This book is a tale of two poetries that are worlds apart in many ways. There is, however, a close, if not always immediately tangible, affinity between them, in literary-historical terms and on the level of individual oeuvres and texts alike. As a translator, I regularly experience and try to sensibly exploit this affinity to increase the quality of translations. Regrettably, the creative and cognitive potential of this kinship is rarely recast into artistic or scholarly practice; and when this does happen, it often proves epistemologically unproductive and/or ethically questionable, as we shall see in the selected examples in this book of flawed intertextual dialogues between Polish and Chinese poets. Nevertheless, my primary aim is not so much critical as it is political. Instead of focusing on the problems in the current connections between Polish and Chinese poetry, I propose alternative linkages, demonstrating how resonance and dissonance can be orchestrated with spectacular effect. Although I draw on culturally specific material, I hope to offer a more broadly applicable modus operandi in world literature studies, one which may be instrumental in discussing various literatures in a way that does justice to, but allows us to transcend, the global cultural-historical context, overcoming its implicit hierarchies and mutual preconceptions and misconceptions.
1 Mismatch? On Com-pair-ison and Directing as Method
Among the many approaches to intercultural literary research, two widely represented general types can be distinguished: propositions that oscillate around broadly taken reception studies (including so-called influence studies, among other things) and propositions that assume a comparative perspective in the strictest sense; that is, they compare texts or poetics to arrive at a deeper understanding of those texts/poetics, their source cultures, or literature at large. While I do recognize the value of these approaches in addressing many pivotal questions, I consider them insufficient in the making of an equal, dynamic, diverse, and ethical discourse of world literature, a task I believe should be at the center of the longtime covenant between comparative literary studies and area studies.
The limitations of reception-oriented approaches are obvious. They exclude discussions of interactions between literatures and poetics between which no points of contact can be identified in the literary-historical past or present. They investigate, describe, and often, as a consequence, reinforce the status quo in global literary discourse. The limitations of comparison have been raised many times too, leading usually to the shared general conclusion that while comparative thinking is unavoidable as a natural process occurring in the human mind, it has to be subject to constant critical examination and confrontation against possibly optimized axiological systems and ethical codes, especially when it concerns interactions between mutually distant cultures. Works such as David Damrosch’s Comparing the Literatures (2020), which critically examines how the comparative method has evolved through the centuries from a literary-historical perspective, or the volume Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013) edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, which gathers essays by renowned postcolonial scholars and comparatists offering a variety of sensible and creative applications of the comparative method, are important steps toward an effective redefinition of comparative literature in a global context. Nonetheless, although the topic has been thoroughly discussed by many authors, I still find it necessary to draw the reader’s attention to what I consider important but not sufficiently addressed or emphasized in the existing scholarship.
My questions largely overlap with those listed by Felski and Friedman in the introduction to their volume:
To what extent do all modes of thought rely on implicit, if not explicit forms of comparison? Is comparative analysis compatible with the acknowledgement of singularity or even incommensurability? Can comparison decenter or unsettle our standards of measure rather than reinforce them? How do we rethink our structures of comparison and the history of its uses to do justice to past and current postcolonial and global contexts? How do the new spatial modes of analysis based on interrelations, conjunctures, networks, linkages, and modes of circulation draw on or enrich comparative thinking? What are the limitations of comparisons based on similarities and differences, and what other methods of comparative thinking might we envision? What are the contributions of different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields to the archive of comparative scholarship?1
However, I wish to ask these questions from a slightly different angle, focusing on the very mechanics and geometry of comparison in which, I believe, lies the root of its undesirable literary-political consequences.
The most problematic aspect of comparison is the way in which it shapes literary politics in macro- and microscale alike. Naively or primitively deployed quantitative and qualitative comparison leads, on the one hand, to tacit competition between literatures. Who is bigger, stronger, wins more prizes, or, on the contrary, who has suffered or struggled more. On the other hand, it leads to calculations about whom to align oneself with to enhance one’s material or symbolic capital. Such naive comparison is rarely discussed or employed explicitly; rather, it constitutes an inbuilt mechanism which determines certain unconscious choices, whether in the individual or collective dimension. For example, authors and scholars representing literatures of nations once colonized or part of the so-called Third or Second World—widely questioned categories that yet still exercise a detrimental impact on the mutual perception of cultures—are more likely to trace or try to establish connections between their own or their nation’s poetry and Western poetries than the other way around.
