Yang Lian's Exilic Poetry

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Yang Lian's Exilic Poetry SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 288 June, 2019 Yang Lian’s Exilic Poetry: World Poetry, Ghost Poetics, and Self-dramatization by Qing Liao Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS FOUNDED 1986 Editor-in-Chief VICTOR H. MAIR Associate Editors PAULA ROBERTS M ARK SWOFFORD ISSN 2157-9679 (print) 2157-9687 (online) SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series dedicated to making available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor-in-chief actively encourages younger, not yet well established scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern standard Mandarin and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. Submissions are regularly sent out for peer review, and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form. We do, however, strongly recommend that prospective authors consult our style guidelines at www.sino-platonic.org/stylesheet.doc. Manuscripts should be submitted as electronic files in Microsoft Word format. You may wish to use our sample document template, available here: www.sino-platonic.org/spp.dot. All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are free in PDF form. Issues 1–170, however, will continue to be available in paper copies until our stock runs out. Please note: When the editor goes on an expedition or research trip, all operations may cease for up to three months at a time. Sino-Platonic Papers is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Yang Lian’s Exilic Poetry: World Poetry, Ghost Poetics, and Self-dramatization Qing Liao University of Pennsylvania 你们已无言, 而石头有了呼声. This stone stands as a witness for those who can’t speak. This dedication was composed by Chinese poet and author Yang Lian 楊煉 and translated by John Minford, then head of the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. It is inscribed upon a stone memorial hewn to resemble the geographical shape of China, dedicated to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The memorial stands outside St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Alten Road in Auckland, New Zealand. It was chosen by two Chinese poets, Yang Lian and Gu Cheng, who were then organizing demonstrations against the Chinese Communist Party’s declaration of martial law at the time they were attending an international conference on non-mainstream Chinese poetry at the University of Auckland. They were denied reentry into China, and their works were blacklisted. The two settled down in New Zealand, and in 1993 Gu murdered his wife and committed suicide, while Yang left his base in Auckland and started his second period of exile elsewhere in Europe. Incorporated into the white stone slab is a globalized poetic resonance: world poetry, one of the striking literary features of the post-Cold War era, an era also famously characterized by great historical changes including the rise of the free market and political upheaval. World poetry has been the subject of much debate. Both established and young scholars, such as Stephen Owen and Jacob Edmond, have contributed to the topic with great energy and sharp criticism. Owen explains world poetry as an invention propitious for the poetry of the Third World, because world poetry is able to provide those SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS NO. 288 poets with an opportunity to be recognized by international critics — in particular, Western critics — so that their poetry and that of others of their nation can enjoy the world’s attention, at least for that moment (28). He contends that world poetry writers must claim their nationality in an intricate manner, providing readers with a refreshingly “exotic” sentiment, but not in such a profound way that readers will lose interest (28). While Edmond recognizes world poetry as a new model and an opportunity for post–Cold War literary revitalization, his argument highlights “the multilateral cross-cultural referents and personal encounters that are neither local nor global, but that reveal the historical origins and contingencies of the local/global dichotomy” (3). He is more confident than Owen in the middle ground between local and global, which poets may explore to discover their true identities, rather than abuse to conceal their hypocrisy regarding alleged colonial Western values and their poor mastery of local literary conventions. The question of whether there is a middle ground between local and global — the supposed foundation of world poetry — remains contested. In order to avoid discussing world poetry in solely theoretical terms, this paper