Cultural Transplantation: The Writing of Classical Chinese Poetry in Colonial Singapore (1887–1945), written by Lap Lam

Cultural Transplantation: The Writing of Classical Chinese Poetry in Colonial Singapore (1887-1945) by Lap Lam (review)

Classical-style poetry in modern China and other Sinitic-speaking localities is attracting greater attention with the recent upsurge in academic revision of modern Chinese literary history. Using the concept of cultural transplantation, this monograph attempts to illustrate the uniqueness, compatibility, and adaptability of classical Chinese poetry in colonial Singapore as well as its sustained connections with literary tradition and homeland. It demonstrates how the reading of classical Chinese poetry can better our understanding of Singapore’s political, social, and cultural history, deepen knowledge of the transregional relationship between China and Nanyang, and fine-tune, redress, and enrich our perception of Singapore Chinese literature, Sinophone literature, the Chinese diaspora, and global Chinese identity.

There are compelling similarities between Afanasy Fet’s lyric poetry and classical Chinese lyric poetry. This connection is traced in the article with specific examples. Fet, carried away by the ideas of Schopenhauer, argued that thepoetic feeling lives in every person and can be called the sixth and highest feeling. In classical Chinese poetry, the Confucian concept of ‘the sense of things,’ the Taoist formula ‘words and forms’ and the idea of the unity of man and nature played an important role. With characteristic fixation of subtle changes of light and shadow, with the transmission of flushed feelings, Fet’s oeuvre reminds the readers of the ancient Chinese lyric poetry. Like classic Chinese texts, Fet’s poems are textbooks where the idea of the unity of man and nature is developed. In both Chinese poetry and Fet’s works, human life goes into natural life, gaining eternity in the nature. As a result, although Fet was not familiar with Chinese culture, the intuitions that fed his work surprisingly coincided with pictorial techniques as a way of conveying emotion in classical Chinese poetry, separated from him by many centuries.

Reviews 65 Zuoya Cao. The Internal and the External: A Comparison oftheArtistic Use ofNatural Imagery in English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry. Asian Thought and Culture, vol. 32. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 163 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-8204-3815-4. This mechanical little book sets out to disprove an assertion ofthe late Paul de Man that "the merging of the internal and the external can never be reached in poetic language." A revised 1993 dissertation from Pennsylvania State University, Zuoya Cao's monograph recalls an earlier, pre-Derrida era when comparative literature could be a rather uncomplicated business: compare and contrast a handful of carefully chosen poems from two disparate literary traditions, chronicle their "similarities" and "differences," and then account for these discoveries by recourse to the literary history and theory of each tradition. Professor Cao follows this old formula closely. For students of Chinese poetry, the saving grace ofher exercise is its focus on natural imagery, certainly a central issue in the Chinese poetic tradition. The work is divided into four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2, "The Use ofNatural Scenery" (pp. 7-42) and "The Use ofNatural Objects" (pp. 43-77), compare, respectively, how the two traditions employ, first, complex landscape descriptions and then individual flora and fauna. These chapters rely on a carefully contrived series of comparisons, each between one Western and one Chinese poem. Despite the promise ofthe title, the corpus ofpoetry subject to comparison is actually quite small. "English Romantic" is confined to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge; and despite the definition of "Chinese Classic Poetry" as T'ang and Sung "lyrics" (p. 1), the Chinese poems chosen for comparison are limited to the shih poetry ofWang Wei, Tu Fu, and Li Po and the tz'u poetry of Su Shih. The entire work does not cite a single Sung dynasty shih poem. Virtually all the poems in these first two chapters are well-known anthology chestnuts—the opening pair being Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Wang Wei's "Mt. Chung-nan" (Chung-nan shan f^^fLLI). In short, Zuoya Cao has severely constricted the parameters ofboth traditions, confining herselfto rather late and rather middlebrow conceptions of these traditions. These opening chapters do not really compare "English Romantic and Chinese Classic Poetry" but rather pit Three Hundred T'ang Poems against Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Obviously, any consideration of the discursive quality of Sung shih poetry or exploration into the lesser-© 1999 by University ^0Vm byways ofEnglish Romantic poetrywould havevastlycomplicated ProfesofHawai 'i Press„ , . sor Cao s task. Within the narrow confines ofthis chosen corpus, her conclusions are focused and predictable. Both traditions employ natural imagery (the "external") to 66 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 express the poet's feelings (the "internal"). But the Romantics are more likely to turn the natural object into a symbol for imaginative meditation, to intellectualize the object into a subjective mental construct, and this process in turn deflects interest away from the physical reality ofthe object itself. However, for the Chinese poet, the physical object "always remains concrete," and "Chinese poets often create a fusion ofnatural scene and feeling where objective and subjective worlds are united in one artistic world" (p. 40). These conclusions are hardly revelations and have been expressed in some detail elsewhere—badly, I have previously argued— by Pauline Yu, whom Zuoya Cao cites, and—much better—by François Jullien, whom she does not cite.1 If Cao's theoretical conclusions are predictable, her exegesis of specific Chinese poems is largely correct and sometimes insightful. Her readings, however, appear as univocal and sui generis. Poetic texts, for Cao, are static, with only one perennial meaning. When quoting Chinese poems, she provides a Chinese text in simplified characters, followed always by another scholars' previously published translation in brackets, which is then footnoted. Her Chinese texts, therefore, are referenced not by citation to any traditional or modern Chinese editions ofthe poets' works but by citation to previous English translations. Thus, textual problems, ofwhich there are many even in the few poems under discussion, are fully ignored. Likewise absent is any mention ofthe rich and complex commentarial tradition. Cao provides no references to traditional commentary and only...

