Origin [Ursprung], although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings […]. The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool […]; its rhythm is apparent only to a double insight.
(W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama).
Even today, the painting lives in a state of perpetual becoming…
(M. K. Hearn, How to Read Chinese Painting).
Abstract
The paper discusses Zhai Yongming’s 翟永明 (b. 1955) most recent long poem, “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang” (随黄公望游富春山, 2015). In this text, Zhai revisits a Yuan handscroll, the classic artistic medium of literati aesthetics, and turns it into the departure point for her own exploration of modern Chinese poetry. As in many of her other poems, in this work Zhai creatively navigates her way through poetic legacies from the remote past in order to comment upon the present socio-cultural situation. For example, she questions the hegemony of the male voice in the Chinese poetic tradition and references the topic of the possibility of gendered, genuinely female, poetics. She also introduces a contemporary ecocritical perspective into the discussion of the genre of landscape poetry when she turns to the ongoing transformation of the natural environment by the forces of modernization. The paper offers a preliminary inquiry into the dense text with a focus on its gendered ecocritical edge. From this vantage point, it seeks to shed light on the creative tensions between past and present in Zhai’s poetry.
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Notes
All translations mine unless otherwise indicated.
Zhai’s literary debut, the series of twenty poems titled Women (女人), had been pronounced the defining gender-aware poetical voice in contemporary Chinese poetry by critics. Since the 1980 s the poet dedicated numerous texts to the discourse of “women’s poetry” (女性诗歌), the “female voice” (雌声), as well as to possible elaborations of “feminine consciousness” (女性意识) in literature. See her essays “Women’s Poetry and Feminine Consciousness in Poetry” (女性诗歌与诗歌中的女性意识, 1989), “More Thoughts on ‘Black Night Consciousness’ and ‘Women’s Poetry’” (再谈‘黑夜的意识’与‘女性诗歌, 1995), “Women’s Poetry: Our Wings” (女性诗歌: 我们的翅膀, 2004) and “Feminine Consciousness, So-called Female Point of View, and the Female Voice (女性意识·女人之见·雌声, 2008), respectively published in Zhai (1989, 1997, 2007, 2010). For a theoretical discussion of lyrical subjectivity in Zhai’s poetry see Zhou (2007, pp. 218–223).
For examples of matching poems and essays see her 2008 volume of poetry and prose, entitled The Most Delicate Words (最委婉的词).
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Jaguścik, J. The time travels of a handscroll: past and present in Zhai Yongming’s landscape poem “Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang”. Int. Commun. Chin. Cult 6, 71–84 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-019-00141-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-019-00141-5