Quite aside from the cultural bias and implicit hierarchies that underlie world literature discourse, so understood comparative thinking also discourages scholars from bringing together literatures that appear to be mutually disproportionate, especially in terms of the territorial scope or timespan of their respective cultural traditions. Juxtaposing poetic traditions of similarly expansive territorial scope or timespan, for example Chinese poetry with American or Russian poetry, appears to be quite natural and common in scholarship. Yet an asymmetric juxtaposition of, for instance, Chinese poetry and Polish poetry calls for more elaborate justification. In imagining what the reader might be feeling when reaching for a volume with “Poland” and “China” in the title, which additionally suggests a comparative perspective, I am reminded of a series of memes that caused a stir on the internet back in 2013. Inspired by photographs from diplomatic visits, these caricature cartoons portrayed president Xi Jinping
To avoid glaring disproportions, smaller literatures are usually merged into categories such as “Western literature,” “Central European literature,” “Middle East literature,” and so forth for them to become “comparable” and enter into an “equal” (in the quantitative sense of the term) dialogue with larger ones. This not only leads to the effacement of their individual specificity and to the multiplying of stereotypes and baseless generalizations but also causes an ontological confusion, so to speak, which stems from considering cultural organisms at two different levels of organization: a relatively self-contained entity of a national literature written largely in the same language (the role of ethnic minorities and their dialects is usually downplayed or glossed over in such discussions) versus a complex network of interconnections between literatures created in many different languages. This is like comparing a whale and a coral reef.
I could perhaps try to dispel the reader’s doubts, arguing that geopoetical “power relationships” are different from geopolitical ones, and that in terms of poetic economy, Poland might be considered a counterpart of Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates—it is small but rich in high-quality resources from which foreign authors, including Chinese poets, draw abundantly. This would not be an unjustified claim because Polish poetry can indeed be counted among the world’s most vivid and widely appreciated poetries, but this path of reasoning would only additionally strengthen the comparative-competitive model which I want to dismantle.
To make matters clear, one can of course theoretically postulate a comparison that has a purely analytical function and does not contain or generate value judgment, though in practice this is virtually impossible due to our deeply rooted mental habits, especially in intercultural discourse, which is still profoundly prejudiced and hierarchical. But even if we can overcome this obstacle and work with crystal-clear epistemological intentions to observe how the objects/texts/cultures we compare shed light on and interpret one another, the efficiency of such an operation is still limited, not least because it is largely contingent on the possible terrae comparationis between them—the more specific and diverse the terrae comparationis, the richer and more precise the outcome of comparative research.
Comparatists often speak of “common denominators” in this context, borrowing the notion from mathematics. This is a very useful loan and it aptly captures not just the mechanisms of the comparative method but also its practical drawbacks. In math, one can find a common denominator for any two or more fractions, but sometimes these common denominators need to be so big that they prove nonoperational. In the case of fractions whose denominators consist of so-called coprime numbers, which have no common factor, finding a common denominator requires multiplying the numbers under the fraction bars by each other; this, at certain magnitudes, may pose a considerable problem. By analogy, we might speak of something like “coprime texts” or “coprime poetries/literatures/cultures” with no—or relatively few—“common factors,” which require a cosmic “common denominator” to be effectively compared. In principle, one can discuss any randomly selected set of poetries or poetics through the prism of their respective take on big themes such as nature, history, life, death, and so forth. Yet, just like between people, it is difficult to imagine that a lively, productive, and sustained dialogue between them hinge exclusively on unanswerable abstract questions on imponderabilia. To a greater or lesser extent, it always needs a less absolute but regular stimulation by different impulses and on different levels. I believe comparative studies combined with area studies possess many tools that may be instrumental in providing and responsibly distributing such stimuli. Mostly, these are actually very old implements which are rusting in the academic toolshed, so it is good to take them out once in a while and simultaneously let some fresh air into the shed. I will use them to build a provisional stage, as in a theater, but prior to this, I need to calibrate them a little bit.
To define my approach, I propose a cosmetic but consequential terminological adjustment to comparative vocabulary; namely, to replace “comparing” with what I will call “com-pair-ing” (without hyphenation hereafter). The operation I refer to as compairing implicitly assumes comparing but, at the same time, structurally expands it; this is also what the word itself wants to enact by its specific “expanded” makeup. When one interprets for comparison, one focuses on the juxtaposed objects as such; their specific features come to the foreground and the interpretational process centers on analyzing their idiosyncrasies and similarities and establishes the possible reasons behind these, including culture-specific and more universal factors. For instance, an observation of dissimilarity may lead to a statement that given texts arise from entirely different systems of values and help specify these systems, whereas an observation of similarity may suggest a common source of inspiration or perhaps the existence of some general mechanisms of literary discourse. Simply put, in the case of comparison, conclusion is approximately equal to a cause (of similarity/dissimilarity), and the cause, in its turn, is approximately equal to an intersubjective truth that one expects to reveal through a comparative act, be it about specific texts/cultures or about literature at large. Compairing, on the other hand, takes all factors that determine comparison into account, but the emphasis is not on convergences, divergences, and their explanation. Rather, it is on how the juxtaposed objects together, as a pair, through their interplay, may contribute to the emergence of a new quality. Where comparing is static, descriptive, and conclusive, compairing is dynamic, narrative, and constructive; where comparing is critical and polemic, compairing is collaborative and poemic, in the etymological sense of poiema as doing, producing, or composing something.
