Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Lu Min is Ph.D. in World Literature, Professor of English at Shanghai Normal University, China. Prof Lu is mainly engaged in American literature, African literature in English, literary theory and criticism, translation teaching and research. She taught Chinese Literature, Chinese Civilization, Chinese Cinema at Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA from 2003 to 2004. She had short-term academic exchanges at the University of Botswana, the University of North Carolina at Greensburg, USA, Liverpool John Moore University, UK from 2015-2020. Prof Lu’s main research projects include the Major National Social Science Fund Project “History of African Literature in English—East Africa”, the National Social Science Fund Project “A Study of Bessie Head’s Thoughts on Literature and Art” and others.
Prof Lu has published two monographs, A Generic Study of American Novels in the Romantic Period (2008), A Study of the Moral Themes in the Domestic Novels in the 19th Century United States (2018), five textbooks, one translated book and one collection of essays. She has also published more than 60 academic papers in key journals in China.
China is a land of poetry.
When asked about poetry, the Chinese tend to think of its origin, The Book of Songs (Shijing in hanyu pinyin, or the Shih ching in Wade-Giles romanization, c.840-620 BC), the most ancient anthology of Chinese poetry. Many of the poems in The Book of Songs are familiar to the Chinese people, such as “Kuan-kuan call the ospreys, /perched there on a river isle. / A pure maid, so alluring, a mate worthy of a nobleman.”[1] “Big rats! Big rats!/ Don’t eat our millet!”[2] “In the seventh month, declining is the Fire Star”[3]. These poems are deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and give Chinese people a poetic trait. When parents teach one-year-old children to speak, they begin with poems, so it is always joyful to listen to one or two-year-old children recite Tang poems.
The Chinese are proud of the great poets, Qu Yuan (Ch’ü Yüan, 340-278 B. C.), Li Bai (Li Po, 701-762), Du Fu (Tu Fu, 712-770), Su Shi (Su Shih, 1037-1101), and many others. While it is obvious that these poets are men, there are also many great women poets in China throughout history, even though the number of famous women poets are much smaller. ‘Kuan-kuan call the ospreys’, the first poem in The Book of Songs, gives an equal position to women and men, and it is the love, admiration, and union of woman and man that make a natural and harmonious world in Chinese culture. There are many beautiful images of women in The Book of Songs, which exerts a great influence on people’s attitudes towards women, morality, values, and aesthetic taste. The authors of the poems in The Book of Songs are unknown, so isn’t it possible that some are women? For the poems are oral lyrics and sung to tunes. Aren’t women good at singing?
When poetry developed into fine art in ancient China, privileged male scholars who were well trained in the academies dominated the world of poetry. Women were generally deprived of such privileges, but some daughters of scholar-officials who were educated by their fathers or private tutors at home, showed their talents for poetry and later became well-known poets. With Chinese civilization’s long history, it is not difficult to select at least a hundred talented women poets in ancient China. The list is long, so only the most well-recognized ten women poets of ancient China are mentioned here. They are Ban Jieyu (48 B.C.-2, Western Han Dynasty), Cai Yan (Eastern Han Dynasty), Su Hui ( 357-?, Eastern Jin Dynasty), Xie Daoyun (340-399, Eastern Jin Dynasty), Bao Linghui (420-?, Southern Dynasty), Xue Tao (c.768-832, Tang Dynasty), Li Qingzhao (Li Ch’ing-chao, 1084- c.1156, Song Dynasty), Zhu Shuzhen (c.1135-c.1180, Song Dynasty), Huang E (1498-1569, Ming Dynasty), Qiu Jin (1875-1907, Qing Dynasty). Among these, Li Qingzhao is undoubtedly the most famous, greatly admired, and well-known to the western world with her name written as Li Ch’ing-chao in Wade-Giles romanization, as was Li Bai (Li Po) and Du Fu (Tu Fu).
All the poems written by the abovementioned poets are in classical Chinese (wenyanwen). To understand them well today, it is necessary to translate the poems into modern Chinese. These translations are only helpful in the process of understanding, and once understood, the presentation and quotation of the poems are in their original forms, that is, in classical Chinese. In this way, these classics are well preserved generation after generation. With the New Culture Movement in the 1910s and 1920s, the “plain language” (baihua or the vernacular), a precursor of modern Chinese (standardized in 1956) was introduced; new poems written in baihua were embraced by young students and poets. Modern poetry began to flourish.
