China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Longxi Zhang, University of California, Riverside
Chair: Ronald C. Egan, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Kang-I Sun Chang, Yale University
With the impact of a growing interest in non-Western literatures and cultures, the demand for Chinese literature in translation has greatly increased in America in recent years. Many Chinese literary works are now made available: not only modern and contemporary novels, but many classical poems have also appeared in English translation. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, to take this widely used college textbook as one example, now includes many Chinese poems and other texts in translation—under the editorship of one of our panelists, Professor Stephen Owen—as part of a global context within which the editors try to situate great Western works. Given the radically different cultural, historical, and literary contexts and different conventions and strategies in reading, however, the availability of classical Chinese poems in translation is only the first step. How to read those poems with adequate understanding and genuine appreciation remains a great challenge to readers not familiar with the original texts or ways of approaching them. As a group of scholars deeply concerned with classical Chinese poetry and its understanding in the West, we propose in this panel to offer readings of a selected number of poems to unfold the literary conventions and interpretive strategies governing the composition and interpretation of this poetry, combining traditional commentaries and interpretations with our own response to the texts, and trying to make classical Chinese poetry accessible by showing its formal characteristics and the various ways of reading them. From formal and historical considerations of the couplets to generic considerations of the lyric sequence and thematic considerations of the tragic sense, from gender issues of the female voice and persona to rhetorical and interpretive issues of ambiguity and indeterminacy, we hope to reveal the complexity of the poetic structure, the basic assumptions of its reading, and the richness of a tradition. In carefully reading and discussing poetic texts in relation to larger issues of criticism and poetics, we want to demystify classical Chinese poetry as some kind of an esoteric art, to open up its great treasure, and to help promote its understanding and appreciation in an ever expanding American readership.
Haun Saussy, Stanford University
No reader of Chinese poetry can long ignore the privileged role of the couplet in determining both poetic form and meaning. The classical stanza shapes in shi poetry require it as a formal unit; single lines are often pointless or incomplete without the matching lines that with them form couplets. Wang Li in his Hanyu shilüxue goes so far as to deny the individual line or verse any structural value: his descriptions of Chinese stanza forms take the doubled line as their basic building-block. Wang’s is a radical hypothesis, but it is borne out by interpretive experience: Reading an unfamiliar shi poem for the first time, we instinctively grope for the bracketings and focusings we expect couplets to provide. But these habits grow out of a history. What is that history? How and through what stages did composers train the users of the Chinese language to read in couplets and to expect to find couplets in what they read?
The purpose of this paper will be to sketch a history of the couplet. The texts surveyed will include bronze inscriptions, speeches from early historical documents, the Book of Odes, rhetorical texts, and poems from the Warring States, Qin and Han eras (by the end of which period duilian, or "responding couplet," structure is well in place). Commentators considered will include Wang Guowei, Wang Li, A. C. Graham, Xu Zhongshu and Yu Xingwu. A first assumption made here is that language knows no separation into verse and prose until the formation of verse-conventions permits prose to be defined as a specific type of language. Many chapters of the Shang shu seem to alternate between verse and prose, but can we be sure that the distinctions we perceive were relevant for speakers of an earlier form of the language? Or do we perceive what we are trained to perceive? It is tempting—and not all that difficult—to arrange samples of rhythmic language in chronological order from the early Western Zhou (ca. 1050 b.c.) to the end of the Han (221 a.d.) so as to show rougher and cruder examples of couplet-structure gradually paving the way towards subtler usages. But that is to assume that the history of the couplet is teleological in form. The experiment of this paper will rather be to assess the rhetorical resources and purposes behind various early examples of the "quasi-couplet," the better to reveal what roads later Chinese poetic composition, in its devotion to the couplet, left untrodden. That may mean a messier history, but for that very reason its story should open more frequently onto fundamental questions of poetics and of the "spirit of the language."
Longxi Zhang, University of California, Riverside
The three poets of the Cao family—Cao the father and his two sons, Pi and Zhi—were political figures in the three Kingdoms period, whose literary taste and talents inspired many around them to compose a new kind of poetry known in history as literature of the Jian’an period, which, in the words of Shen Yue, "wove emotions into refined writing and covered substance with such literary refinement." Owing to the turbulent condition of their time of war and ruthless power struggle and the significant social positions they occupied, the three Cao’s, and Cao Cao (155–220) and Cao Zhi (192–231) in particular, gave powerful expressions to the emotion best characterized as bei, a sense of the tragic that was not just a personal feeling but a personal response to—and recognition of—an almost impersonal condition of history in which the individual was powerless to set things right. The expressions are thus both lyrical and political, and the tragic sense (bei) caught in their poetic works had a great influence on later writers, while also harking back to earlier classics like certain songs in the Shi jing and the works of Qu Yuan. But bei—what I call the sense of the tragic—is of course much more pervasive than what we find in the works of the Cao’s; it is in fact one of the most important poetic topoi and aesthetic categories in classical Chinese literature. In reading a number of poems by the three Cao’s, therefore, I hope to delineate bei as an essential category in the reading and appreciation of classical Chinese literature in general.
Stephen Owen, Harvard University
One of the most common responses of Euro-American readers to Chinese poetic language is attention to its relative indeterminacy. Some indeterminacies are shared with literary Chinese prose and some are intensified by poetic language. These include the elision of pronominal agents and tense, the fluidity of grammar, the formal identity of general and particular statements, and paratactic relations between lines. As one becomes accustomed to the language of Chinese poetry, these characteristics become invisible through habit. Yet these questions are worth revisiting to pose the question of the function of indeterminacy in Chinese poetic language.
This paper will address two functions of indeterminacy: (1) the way in which "making sense" of poetic lines and the relation between them reinforced educational solidarity (just as in Europe the ability to construe rhetorically complex sentences not only required a certain level of education, but also celebrated the exclusivity of such education); (2) how determinations in the reading process permitted identification of the reader and the poet.
Finally the paper will consider how published baihua translation of classical poetry, increasing in recent years, reveals the profound differences that lay underneath the presumption of commonalty of understanding.