Traditions and Modernity in Chinese Poetry & the Anglophone Avant-Garde: Towards a Sociology of Translation in the Literary System

Has the fact of Chinese history determined, or been determined by, avant-garde Anglophone poetry? What do “modernity” and “tradition” mean in the context of Chinese poetry in English translation? Examining the micro-history of avant-garde English presentations of Chinese poetry and the shifting configuration of China over the last hundred years, this paper will present a sociology of the divergence between antiquity and modernity as accessible through Chinese poetry in English. Specifically, looking at how the Anglophone avant-garde’s former association of Chinese antiquity and English experimentation (in Pound, Rexroth, Snyder, etc.) has yielded to the current predilection for contemporary writing (in Hejinian, Padgett, Waldrop, Weaver, etc.) while “Classical” Chinese poetry has mostly fallen to the upholders of “Official Verse Culture” or what has been labeled “The School of Quietude” (Milosz, Merwin, Young, etc.), I will look at how the factors of China’s (1) “reform and opening up” 改革開放, (2) exile and immigration, and (3) social networks and poetry festivals, plus (4) education and developing conceptions of poetic value in the English-speaking world, have compelled a change in the relationship between China and Anglophone poetic communities. Finally, asking why the poetic avant-gardists in English still working with pre-modern Chinese poetry can be counted on the fingers of one hand—J. H. Prynne, Eliot Weinberger, John Cayley, Kit Kelen, and Jonathan Stalling—the presentation will conclude with a discussion of the role of the self in Chinese and English writing and an appeal to learn from these writers how to insist on the continued relevance of ancient Chinese literature without letting the realities of contemporary China pass by.