With the New Culture Movement, more and more women students enrolled in schools and universities, and some of them even pursued further study abroad. The 20th century witnessed the amazing growth of women poets and writers both in number and the quality of writing. Poetry was no longer an elitist habit; women writers explored all genres to express their feelings, ideas, experiences, sufferings and longings. Novels and essays became increasingly popular with young readers. The famous women writers of the modern period are Su Xuelin (1897-1999), Lu Yin (1898-1934), Bing Xin (1900-1999), Shi Pingmei (1902-1928), Lin Huiyin (1904-1955), Ding Ling (1904-1986), Xiao Hong (1911-1942), Zhang Ailing (1920-1995), Nie Huangling (1925-), Zong Pu (1928-), Zhang Jie (1937-2022), Sanmao (1943-1991), Xi Murong (1943-), Shu Ting (1952-), Can Xue (1953-), Zhai Yongming (1955-), Wang Anyi (1954-), Tie Ning (1957-), to mention a few of them.
With the economic boom in 21st-century China, the production of literature has increased in an unprecedented way. Women poets, writers and critics are extremely active in both creative and critical writings, so much so that it gets hard for readers to keep up with publications, also given fast-paced modern life. Writing competitions and literary prizes have mushroomed, such as the Lu Xun Literary Prize, Mao Dun Literary Prize, Lao She Literary Prize, Cao Yu Literary Prize and many others. Many contemporary women poets and writers have won prizes, gaining public acclaim. This is abetted by a flourishing Internet literary culture which competes with traditional print media. For instance, We Media gives poets and writers new forums and ways of publishing their poems, novels, essays and other literary creations. Yu Xiuhua (1976-), a rural poet with cerebral palsy, found her poetic expression via the Internet to become an internationally known phenomenon.
For Poetry at Sangam, I select five women poets from ancient China to the contemporary. They are Li Qingzhao, Huang E, Bing Xin, Shu Ting and Yu Xiuhua. Among the five, Li Qingzhao, Bing Xin, and Shu Ting are regarded as the three finest women poets in China, while Huang E and Yu Xiuhua are unique in their own ways. They have one thing in common, that is, love is the central theme of their poems.
Li Qingzhao was born into a scholar-official family in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) and received a good education at home in present-day Jinan of Shandong Province. In 1101, she married Zhao Mingcheng (1081-1129), a brilliant Imperial University student who had a strong interest in epigraphy and archaeology. Their marriage was hailed among the literati. Li Qingzhao wrote many lyrics expressing her happiness, love, loneliness, longings, and sufferings, which reflected the ups and downs of her life and the defeat of the Northern Song Dynasty by Jurchens from the North. The selected Ci poem ‘Slow, Slow Tune’ (sheng sheng man) is regarded as an unsurpassed paragon. Ci, a type of poetry akin to lyrics created for musical accompaniment, reached its summit in Song literature. Each Ci has a Cipai, the name of the tonal pattern deciding the rhythm and form of a verse. The very name of the Cipai “Slow, Slow Tune” indicates that the tune is slow and long.
Written in her later life after the death of her husband, “Slow, Slow Time” expresses Li Qingzhao’s boundless grief over her losses, not only for her beloved but also family and homeland lost earlier in the chaotic war in the north. The use of seven groups of reiterated characters at the beginning of the poem create a marvelous effect of sound and meaning. It is extremely difficult to retain the reiteration in the translation, but the imagination and effort involved in keeping this feature will hopefully be sensed by English readers.
Huang E, born in Sichuan province, is like Li Qingzhao in their sharing of similarly wealthy and literary family backgrounds and happy marriages. Her husband Yang Shen (art name Sheng’an, 1488-1559) was an excellent scholar holding a post in the Hanlin Academy of the Ming court. Unfortunately, early in their marriage the emperor exiled Yang Shen to Yunnan for the poet-scholar’s remonstration against him, and the couple were forced to live largely apart for thirty years. They communicated by writing letters, mostly as poems. These poems by the husband and wife were collected and published as Sanqu by Mr. and Mrs.Yang Sheng’an. Sanqu is a type of verse with tonal patterns modeled on tunes drawn from folk music. Huang E’s poems are much bolder and more “sensuous”[4] than those of Li Qingzhao’s. She wrote much about sex and sexual desires in words that were poetic and frank but not obscene. Her literary talents, role as a chaste wife and her life as a grass widow justify her bold and erotic poems and strike a chord in readers.
