What is Good Literature? An Experiment in Aesthetic Judgement & Implicit Comparison

What is Good Literature? An Experiment in Aesthetic Judgement & Implicit Comparison OCCT Discussion Group 2017, Hilary Term W2

Requiem The wave of that year flooded the sands on the mirror to be lost is a kind of leaving and the meaning of leaving the instant when all languages are like shadows cast from the west life s only a promise don t grieve for it before the garden was destroyed we had too much time debating the implications of a bird flying as we knocked down midnight s door alone like a match polished into light when childhood s tunnel led to a vein of dubious ore to be lost is a kind of leaving and poetry rectifying life rectifies poetry s echo

Reading Taste the unnecessary tears your star stays alit still for one charmed day a hand is birth s most expressive thing a word changes dancing in search of its roots read the text of summer the moonlight from which that person drinks tea is the true golden age for disciples of crows in the ruins all the subservient meanings broke fingernails all the growing smoke seeped into the promises Requiem The wave of that year flooded the sands on the mirror to be lost is a kind of leaving and the meaning of leaving the instant when all languages are like shadows cast from the west life s only a promise don t grieve for it before the garden was destroyed we had too much time debating the implications of a bird flying as we knocked down midnight s door alone like a match polished into light when childhood s tunnel led to a vein of dubious ore to be lost is a kind of leaving and poetry rectifying life rectifies poetry s echo taste the unnecessary sea the salt betrayed

and now the author s identity will be revealed

Bei Dao 北島 (b. 1949, China) Reading and Requiem : written in the 1990s in the US, translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong

I wince when Bei Dao begins a poem: A perpetual stranger am I to the world I thought I destroyed the only copy of that poem when I was 14, a year after I wrote it. I thought we all did. We destroyed it the moment we discovered the immense difference between writing and reading what we have written. Such sentimentality (or, perhaps, self-conscious posing) is, however, the disease of modern Chinese poetry. Stephen Owen

to the world I is always a stranger

Is this Chinese literature, or literature that began in the Chinese language? For what imaginary audience has this poetry been written? [ ] If this had been an American poet writing in English, would this book have been published, and by a prestigious press? We must wonder if such collections of poetry in translation become publishable only because the publisher and the readership have been assured that the poetry was lost in translation. But what if the poetry wasn t lost in translation? What if this is it? This is it. Th[is ] is a poetry written to travel well, and it declares the fact proudly. [ ] The international audience admires the poetry, imagining what it might be if the poetry had not been lost in translation. And the audience at home admires the poetry, knowing how much it is appreciated internationally, in translation. Welcome to late twentieth century. Stephen Owen

Th[e] need to have one s work approved in translation creates [ ] a pressure for an increasing fungibility of words. Yet poetry has traditionally been built of words with a particular history of usage in a single language of words that cannot be exchanged for other words. Poets who write in the wrong language not only must imagine themselves being translated in order to reach an audience of satisfying magnitude, they must also engage in the peculiar act of imagining a world poetry and placing themselves within it. And, although it is supposedly free of all local literary history, this world poetry turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a version of Anglo-American modernism or French modernism, depending on which wave of colonial culture first washed over the intellectuals of the country in question. This situation is the quintessence of cultural hegemony, when an essentially local tradition (Anglo-European) is widely taken for granted as universal. Stephen Owen

On the one hand, he is disappointed at the lack of history and culture that would distinguish China from other countries. On the other hand, the historical context essential to the writing and reading of contemporary Chinese poetry is not taken seriously and is used only as an occasion for chastising the poet who writes for self-interest. Michelle Yeh

Works that are difficult to translate are celebrated for their engagement with a specific national language and for their refusal to enter, or enter easily, into the pipeline of multinational publishing, while works that are easy to translate are vilified for having surrendered to that pipeline, exchanging aesthetic innovation for commercial success, eschewing the idiosyncrasy of the local for the interchangeability of the global ; but this turn away from translation is something of a return. The notion that important literary texts have a distinctive language and that they are intended for a specific group of competent readers has been the reigning intellectual paradigm for at least the past century. Rebecca Walkowitz

Characteristic of this Orientalist melancholia are all the feelings proper to nineteenth-century Anglo-German Romanticism: the assumption that literature should be about depth and interiority, that expression of emotional truth should be modest, if not altogether wordless, and that being cultured means being hostile toward any form of reification and exhibitionism. Notably, Owen is not insensitive to oppression and suffering (he repeatedly points to the injustice caused by Western imperialism and Western cultural hegemony), but such sensitivity demands that oppression and suffering should not be announced loudly or even mentioned too often by those who are undergoing it, for that would amount to poor taste and insincerity. Rey Chow

The problem for a nonspecialist reader apart from the danger of the critical prose bursting into flames in your hands is that Chow is so deeply committed to her position that she doesn t see any need to combat Owen s views by discussing a single line of Bei Dao s poetry. David Damrosch