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The Poetics of Discontinuity: East-West Correspondences in Lyric Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Pauline Yu
Pauline Yu*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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Abstract

This article discusses some characteristic methods and structures shared by modern Western and classical Chinese poetry, focusing on the works of Georg Trakl and major poets of the T’ang dynasty. Among the similarities examined are the preference for concrete imagery over abstract, discursive statement; the paratactical juxtaposition of images, which leaves their logical, temporal, and grammatical relationships unspecified and often ambiguous; and the tendency for images to become “ciphers” that suggest, but do not support, metaphorical interpretation. There is also a reluctance to obtrude a first-person speaker onto the scene, and this has led some critics to label Symbolist-post-Symbolist and Chinese poetry “impersonal”; this essay argues, however, that the hidden subjectivity of even the most “impersonal” poem should not be overlooked. Nevertheless, the omission of subject does frequently increase ambiguities among the other elements of a work and contributes to the “poetics of discontinuity” common to the two traditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 2 , March 1979 , pp. 261 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 Rainer Maria Rilke was the first to suggest a possible connection between Trakl's work and Chinese poetry, in a letter of 22 Feb. 1917 to Erhard Buschbeck:

Das Traklsche Gedicht ist fur mich ein Gegenstand von sublimer Existenz. Nun erschutterts mich erst recht, wie die von Anfang an fluchtende, in ihrer Beschreibung leise ausgesparte Gestalt imstande war, das Gewicht ihres fortwàhrenden Untergangs in so genauen Bildungen zu beweisen. Es fâllt mir ein, dab dieses ganze Werk sein Gleichnis hâtte in dem Sterben des Li-Tai-Pe: hier wie dort ist das Fallen Vorwand fur die unaufhaltsamste Himmelfahrt.

The Trakl poem is for me an object of sublime existence. Only now does it really impress me how the figure—fleeting from the very beginning and spare in its description—was able to demonstrate the weight of its ongoing decline in such precise images. It occurs to me that this entire work might have its likeness in the death of Li T'ai-po: both here and there, falling is a pretext for an inexorable ascension to heaven.

See his Briefe aus den Jahren 1914 bis 1921, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1937), iv, 126. Rilke is alluding here to the legends associated with the death of the T'ang dynasty poet Li Po (or Li T'ai-po), who was said to have drowned, either while attempting to embrace the reflection of the moon or while being carried off to eternal life on a dolphin's back. The latter myth had been given currency by Hans Bethge in a foreword to his volume of “translations” (Nachdichtungen) of Chinese poetry. Die chinesische Fltite (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1907), pp. 107–08.

2 Ch'iian T'ang shih (Taipei: Ming-lun, 1971), p. 4429. Further references to this collection (The Complete T'ang Poems) will be given in the text, abbreviated as CTS. All translations from the Chinese are my own.

3 Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, ed. Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar (Salzburg: Otto Miiller Verlag, 1969), i, 39. Subsequent references to poems and letters from this edition are given in the text, and all translations from the German are my own.

4 J. D. Frodsham, The Poems of Li Ho (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. xliii. Frodsham translates Li Ho's official biography from the New T'ang History (Hsin T'ang shu), pp. xv-xvi.

5 For a more extensive discussion of the characteristic structures and syntax of this form see Kao Yu-kung and Mei Tsu-lin, “Syntax, Diction and Imagery in T'ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, No. 31 (1971), pp. 49–136.

6 This is especially true of the late T'ang (ninth to tenth centuries), to which Li Ho is usually assigned. For an illuminating discussion of the poetry of this period see A. C. Graham, Poems of the Late T'ang (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), pp. 13–37.

7 James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 41.

8 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (New York: Arrow Editions, 1936), p. 25; rpt. in Ezra Pound, Instigations (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 37576. Page references cited in text are to the reprint.

9 Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” New Age, 7 (Dec. 1911), p. 130; quoted in Wai-lim Yip, “Wang Wei and the Aesthetic of Pure Experience,” Tamkang Review, 2 (Oct. 1971) and 3 (April 1972) (2 vols, in 1 issue), 209, n. 4. Also published, in abridged form, as “Wang Wei and Pure Experience,” in Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei, trans. Wai-lim Yip (New York: Grossman, 1972), pp. v-xv.

