Traduire

TRADUIRE… INTERPRÉTER
and censorship under the totalitarian regime. They claimed in their manifesto that
their poetry is “a new embodiment of our national spirit, the voice and pulse of the
thinking generation, a reaction against the poetic disease of the past two
decades...poetry is no longer hack literature, no longer the mouth-piece of politics;
now we are standing face to face with our land, imbued with suffering and full of
hope; we muse on this sorrowful but radiant dawn; now we need our own stance, our
own voice.” 1 Jintian poets expressed their yearning, vision and anxiety for the new
age to come by adopting new forms and styles such as the use of symbolic and
suggestive skills, alternation of impressions and fantasies, interplay of conscious and
unconscious, etc. Not surprisingly, this new kind of poetry was controversial and
provocative at the time. 2 It was criticized for being “misty,” “obscure,”
“incomprehensive and does not serve the people” and this is exactly where the name
“Misty poetry” originated from. 3 Jintian was banned in late 1980, shortly after its
founding. 4 During the 1980s, the Chinese authorities led by Deng subsequently
launched several campaigns against “Spiritual Pollution” and “Bourgeois
Liberalism” to discredit both the poets and their work. 5
However, Gu Cheng and his fellow poets defended their work by justifying
that their poetry “is not misty at all,” and emphasized that “its principle quality is
that it is real-it moves from objective reality to subjective reality, from passive
reflection to active creation,” as Gu Cheng himself once defined the essence of
misty poetry in an interview: “it is the awakening of an aesthetic consciousness.
Some areas are gradually becoming clearer, in fact.” 6 The misty poetry can
therefore be perceived as the rise of a new mode of self-expression and aesthetic
appreciation in defiance of the totalitarian censorship, which not only openly
rebelled against literary doctrines but also voiced the sentiment and aspiration of the
youths at the turning point of drastic political transformation. It is “the shared
experience of the younger generation, the shared reality they face, and the shared
ideals they pursue” 7 that inspired thousands of young readers to embrace these
poems as they found nothing “obscure” in them. The shutting down of Jintian
eventually failed to prohibit the Jintian poets making its way from the underground
into the mainstream 8 and becoming the predecessor of post-mid 1980s Chinese
avant garde poetry. 9
1 Hong Huang, “Misty Manifesto,” Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: The
Noonday Press) 235.
2 Gu Cheng, “Misty Mondo,” Gu Cheng: Selected Poems (Hong Kong: Rendition, 1990) 169.
3 Geremie Barmé and John Minford, “Out of the Mists,” Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience
(New York: The Noonday Press) 234.
4 Chu and Golden 172.
5 Chu and Golden 174.
6 Gu 169.
7 Gu 171.
8 Crippen 11-12.
9 Hung Tzucheng, “Editor’s foreword of A New Selection of Misty Poetry,” Academic China 5 (2005), 1
Apr. 2010 .
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