The forms of Chinese classic poetry have been developed through thousands of years of history and are still current in today's poetry society. A re-classification of the rhyming words, however, is necessary to keep the classic poetry up to date in the new settings of modern Chinese language. To ease the transition process, computing technology is used to help the readers as well as poetry writers to check the compliance of poems in accordance with the forms and to compose poems without the effort to learn the old grouping of rhyming words. A piece of software has been developed in a faculty/student research project at the University of Houston-Downtown to verify this idea. This software, called Chinese classic poetry wizard, provides the functionality of checking metrical forms and rhyming schemes. It also allows users to edit rhyme dictionaries and metrical forms. The new rhyming scheme proposed in this paper should rationalize the composition rules of classic Chinese poetry in the modern society; and the poem composition wizard will provide a handy tool for poem composition. This work will help revive Chinese classic poetry in modern society and, in a sequel, contribute to the current campaign of advocating Chinese traditional teachings.

The study of Chinese classical poetry in Russia dates back several centuries, it is original, has its own bright, distinctive features, no matter in the period of Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, or contemporary Russia, it always occupies a unique position in the world’s sinology field. In this article, the spread of Chinese classical poetry in Russia is systematically considered from such aspects as the interaction of translators and researchers, translations and works about poets, writers and their works, as well as translation principles and various aspects of research, originality, models of cooperation. This article points out that the study of Chinese classical poetry in Russia attaches great importance to translation, to the exploration of translation principles from the perspectives of rhyme, rhythm, form, paragraphs, tasks, and readers, to the combination of translation, annotation, and research, to the construction of academic terms, and the cooperative mode of poetry translation between Russian sinologists and poets. The paper notes that there are two important goals for Russia and Russian science in translating and researching Chinese classical poetry: firstly, they can serve to enrich national literature and write the history of Russian literature too; secondly, they can be used to introduce Chinese poetry into the context of the development of Russian and world culture. Russian translators and Sinologists-researchers will continue to contribute to the spreading of Chinese poetry and make it a part of world literature.

Classical Chinese poetry has a history of thousands of years and is a precious cultural heritage of humankind. Compared with the modern Chinese corpus, it is irrecoverable and specially organized, making it difficult to be learned by existing pre-trained language models. Besides, with the thousands of years of development, many words in classical Chinese poetry have changed their meanings or been out of use today, which further limiting the capability of existing pre-trained models to learn the semantics of classical Chinese poetry. To address these challenges, we construct a large-scale sememe knowledge graph of classical Chinese Poetry (SKG-Poetry), which connects the vocabularies in classical Chinese poetry and modern Chinese. By extracting the sememe knowledge from classical Chinese poetry, our model PoetryBERT not only enlarges the irrecoverable pre-training corpus but also enriches the semantics of the vocabularies in classical Chinese poetry, which enables PoetryBERT to be successfully used in downstream tasks. Specifically, we evaluate our model in two tasks in the field of Chinese classical poetry, which are poetry theme classification and poetry-modern Chinese translation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the two tasks to show the effectiveness of sememe knowledge based pre-training model.

Based on the Chinese classical poetry literature translated by Chu Nom which is the ancient native language of Vietnam, this paper analyzes the three forms of Vietnamese literati's translation of Chinese classical poetry: formal translation, interpretive translation and expansive translation. It is pointed out that these translations are characterized by various genres and distinctive national colors. The translation of Chinese classical poetry by Chu Nom in Vietnam reflected the new changes and localization of Chinese poetry in Vietnam, and showed that Chinese poetry has gone from Vietnamese literati to ordinary people.

Classical Chinese poetry is an important literary genre in Chinese literature, of which the Tang poems and Song lyrics are two of the highest artistic achievements in ancient Chinese poetry. The study of classical poetry translation has become a hot topic in Chinese literary translation. This paper aims to study the translatability of Chinese classical poetry from the perspective of the translation strategies of Xu Yuanchong by selecting lyrics titled everlasting longing in the Chinese-English Translation of 300 Chinese Tang and Song Lyrics authored by Xu Yuanchong, an outstanding translator. In the translation of Xu Yuanchongs poems, he emphasized the beauty of meaning, form and sound. Through a theoretical overview of important translation strategies and case study of the translation strategies adopted by Xu Yuanchong, the following conclusions are drawn: Xu Yuanchongs translation strategy of creative translation has greatly improved the translatability of classical Chinese poetry. Due to the particularity of the poetry style and literary form, the semantic meaning loss can be caused to a certain extent, so the translation strategy oriented by functional equivalence and aesthetic pursuit can provide the reference for the translation of Chinese classical poems and lyrics.

