, and political activities of the receiving end. Keywords: poetry translation, context, reception, target system, publishing phenomenon ∗ Adjunct Lecturer, Department of English, National Changhua University of Education. Received December 30, 2011; accepted March 21, 2012; last revised May 13, 2012. 47 國立彰化師範大學文學院學報 第六期，頁 47-64 二○一二年九月 中詩英譯與接受現象 廖佳慧∗ 摘要 研究翻譯作品，必得研究其在譯入環境中的接受反應。透過翻譯，外國文學在 目的系統中廣宣流布。龐德的〈河商之妻〉(譯寫自李白的〈長干行〉)即一代表實 例，至今仍被納入英美文學選集中。藉由中詩英譯的歷時調查，本文側重譯作與譯 入文境間的互動，審視前者與後者的社會文化間的關係。本文強調翻譯行為的發生 與接受一方的時代背景相互作用。譯作不會憑空出現，亦不會在目的環境中形成封 閉的狀態，而是與文學、文化、社會與政治等活動彼此交流、影響。 關鍵字：詩詞翻譯、文境、接受反應、目的/譯入系統、出版現象 ∗ 國立彰化師範大學英語系兼任講師。 到稿日期：2011 年 12 月 30 日；確定刊登日期：2012 年 3 月 21 日；最後修訂日期：2012 年 5 月 13 日。 48 The Reception and Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry in English Writing does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in a context and the process of translating texts form one cultural system into another is not a neutral, innocent, transparent activity.
    [Show full text]
  • Han, Wei, Six Dynasties Syllabus
    Topics in Classical Chinese Poetry and Poetics (16:217:527) Han, Wei and Six Dynasties Course Guidelines and Syllabus Spring 2020 Instructor: Professor Wendy Swartz [email protected] Scott Hall 323 Office Hour: T 11:00-12:00, and by appointment Course Description: This course introduces the major poetic genres and works of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties, the formative period for classical poetry. It will focus primarily on the art of reading poetry, with attention to relevant historical, biographical and literary-historical contexts. Emphasis will thus be placed on 1) learning the conventions of particular genres and subgenres, 2) assessing the qualities of individual poets and poems through an examination of their manipulation of these conventions, and a comparison with other voices in the tradition, and 3) recognizing the larger stylistic shifts and literary concerns that developed over the course of early medieval China. Readings from a selection of modern criticism will be helpful for understanding individual poets, issues and themes. Primary texts and commentaries are in Chinese, therefore proficiency in reading both modern and classical Chinese is required. Requirements and Grading: 1. Participation (10%): Participation in the translation and analysis of poems in class is mandatory. Students will need to come to class having read and translated all of the assigned poems and critical literature. 2. Class presentation (20%): Each week a student will be delegated to present on the weekly secondary readings (highlighted in bold). These brief presentations should summarize and analyze the main arguments of the readings and pose questions about them. All other students will read in advance the selected material and be ready to pose questions about the reading.
    [Show full text]
  • Hsian.G Lectqres on Chinese.Poet
    Hsian.g LectQres on Chinese.Poet: Centre for East Asian Research . McGill University Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry Volume 7, 2015 Grace S. Fong Editor Chris Byrne Editorial Assistant Centre for East Asian Research McGill University Copyright © 2015 by Centre for East Asian Research, McGill University 688 Sherbrooke Street West McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 3R1 Calligraphy by: Han Zhenhu For additional copies please send request to: Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry Centre for East Asian Research McGill University 688 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec Canada H3A 3R1 A contribution of $5 towards postage and handling will be appreciated. This volume is printed on acid-free paper. Endowed by Professor Paul Stanislaus Hsiang (1915-2000) Contents Editor’s Note vii Nostalgia and Resistance: Gender and the Poetry of 1 Chen Yinke Wai-yee Li History as Leisure Reading for Ming-Qing Women Poets 27 Clara Wing-chung Ho Gold Mountain Dreams: Classical-Style Poetry from 65 San Francisco Chinatown Lap Lam Classical Poetry, Photography, and the Social Life of 107 Emotions in 1910s China Shengqing Wu Editor’s Note For many reasons, Volume 7 has taken much longer than anticipated to appear. One was the decision to wait in order to have four Hsiang Lectures in this volume rather than the customary three. The delay and small increase in the number of lectures bring new horizons in research on Chinese poetry to our readers. Indeed, in terms of the time frame covered, this volume focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on the twentieth century. Three of the four lectures are fascinating studies of the manifold significations of classical verse and their continued vitality in the discursive space of Chinese politics and culture in a century of modernization.
