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I Speak to Rivers and Silence — Lyricism in Lan Lan’s Poetry
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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ix I Speak to Rivers and Silence — Lyricism in Lan Lan’s Poetry Lyrical poetry is a confident art that moves outward and into difficult realms. It contains a fleeting glimpse of the familiar order in a studied arrangement that defines its stylistic life. But surely, even apologists for this art, “hearers and hearteners of the work,”1 know how impossible it must be to commit to this practice without the urgency of social preoccupations and intellectual drive: will lyrical poetry stand in danger of being perceived as “pleasing words or sounds,” devoid of an immediate rhetoric, a sustained sense of narrative gravity and architecture? Considered one of today’s most influential Chinese lyrical writers, Lan Lan emerged as a representative woman poet during the early nineties. A consistent presence in the mainland literary scene, her writing renews the need to address lyricism when the dominant cultural discourse favors phallocentrism and the privilege of human over non-human. Born in 1967 to a soldier father and a peasant mother in Yantai, a village in Shandong province, Lan Lan grew up with her grandmother in rural Henan and Shandong. Away from the blows of the Cultural Revolution, she saw the carefree joys of childhood. From a young age, nature spoke to her: charmedbyitsmysteries,silenceandchanges,shelearnedtoliveinintimate harmony with the pastoral world. Lan Lan’s grandmother was a talented storyteller. She engaged the child’s imagination with magical fables and folk tales, encouraging her to indulge in books and play. Origins for much of the poet’s adult work are meditative impressions of the disquieting and the enigmatic in a rural world where trees run and rivers gossip. Of these early days of bliss and innocence, the poet recalls with nostalgia and in present tense: “I go to a school where my classroom is a cowshed and our 1. Yeats, W. B. “At Galway Races.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 97. x ‘desks’ made of sun-dried mud brick. Right behind us are a large pile of peanut vines and two yellow cattle.” At fourteen, Lan Lan published her first sequence of poems, “I Want to Sing,” in a renowned literary journal based in Wuhan, Fragrant Grass. Her impassioned desire to “sing,” cantabile — the verb that defines her literary debut — enacts the Greek ideal that great poetry must be celebrated as music. “Sing, goddess,” proclaims Homer in his invocation to the Muse at the start of The Iliad. Another Chinese poet Hai Zi3 also extolled the commitment to songs as an ideal for lyric poetry: “To become a poet you must . . . endure what must be endured, sing what must be sung.”4 Apart from the singer as a recurring persona — take for instance, the eponymous poem “Singer” — the vocal emphasis in Lan Lan’s poetic behavior is part of the narrator’s image and pathos. “A line of words. Transmitting your voice / into my body in soundless waves,” she discloses in “Secret Lover.” Heard through a line of words, the voice now imposes itself as an erotic agent that physicalizes the sonic allure through earthly sensations and nondiscursive effects. Hopingtopursueherpassionintheliteraryworld,LanLanexperienced a series of setbacks at the start. Fragile in health, she moved with her family from village to village and bore the heavy loss of her grandmother, who died in the year when the end of the Cultural Revolution coincided with the Tangshan earthquake. She fainted during her high school examination and had to abandon the prospect of college studies for a working life — as a factory worker packaging wine, a crane operator, and a technical writer. 2. My translation; see the poet’s biographical chronology in Selected Poems of Lan Lan. Beijing: Poetry and People, 9. 115. 3. Considered a major Chinese poetic voice, Hai Zi (1964–1989) has a posthumous cult-like status in China. Born and raised in a farming village in Anhui province, he passed the entrance exam to the prestigious Beijing University at fifteen. At twenty, he started teaching philosophy and art theory at China University of Political Science and Law. During his brief yet explosive life, he wrote about 5 poems and several epics, portraying an intense mix of illuminating and complex visions of his difficult society. Hai Zi committed suicide in 1989 by laying himself on a railroad track at Beijing Shanhaiguan. He was twenty-five. 4. Hai Zi. “Excerpt from ‘The Poet I Most Love — Hölderlin.’” Trans. Gerald Maa. Chinese Writers on Writing. Ed. Arthur Sze...