By bringing out the pair, the word compair and its derivatives intend to accentuate the primacy of the interaction between objects/texts on which an interpretative operation is performed over other elements of literary discourse that codetermine the meaning, and the noncompetitive and nonhierarchical character of this interaction. In addition, the broken orthographic rule signals what often happens in compairative operations: texts tend to break free from the paradigms that determine their reception and the trajectory of circulation within their most immediate discursive and linguistic surroundings and it becomes necessary to negotiate new laws of mechanics and dynamics in a transcultural environment.
I like to think of my compairative work as theatrical directing. In the theater world, the director (being the counterpart of a compairatist in literary studies) and the actors (= texts) remain in close contact throughout the entire production process and have to react to one another’s words, actions, and other less tangible signals in order to create a convincing stage narrative. This narrative, although usually anchored in the surrounding world (in the case of compairative activity, meaning local cultural discourse), does not have to conform to its rules, which become temporarily suspended. Conversely, it often has ambitions, and the power, to gradually transform the external order. Comparing actors in a static picture would be a futile exercise, no more productive than comparing characters in the Winnie memes, revealing nothing new about any of them. However, when the actors perform together, strategically matched on stage, the dynamic that emerges between them gradually brings out their unique characteristics, personalities, and abilities, at the same time pushing the entire plot forward.
This approach stems from my experience as a literary translator and interpreter. In 2016 and 2017, during my stay in Beijing, I had the pleasure of collaborating with one of Europe’s most accomplished directors, Krystian Lupa, on his Polish-Chinese play Mo Fei based on Shi Tiesheng’s
Another fascinating thing was Lupa’s ability to incorporate coincidences, including various apparent mishaps, into his project. When he was working with the Chinese producers to find actors for the play, I committed what I now see as a felix culpa. While translating the director’s instructions for the producers, I overlooked the information regarding the age of one of the main characters. Lupa envisioned him as a young man in his late teens, whereas the producers organized a casting for children aged seven to nine years old. At the beginning, the director looked anything but delighted, but there was one child who won his heart, and he ended up adding several new scenes to the script just for the boy. The entire play greatly benefited from this decision.
I try to approach poems like Lupa approached his actors; that is, as independent, creative entities with their own experience, personality, and worldview. Instead of me imposing a fixed scenario and homogenous style on them, it is the poems that tell a certain story. They are the (text-)actors on the compairative stage; my job as director is to allow them to maximally play out their individual potential. Of course, like in theater, the compairative story told by the text-actors has to be roughly designed beforehand. It is set in a specific time and place and against a concrete background. It is divided into clear acts/scenes (= chapters/sections of the book). The director (= scholar) must be quite familiar with the actors (= texts), including their background and stage experience (i.e., the way the texts have functioned in their respective local literary discourse and other contexts) in order to know what can be expected from them, whether they fit the general conception, how to pair them on the stage (= page), and whether they can be trusted when the performance gets out of hand. That said, there is also a lot of space for natural interactions, free play, happenstance, and surprise, as in the audience’s favorite scene in Mo Fei, where the journalist Sandra, played by a Polish actor, and the protagonist, Drunkard Mo Fei, discuss existential problems in broken English. This scene aptly illustrates what I will be doing in the present study: inviting Polish and Chinese poems to con-verse—that is, create a joint poetic narrative—in English for a global audience.
Like in a theatrical play, the dynamic on the compairative stage between the text-actors takes different forms. Frequently, the text-actors enter into close dialogue, and their lines are directly intertwined in the emerging narrative. In one section, the interaction is so close that the compaired poems’ respective I-speakers undertake what looks like intertextual dating which develops into a more consistent relationship throughout the authors’ oeuvres. But there are also episodes in which poems start on the opposite sides of the stage and gradually move toward the middle, where they meet at the end of the scene/section or act/chapter. In other situations, a scene/section starts from a monologue of one text-actor and the other doesn’t enter the stage until later. Then, the first monologue sets the stage for the second one, and is ultimately reinterpreted by it. Finally, there is also a scene/section in which two text-actors meet in a con-versation with a third party; that is, a work that inspired both of them independently of each other. Sometimes the text-actors have a clear message they want to deliver through performance, sometimes the performance itself is a message, and sometimes there is no message and the performance is intended to provide the pleasure of the (inter)text and an opportunity to contemplate the mastery of composition.
