Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-2l2gl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-25T23:19:29.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Metaphor and the Conscious in Chinese Poetry under Communism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

S. H. Chen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Commenting on literature as a human record, Goethe once called it “The fragment of fragments: The smallest part of what has been done and spoken has been recorded; and the smallest part of what has been recorded has survived.” I find this observation a very sobering and instructive reminder for a discussion of Chinese poetry under Communist rule. Goethe was speaking of literature in general. And poetry, formally at least, being but one of its branches, is by deduction a fragment of “the fragment of fragments.” Over a decade many things have been accomplished under the régime. Many deeds have been done, immense work of material reconstruction has been completed, and more is in process, on the débris of destruction of comparable quantity; and unfathomable tribulations, pains and frustrations in soul and body are felt and muttered, as well as the hue and cry of zeal and enthusiasm exclaimed among massive crowds.

Type
Special Survey of Chinese Communist Literature
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 13 , March 1963 , pp. 39 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1963

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The China Quarterly, No. 3, 07–09 1960.Google Scholar

2 People's Daily (Jen-min Jih-pao), 03 24, 1962.Google Scholar

3 One example in classical poetry to show the derivation is available in English translation, “Ruins of Lo-yang” by Chih, Ts'ao (a.d. 192–232), translated by Waley, Arthur in Translations from the Chinese (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).Google Scholar

4 Near the Communist war-time headquarters of Yenan.

5 “Learned,” hsueh-hsi, is treated as a special term, which in Communist China has come especially to mean training to be a member of the new revolutionary society.

6 Most of their articles on the ko lü problem were published in several numbers of the Wen-xue Fing-lun 1959–1960Google Scholar, a bi-monthly on literary theories, perhaps the best of its kind.

7 All Feng Chin's works quoted in this paper are from his Shih-nien Shih Ch'ao, published in Peking in 1959.

8 From Kingsley, 's “Alton Look,”Google Scholar quoted and criticised by Raskin.

9 T'ai shih, to signify the hours actually spent at work on the t'ai, literally “bench” or table.