Bing Xin was born into an extended family of traditional Confucian gentry in Fujian province. She attended Yenching University in 1923, earning a bachelor’s degree. Her 164 lyrical pieces, influenced by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds, were published in Morning Post from 1919 to 1921 and later collected as Stars, which won her instant fame and a study grant at Wellesley College in the United States, where she received a master’s degree in 1926. Her fluid, simple, fresh, and direct style is named after her as the “Bing Xin Style”[5]. Bing Xin translated many of Tagore’s plays and poems, and the Chinese version of Gitanjali and The Gardener are so influential that some quotations from Tagore are mistaken as having Chinese origins. The Bing Xin Style serves as a bridge from Classical Chinese to modern Chinese poetics. ‘The Paper Boats—for Mother’ is a reflection of the poet’s love and longing for her mother and her deep attachment to her motherland. Bing Xin writes from the perspective of a child, choosing paper boats from the world of children’s games to express her delicate feelings, yet the image of paper boats drifting on the sea powerfully reflects China in the 1920s torn and struggling between the old and the new.
Shu Ting was born in Fujian province. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), like the majority of youth, she was sent to the countryside to work with farmers for three years until 1973. She then worked at a cement factory, a textile mill, and a lightbulb factory. However she began to write poems in 1969. ‘To the Oak Tree’, her first published poem in 1979, won her immediate recognition. This love poem depicts a woman’s love for a man highlighting the gender differences of femininity and masculinity yet asserting independence and equality. Shu Ting is a representative of “Misty Poetry”. According to Gu Cheng (1956-1993), “Misty Poetry was born of the Cultural Revolution, born out of the void after the catastrophe. It appeared like another explosion of the chaos, experiencing the age of innocence of the human race within the blink of an eye. Almost all of the authors of Misty Poetry once told about such innocent expectations and pains as seen from a child’s perspective.”[6] The simplicity, femininity, and purity of Shu Ting’s poems touched and softened people’s hearts hardened by the Revolution, and filled the void with tenderness and humanity in the post-revolution era.
Yu Xiuhua was born with cerebral palsy in the village of Hengdian, in Hubei province. At age six, she learned to walk with the help of crutches. Having difficulty in speaking and writing, she dropped out of school in the tenth grade. At age nineteen, her parents arranged her marriage with a man twelve years older than her. They have a son, but there was no love between the couple, and the man was almost constantly away working in the cities. Yu Xiuhua became well known in 2014 with her online poem ‘Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You’. In 2015, her debut book, Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays sold fifteen thousand copies in one day. Yu Xiuhua paid her husband 150000 yuan from her royalties to get her divorce in 2015. Disabled, scorned, isolated and unloved, she finds her “poetic living”[7] through Internet literature. Frank, direct, passionate and unashamed, Yu Xiuhua’s poems unveiled the pretenses, repression and moralization of present-day urban Chinese where the aim is to climb the social ladder though social mobility is very difficult. The themes of her poetry are largely about love, affection, life lessons, her disability and the closed village from which she cannot escape. In ‘If All Things Are Interlocked with You’ Yu Xiuhua expresses an unanswered love, and its defiance. She ties the idea of love between people to the village; for her, loving both are the same. These two constantly recurring themes in Yu Xihua’s poetry are smoothly integrated and presented to give the poem its distinctive character. In 2017, The New York Times named her one of the eleven most courageous women from around the world.
The selected five poems by Li Qingzhao, Huang E, Bing Xin, Shu Ting and Yu Xiuhua sketch the arc of social changes in China and the development of poetry from the women’s perspective. Though these poems are from this personalized lens, they are vivid and reflect national life through their strong emotions. Even if the outside world is broken, full of evils, conflicts and hardships, they state the inner world of the women poets is still beautiful and strong.
The Paper Boats—For Mother by Bing Xin translated by Liu Yuanhao
Slow, Slow Tune by Li Qinzhao translated by Liu Yuanhao
To An Oak Tree by Shu Ting translated by Liu Yuanhao
If All Things Are Interlocked With You by Yu Xiuhua translated by Liu Yuanhao
Double-Tune • Falling Plum Breeze by Huang E translated by Zhu Tianyue
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[1] Anonymous, “Classic of Odes”, translated by Jeffrey Riegel, The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, Victor H. Mair ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 61-62.
[2] Anonymous, “Classic of Odes”, translated by Jeffrey Riegel, The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, Victor H. Mair ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 67.
[3] Anonymous, “Classic of Odes”, translated by Jeffrey Riegel, The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, Victor H. Mair ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 67.
[4] Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Women Poets of China, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1972, p. 126
[5] Yan Haiping, Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 83.
[6] Yibing Huang, “The Ghost Enters the City: Gu Cheng’s Metamorphosis in the ‘New World’,” New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Christopher Lupke ed., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 137.
[7] Dian Li, “Yu Xiuhua: A Life Lived in Poetry,” World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday. org/2018/july/yu-xiuhua-life-lived-poetry-dian-li
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