The story that will emerge from this experiment lays no claims to finality, exclusiveness, or objectivity. Just like actors who can star in many different plays or films, contributing to various plots, the texts I have selected for my compairative narrative may tell different stories in different configurations, company, and stage arrangements. The main thread of the story I wish to tell is poetry’s journey in search of singularity, a destination to be defined more precisely in the next section. During this journey, Polish and Chinese poetry not only learn and discover each other; they also exchange their experiences and confront their perspectives through poems in order to better understand the various phenomena they come across and try to find solutions to the local and global problems they encounter, thus contributing to the transformation of world literature discourse. This is certainly not to say that their con-versations will provide universally applicable analytical frameworks or ultimate answers to big literary-theoretical questions. Rather, they offer images and ideas that might inspire or be incorporated into someone else’s project and developed in a constructive and creative way. Among such inventions that emerge during the interactions between Polish and Chinese poetry on my compairative stage is the metaphorical model of poetry as a photosynthesizing plant, as drawn from my observations of Polish ecopoetry and Chinese migrant worker verse, a notion of cosomology intended to connect the perspectives of cosmos and soma based on the investigations of linkages between poetry and ethnomedicine in the two countries, the game/play dichotomy as a literary-analytical tool inspired by poets’ experiments with Western postmodernism, or the very ideas of con-versing and compairing, which I developed for the needs of the present study. An interesting side effect of my research is how the findings that originate in the explorations of non-English-language literatures stretch the English language, forcing it to embrace neologisms and broaden its own lexicon and, occasionally, its syntax.
I am aware of certain limitations of my makeshift terminology. The most obvious among them is the problem that appears when one brings a third object into the picture. Technically, the word compair may not be useful for those working with more diverse material than a pair of texts/objects/cultures. If one still wishes to stick to it for the juxtaposition of three or more literatures, might I suggest a translational trick; namely, to render pair as a French word meaning “even, equal” (adj.) or “peer” (n.) and treat the third element as a new, equal mate for the duo at hand. Incidentally, rendered as a bilingual hybrid, the term additionally draws attention to an essential function of compairison: mediating between cultures. Other inconveniences include the untranslatability of the distinction compare/compair into most of the world languages and the two terms’ phonetic indistinguishability in English, which poses a challenge during oral presentations. But, since we have already stepped onto the territory of the French language, think, for instance, of Jacques Derrida’s famously misspelled untranslatable and indistinguishable différance, which both makes and does not make a difference, its crucial (dys)function being the triggering of an endless chain reaction, a play of meaning which defies final interpretation. This is, hopefully, precisely what we will experience in the present study, compairing various Chinese and Polish poems and sometimes allowing them to wander off the main narrative path I designed for them toward new or little-known territories of the literary universe.
2 Singularity: A Few Words about the Structuring Principle
The date that marks the beginning of my compairative narrative is June 4, 1989, the day on which Poland celebrated its first partially free parliamentary election after World War II and China witnessed the cruelty of its totalitarian regime at the massacre on Tiananmen Square. Although the circumstances of these events were radically different, June Fourth was a “reset” for poetry discourse in both countries, prompting the process of defining poetry anew.
We will view this process in three dimensions associated with three meanings I ascribe to the word singularity, along with the fourth meaning that underlies all of them and which will be explicated at the end of this section. The three dimensions, discussed in an order that reflects the shifting interest of the two poetry discourses over time, are: (1) singularity of national poetry defined specifically vis-à-vis social-political background, vis-à-vis local poetry tradition, vis-à-vis world poetry, and vis-à-vis the entire field of cultural production; (2) individual singularity of authors and poetics; (3) capital-S Singularity as a sphere located beyond the (presumed) limits of text and language. This last notion is inspired by the notion of Singularity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and signifies a moment in which a given discipline’s paradigms exhaust themselves, when they can no longer describe the emerging reality, and an entirely new grammar of understanding has to be developed. In the case of poetry, what breaks down are available paradigms of (human) language organization which pushes poetry to undertake efforts to reinvent itself by, for example, borrowing nonhuman languages from nature (ecopoetry) or machines (cyberpoetry, artificial intelligence or AI poetry). Thus, by compairing Polish and Chinese contemporary poetry, one can observe the entire process of poetry’s “spatial” development, from the most intimate sphere of personal idioms to the limits of human language, condensed in the timespan of the roughly three decades between 1989 and 2020.