10 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), pp. 3, 5.

11 Ezra Pound, “A Few Don'ts,” Literary Essays, p. 4; emphasis mine.

12 T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” Speculations (New York: Harcourt, 1924), pp. 134, 133.

13 Paul Valéry, “Poésie et pensée abstraite,” Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Tours: Gallimard, 1959), i, 1331.

14 Gottfried Benn, Problème der Lyrik (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1951), p. 16.

15 Reinhold Grimm makes a similar distinction in slightly different terms when he suggests that modern Western poetry, in trying to free itself from the highly inflected grammar of the languages in which it is written, moves either toward an isolating syntax, like that of Chinese, or toward an agglutinating one. See his “Versuch liber Lyrik und Sprachbau,” in Strukturen (Gottingen: Sachse und Pohl Verlag, 1963), pp. 17296.

16 Edgar Lohner isolates these last-mentioned practices as the two major features of modern poetry: “einmal die substantivistische Ausdrucksweise, die ja gemaG der besonderen Funktion dieser Wortklasse eine Tendenz zum Umfassenden und Absoluten aufweist; zum anderen die Simultaneitât, das Zusammenziehen und Vermischen von Raum und Zeit” ‘in the first place the substantival mode of expression, which, in accordance with the special function of this class of words, demonstrates a tendency toward the all-encompassing and absolute; and in the second place, simultaneity, the pulling together and mixing of space and time.‘ See his “Wege zum modernen Gedicht,” in Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), p. 383.

17 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres, ed. Suzanne Bernard (Paris: Gamier, 1960), pp. 344, 221.

18 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 366.

19 See esp. Herbert Lindenberger, “Georg Trakl and Rimbaud: A Study in Influence and Development,” Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 21–35; Reinhold Grimm, “Georg Trakls Verhiiltnis zu Rimbaud,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, NS 9 (1959), pp. 288–315, rpt. in Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, pp. 271–313; and Bernhard Bôschenstein, “Wirkungen des franzôsischen Symbolismus auf die deutsche Lyrik der Jahrhundertwende,” Euphorion, 58 (1964), 375–95. Trakl never read Rimbaud in the original but encountered him in the translations produced by Karl Klammer under the name K. L. Ammer. See Arthur Rimbaud, Leben und Dichtung, trans. K. L. Ammer (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1907).

20 Herbert Lindenberger, Georg Trakl (New York: Twayne, 1971), p. 63.

21 See Killy, Uber Georg Trakl (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1960), pp. 18–19.

22 Grimm, “Georg Trakls Sonne,” in Strukturen, pp. 148–49, 156.

23 Karl Ludwig Schneider, Der bildhafte Ausdruck in den Dichtungen Georg Heyms, Georg Trakls und Ernst Stadlers (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1954), p. 89.

24 Rudolf Dirk Schier, Die Sprache Georg Trakls (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1970), p. 36.

25 Hermann von Coelln, “Sprachbehandlung und Bildstruktur in der Lyrik Georg Trakls,” Diss. Heidelberg 1960, p. 131; quoted in Schier, p. 35.

26 BIy, “On Current Poetry in America,” The Sixties, 4 (Fall 1960), p. 29.

27 Yip, “Translating Chinese Poetry,” Chinese Poetry: Major Modes and Genres (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 19, 11.

28 Yip, “The Chinese Poem: A Different Mode of Representation,” Delos, 1 (1969), 72.

29 Dufrenne, Le Poétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1963), p. 91.

30 Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, trans. H. B. Veatch (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), p. 97; quoted in James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 60.

31 Grimm, “Georg Trakls Sonne,” p. 356, n. 2. The Dilthey citation comes from W. Dilthey, Uber die Einbildungskraft des Dichters. Bausteine zu einer Poetik, in W. Diltheys Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1924), vi, 220.

32 Eugen Gomringer, Konstellationen; constellations; constelaciones (Bern: Spiral Press, c. 1953); quoted in Grimm, “Versuch uber Lyrik und Sprachbau,” p. 183.