This study speculated on changes in poetic expressions of Miam Yoo Hee-Chun according to his situations as a variation. It is expected that change in poetry written by a literary person in the 16th century will be explained and it will be a clue to understand an aspect of Chinese poetry in Honam. 『Miamjip』 has a total of 282 poems with 243 titles recorded and is divided into two categories: 144 poems which were written during his exile and 138 which were written after he was released from the exile. It was explained that there was a great difference in his life between the exile period and the release period when poetic forms were considered. During the exile period, he usually wrote ancient poems and a regulated verse rather than a quatrain in Geunchesi. After the release period, he wrote a quatrain rather than an ancient poem. As well, the most distinctive characteristics of the poems he wrote during the exile period were that his poems were arguing and depended on antiquity. However, during the release period, as the poems were monotypic or repetitive, it was felt that he was not so much enthusiastic on writing poetry and to explain them in an aspect of economic logic, they were not positively considered. As above-mentioned, this study explained changes in his poetic expressions according to his situations. As for a poetical style, his poems are related to Song-style poetry as they are arguing and not emotional. Also, the poems after the release period were usually monotypic and were supplemented in 『Miam Journal』.

The forms of Chinese classic poetry have been developed through thousands years of history and are still current in today's poetry society. A re-classification of the rhyming words, however, is necessary to keep the classic poetry up to date in the new settings of modern Chinese language. In order to maintain the continuation of the poetry forms, computing technology can be used to help the readers as well as poetry writers to check the compliance of poems in accordance to the forms and composite poems without the effort to learn the old grouping of rhyming words. This work will help revive Chinese classic poetry in modern society and promote its writability.

Classical Chinese Poetry (CCP) is a valuable but almost locked treasure chest of human wisdom and civilization since 2000 years. With the advent of the Web 2.0 a renaissance of CCP is possible even outside Chinese-speaking communities world-wide. With mobile technologies and educational games we can address new learning communities for CCP and open the chest again. In this paper, we introduce a Web 2.0 personal learning environment for CCP. We have developed a generic and interoperable data model for CCP we utilize not only for mobile learning scenarios but also for educational gaming with different levels of difficulty. Learners are empowered to learn Chinese poetry, language, history, and culture. This research work shows how modern information technologies assist users to diffuse knowledge across the borderlines of communities and societies.

Primary verbal composite modelling, as manifested in cognitive poetics, raises serious theoretical questions over the nature and function of the linguistic sign. This chapter attempts to assess Chinese poetics popularized by North American sinologists in the 1960s to 1980s, re-read the so-called ‘Old Style’ Chinese poetry produced before the sixth century, and, finally, investigate why classical poetry in general lacks figurative and imagistic intricacy, characteristic of highly conceit-laden Western poetry, e.g. in the metaphysical and modernistic traditions. Specifically, the essay analyzes the ways in which mental spaces in classical Chinese poetry are mapped and examines how vital relations, scales, force-dynamics, and image-schemata, are integrated or ‘blended’ in creating mediated poetic ‘space’. Through close readings of sample poems in terms of current Language and Space studies, the author argues that the commonly assumed iconicity in classical Chinese poetry should be more properly called poetic indexicality rather than iconicity.

Chinese classical poetry occupies an important position in ancient Chinese literature. However, the existing research on Chinese classical poetry is usually limited to a certain poet or dynasty to analyze its historical and cultural influence and lacks comprehensive research on the process of ancient poetry from the perspective of time and space. We integrate multisource data and information, including poets’ biographies and Chinese classical poetry, to build a relatively complete social network of 41,310 poets. Based on this network, we use natural language processing and social network analysis techniques to research the relationships between poets. For example, how poets of different dynasties and different schools relate to each other. In order to quantitatively analyze the changing process of poets’ influence over a period of time, we propose a new method—time-series entropy weight method—to calculate the dynamic changing process of poets’ influence over time. Besides, we evaluate and discuss the method of calculating the influence of poets by means of propagation dynamics model and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Through the study of the complex social relations of poets and the quantification of their influence, we can assist in the study of the development of different schools and styles of ancient poetry. Our work offers a new, data-driven, long-run perspective on the evolution of Chinese poetry for historical researchers and enthusiasts to understand the complex relationships among historical figures.

The forms of Chinese classic poetry have been developed through thousands years of history and are still current in today's poetry society. A re-classification of the rhyming words, however, is necessary for the classic poetry writing to be done in the new settings of modern Chinese language. In order to maintain the continuation of the poetry forms, computing technology can be used to help the readers as well as poetry writers to check the compliance of poems in accordance to the forms and compose poems without the effort to learn the old grouping of rhyming words. This work will help revive Chinese classic poetry in modern society and promote its writability.