Returning to the theatrical metaphor, this book is divided into a preparatory stage (chapter 1) and a six-act play (chapters 2–7). In chapter 1, I let the cast—Polish and Chinese poetry—get to know each other, look for common ground, and fix mutual misconceptions and misunderstandings that may thwart collaboration between them during the performance. This stage ends with a rehearsal, so to speak, during which we observe and critically analyze one of the few active attempts at con-versing undertaken by contemporary Polish and Chinese poets to date. The entire preparatory stage is open to the audience and recorded in the book, so, from the perspective of the spectators/readers, it can also be taken as a prologue which introduces them to the main threads that will be developed in the ensuing acts/chapters. In chapters 2–5, the narrative develops under the director’s relatively tight control with limited space for improvisation, following a near-parallel order of the emergence of certain phenomena in the two poetry discourses. In chapters 6–7, the text-actors take the initiative and lead the action toward an open ending.
Chapters 2–7 are constructed in such a way that they can be read independently of each other and the cross-references between them are usually explicitly marked to facilitate selective reading for those who reach for the book for a specific topic. On the other hand, in the spirit of the postulate that form is content and medium is message, the study’s broad scope as such constitutes part of the experiment I propose in this book. It is aimed at testing the compairative invention on possibly diverse sample materials and in different conditions in order to assess how far and how deep a stimulated con-versation between two culturally distant poetries can reach without detracting from its dynamic and productivity. In this respect, I leave the final conclusion to the reader, encouraging them to critically evaluate the result of the experiment, weighing successful and unsuccessful passages.
2.1 Chapter 1: Before the Curtain Goes Up
Chapter 1 briefly outlines the development of the two poetry discourses, pointing out, among other things, some cases of their direct interactions understood as a consciously undertaken dialogue between authors, with intersubjectively demonstrable and explicit inspirations and influences. A crucial role in shaping the trajectory of these poetic contacts between Poland and China is played by the shared wartime and totalitarian experience, especially the official “brotherhood in socialism” between the two countries which was eventually dissolved on June 4, 1989. Some say that the connection between the election in Poland and the massacre in Beijing was more than the mere black humor of God, suggesting that the Chinese authorities’ brutal response to student protests was prompted by their awareness of the democratic transformation in Central Europe. This is, in my opinion, an even more painful explanation, as it means that, in a sense, the Chinese people paid a bitter price for Polish freedom. In any event, June Fourth is the date when the official “brotherhood” between the two countries was irretrievably severed, generating new, complex narratives about China in Poland and vice versa.
Aside from the official diplomatic stance of the two governments, these narratives seem to have assumed exactly opposite vectors in terms of culture. In the works of contemporary Chinese poets, the modern history of China (the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square) is quite easily projected onto the spatiospiritual topography of Poland (Stalinism, Martial Law, “Solidarity”), as I tried to demonstrate in my paper “Oświęcim, Cheap Bread, and Potatoes in Wounds: Poland in the Eyes of Chinese Poets” (Oświęcim, tani chleb i ziemniaki w ranach. Polska oczami chińskich poetów).2 At the same time, what the Chinese poets perceive as similarities that allow them to perform the cross-cultural poetic mapping of their own historical experience on the Polish territory is, in Poland, treated as a manifestation of the substantial differences between the two nations and strengthens the image of China as an Other of Poland. This Other is often regarded with a mixture of fear, pity, superiority, and pride, in a way that is not much different from how Poles themselves were looked at by “more Western” nations for many years. This is reflected, for instance, in the popularity of testimonial prose by Chinese dissidents among Polish readers and Poland’s appetite for political criticism by authors like Yan Lianke
At any rate, for Polish poets, the events of 1989 meant first and foremost the abandonment of the traditional role of artists as bards of the nation and of their tacitly acknowledged duty to be actively involved in the struggle for freedom. In particular, this implied the symbolic dethronement of the four Old Masters (Starzy Mistrzowie), also known as the Great Four of Polish poetry: Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, and Tadeusz Różewicz, all born before World War II, and the established authors associated with the so-called New Wave Generation, born in the mid-1940s, including Adam Zagajewski, Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Julian Kornhauser. Of course, all of these authors continued creating poetry into the 1990s and later and were successful in finding a new voice for their writing, but they no longer enjoyed the unquestionable authority and unswerving admiration among younger poets and literary audiences.