    [Show full text]
  • Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese
    Generating Classical Chinese Poems from Vernacular Chinese Zhichao Yang1,∗ Pengshan Cai1∗, Yansong Feng2, Fei Li1, Weijiang Feng3, Elena Suet-Ying Chiu1, Hong Yu1 1 University of Massachusetts, MA, USA fzhichaoyang, [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] hong [email protected] 2 Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, China [email protected] 3 College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, China [email protected] Abstract Since users could only interfere with the semantic of generated poems using a few input words, mod- Classical Chinese poetry is a jewel in the trea- els control the procedure of poem generation. In sure house of Chinese culture. Previous poem this paper, we proposed a novel model for classical generation models only allow users to employ Chinese poem generation. As illustrated in Figure keywords to interfere the meaning of gener- ated poems, leaving the dominion of gener- 1, our model generates a classical Chinese poem ation to the model. In this paper, we pro- based on a vernacular Chinese paragraph. Our ob- pose a novel task of generating classical Chi- jective is not only to make the model generate aes- nese poems from vernacular, which allows thetic and terse poems, but also keep rich semantic users to have more control over the semantic of the original vernacular paragraph. Therefore, of generated poems. We adapt the approach our model gives users more control power over the of unsupervised machine translation (UMT) to semantic of generated poems by carefully writing our task. We use segmentation-based padding and reinforcement learning to address under- the vernacular paragraph.
    [Show full text]
  • A Brief History of Chinese Poetry: Classical to Contemporary
    A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE POETRY: CLASSICAL TO CONTEMPORARY Title: A Brief History of Chinese Poetry: Classical to Contemporary Author: Phil Smith School: PS 41M Subject Area: Art/Poetry Grade Level: 6-8 Time Two 50-minute perioDs Required: Standards: Standard 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding. As listeners anD readers, stuDents will collect Data, facts, anD iDeas; Discover relationships, concepts, anD generalizations; anD use knowleDge generateD from oral, written, anD electronically proDuceD texts. As speakers anD writers, they will use oral anD written language to acquire, interpret, apply, anD transmit information. Standard 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression. StuDents will read anD listen to oral, written, anD electronically proDuceD texts anD performances, relate texts anD performances to their own lives, anD Develop an unDerstanDing of the Diverse social, historical, anD cultural Dimensions the texts anD performances represent. As speakers anD writers, stuDents will use oral anD written language for self- expression anD artistic creation. (Source: http://www.p12.nyseD.gov/ciai/ela/elastanDarDs/elamap.html) Keywords / “Five Classics”: “Since the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220BCE) the “Five Classics” Vocabulary: refer to a Divination manual, the Classic of Changes; the olDest anthology of poems, the Classic of Poetry; a collection of speeches anD Decrees, the Classic of Documents; a historical chronicle, the Springs and Autumns; anD three hanDbooks of rulers anD behavior nameD together as the Ritual.” Literati: “The northern state of Qin establisheD China’s first unifieD Dynasty (221-207 BCE) (The English worD “China” comes from Qin.) One key to Qin’s success was its Development of a bureaucracy of able scholars granteD official positions anD forgeD a bonD between written culture anD politics that woulD last until the late 20th century.
