Fog seal
The term mist poetry ( 朦朧詩 / 朦胧诗 , Ménglóng Shī , English Misty Poets ), often translated as Menglong poetry, obscure poetry or hermetic poetry, came up in the late 1970s and shaped Chinese poetry between 1978 and around 1985 .
History and background
Up until the end of the 1970s, the cultural guidelines set out in 1942 by Mao Zedong ( Chinese 毛泽东 , Pinyin Máo Zédōng ) in the so-called Yan'an talks on literature and art were absolutely binding. According to these talks, writers and artists should form a “cultural army” to educate the masses and instill revolutionary values in them. All art is supposed to be political and there is no l'art pour l'art . According to these guidelines, poetry was relatively conform and realistic, as the following propaganda example shows:
The moon follows the earth,
The earth follows the sun,
Oil follows our steps,
And we shall always follow the Communist Party.
In order to master the civil war-like state of affairs towards the end of the Cultural Revolution , many were sent to the countryside under the motto "Up into the mountains and down into the country" ( Chinese 上山 下乡 , Pinyin shàngshānxiàxiāng ). The dissatisfaction of those deported was great, many felt out of place and disillusioned with no socio-cultural support after the cultural revolution, the "Ten Lost Years", had swept across the country. Although it was forbidden to publish literature and art during the Cultural Revolution, extensive underground poetry circulated that was also written under extreme conditions: Gu Cheng ( Chinese 顾 成 , Pinyin Gù Chéng ) is said to have written his poems in the Pig pens began to write; Bei Dao ( Chinese 北岛 , Pinyin Běi Dǎo ) wrote his first pieces in the evening after work on the construction site. Only with the death of Mao Zedong, the imprisonment of the gang of four and an opening to the West did the cultural guidelines loosen up. The unofficial magazine “Heute” ( Chinese 今天 , Pinyin Jīntīan ) or “Today”, which was initiated by Bei Dao and Mang Ke ( Chinese 芒克 , Pinyin Máng Kè ) in 1978, offered a platform for these feelings and poems . The pioneering poem “The Answer” ( Chinese 回答 , Pinyin huídá ) appeared in the first edition, which can be seen as a paradigm for Obscure Poetry. The line “I don't think so” ( Chinese 我 不 相信 , Pinyin wǒ bù xiāngxìn ) has almost become the catchphrase of this time. The publication of further Menglong poems immediately initiated a long-term discussion about the freedom of the author and the individual and his obligations towards society, the state and the party. In the course of the discussion, attempts were repeatedly made to suppress Menglong poetry by means of campaigns. "Jintian" had to cease operations in 1980, but it still exists online. Many of the poets who u. a. who published their poems in "Jintian" were literally children of the Cultural Revolution. Many were born in the 1950s, characterized by an early childhood with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, thereby being cheated of youth and education. This generation is also considered to be the “lost generation”, which was also deprived of its values and traditions, brought up in the spirit of a Maoist regime. The first major campaign that attempted to put an end to Menglong poetry was the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution in China from 1983-84, but the final turning point was the June 4, 1989 massacre in Tianan'men Square . The most famous poets Bei Dao, Gu Cheng and Yang Lian were staying abroad at the time and were forced to remain in exile by the events.
Fog poetry, obscure poetry
With the emergence of the term, there was little agreement back then as to what should be called a Menglong poem, let alone what form it should have. Nevertheless, in retrospect, certain characteristics can be determined: The main focus is the search for one's own self, for the individuality of a person, which was lost in the masses of the Cultural Revolution. The standardized, communist poetry denied an individual self and emphasized the mass. Many Menglong poems show the existence of a single ego, a subject, and do not speak of a mass. Another common feature of the poets of that time is the often inadequate schooling due to the cultural revolution, which granted only limited access to traditional books or western works and thus forced recourse to the experiences of an individual self. In addition, many of the poets who were sent to the countryside with their parents experienced their childhood in direct contact with nature, which is often also reflected in the poems, and is almost idealized: when the traditions are no longer there to write about , the impressions of nature are brought back to the center. Other aspects used:
- Ambiguity, vagueness versus previously unambiguousness and clarity
- a first-person voice, expression of one's own personality, no "we", no "masses"
- no definitive-ultimate meaning of a text that can be deciphered
- Diversity
- often inclusion of nature images and observations
- Desire for artistic innovation
- "Polyphonic" forms with changeable meanings
- Transformation and openness
- no "we", no me that disappears in the crowd
- no ideologically empty slogans
The overarching means of all Menglong poems is, as the name Menglong ( Chinese 朦胧 or 蒙胧 , Pinyin ménglóng ) already means, obscurity, or ambiguity and ambiguity. With this rhetorical device it was possible both to criticize the prevailing conditions and not to throw oneself into the crossfire of criticism. Nevertheless, this means alone was enough to generate critical voices after the first publications in "Jintian": The use of ambiguities and individualism, the deviation from the realistic tradition, the skeptical-pessimistic view of the desired modernizations and a wrong one were criticized Representation of society. Poetry should serve the people by being politically correct in content and form and easy to understand, especially with regard to the imagery. The growing influence of the West was also blamed for such counter-revolutionary work. Most of Menglong's lyric, however, remains stuck in a political context.