In China, June Fourth, among other dramatic consequences, resulted in the banishment of many Obscure poets (
Already from the mid-1980s, the Polish Old Masters and New Wave poets had been regularly attacked by authors who were later called the Brulion Generation (after the title of the journal that united the avant-garde literary community toward the end of the decade), while Chinese Obscure poets had felt the Third Generation (
2.2 Chapters 2–4: Defining National Poetries (singularity I > singularity II)
In her seminal monograph, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2009), Clare Cavanagh noted that for several decades after World War II, in Western countries, Poland was perceived as “Slavic shorthand for an oppressed nation where poetry still counts.”4 In 1989, when Poland regained independence, the most pressing challenge for Polish authors was to change the image of Polish verse, cut off the linkage between poetry and oppression, and mark the uniqueness of national poetry, its creativity, energy, and imagination.
Similar aims had been on the minds of contemporary Chinese poets since the end of the Cultural Revolution, although their focus was not so much on emerging from the shadows of recent history as from the shadows of the classical tradition with which Chinese verse has been widely associated in Euro-American culture. The modernization movement had begun in the early twentieth century but was interrupted in the 1940s by political circumstances, and the opportunity to take it up again did not return until the 1980s. After the three decades of virtual isolation between the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the announcement of “reform and opening up” (
The aforementioned transformations are related to the first aspect of poetic singularity that I wish to investigate; namely, the singularity of national poetry. For several years after 1989, the poetry scenes in Poland and China were busy negotiating the shape of, and hierarchies within, their respective local poetry discourses. This phase was characterized by conspicuous dichotomies that resulted in nationwide polemics between the Classicists and the Barbarians (Klasycyści vs. Barbarzyńcy) in Poland and the Intellectual poets and Popular poets (
The first dimension of singularity—that is, the singularity of national poetry—has invariably remained in a complex relationship with its second dimension, the individual singularity of poets and poems. On the one hand, one can say that national poetry establishes itself as a net force of individual poetics, a big picture whose shape is negotiated between them; on the other hand, in transitional periods, in which the definition of national poetry becomes the main focus of literary audiences, critics, and/or authors, it often obscures individual singularities, bearing a negative impact on their reception and downplaying their uniqueness. This conflict was particularly visible in Poland when, in the 1990s, scholars launched an informal search for a new poeta vates among Brulion authors, who, in turn, consistently sabotaged these attempts, fearful of how, to quote Frank O’Hara’s “Sleeping on the Wing,” “space is disappearing and your singularity”5 and making this final line of O’Hara’s poem the manifesto for their generation.6 In China, authors who stayed in the country tended to think of their individual singularities as contributing to, rather than developing against, the national poetry’s singularity, which arguably resulted in a more permanent locking of their poetics into fixed paradigms that emerged in local poetry discourse. Emigrants, such as Bei Dao or Duo Duo, were more determined to emphasize their desire to work on their own account. In my interpretations of works from this polemical period in chapters 2–4, I will try to do justice to both of these dimensions of poetic singularity and bring out healthy and unhealthy tensions between them. Also, the compairative narrative as such will be on two levels in each chapter, centered on the interplay between the two poetries on the one hand, and on interactions between individual poet(ic)s matched in cross-cultural pairs on the other.
Chapter 2 compairatively rereads two types of foundational narratives of post-1989 poetry in Poland and in China, around which the newly emergent poetry scenes gradually polarized themselves. I refer to these two strongly mythogenic narratives as the narratives of Old Masters, borrowing the term widely used in Polish poetry discourse, as represented here by the doyens of the late twentieth-century poetry scene, Czesław Miłosz and Ai Qing
Both case studies, one on Miłosz and Ai Qing and the other on Wojaczek and Haizi, draw on texts with surprising mutual resonances despite geographical and cultural distance and a notable difference in the authors’ individual styles. This is partly explained by the poets’ common sources of inspiration, mostly drawn from Western and Russian literature. These sources include Walt Whitman for Miłosz and Ai Qing—whose paths, however, parted as early as in the 1950s—and Nietzsche, the Romantics, and the existentialists for Wojaczek and Haizi. They also trigger a more general compairative narrative that leads to a reflection on the complex relationships between the lived historical/personal experience and artistic creation. Miłosz and Ai Qing, each in his own way, try to rationalize and universalize these connections and set ethical standards for national poetries. Wojaczek and Haizi test various reactions between the world and the word on their “homunculuses,” to use Wojaczek’s term when referring to the lyrical persona in his poetry.
In chapter 3, I investigate how contemporary poetry negotiated its territories with other arts. The first section examines its interactions with high culture exemplified by theater, which at the time was also looking for new forms of expression and welcomed contributors representing all kinds of artistic activity. Section 2 turns to rock music as part of a rapidly developing popular culture. Parallel to a literary-historical discussion, this chapter undertakes a methodological reflection on questions concerning translation, which—as I already disclosed—constitutes a main source of inspiration in the present study. Some two-thirds of the Polish-Chinese pairings discussed in this book were first more or less consciously matched by me in translation, and thus two-thirds of this analysis could be read as a work in translation studies. In fact, translation itself might be taken as a specific case of compairative operation, for it always involves connecting (con)texts from source and target culture and negotiating between them in order to create a new, translational, object; however, in this case, the negotiations are clearly hierarchical, and the text in translation usually plays a decisive role in determining the translator’s choice.