    [Show full text]
  • Analyzing Sentiment in Classical Chinese Poetry
    Analyzing Sentiment in Classical Chinese Poetry Yufang Hou Anette Frank Institute for Computational Linguistics, Heidelberg University, Germany (hou|frank)@cl.uni-heidelberg.de Abstract positive or negative) of textual elements in Tang poetry from a computational perspective. Specif- Although sentiment analysis in Chinese ically, we propose a novel graph-based method to social media has attracted a lot of in- create a sentiment lexicon for classical Chinese terest in recent years, it has been less poetry. Such a lexicon is a valuable resource for explored in traditional Chinese literature other computational research on classical Chinese (e.g., classical Chinese poetry) due to the poetry, such as semantic analysis (Lee and Tak- lack of sentiment lexicon resources. In sum, 2012) or poetry generation (He et al., 2012; this paper, we propose a weakly super- Zhang and Lapata, 2014). vised approach based on Weighted Person- Turney and Littman (2003) propose a PMI- alized PageRank (WPPR) to create a sen- based algorithm to estimate the semantic orien- timent lexicon for classical Chinese po- tation or polarity of a word. The semantic ori- etry. We evaluate our lexicon intrinsically entation of a given word is calculated by com- and extrinsically. We show that our graph- paring its similarity to positive reference words based approach outperforms a previous (e.g., excellent or beautiful) with its similarity to well-known PMI-based approach (Turney negative reference words (e.g., poor or bad). In- and Littman, 2003) on both evaluation set- stead of calculating the similarity between a given tings. On the basis of our sentiment lexi- word and each of the positive (negative) reference con, we analyze sentiment in the Complete words separately, we apply Weighted Personalized Anthology of Tang Poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • Course Form for PKU Summer School International 2020
    Peking University Summer School International 2020 Course Form for PKU Summer School International 2020 Classical Chinese Poetry Course Title 中国古典诗词 Teacher MEI Shenyou First day of classes June 29, 2020 Last day of classes July 24, 2020 Course Credit 2 credits Course Description Objective: As a time-honored genre, poetry enjoyed an unrivalled status in classical Chinese literature. This course offers a survey of classical Chinese poetry by studying its evolution from about the 11th century B.C to the 12th century AD, when poetry had almost passed the zenith of its development. We shall study its two major forms — Shi poetry & Ci poetry (song lyrics) — and examine their various modes by focusing on the most representative works in history, particularly by ten major poets, with due attention to their distinctive life experience and the cultural context of each poem. By the end of the term, students will be enabled to cultivate their capacity for independent appreciation and to catch a glimpse of the breadth, depth and wealth of classical Chinese poetry. Pre-requisites Some basic knowledge of Chinese is preferable, but not mandatory. Proceeding of the Course This is a lecture/seminar-combined class. On class days, when a new genre or poet is being introduced, I will introduce at the very beginning some relevant historical and cultural background information, followed by students’ discussion. Generally, we focus on one genre/poet for each session. All the study materials will be in English. I shall find the best translations available, sometimes along with the Chinese original and relevant audio readings.
    [Show full text]
  • The Reciprocal Origins of Pentasyllabic Verse and of Imitation Poetry
    50 Chapter 2 Chapter 2 The Reciprocal Origins of Pentasyllabic Verse and of Imitation Poetry Blue dye derives from the indigo plant but is bluer than the plant itself; ice is formed by water but is colder than water itself. Xunzi1 ⸪ The fact that most Six Dynasties ni poems were composed in pentasyllabic meter reflects a profound relationship between imitation poems and the ori- gins of pentasyllabic verse. Elite pentasyllabic verse originated as kind of re- fined or formalized version of more fluid songs; imitations of pentasyllabic verse were in turn more refined or standardized versions of earlier poems. Some of the earliest surviving examples of pentasyllabic verse originated as adaptations of other poems, or recastings of songs in a more permanent writ- ten form. Indeed, one reason so few examples of pentasyllabic verse survive from this early period is that the form began as a kind of song that was trans- mitted orally and not written down. Later, some of these poems were identi- fied as yuefu 樂府, “Music Bureau” songs, but Han texts like Lady Ban’s fan poem were classified both as shi and yuefu.2 Conversely, imitation poems were often a kind of refinement or crystallization of preexisting songs or poems. The earliest examples of each form are not necessarily even distinguished, but “original poems,” “imitation poems,” and “songs” are overlapping categories. An examination of imitation poetry is itself a route to understanding the early development of pentasyllabic verse. From the third century on, however, “imitation poems” began to sharpen the distinctions among these categories. Yuefu is in one sense the opposite ex- treme on the spectrum of authorial intent from ni poetry: while yuefu often employs a generalized and typecast narrator, such as an abandoned woman or 1 Quoted from Xunzi jijie 1.1, but similar proverbs are preserved in other early texts.
