http://www.iias.nl/kreeft/IIASNONLINE/Newsletters/Newsletter14/Regional/14cead08.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ <../Pages/IIASN14.html> <../Index/Contents.html#AnchorReports> 26 - 30 JULY 1997 WUYISHAN, PR CHINA International Symposium on Modern Chinese Poetry ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By MAGHIEL VAN CREVEL <#AnchorCrevel> In the final days of July of this year, over fifty scholars, critics, and poets descended on the town of Wuyishan, in a spectacularly beautiful part of southeast China, to attend the International Symposium on Modern Chinese Poetry (Xiandai Han shi guoji yantao hui). The symposium's main organizing bodies were Fujian Normal University and the Research Institute for Literature of the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences, assisted by the Research Institute for Literature of Peking University and other academic and literary institutions. Participants came from all over the PRC, including Hong Kong, as well as from Australia, Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Outside the three-day, rather dense programme of formal presentations and discussion, there was ample opportunity for further trading of views and materials, and for appreciating such divergent Wuyishan charms as Wulong tea and snake wine. The symposium's organizers, especially Wang Guangming and other staff of the Department of Chinese at Fujian Normal University, did an expert job in creating ideal circumstances for intensive, stimulating scholarly exchange. The participants brought with them a great variety of topics, approaches, questions and answers. Rather than reporting in detail on individual presentations - thirty-four papers were given, all in Chinese - I will identify a few central, recurrent points of discussion, some of which have sustained critical interest for a full one hundred years, ever since the first signs of modernity in Chinese poetry in the late 1890s. Old and new, Chinese and foreign First of all, relationships between classical and modern traditions in Chinese poetry proved to be an issue of undiminished relevance. Among others, Lan Dizhi and Sun Yushi dwelt upon interactions between the old and the new, the 'new' roughly denoting twentieth-century texts: how the new has drawn inspiration from the old, how the new has failed to draw inspiration from the old, how the old has influenced the new and - as Ren Hongyuan argued - how the new has influenced the old. A closely related topic is of course that of modernity itself; Ping-kwan Leung, Sasaki Hisaharu, Wang Guangming, and Zang Di were among the many speakers addressing one or another of its aspects as pertinent to Chinese poetry. In the study of modern Chinese literature, the dichotomy old-versus-new is matched in prominence by the dichotomy Chinese-versus-foreign. At the Wuyishan symposium, the latter was manifest in at least three areas of debate: (1) foreign influences on the language of twentieth-century Chinese poems, (2) the lives and times of modern Chinese poems and poets outside China - touched on by Wolfgang Kubin and Wang Jiaxin - and the growing impact of non-Chinese scholars and critics on Chinese poetry scenes, and (3) powers and limitations of oppositions such as Chinese-foreign, Chinese-Western and Eastern-Western. The first of these three can be seen as part of a much larger issue offering endless possibilities for theorizing: that is, ways in which the nature of the modern Chinese language determines the nature of modern Chinese poetry. While relationships between any language and its poetry merit scholarly interest, the modern Chinese case may derive extra relevance from an exceptionally turbulent history. The birth of modern Chinese poetry is associated with radical language reform early in this century, and categories such as the 'translation style' - bearing linguistic traces of foreign originals - and the 'Mao style' - heavily coloured by Maoist political lingo - have proved useful in describing some of the formidable changes that the language of modern Chinese poetry has undergone. Speakers on such matters included He Rui, Li Zhensheng, Liu Fuchun, Shen Qi, and Zhou Xiaofeng. Poethood Another important topic, once more confirming the lasting accuracy of work on modern Chinese poetry done by scholars such as Kai-yu Hsu, Lloyd Haft, and Michelle Yeh, was the social role of the modern Chinese poet and, more generally, representations of poethood and of the writing process. Possible types of 'responsibility' were the subject of ardent debate: to Chinese history, to the individual self, to art, to language. In these discussions - involving, among others, Hong Zicheng, Liu Denghan, Luo Hanchao, Sun Shaozhen, Wang Xiaoni, Xie Mian, Xu Jingya, and Zhu Shoutong - differences of opinion and persuasion between different generations of scholars, critics and poets were pleasantly irreconcilable. Contemporary PRC poetry since the mid-1980s turned out to be the pièce de resistance. But in view of the explosive development of Chinese poetry in the past decades and its overall pluriformity, it is hardly surprising that not all of its critics are equally enamoured of all of its styles. In addition to broad issues such as the above, which have kept critics of modern Chinese poetry in business for a century now, the symposium featured more specialized but no less exciting presentations. Huang Lin, Lin Qi, Zhai Yongming, Zhou Yaqin and others spoke on issues in Chinese women's poetry, sparking off debate which resulted in a postponement of dinner; Tu Kuo-ch'ing discussed internet poetics and their implications for Chinese poetry in the next century; Hsiao Hsiao dwelt on prose poetry from Taiwan, with reference to classical Chinese samples of this elusive genre; Pai Ling gave a fascinating talk on poetic composition; Chen Zhongyi, Cheng Guangwei, Cui Jianjun, Jin Longyun, Nan Fan, Tang Xiaodu, Maghiel van Crevel, Yu Zhaoping and others presented case studies which between them spanned the full range of modern Chinese poetry up to the present day. Inevitably, the 'Chineseness' of that poetry led into varying interpretations of Han in xiandai Han shi - literally 'modern Han poetry' - which can be read as short for either Hanzu 'the Han/Chinese people/nation' or Hanyu 'the Han/Chinese language': should the term, depending on its context, perhaps sometimes be translated as 'modern poetry in Chinese'? The symposium's closing session had been reserved for 'free debate' and was chaired by Wang Guangming. The discussion pointed to a new kind of urgency for an old question: to what extent can and should modern Chinese poetry be an ideological undertaking? Or, in one possible rephrasing, what is the division of labour between its being Chinese and its being poetry? The remains of one kind of orderliness in this field - that forcibly imposed by wars and politics - are fast disappearing, and new forces to reckon with include the full gamut of literary theory as well as prosaic Truths of Money: how much, for example, does a book of poetry cost its author in today's radically commercialized China? But time ran out, as it will, before definite and final conclusions on modern Chinese poetry could be reached. * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dr M. van Crevel works at the School of Asian Studies, University of Sydney <../Pages/IIASN14.html> <#AnchorTop> ------------------------------------------------------------------------