Line, Loop, Constellation

Gathering 250 classical Chinese poems translated by four major American poets (Pound, Williams, Rexroth, Snyder) and one poet-translator-scholar (Hinton) in his New Directions anthology Eliot Weinberger opens up the possibility of reading classical Chinese poetry through American poetry, or vice versa. While the impact of classical Chinese poetry on modern poetics has been amply acknowledged literary scholars have seldom examined the resulting texts beyond the paradigm of the renewal and transformation of American poetry and poetics. This oblique sense of indebtedness also strikes a curious contrast with the marginalization of Chinese literature in current discussions of world literature. An attempt at a world history of classical Chinese poetry, therefore, must not be concerned merely with the cataloguing of classical Chinese poetry in translation and the identification of its influences but with the formulation of new frameworks and strategies of reading that might resist or counteract what Shu-mei Shih has described as the Western canon’s “technologies of recognition” (2004). This chapter will start by tracing the main trajectory of the “worlding” of classical Chinese poetry along the Pound-Rexroth-Snyder axis, but branching out to less-studied poets like Charles Bukowski and James Wright, and extending the line to contemporary poets such as Roo Borson and Kim Maltman (Canada), Diana Bridge and Nina Powles (New Zealand), and Peter Larkin and Sarah Howe (UK; UK-Hong Kong), all of whom create and inhabit their own world of Chinese poetry. Through this expanded mapping of the “worlds” of classical Chinese poetry, in both geopolitical and demographic terms, I seek to uncover a diverse range of resonances and echoes through translation, rewriting, rereading, and critique. Reframing such works as part of a Chinese-inflected world literature, I argue that the impact of classical Chinese poetry in contemporary writing has gone beyond the migration and transformation of aesthetic concepts and forms, but of personal histories, identities, and the very notions of cultural tradition and literary lineage.

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