turns to the particular case of the modern Chinese poet Yang Lian. It focuses on his poetic collection Non Person Singular, a selection of short poems written between 1981 and 1991, including the cycle of poems entitled “Scenery in a Room,” which can be considered the prelude to his later exile poetry (Yang, introduction). Yang is typical of dissident Chinese poets after 1989 in that he garnered a transnational reputation for political engagement and later became a strong domestic seller with worldwide recognition. His Non Person Singular is also typical of world poetry in the sense that it centers on his exilic life, intertwining past Beijing with present Auckland. Most importantly, his extensive use of images corresponds to the world poetry tradition, in that it wisely seeks to decrease translation difficulty and to transform untranslatable words into translatable images. However, Yang also stylistically differs from other Chinese modernists due to his immersion in Chinese classical poems and his late start in reading Western literature in translation. This paper will investigate the stylistics of Yang’s short poems written during his period of exile in Auckland and deconstruct them under the tension between dissidence and accommodation to point out that world poetry should go beyond mere exploitation of the brutality of the state to produce dramatizations that stand on their own and that are successful on their own terms. 2 LIAO, “YANG LIAN’S EXILIC POETRY” Yang Lian, 2004. The photograph, by Song Zuifa, appeared in Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Brill, 2008), p. 138. 3 SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS NO. 288 BIOGRAPHY OF YANG LIAN Yang Lian was born into a diplomatic family on February 22, 1955, during the period his parents were stationed at the Chinese embassy in Bern, Switzerland. His grandfather had accumulated great wealth, but Yang’s parents were radical idealists who donated all their belongings to the Chinese Communist Party. Before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, they left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and retreated to universities to teach English, but Yang refused to learn even one English word, a decision he deeply regretted during his exile in Auckland, according to his interview with ifeng.com. However, his father forced him to study classical Chinese before he was even seven years old, requiring him to recite poems (whose meanings were then obscure to Yang) at the dining table (Yang, interview). Yang’s given name, “Lian” (炼), conveys his father’s literary expectations for him: the word refers to the process of refining coal or metals through the application of intense heat, and also denotes the refinement of words into finer combinations. When Yang was six years old, his parents brought him back to Beijing to live in the Yuanming Yuan neighborhood. His first poem “Apologia: To a Ruin” (“Zibai-gei yizuo feixu 自白—给一座废墟”) was dedicated to Yuanming Yuan. In the poem, he transforms the ruins of Yuanming Yuan into the graveyard of Chinese dynastic history, traditional culture, and myriads of lives. He wrote, “this testament becomes a curse muttered at my birth” (Yang, Renditions: Chinese Literature Today, introduction to Yang in 2001, he was separated from his parents in the 1970s and sent down to the countryside, following Mao Zedong’s “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement, which aimed to purge pro- bourgeois sentiments among Chinese youth through hard labor alongside peasants and workers. From 1974 to 1977, Yang served as a coffin-bearer and grave-digger in the suburbs of Beijing. He took as one of his first poetic subjects his experience of working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, focusing on his interactions with such elements of nature as the sun, moon, earth, river, night, etc. Yang’s preference for natural images was shared by the Menglong (“Misty” or “Obscure”) poets, who also abandoned the grandiose, meaningless words of political propaganda that had worn out China since the Cultural Revolution. Menglong poetry is conventionally translated as “Poetry of Shadows” or “Obscure Poetry” and gained its name from Chen Jingrong’s 陈敬容 translation of Baudelaire’s work “Dawn” (“Le crépuscule du matin”) from The Flowers of Evil (Les fleurs du mal) (Edmond, “The ‘Flâneur’ 4 LIAO, “YANG LIAN’S EXILIC POETRY” in Exile,” 380).
Recommended publications
  • A Massively Single Number