The discussion in the first section of chapter 3 centers on intertextual connections established by me in translation between Tadeusz Różewicz’s poetic plays Card Index (Kartoteka, 1958) and Card Index Scattered (Kartoteka rozrzucona, 1990–1994) and Yu Jian’s long poem “File 0” (0 dang’an 0
As regards interactions between poetry and rock music, I approach the problem from two opposite sides, inquiring into the work of two artists: Polish poet-turned-musician Marcin Świetlicki and Chinese musician-invited-onto-poetry-Parnassus Cui Jian
Chapter 4 moves to the backstage of the Polish and Chinese poetry scenes, introducing “invisible poets” whose work significantly coshaped their respective national poetry discourses in the 1990s. Their long-term impact, however, has not become fully manifest until the end of the polemical decade. The chapter’s protagonists are four women authors: (1) Wisława Szymborska and Wang Xiaoni
Initially, this chapter was not devised as a chapter about women’s poetry, and I had intended to portray some male authors as well. Eventually, however, I abandoned that idea and instead decided that this may become a good opportunity to retell the story of female poetry from an angle that might become an alternative to the plethora of male-dominated narratives on the history of contemporary verse and the growing number of interventionist readings aimed at the demarginalization of women. Such narratives do not always respect the desire of some women to remain invisible and reclaim their voices as feminist activists or to contribute to subversive narratives that sabotage patriarchalism. Thus, a paradoxical situation emerges: the patriarchal discourse denies women the right to visibility, and the women-activist discourse sometimes actually denies women the right to invisibility. This holds not only for women but for many other underrepresented groups. I try to find a way out of this stalemate, showing how the authors discussed transform their seemingly disadvantageous social and existential position into an advantage through poetry.
2.3 Chapter 5: Listening to Individual Voices (singularity II > singularity I)
The turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries saw a significant shift in literary-critical attention toward what I call individual singularity. The newly emergent generation of poets, most of whom were born in the 1970s, was referred to as roczniki siedemdziesiąte ([born in] the 70s) in Poland and 70 hou (70
Unlike chapters 2–4, which focus on general concepts, attitudes, and approaches to poetry, chapter 5 handles poetics directly concerned with the authors’ self-positioning in the world, not in literary discourse. In section 1, we meet two sharp-tongued and kindhearted rebels: Krzysztof Siwczyk and Yin Lichuan
In section 2, we will examine two long poems, Twelve Stations (Dwanaście stacji, 2004) by Tomasz Różycki and “Homecoming” (
The chapter ends with a panoramic section devoted to the notion of poetic imagination. “Emboldened imagination” (ośmielona wyobraźnia), termed so by Marian Stala, became a leitmotif in Polish poetry discourse of the early 2000s, catalyzing its shift from the quest for the singularity of national poetry to the focus on the individual singularities of poets and poems. In China, portents of an “imagination turn” appeared at the threshold of the second decade of the twenty-first century in Chen Chao’s
2.4 Chapters 6–7: Toward the Limits of Language (singularity III, or Capital-S Singularity)
As mentioned earlier, the third dimension of singularity—capital-S Singularity—which plays an increasingly important role not just in Polish and Chinese poetry but in world poetry in general, may be defined by analogy to the notion of Singularity in STEM. It is, in a great simplification, a hypothetical liminal point where the laws of a given discipline break down and are rendered ineffective to approach the reality that presumably stretches beyond the domain that is describable within the available paradigms developed by the discipline. Capital-S Singularities cannot be synchronized with our available “grammars of understanding” or reproduced within well-proven “grammars of creation,” to use George Steiner’s term,7 and require developing alternative paths of thinking that transcend conventional cognitive and creative habits. For physicists, Singularity is a point in spacetime characterized by infinite gravitation at which the laws of physics are believed to collapse and can no longer describe the occurring processes; for example, in the “zero moment” of the cosmic Big Bang or inside a black hole. For mathematicians, Singularity is a point at which a certain mathematical object is not defined or ceases to be “well-behaved,” as they call it, meaning that the geometries and algebras that are at their disposal fail to interpret the object’s performance. Finally, the technological Singularity sought by engineers is a point at which “humans will transcend biology,” in Ray Kurzweil’s formula,8 and the technological development will escape our control, when machines will start to program themselves, creating algorithms that do not obey the logic determined by the specific wiring of the human brain. Michael Kanaan, for one, offers the following definition:
The point at which a machine might cross into that hypothetical state is called the singularity—a moment when all knowledge a superintelligent machine possesses runs exponentially rampant, with knowledge building upon knowledge in an endlessly escalating, unstoppable process that would also prompt the machine to divine its own motivations and purposes, arguably its own iteration of consciousness. It’s fascinating to speculate about what would happen if that moment ever occurred. But whether it would be the best or worst thing that ever happened to the human race, or something in between, is only a hypothetical or philosophical question for now, as it’s not a practically possible outcome of any known science.9
