Translated Modernity of Chinese Poetry in the 1940s: W. H. Auden and the Nine Leaves School

Abstract

This dissertation concerns the role of translation in shaping Chinese poetic modernity, an important issue in the study of 1940s Chinese poetry. The Nine Leaves School (Jiuye), a loosely connected literary society, flourished in China during the 1940s. Its members wrote and translated many poems that showed their anxiety towards both Western waves of poetic modernity and local Chinese traditions. Through an in-depth study of the reception of W. H. Auden’s poems and literary ideas within the Nine Leaves School, this dissertation looks into the Nine Leaves poets’ contribution to Chinese poetic modernity mainly in the 1940s, both in terms of poetic genres and images, and argues that the Nine Leaves School signifies the maturity of Chinese poetic modernity—a polyphonic poetic world that blurs the boundaries of nationalities, cultures, and ideologies in order to achieve a cosmopolitan ideal.
This inquiry starts with the contextualization of “translated modernity” as a translingual practice in the comparative study of W. H. Auden and Chinese poetry in the 1940s. Translingual practice involves technical and cultural translations between different languages, and the transmission of ideas through languages among various cultural and ideological contexts. Chapter I reviews the notion of Chinese poetic modernity, scholarships on the Nine Leaves School and Auden’s footprints in China. Chapter II addresses the intellectual background of Auden’s visit to China and, through his view on multiple dimensions of translation, the description of the East as the Oriental Other. Chapters III through V focus on the appropriation of Auden’s adaptations of traditional poetic forms in 1940s China, mainly sonnets, light verses, and epics (or mock-epics) in poems by Nine Leaves poets and their predecessors, including Bian Zhilin 卞之琳, Du Yunxie 杜運燮 and Tang Shi 唐湜. Chapters VI and VII focus on the imagery of soldiers and cities in the poems of Nine Leaves poet, Mu Dan 穆旦 and others, which serve to contextualize the contending discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in wartime China.
This dissertation concludes with, on the one hand, a reconsideration of the unequal influences of the Chineseness in Auden’s China verses, and the poetic integration of traditions in the Nine Leaves School in their search for literary modernity, on the other. This study pays particular attention to the relationship between the poetic text and its reader, between literary criticism and its socio-ideological context, and between Western poetic genres and their Chinese adaptations.

Date of Award	26 Jan 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Birgit LINDER (Supervisor) & Jun QIAN (Supervisor)