    A MASSIVELY SINGLE NUMBER 庞大的单数 Edited by Yang Lian Translated by Brian Holton SHEARSMAN BOOKS 3 First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Shearsman Books Ltd 50 Westons Hill Drive Emersons Green BRISTOL BS16 7DF www.shearsman.com ISBN 978-1-84861-376-8 Poems copyright © by the individual authors, 2015. Introduction copyright © Yang Lian, 2015. All translations copyright © Brian Holton, 2015, except ‘What Is Not’ (p.34), copyright © Wang Shuya, Max Davis, and William Ellis, 2015. The original poems reprinted in this volume remain in the copyright of their authors and are copyright © 2015, except where listed otherwise. 4 Artsbj.com International Chinese Poetry Prize Anthology 5 6 CONTENTS 1 Introduction ––Yang Lian POEMS WITH JUDGES’ COMMENTS SECOND PRIZE POEMS : Cao Shu 13 Judge’s Comment ––Zhai Yongming 14 from Rectifying Tower Liaohui 27 Judge’s Comment –– Qin Xiaoyu 30 Seated at Peace 32 What Is Not 34 Soul at Peace 36 Ordinary Chinese, Sichuanese THIRD PRIZE POEMS : Zang Di 45 Judge’s Comment –– Yang Xiaobin 46 Compendium of the Necessary Angel 48 Compendium of Excavation 50 2013 Dragonboat Festival Compendium 7 Yu Jian 55 Judge’s Comment –– Tang Xiaodu 58 Ecology — After Reading the Biography of Solzhenitsyn 62 Iraq 64 Hometown Qi Ye 69 Judge’s Comment –– Xi Chuan 70 from River of Dark Clouds THE PRIZE FOR FIRST COLLECTION : Zhong Shuo 85 Judge’s Comment –– Jiang Tao 86 My Lovely Name Is Howling in Heat 88 People’s Square 90 Immortal Xu 92 Hereditary Grudge 96 Chrysanthemum Rhapsody 98 Man’s Perfume 100 Practising Enthusiasm
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry of Bei Dao, Yang Lian, and Duoduo
    Constructing a System of Irregularities Constructing a System of Irregularities: The Poetry of Bei Dao, Yang Lian, and Duoduo By Chee Lay Tan Constructing a System of Irregularities: The Poetry of Bei Dao, Yang Lian, and Duoduo By Chee Lay Tan This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Chee Lay Tan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8026-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8026-8 For my father, Tan Lian Kim (1950-1986), and his appreciation of art and beauty One of the most intriguing and characteristically Chinese techniques in Chinese traditional paintings is “liubai,” meaning to “leave whiteness behind.” A painter may consciously keep parts of a painting empty to contrast black paint with white space. While such whiteness can be regarded as negative space because of the absence of ink, it also represents an active space emitting positive power. Not only does this white space empower the artist to balance the entire painting, unite the various images, and manage space, but it also enhances the legibility and visibility of individual elements, including images, colours, and strokes. Mistiness is a form of liubai in poetics. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Charts .............................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Reclaiming the Self in Yang Lian's Yi and Gao Xingjian 'S Lingshan
    Personal Freedom in Twentieth-Century China: Reclaiming the Self in Yang Lian's Yi and Gao Xingjian 's Lingshan Mabel Lee A common assumption is that China's traditional culture had no place for the 'self', an awareness of which is critical for the emergence of the notion of personal autonomy and for the generation of demands for the right to personal freedom and the corollaries of social and political equality. The propaganda, including the literature, produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) would seem to support such an assumption. However, this paper will argue that such an assumption is incorrect and that while the Chinese notion of 'self' may differ significantly from its Western counterpart, it has had a long history of development and that the period of greatest development has in fact taken place in the present century, during which time Western philosophies with strong resonances in traditional Chinese philosophy have been eclectically embraced. The awakened 'self' and its demand for freedom was then consciously put aside because of the perceived need for mass action in patriotic struggles first against Western imperialism, then against Japanese territorial encroachment and finally full-scale invasion in 1937. Such threats to the nation had been clearly removed by the late 1970s and, as Deng Xiaoping's ascendancy to power signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution to a still nervous population, the call for the affirmation of the self resurfaced in the voice of the young Beijing poets during the Democracy Wall Movement, 1978-79. As China opened to the international world in its push to establish itself as one of the modernised nations of the world, foreign works of literature, philosophy, politics, and economics flooded in alongside the 133 Mabel Lee technological and scientific works.