    [Show full text]
  • Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry
    Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry Edited by Ping Wang and Nicholas Morrow Williams Hong Kong University Press Th e University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2015 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8139-26-2 All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitt ed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Liang Yu Printing Factory Ltd. in Hong Kong, China Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors ix 1. Southland as Symbol 1 Ping Wang and Nicholas Morrow Williams 2. Southern Metal and Feather Fan: Th e “Southern Consciousness” of Lu Ji 19 David R. Knechtges 3. Fan Writing: Lu Ji, Lu Yun and the Cultural Transactions between North and South 43 Xiaofei Tian 4. Plaint, Lyricism, and the South 79 Ping Wang 5. Farther South: Jiang Yan in Darkest Fujian 109 Paul W. Kroll 6. Th e Pity of Spring: A Southern Topos Reimagined by Wang Bo and Li Bai 137 Nicholas Morrow Williams 7. Th e Stele and the Drunkard: Two Poetic Allusions from Xiangyang 165 Jie Wu 8. Jiangnan from the Ninth Century On: Th e Routinization of Desire 189 Stephen Owen Works Cited 207 Index 219 Contributors David R.
    [Show full text]
  • Jueju: the Quintessential Chinese Poetry Form Before the Sonnet, Before Haiku, There Was and Still Is the Chinese Jueju
    Presented by Jueju: The Quintessential Chinese Poetry Form Before the Sonnet, before Haiku, there was and still is the Chinese Jueju. The history of Chinese literature stretches back thousands of years and remains vibrant to this day. With thousands of classical Chinese poems by masters of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) like Li Bai and Du Fu to Su Dongpo in the Song Dynasty (960–1279), to modern writers like Lu Xun (1881–1936) and the blockbuster fi ction of famous novelists like Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan (1955-), the range and depth of Chinese literature is second to none. While up to 200,000 books are published each year in China, only a small fraction of these are translated into English. In fact, less than 3% of books published in America every year are translations from other languages, and only a small fraction of these are from the Chinese. Communicating the richness of Chinese literature relies heavily on translation. In 2008, scholars from The University of When you hear a jueju, the fi rst thing you hear is a set number of syllables (in this Oklahoma (OU) and Beijing Normal University case seven syllables to a line and four lines long). (BNU) began laying the 枫桥夜泊 foundation for establishing 张继 Yuè luò wū ti shuāng mǎn tian Chinese Literature Today, 月落 乌啼 霜满天 Jiāng fēng yú huǒ duì chóu mián a new literary magazine created in the image of 江枫 渔火 对愁眠 OU’s famous World Literature Today magazine, gū sū chéng wài hán shān sì 姑苏 城外 寒山寺 which is celebrating its 90th anniversary this Yè bàn zhōng shēng dào kè chuán year.
    [Show full text]
  • Tradition and Modernity in 20Th Century Chinese Poetry
    Tradition and Modernity in 20th Century Chinese Poetry Rob Voigt Dan Jurafsky Center for East Asian Studies Linguistics Department Stanford University Stanford University [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Julia Lin notes that the period following the May Fourth Movement through 1937 saw “the most ex- Scholars of Chinese literature note that citing and diverse experimentation in the history of China’s tumultuous literary history in the modern Chinese poetry” (Lin, 1973). Much of this 20th century centered around the uncomfort- experimentation was concerned with the question able tensions between tradition and modernity. In this corpus study, we develop and auto- of modernity versus tradition, wherein some poets matically extract three features to show that “adapt[ed] the reality of the modern spoken lan- the classical character of Chinese poetry de- guage to what they felt was the essence of the old creased across the century. We also find that classical Chinese forms” (Haft, 1989). Taiwan poets constitute a surprising excep- The founding of the People’s Republic of China tion to the trend, demonstrating an unusually in 1949 was a second major turning point in the strong connection to classical diction in their work as late as the ’50s and ’60s. century, when “the Communists in one cataclysmic sweep [...] ruthlessly altered the course of the arts” and poetry “became totally subservient to the dic- 1 Introduction tates of the party” (Lin, 1973). With the “physi- For virtually all of Chinese history through the fall cal removal of the old cultural leadership,” many of of the Qing Dynasty, poetry was largely written in whom fled to Taiwan, this period saw a substantial Classical Chinese and accessible to a small, edu- “vacuum in literature and the arts” (McDougall and cated fraction of the population.
    [Show full text]