Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Robert Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032245478
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000583144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book, first published in 1947, is an anthology of Chinese poetry from a period when it was entering an entirely new world, where all or nearly all the ancient poetic traditions were being cast aside. No longer could Chinese poetry be regarded as the graceful accomplishment of retired sages: the new voices were powerful, realistic, even brutal.

Ai Ching

Ai Ching was born in 1910 in Chekiang, the son of a landowner. After graduating from middle school, he studied medicine for a while, but later went to France against his parents’ wishes, where he earned a living by designing Chinese figures for porcelain. Shortly after his return to China in 1932, he was arrested by the police of the French Concession in Shanghai for “harbouring dangerous thoughts” and was not released till October 1935. Thereafter he became a professional writer, often teaching and nearly always editing magazines. Later he journeyed to Yenan, and taught occasionally at Lu Ti Academy, which was founded in honour of Lu Hsun. He is one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—of living Chinese poets, with an extraordinary capacity for putting the Chinese scene on paper. His greatness lies in his simplicity, his vigour and his majestic love for common things. His vision lies in his simplicity.

Ai Ching is the child of the poetic revolution begun in 1917 by Dr. Hu Shih, but the original founders of the revolution would not recognise him. He has completely abandoned the old antithetical forms which still remain, thinly disguised, in modern Chinese poetry. Confucius said: “Poetry is teaching.” Ai Ching’s poetry is essentially propaganda for his beloved north China, its vast unfertile plains and robust men. He refuses to be bound within any given form; the architectonics of Hsu Chih-mo are not for him, and he has stated publicly that the adage: “Cut your coat according to the cloth”, means nothing in a rigorous north China winter, where the only possible adage is “Change your coat according to the weather”. He has been influenced by Mayakovsky, Verhaeren and Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet, which he has read many times—but the most lasting influence has been the strange, tortured vision of Van Gogh which he first learned to respect in Arles. And, curiously, there are times when Provence seems to flower in his poetry against the arid soil of north China.

His published poems include Ta-yen-ho and Pei-fang (Northern Land), but he did not achieve fame until the publication in 1940 ofThe Man Who Died a Second Time. Together with Tai Wan-shu he edited a magazine known as Ting Tien (The Culminating Point), and he has since worked on many other literary periodicals published from Yenan and Kalgan, where he lived till the fall of Kalgan in November 1946. He was one of the leaders under the Chinese Communists of the prodigious output of poetry which occurred all over the Communist areas, and it was largely due to his encouragement that Tien Chien has leapt into fame.

The Man Who Died a Second Time

I. The Stretcher

When he awoke

He did not know he was still alive.

He had been sleeping on a stretcher:

The soldiers carried him,

And they did not speak.

The weather was frozen in the cold wind.

The clouds sank low and moved swiftly.

Speechless, the wind shook the boughs.

Swiftly, swiftly they carried the stretcher

Through the winter forest.

He had passed through the flames of pain

And his heart was now in such tranquillity

That it resembled a battlefield when the fighting is over:

As tranquil as that.

But still the blood

Flowed from the wound in the soggy bandage,

Drip by drip,

Falling on the winter roads of China.

And on this same night

A solemn procession, ten times larger than before,

Moved up to battle,

Their thousands of feet

Rubbing away the remaining stains of his blood.

II. The Hospital

Where were our guns?

Where were our clothes with the bloody stains?

Other soldiers were wearing our helmets.

We wore cotton clothes embroidered with red crosses,

And we lay down,

And there were a thousand other pieces of flesh

Corroded by metallic spirits and by poison gas.

We all of us looked through eyes stained dark with fear,

Suspicious, continual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Hsu Chih-Mo
• Wen Yi-Tuo
• Ho Chih-Fang
• Feng Chih
• Pien Chih-Lin
• Yu Min-Chuan
• Tseng K’o-Chia
• Ai Ching
• Tien Chien
• Appendix: The Drummer of the Age