    [Show full text]
  • THE NEW Alphabet Opening DAYS
    THE NEW AlPHA BET OPENING D AyS A OPEN N DA y i S N g THE NEW AlPHABeT OPENiNg DAYS Curated by Bernd Scherer and Olga von Schubert 1 PROGRAM 25 THU, JAN 10 4:30 P.M. – MIDNIGHT FROM ZED TO OMEGA “WALK-IN THEATER: A BABYLON, WHOSE TOWER DOES NOT COLLAPSE, IN BERLIN” 47 FRI, JAN 11 3:00 P.M. – 5:30 P.M. THE DISCRETE CHARM OF THE ALPHABET 61 FRI, JAN 11 6:00 P.M. – 8:45 P.M. ARCHIVE SUITE 71 FRI, JAN 11 6:00 P.M. – 8:45 P.M. THE THREE TONGUES YOU SPEAK IN YOUR SLEEP 81 THU, JAN 10 – FRI , JAN 11 SANDEEP BHAGWATI: LISTEN �MIYAGI HAIKUS� 113 SAT, JAN 12 3:00 P.M. – 7:30 P.M. STOP MAKING SENSE 129 SAT, JAN 12 4:00 P.M. – 7:00 P.M. LOOMING CREOLE 139 SAT, JAN 12 8:00 P.M. – 11:30 P.M. COUNTERING VIRTUAL DISPOSSESSION 149 SUN, JAN 13 1:30 P.M. – 4:30 P.M. (UN-)LEARNING PLACE 158 THE NEW ALPHABET 2019–2021 Program Preview 163 BIOGRAPHIES 185 INSTALLATIONS 2 ESSAYS AND POEMS 9 89 The New Alphabet Lyrical Responses to Sandeep Bernd Scherer Bhagwati’s Miyagi Haikus Yoko Tawada, Yang Lian, Monika Rinck, Ranjit Hoskoté, 33 Christian Filips, Lance Olsen Reading and Writing How can I live? What can I know? What does the 119 future hold? The Crisis of Epistemology and Alexander Kluge New Institutions of Learning Felix Stalder 53 Algorithms—the Heirs of 125 the Alphabet? Machine Languages of AI On the “new opacity” Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen and the project of “digital enlightenment” Sybille Krämer 133 Kriol Operating System Accounts from the first part 57 of The Middle Passage On the Cosmotechnical Filipa César Nature of Writing Yuk Hui 145 Countering Virtual 67 Dispossession Archive Suite Kader Attia Karin Harrasser 153 77 Learning Beyond Alphabets Inside a Translator’s Mind Boris Buden and Vincenzo Latronico Olga von Schubert 85 Listening to Listening On the LISTEN [Miyagi Haikus] project Sandeep Bhagwati The New Alphabet Foreword The world around us is increasingly being shaped by scripts and the act of writing letters and numbers: Knowledge is being negotiated on the basis of written texts.
    [Show full text]
  • 3 May 2013 © PEN International, 2013
    3 May 2013 © PEN International, 2013 The PEN Report: PEN International celebrates Creativity and Constraint literature and promotes freedom in Today’s China of expression. Founded in 1921, our global community of writers Authors Sarah Hoffman, Larry Siems Preface John Ralston Saul now spans more than 100 countries. Editors Sahar Halaimzai, Sara Whyatt With thanks to The Independent Chinese Our campaigns, events, publications PEN Centre, PEN American Center, and programmes aim to connect Marian Botsford Fraser, Cathy McCann, writers and readers wherever they Laura McVeigh, Joshua Rosenzweig and Maya Wang are in the world. President John Ralston Saul Secretary Hori Takeaki PEN International is a non-political Treasurer Eric Lax organisation and holds special Executive Director Laura McVeigh consultative status at the United Nations. Board Haroon Siddiqui Yang Lian Markéta Hejkalová Elizabeth Hiester Philo Ikonya Lee Gil-won Sylvestre Clancier Antonio Della Rocca Pen International ©PEN International, 2013 Brownlow House, 50/51 High Holborn, London WC1V 6ER All rights reserved. Without limiting T 44(0)20 7405 0338 the rights under copyright reserved Email [email protected] above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into INTERNATIONAL P. E. N. a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any (known as PEN INTERNATIONAL) form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording (A COMPANY LIMITED BY GUARANTEE) is a or otherwise), without the prior written registered charity in England and Wales
    [Show full text]
  • {DOWNLOAD} Ai Weiwei Ebook Free Download
    AI WEIWEI PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Karen Smith,Bernhard Fibicher,Hans-Ulrich Obrist,Qing Ai,Weiwei Ai | 160 pages | 16 May 2009 | Phaidon Press Ltd | 9780714848891 | English | London, United Kingdom Ai Weiwei Art, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory Shortly after Weiwei was born—most sources state on August 28, , but others suggest May 13 or 18, —communist officials accused Ai Qing of being a rightist, and the family was exiled to remote locales. They were first sent to the northeastern province of Heilongjiang and then to the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang before being allowed to return to Beijing in , at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Eager to escape the restrictions of Chinese society, he moved to the United States in Although Ai initially focused on painting, he soon turned to sculpture , inspired by the ready-made works of the French artist Marcel Duchamp and the German sculptor Joseph Beuys. Exploring the fraught relationship of an increasingly modernized China to its cultural heritage, Ai began creating works that irrevocably transformed centuries-old Chinese artifacts—for instance, a Han dynasty urn onto which he painted the Coca-Cola logo and pieces of Ming - and Qing -era furniture broken down and reassembled into various nonfunctional configurations. After building his own studio complex on the edge of Beijing in , Ai turned toward architecture , and four years later he founded the design firm FAKE to realize his projects, which emphasized simplicity through the use of commonplace materials. In Ai was invited to write a blog for the Chinese Web portal Sina. Although he initially used the blog as a means of documenting the mundane aspects of his life, he soon found it a suitable forum for his often blunt criticism of the Chinese government.
