The Making of a Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Spender, and Yang Mu

Abstract

One of formidable challenges for comparatists today is reconfiguration of Goethe's term Weltliteratur (1827) in age of globalization. In analyzing making of poetry, Stephen Owen raised point about negative effects of Western influence on modern Chinese poetry in his essay The of Global Influence: Is World Poetry? (1990). He suspected that Bei Dao had been selling the state's brutality and the suffering of oppression in China to West in highly translatable language (Owen, Anxiety 29). In so doing, poet sacrificed poetry to his own self-interest. Owen's views about loss of and decline in contemporary poetry from mainland China aroused heated debates and were harshly criticized, most notably by Michelle Yeh and Rey Chow, as symptomatic of Orientalist bias (Yeh, Chayi 94-96; Chow, Writing 1-26). Yeh found Owen's accusations self-contradictory, as result of his desire for difference. In insisting on cultural difference derived from his expertise in classical Chinese poetry, Owen in fact gave rise to suppression of internal differences within Chinese lyric tradition (Yeh 95). She saw in Owen's criticism his worries about disappearance of difference that clearly marks out contemporary poetry in China from that produced in rest of (Yeh 96). Rey Chow followed up on this point and argued that Owen actually suffers from anxiety over his own intellectual position as Sinologist (Chow, Writing 3). From these critics' points of view, Owen's essentialist notion of Chineseness in poetry is common in Westerners' Orientalist biases, which imprison the other in static past. In retrospect, although Owen's reading of high translatability of some modern poems as sign of deculturation is problematic, he did nonetheless remind readers of cultural hegemony of West. Instead of celebrating an innocent synthesis of all literatures in world, he warned them of pitfalls of taking for granted local (Anglo-European) tradition as universal literary model for developing poetry (Owen, Anxiety 28). Bearing in mind controversy caused by Owen's provocative question, David Damrosch put forward possible answer to question What is literature? based on study of circulation of literary texts via translation. According to Damrosch, all works begin in their original language, but a work only has an effective life as literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within literary system beyond that of its original culture (Damrosch 4). He indirectly endorses Susan Bassnett's suggestion that translation is a major shaping force for change in history of culture because it enhances mobility of text (Bassnett 10). To approach an understanding of world literature, questions contemporary discourse needs to address are not only about longevity of work, but also about its evolution across cultures. Doubtless, our rapidly globalizing of twenty-first century facilitates speedy travel of literary theory and practice. In Traveling (1982), Edward Said explicates ways theories are applied in any mature writing and iterates importance of critical recognition (Said, World 226-247). He sees this in Raymond Williams's way of using theory consciously to qualify, shape and refine his borrowings from Lukacs and (Said, World 241). In manner of influence studies, Said traces how Lukacs's Theory of Novel (1920) and History and Class Consciousness (1923) affected his European students and readers, more prominent among them Lucien Goldmann in Paris and Raymond Williams in Cambridge. Adopted in another place and at different time, theory appeared to Said to have lost its original revolutionary vigor and sedimented into kind of dogmatic orthodoxy. Years later, Said admitted bias in his early formulation and revised his arguments in his 1994 essay Traveling Theory Reconsidered (Said, Reflections 436-452). …