At Dao: a cry for individuality
Ronald Janssen emphasizes that when analyzing Bei Dao's works one should not make the mistake of replacing the lyric self with that of Bei Dao. The lyrical self in his poems usually expresses itself as “we” or in the sense of a “we”. This “we” serves as a moral authority to work through the truth between man and society, the cultural revolution and its essence. Thus, for. For example, the “I” ( Chinese 我 , Pinyin wǒ ) in “The Answer” can be read as a collective I, a “We, the Cultural Revolution victims” - which, in turn, ironically refers to the education of collective consciousness during the Mao era can refer. In his works, the central theme of expropriation becomes obvious early on, that man is in a crisis of knowledge, belief and expression. Dao sees himself here as a permanent stranger to the world and himself. This may also be shown in the fact that the poems Bei Daos convey a feeling of being separated from the world as a closed system - they are not closed to an approximate interpretation like that Gu Chengs. In the development of his works, two directions can be identified in which the obscurity of his poems points: The first is the more practical application of obscurity. When Bei Dao started to write his poems, he was working in construction and wrote his poems in the evening in the construction site hut and in secret. Writing in obscure, blurred images was also a way of escaping the censorship and confiscation of one's works - not even literary experts could decipher the poems or find out the “secret code” of Bei Dao and his fellow poets. From a philosophical point of view, Bei Dao's obscurity refuses to reveal the objective reality that he had in mind when composing his poems to the readership. Such a separation between a set of images and their equivalent in the real world is characteristic of Bei Dao's works.
Gu Cheng: Descent into the Abyss
The early poetry of Gu Cheng moves between coming to terms with the past and the search for oneself. In his poetry, like Bei Dao, he brings an independent self to speak for the first time. His search for himself and his identity is also evident in his experiments with forms of representation and means of expression, all in the background of a lack of school education. In the course of his works, the ego moves more and more into the center; in the later works the penetration of modernity into the rural areas of China also dominates. Gu Cheng draws such a field of conflict in China between an agricultural state and an industrial nation, which is still extremely topical today. What is also striking, as Peter Hoffmann shows in the cross-section of Gu Cheng's works, is his growing self-alienation. This is no longer just the result of a mistrust that has grown due to the Cultural Revolution, but also of a strangeness towards oneself.
Yang Lian: Western means for one's own traditions
Short biography
Yang Lian ( Chinese 杨炼 , Pinyin Yáng Liàn , born February 22, 1955 in Bern ) was sent to the country after graduating from middle school in 1974. After returning a few years later, he joined Jintian magazine in 1979. In 1980-83 he began touring the Chinese hinterland and gathering knowledge of the original places of Chinese civilization. His most outstanding poem from this period is "Nuorilang" ( Chinese 诺 日 朗 , Pinyin nuò rì lǎng ). It was so severely criticized in the "Campaign against Mental Pollution" (1983/84) that he was unable to publish anything in China in the following years. At the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, he was also abroad, but has since been declared persona non grata by the government. Today he lives in London as a freelance artist.
Characteristics
At first Yang Lian still wrote many classical Chinese poems, from 1979 - also through meeting the poets of the magazine "Today" - he wrote only modern poetry. In his poems he repeatedly seeks to examine his own traditions in order to find his artistic identity, and does not only use Western models. In this dispute, however, tradition does not have to be blindly rejected or continued, but rather receive new impulses with a doubting spirit, a kind of “creative tradition” (example: Nuorilang). At the same time, this search is also one for a tradition that is valid for himself. This search and this interest in traditional roots must definitely be seen in the mirror of the times, as the Cultural Revolution denied the Chinese any ideas of tradition and tried to destroy them. Another central aspect of Yang Lian's poetry is the development of his own system of symbols. Much of Yang Lian's obscurity resides in this draft of its own symbolism, which Sean Golden and John Minford compare to those in the poems of William Blake , Ezra Pounds, and others. Another great area of interest for Yang Lian is the western works, which have repeatedly influenced his poetry. So it can be said that Yang Lian uses western modern poetry techniques to rediscover his own traditional culture and to filter out the aspects that are important to him.
See also
literature
- Tony Barnstone (Ed.): Out of the Howling Storm. The New Chinese Poetry . Wesleyan University Press, Hanover / London 1993.
- Séan Golden, John Minford: Yang Lian and the Chinese Tradition . In: Howard Goldblatt (Ed.): Worlds Apart. Recent Chinese Writing and its Audiences . Sharpe, Armonk 1990, pp. 119-137.
- Peter Hoffmann: Gu Cheng . In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Critical lexicon for foreign-language literature . Edition text and criticism, München 1983–.
- Ronald R. Janssen: What History Cannot Write: Bei Dao and Recent Chinese Poetry . In: Critical Asian Studies , 34, Vol. 2, 2002, pp. 259-277.
- Wolfgang Kubin: At Dao . In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Critical lexicon for foreign-language literature . Edition text and criticism, München 1983–.
- Wolfgang Kubin: Word, Earth, Customs. Notes on Yang Lian's Concentric Circles cycle . In: Orientierungen , 1, 1999, pp. 112–117.
- Kwai-Cheung Lo: Writing the Otherness of Nature: Chinese Misty Poetry and the Alternative Modernist Practice . In: Tamkam Review , 29, Vol. 2, 1998, pp. 87-117.
- Simon Patton: Premonition In Poetry: Elements of Gu Cheng's Menglong Aesthetic . In: Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia , 22 + 23, 1990-91, pp. 133-145.
- Mark Renné: Yang Lian . In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Critical lexicon for foreign-language literature . Edition text and criticism, München 1983–.
- William Tay: Obscure Poetry: a Controversy in Post-Mao China . In: Jeffrey Kinkley (Ed.): After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society 1978-1981 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1985.
- Michelle Yeh: Misty Poetry . In: Joshua S. Mostow (Ed.): The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature . Columbia University Press, New York 2003, pp. 520-526.
- Wai-lim Yip: Crisis Poetry: An Introduction to Yang Lian, Jiang He and Misty Poetry . In: Renditions , 23, 1985, pp. 120-130.