    [Show full text]
  • Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms
    Annual Meeting The American Comparative Literature Association Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms April 1-4, 2010 New Orleans, LA Table of Contents 1. Conference Schedule 4 2. Welcome and General Information 7 3. Seminar Overview 8 4. Plenary and Special Sessions 17 5. Seminars in Detail 18 6. Acknowledgements 215 7. Hotel Maps 216 8. Index 221 9. Call for Proposals for ACLA 2011 250 10. Map of New Orleans Back Cover 3 ACLA 2010 Conference Schedule Thursday 4/1 4:00 - 8:00pm Registration and Information Open Mezzanine, Hotel Monteleone 4:30 – 6:00pm ADPCL and Graduate Caucus Round Table: Navigating the Current Job Market (Atia Sattar and Chandani Patel, presiding) La Nouvelle East Room, Hotel Monteleone 6:00 - 8:00pm Welcome Reception Queen Anne Ballroom, Hotel Monteleone Friday 4/2 7:30 -12:00pm Registration Continues Mezzanine, Hotel Monteleone 7:30 - 10:30am Continental Breakfast and Coffee/Tea Service Catering Stations in the Hotels Astor, Bienville and Monteleone, and at Arnaud’s 8:00 - 10:00am ACLA Executive Board Meeting Hunt Room, Hotel Monteleone 8:00 -10:00am Stream A panels 8:30 - 5:00pm ACLA Book Exhibit Second Mezzanine, Hotel Astor 10:15 - 12:15pm Stream B panels 12:30 - 1:30pm Business Meeting Queen Anne Ballroom, Hotel Monteleone 1:30 - 5:00pm Registration Continues Mezzanine, Hotel Monteleone 1:30 - 3:30pm Stream C Panels 3:45 - 5:45pm Stream D Panels 4 6:00 - 7:30pm Plenary Roundtable: Translation Emily Apter, NYU; Sandra Bermann, Princeton U; Jacques Lezra, NYU; Haun Saussy, Yale U; Michael Wood, Princeton U Queen Anne Ballroom, Hotel Monteleone 7:30pm – 9:30pm Graduate Student Reception 701 Dauphine St., corner of Dauphine and St.
    [Show full text]
  • Yang Lian Adonis 8 Nov 2010
    Contemporary China Centre University of Westminster AGENCY AND IMAGE IN POETIC LANGUAGE: AN ENCOUNTER BETWEEN ADONIS AND YANG LIAN Monday 8 November 2010 5.30 - 8pm The Pavilion University of Westminster 115 New Cavendish Street London W1W 6UW ‘My loneliness is a garden.’ Adonis ‘Watching ourselves set sail.’ Yang Lian Numerous Chinese and Arabic poets have been translated into English but few are translated across these two languages. Chinese and Arabic poets have not therefore to date enjoyed the opportunity to become acquainted with each other’s poetry except when mediated by the intervention of a third language. Yet there are many reasons to begin to explore shared themes across these poetic fields, from the global status of their two ‘world cultures’, distinctive yet intersecting legacies of engagement with colonialism and Western poetry, to common problems of cultural translation. A recent encounter in Jordan in 2002 between Adonis, the Arab world’s best known poet, and Yang Lian, one of the ‘founders’ of contemporary Chinese poetry and a London-based political-cultural critic, has begun an unprecedented exchange between these two world cultures. Pursuing the themes of cultural ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ which the two share in their writing, they have since 2002 held a number of dialogues, their poems have been translated into Arabic and Chinese (as well as English), and interviews between them have been translated into English, as well as Arabic and Chinese. This encounter between Adonis and Yang Lian will focus on the question of how poetic languages in translation can have a universal appeal across experiences of cultural and political difference, transnational migration and exile.
