Abstract
The paper discusses what it means to write a modern epic in the Chinese context using Shi Tang’s heroic narratives as an example. Through a brief comparison of the trajectory of the epic in twentieth century China and its Western counterpart, using Eliot’s and Auden’s (mock-)epics as examples, this paper argues that the former’s differences in its re-construction of history are due to an extremely weak strain of epic narrative tradition in China that has been usurped by the form of heroic elegy, focusing on the epitome of national characteristics within the discourse of collectivism. Seeing Shi Tang’s modern epics as rewriting and translating Chinese traditional heroic stories of nomads for a contemporary readership, this paper examines how he domesticated the culture of minorities into the nationalistic discourse of Republican China while at the same time shunning the propagandistic tendency of People’s Poetry. Rather than fitting Shi Tang’s epic into a European critical paradigm, this paper shows that any culturally biased categorization of genres might hinder the possibility of its manifestation in the Chinese context. Moreover, this paper also shows that the localization of “epic” as a literary genre is significant in the modernization of vernacular Chinese poetry.
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Notes
For the mapping of intellectual controversies concerning the epic in Republican China, see Gang Lin, “20th century exploration of the ‘Issue of the Chinese epic,’” Frontier of Literary Studies, 2010, 4 (1): 32-54. Translated from Zhongguo Bijiao Wenxue [Comparative Literature in China] by Yixiang Du, 2006, (2): 137-150.
Zhu did not distinguish between long narrative poems and epics. In his essays, they refer to the same poetic genre. He regarded “The wife of Zhongqing Jiao,” China’s longest narrative poem —of only 1745 characters in length— as a ballad, rather than an epic, p. 135. See Guangqian Zhu, “The unexplored territory of Chinese literature,” in Zhu Guangqian quanji [The complete works of Guangqian Zhu], vol.8. Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993.
Ibid., p. 138. On the birth of mythology, Guangqian Zhu thought that the history of Chinese literature has its own particularity of development, “most of the other nations had mythologies first, then literature. Narrative poems in other nations mostly evolved from mythologies in primitive times; however, judging from the description of people’s life in Shi (Book of songs), Shu (The book of history), Li (The book of rites), Yi (The book of changes), Chunqiu (The spring and autumn annals), we could tell they were already written in an age after the formation of culture without traces of primitive life, and mythologies are quite rare in those works.”
See James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, p.154, “the heroic tradition has not been completely absent in China. During the Warring States Period, knights-errant (yu-hsia) and political assassins played an important role in contemporary affairs. Heroes of later periods, especially the warriors of the Three Kingdoms and the outlaws of Liangshan, have become household names through popular tales.” Liu strictly differentiated heroic poems and heroic epics, or epics in general. He argued for the absence of the epic in Chinese literature: “One more contributory cause of the absence of epic, or at least heroic epic, in Chinese is the condemnation of the cult of personal valour and physical prowess by Chinese scholars.”
The Warring States Period is a historical classification of a time period in ancient China that concluded with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE. There are controversies about the beginning of the period in academia, and I use the commonly cited source from Qian Sima, a West Han Dynasty historian.
This is a monumental biographical general history by Qian Sima (?135 BCE - 86 BCE) from the Han Dynasty (202 BCE - 9 CE). The work covers the world as it was known to the Chinese and a 2500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han.
The 1998 edition of Encyclopedia of China did not mention the Chinese tradition of epic; the 2004 version, however, explained Chinese epic under the item “Epic” in the volume of “Foreign Literature.” For detailed explanations, see Encyclopedia of China, vol. 2 of “Foreign literature,” 932-933. Beijing: Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, 2004. For on-line source, please visit the following link: http://202.106.125.14:1168/indexengine/entry_browse.cbs?valueid=%CA%B7%CA%AB&dataname=dbk2%40D%3A%5Cdabaike%5Cdbkdms%5Cdata%5Cbook2%5Cdbk2.tbf&indexvalue=%BF%CB%D6%C7 (Accessed on February 17, 2019).
Translationese refers to the awkwardness or ungrammaticality which results from the overly literal translation of idioms or syntax.
The term “the flow of time” was first used by Tang in analyzing Xin Di, another Nine Leaves poet’s comment on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem. For details, see Shi Tang’s “Wo de shiyi tansuo” (“My poetic art”), from Xinyidu ji [Collection of new ideas], p.194.
It was later turned into a stage play entitled The Dog Beneath the Skin: An Epidemic Epic. Auden and Isherwood’s early 20th century journey play was adapted to the AIDS crisis, performed by a cast and crew of 40.
For example, in the introduction of Kedan, which sounds similar to “Satan” in Chinese, Shi Tang writes, “Our hooligan teenager Kedan, / An ambitious prodigal son” in Heroes of the prairie, p. 92.
Tang explained his view on the relationship between image and meaning as analogous to that between form and content. See Shi Tang, “On images” from Xinyidu ji [Collection of new ideas], p.9. “The confrontation between image and meaning is different from that between form and content. The latter concerns the relationship between means and intention, and the subject and the subordinate. The former, logically speaking, also belongs to subject-subordinate relationship, but remains an internally parallel and integrated one.”
Hailing Wang (Prince Hailing of Jin 1122-1161), Han name for Liang Wanyan, was the fourth emperor of the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234). Tang’s “Hailing Wang” was first written in 1970 and revised later in 1979.
Dong’ou Wang (The King of Dong’ou) refers to Yao Zou (?251 BCE - 185 BCE), the first king of Dong’ou (472 BCE -138 BCE), roughly including the area of today’s Wenzhou and Taizhou in today’s Zhejiang Province of China. It is still used as substitute name for Wenzhou today, and it is perhaps for this reason that Shi Tang’s Song for the King of Dong’ou, written in 1998 is labeled as the first epic of Wenzhou in Chinese academia.
The title “Chunjiang Huayueye” [“A moonlit night on the spring river”] was originally a long yuefu poem by Ruoxu Zhang (?660-?720) in the Tang Dynasty, whom Shi Tang had already acknowledged in the preface of his long narrative under the same title in modern Chinese language. However, in the preface written in semi-classical Chinese, Tang delineates the spectrum of Zhang’s style: “Its tone was originally Wu official lyric made by the Late Chen emperor Shubao Chen (553-604), and later was imitated by Emperor Guang Yang of the Sui Dynasty (569-618) and Tingyun Wen (?812-?870), but Ruoxu Zhang’s version is the most outstanding.” See Chunjiang Huayueye [A Moonlit Night on the Spring River], p. 70.
“Biancheng” [“The border town”] is Shi Tang’s reflections upon Fu Du’s (712-770) poem “Su Zhongqing” [“On Heartfelt Emotion”]. The epic, first written in 1969 and revised in 1978, is a brief review of Du’s whole life as a poet in exile.
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This essay is Granted by “The Translation Activities Among Intellectuals at Southwestern Associated University and the Construction of the Theories of Translation in Modern China” (18CWW004)
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Zhang Qiang got his PhD in comparative literature at City University of Hong Kong in 2016. He is currently an associate professor in the department of translation at Nankai University. His research includes comparative study of modern Chinese and English poetry, the poetics of wartime literature, etc.
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Zhang, Q. The birth of modern Chinese epics: Shi Tang and his Hero of the prairie. Neohelicon 48, 719–734 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00603-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-021-00603-z