Dec 2015, Volume 9 Issue 4
    

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  • research-article
  • research-article
    YANG Zhiyi
  • research-article
    Jerry D. Schmidt
  • research-article
    Frederik H. Green

    This essay explores the poetic responses of several Qing-dynasty poets to their encounter with Western-style oil painting. Unfamiliar with Western post-Renaissance techniques, most notably the use of perspective and of oil paints, these poets expressed their anxiety, distaste, curiosity and appreciation of Western aesthetics and cultural practices through their poems. By focusing on previously un-translated poems of Weng Fanggang 翁方綱 (1733–1818), Li Xialing 李遐齡 (1768–1832), Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and others, I argue that these poems function as metaphors for the complex ways in which China’s late imperial elites negotiated their country’s encounter with the West, both as a tight-knit group bound by dynastic conventions and as a loose network of individual thinkers whose varied talents allowed for highly original reflections on the cultural potential of East-West encounters. I will show that—while strictly adhering to traditional Chinese prosodic conventions—these poets through their creative and nuanced poetic commentaries on Sino-Western relations achieved an unusual degree of cultural cross-fertilization. Intrigued by the “foreignness” of the art works they set their eyes on, these poets, I will illustrate, were able to expand the horizons of poetic discourse without surrendering to the lure of the foreign or abandoning indigenous formal conventions.

  • research-article
    YANG Zhiyi

    This article explores the stylistic innovations in the Ancient-Style Verse (gutishi古體詩), and particularly in the subgenre of gexing 歌行, from the Late Qing to the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that the relative free prosody of the Ancient-Style allowed innovation disguised as restoration. Yet, instead of being the prelude to modern vernacular poetry, the innovations in this genre may have found an end in themselves—namely, creating a style of verse which showed a unique combination of modern elements and deliberate stylistic archaism. Its lyric archaism and innovation were formulated in dialectical terms, which have been frequently evoked in the reformative moments of the Chinese tradition. This paper examines the evolution of the new gexing style through the close reading of a few gexing poems by Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848-1905), Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873-1929), Lin Gengbai 林庚白 (1896-1941), and Liu Yazi 柳亞子 (1887-1958). Given the rise of vernacular poetry since 1917, the poems of Lin and Liu may be called the Classicist Verse, which represents the author’s conscious choice to elaborate on the subject matter using a particular classical genre, when other modern genres are available. In the end, I will also discuss the gexing style verses by Li Sichun李思純 in the translation of multi-stanza European poetry, as a practice in accord to the indigenization agenda of the Critical Review magazine.

  • research-article
    Jon Eugene von Kowallis

    This article begins by articulating a new perspective on the translation of Chinese poetry, arguing that the most important of the three well-known “difficulties” in the translation of Chinese poetry outlined by Yan Fu 嚴複 (1854–1921)—namely, faithfulness (xin 信), conveyance (da 達), and elegance (ya 雅)—should in fact be the one that is least often discussed, da. The author principally interprets da as “conveying” the mood and then the meaning of the original work into the target language. This position is then illustrated by specific examples from Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) emotive and highly allusive classical-style poetry, engaging issues regarding its annotation, exegesis, and translation which have arisen in Chinese literary and scholarly circles. The author suggests that since the deployment of affective images has often been designated as an essential and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese poetry, the translation of Chinese poetry into Western languages must make an effort to engage with the original images—not simply resorting to paraphrases or substitutions—and concludes that poetry in translation can and does have important and lasting effects on the literature of the target language.

  • research-article
    ZHANG Hui

    Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–93) was not only one of the founders of German Studies in China, but he also was an important scholar of the Tang dynasty poet, Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70). The present essay attempts to analyze Feng Zhi’s “coming of age” by using Du Fu as a case study for the dialogue between the modern and Western-educated intellectuals on the one hand, and the twentieth-century political and nativist movements of China on the other. Feng’s admiration for Du Fu prompted him to write a biography for this precursor poet, this “Sage in Poetry” (shisheng 詩聖), which was not only a record of his life, but also a mirror that reflects Feng’s own spiritual transformation from a student of Western romanticism, individualism, and existentialism, to, in his own words, a “mouthpiece of the people.”

  • research-article
    LAM Lap

    Classical-style poetry is a neglected genre in the study of Chinese American literature. Except for the Angel Island Poetry and the Songs of Gold Mountain (Jinshan geji 金山歌集), no substantial research has been done on the enormous amount of classical-style poems published in San Francisco and New York. This article attempts to explore this uncharted territory by examining the poetry of Tung Pok Chin 陳松柏 (1916–88, aka Lai Bing Chan 黎屏塵) and his story as a Chinese immigrant. Chin moved to the United States in 1934 as a paper son. He joined the American navy during World War II and eventually established his own laundry business in Brooklyn. Since the late 1940s, Chin published a significant amount of his classical-style poetry in the China Daily News (Meizhou huaqiao ribao 美洲華僑日報), a left-wing newspaper operated by the pro-communist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. With the help of his daughter, he also wrote a memoir in English narrating his assimilation into American society. His poetry, though not particularly refined, similarly records his experiences and comments regarding American life and politics. Based on the source materials found in the Tung Pok Chin Papers archived in New York University, his memoir, and the poems he published in the China Daily News, herein I illuminate how Chin adopted a traditional form of poetry as his expressive vehicle and, with the narrative power of his English memoir, how he used his poems to construct a social identity. The article also relates Chin’s work to the broader context of Asian American studies, as well as the classical poetry community and its development in New York, and ponders his significances in the history of Chinese American literature.

  • research-article
    GUO Jian
  • research-article
    HUANG Junliang
  • research-article
    Kate Merkel-Hess
  • research-article
    ZHANG Zhen