    [Show full text]
  • Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent Cosima Bruno Department of China and Inne
    This is the Accepted Version of an article which is published in final form (version of record) by Taylor and Francis in Life Writing and available online via http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlwr20#.V2kJPeYrL-Y Please refer to published version when citing and to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. Accepted Version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22627 Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent Cosima Bruno Department of China and Inner Asia SOAS, University of London, UK Abstract This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognizes the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile. Keywords languaging; multicultural London; poets of Chinese descent; xenophone 1 For more than two decades now, scholarly discourse has been attempting to break the national boundaries of literatures from around the world, and especially of those literatures produced in a hyphenated context, such as the British-Chinese.
    [Show full text]
  • Chinese Writers and Artists Travel to Paris, 1920S–1940S
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Dreams and Disillusionment in the City of Light: Chinese Writers and Artists Travel to Paris, 1920s–1940s A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Angie Christine Chau Committee in charge: Professor Yingjin Zhang, Chair Professor Larissa Heinrich Professor Paul Pickowicz Professor Meg Wesling Professor Winnie Woodhull Professor Wai-lim Yip 2012 Signature Page The Dissertation of Angie Christine Chau is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2012 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ...................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents............................................................................................................... iv List of Illustrations.............................................................................................................. v Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ vi Vita...................................................................................................................................viii Abstract............................................................................................................................... x Chapter 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Translation and World Literature
    Master Thesis Faculty of Humanities Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Translation and World Literature: Bei Dao and Yang Lian in English and Italian Submitted by: Matteo Garbelli S2618613 MA Asian Studies (60 EC) Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Maghiel van Crevel 15 July 2020 Leiden Word count (including references, excluding the translations, which my supervisor advised me to include as “an appendix interwoven with the narrative”): 14.662 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Introduction 4 2. The state of the field(s) 6 2.1 On world literature 6 2.2 Translation, translators and the task of translating poetry 9 2.3 Contemporary Chinese poetry: Bei Dao and Yang Lian 11 3. Theory and methodology 14 4. Bei Dao and Yang Lian as world literature 17 4.1. After the Cultural Revolution: unofficial and avant-garde poetry from China 17 4.2. Selection of texts 18 4.3 Bei Dao 19 4.3.1 Protest 19 4.3.2 Art and poetry 22 4.3.3 Distance and separation 25 4.3.4 Intimacy and everyday life 29 4.4 Yang Lian 33 5. Conclusion 50 Bibliography 52 2 Acknowledgements The present thesis is the result of my studies at Leiden University. I would like to thank everybody who made it possible for me to come this far and contributed to making my experience in Leiden enriching and stimulating. Some special mentions, however, are in order. First of all, thanks to Dr. Maghiel van Crevel for encouraging me to engage the challenging task of elaborating topics, ideas and materials that mattered to me into a piece of research, and for being a great supervisor even under unusual circumstances.
    [Show full text]
  • Yang Lian Was Born in Switzerland in 1955, and Grew up in Beijing. His
    Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his sequence ‘Norilang’ was published in 1983. Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and next year, he started his journey through out the global. Since then, Yang Lian has published eleven collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than thirty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. His most representative works including the long poems such as Yi, Where the Sea Stands Still, Concentric Circles and The Narrative Poem, and have been reviewed as "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!", "one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature". Yang Lian and the English poet W. N. Herbert edited Jade Ladder, a new Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English (Bloodaxe, 2012), and The Third Shore, the anthology of Chinese – English poets’ mutual translation (Shearsman, 2013). Among other awards, in 2012, Yang Lian has won Nonino International Literature Prize in Italy, the juries of the prize were presided by V S Naipaul. In 2013, he won “Tian Duo” (Heavenly Bell) prize for the long poem in China. In 2014, he won The International Capri Prize 2014, an internationally well-known poetry prize in Italy. Yang Lian has been invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression in 2013.
    [Show full text]