American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounter

197 Pages·2012·1.535 MB·English

by  Zhang Yuejun, Stuart Christie (eds.)

American Modernist Poetry and
the Chinese Encounter
American Modernist Poetry and
the Chinese Encounter
Edited by
Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie
AMERICAN MODERNIST POETRY AND THE CHINESE ENCOUNTER
Copyright © Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-39171-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-35172-5 ISBN 978-0-230-39172-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230391727
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American modernist poetry and the Chinese encounter / Edited by
Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie.
pages cm
ISBN 978–0–230–39171–0 (hardback)
1. American poetry—Appreciation—China. 2. National characteristics,
American, in literature. 3. Modernism (Literature)—China. I. Zhang,
Yuejun, 1965– II. Christie, Stuart, 1967–
PS159.C5A44 2012
811.009—dc23 2012014916
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Acknowledgments i x
Introduction 1
Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie
Part I Entry
1 “Between Walls”: So Much Depends on Chinese
Immigrant Poetry in Defining the Modernist Age 19
Christopher A. Shinn
2 H. T. Tsiang’s Poems of the Chinese Revolution and
Transpacific Bridges to a Radical Past 49
James I. McDougall
Part II Influence
3 Usurious Translation: From Chinese Character to Western
Ideology in Pound’s Confucian “Terminology” 77
Stuart Christie
4 Wandering Lost upon the Mountains of Our Choice:
W. H. Auden’s “In Time of War” 95
Lim Lee Ching
5 China and the Political Imagination in Langston
Hughes’s Poetry 111
Luo Lianggong
vi ● Contents
Part III E xit
6 Allen Ginsberg’s “China” 123
Su Hui
7 Grievance of the Gendered Self: Chinese G uiyuan
Elements in Carolyn Kizer’s Poems 133
Li Jing
8 Jane Hirshfield’s Poetic Voice and Zen Meditation 153
Chung Ling
Note on Contributors 179
Index 183
Index of Chinese Sources and Uses 195
Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Dào (the way) . Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great
Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects
(New York: New Directions, 1951) 82
3.2 Jìng (respect). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great
Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects
(New York: New Directions, 1951) 83
3.3 Dé (virtue). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great
Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects
(New York: New Directions, 1951) 84
3.4 Yì (equity). Ezra Pound, trans., Confucius: The Great
Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects
(New York: New Directions, 1951) 86
Table
3.1 Six modes of character construction 80
Table modified from source: Zuo Ming’an (左民安).
Xi Shuo Han Zi (細說漢字, “Origin of Chinese
Characters”). Beijing: Jiu Zhou Chu Ban She, 2005.
Acknowledgments
T
he editors would like to thank specific individuals whose
support and knowledge made the intercultural as well as
translational challenges of this edition seem less daunting:
Charles Bernstein, A. V. Christie, Glennys Christie, 何聰慧, Deepa
John, 林韻莊, David Lam, Brent Newsome, Nie Zhenzhao, Ou
Hong, Sy Suet Yee, 徐荻緯, and Scott Smiley . The China Scholarship
Council, the Fulbright Foundation, as well as the Hong Kong
Research Grants Council funded specific elements of this research,
for which support both editors are extremely grateful. The edito-
rial staff and production team at Palgrave Macmillan and Newgen
have exercised good humor, forbearance, and restraint at all stages
of the process.
E arlier versions of Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight, exten-
sively revised for these pages, appeared respectively in T he Journal
of Cambridge Studies 5.1 (2010) and Connotations: A Journal for
Critical Debate 21.1 (2011–2012), © Waxman Verlag.
Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hong Kong SAR,
People’s Republic of China
Introduction
Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie
I
n July 2007, scholars descended upon Wuhan, Hubei province,
for an international conference dedicated to scholarship on
American modernist and contemporary poets. 1 Significantly,
the great majority of attendees were Chinese scholars and students
eager to bring their English-language research on American and
American-based poets and poetry (ranging from Langston Hughes
to Elizabeth Bishop, from W. H. Auden to Allen Ginsberg) into
dialogue with their international peers. The initial aim and audi-
ence of the present volume correspond to those of the 2007 con-
ference: not only to document the best of such research—on how
American modernist poetry has been received and analyzed by
Chinese commentators—but also, equally, to engage bilaterally
(via the English language) with the already well-established field
and scholarship on American poetry elsewhere. As such, A merican
Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounte ris both product and
symptom of the rapidly developing landscape for the scholarship
and study of American poetry as the Chinese tertiary education
sector advances. At a time of perceived decline in marketability—
and funding—for literary study in the West, the popular appre-
ciation of American modern and contemporary poetry by Chinese
students and scholars is growing. So, too, scholars researching on
China and American poetry from outside Asia are beginning to
connect their own research to the best writing and research coming
from China.
I t may be naïve to suppose, however, that simply engaging in bilat-
eral dialogue with Chinese scholars will be sufficient to achieve a
2 ● Zhang Yuejun and Stuart Christie
truly transnational literary study that more capably reflects the axial
tilt of our planet toward the sinographic. 2 In order to be truly effec-
tive, dialogue bridging polarizing tendencies within literary criti-
cism, whether anglocentric or sinocentric, will require ever-greater
numbers of anglophone scholars to undertake work and study in
China, including beginning the lifelong learning process of learning
to read and write in Chinese.3 Transnational literary study requires
an honest and sincere commitment to acquiring at least some degree
of fluency in the Chinese language and, with it, access to a radically
different worldview—as no longer merely the recognition of the for-
eign, but familiarization with it in an era of rapid globalization.
A ccordingly, the “China” that emerges in the following essays is
reimagined as both historical and metaphorical by scholars who pos-
sess “a healthy respect for the power of texts to shape realities both
backward and forward, to create or foreclose possibilities not just of
interpretation but of experience.” 4 Indeed, anglophone scholars need
to e xperience “China” far more than we/they currently do, by allow-
ing the latter to emerge as the thinking “through” of historical and
textual difference, including the means by which the “West” has
come to know itself as an entity, and with an eye toward converg-
ing epistemological horizons.5 The fate of literary transnationalism
may depend on this collective enterprise to know “China” better,
and peril befalls those who would eschew such a bilateral process.
In similar terms, Eric Hayot has written that “the transnational
turn . . . does not simply have to be about the United States’ recogni-
tion that the rest of the world has something to teach it . . . if that is all
it is, the danger, for the turn to China in particular, is that this move
outward will simply function as a further index of self-absorption.” 6
Hayot’s categorical warning about hegemonic navel-gazing is at
once reflexive and appropriate. He fails to note, however, that the
latest rendering of the “transnational turn” not only has occurred
from the perspective of frontiering Western scholars and students
encountering China as if for the first time but it has also entailed
critical reassessment by China-based scholars who are themselves
keen to assist in the formation of discourses of and about “China” at
once moored to the historical China and proliferating apart from it.