In the context of poetry, which is made from and codetermined by (human) language, Singularity indicates a hypothetical point at the furthest limits of (human) language, where its structures decompose, the textual reality gets out of hand and requires a new system of signs that will be able to synchronize itself with its dynamic. This is the most far-reaching among the enterprises discussed in the present study. Authors who set out in search of capital-S Singularity are prepared for a one-way expedition. Their poems “leave home and never return,” to quote Andrzej Sosnowski, one of the protagonists of chapter 6. To paraphrase the other protagonist of the chapter, Che Qianzi
Sosnowski and Che have never been interested in defining national poetries or striving for individual singularity in or through poetry. Conversely, they have aimed at redefining the very essence of poetry and tried to annihilate the individual self in order to acquire a greater flexibility of poetic subject that will not be limited to the specific abilities of the human mind. They have drawn inspiration from postmodern philosophies and established a dialogue with prominent twentieth-century American poets, in particular with the New York school (which fascinated Polish authors) and with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (who easily found a common ground with Chinese authors). Sosnowski’s and Che’s works, especially in the beginning (i.e., in the late 1980s and early 1990s), created controversy among their confused audiences. Their poems were rendered “incomprehensible” and/or depreciated as mere language game or language play. To address the first of these charges, I try to demonstrate that the category of (in)comprehensibility is ineffective for describing their poetry, the very nature of which is anepistemological, oriented rather toward ontological transformations of poetic matter. Confronting the second charge, I develop a theoretical argument based on the two often synonymously used categories of game and play. Building on the findings of game studies, I clarify the difference between gaming and playing and transfer it to poetry discourse to bring out the uniqueness of Sosnowski’s (gaming) and Che’s (playing) artistic propositions. This is also a starting point for a more general reflection on our misunderstanding of the nature of understanding in literature and other spheres of human endeavor.
While Andrzej Sosnowski and Che Qianzi strive to overcome the limitations of human language by means of human language itself, the authors introduced in chapter 7 search for new grammars in nonhuman languages, engaging in extensive interactions with the natural sciences and modern technologies. In the works of Julia Fiedorczuk, Yin Xiaoyuan
2.5 Singularity IV
In addition to the three meanings of singularity which constitute the conceptual framework of my narrative, there is one more—which I discovered only several months into the writing of this book—that aptly describes my methodological approach. I am thinking of Derek Attridge’s notion of singularity as laid out in The Singularity of Literature (2004). As a student, I read the book in Polish translation (Jednostkowość literatury, 2006) by Paweł Mościcki, not knowing its original title, which explains why I did not immediately associate Attridge with the term in question. Nevertheless, his idea of literature as a set of events in which the text’s singularity is actualized in an inventive and creative but also deeply ethical act of reading is one which has shaped my approach to literature. Attridge’s definition of reading as a “movement toward the unknown” which gradually pushes one’s way of thinking on new tracks and allows the development of new “modes of mental processing” concurs with my take on a compairative activity as an attempt at restructuring the grammar of literary discourse:
It is only when the event of this reformulation is experienced by the reader (who is, in the first instance, the writer reading or articulating the words as they emerge) as an event, an event which opens new possibilities of meaning and feeling (understood as verbs), or, more accurately, the event of such opening, that we can speak of the literary. The predilections and conventions by means of which most events of comprehension occur are challenged and recast, not merely as automatic extensions but as invitations to alterity, and thus to modes of mental processing, ideas and emotions, or conceptual possibilities that had hitherto been impossible—impossible because the status quo (cognitive, affective, ethical) depended on their exclusion. This process of initiation, this movement into the unknown, is experienced as something that happens to the reader in the course of a committed and attentive reading.
This is what a literary work “is”: an act, an event, of reading, never entirely separable from the act-event (or acts-events) of writing that brought it into being as a potentially readable text, never entirely insulated from the contingencies of the history into which it is projected and within which it is read.10
The reading events in my book mostly consist of collisions between poems written by Polish and Chinese authors that generate specific accidents of meaning within my readerly horizon. In this perspective, constructing a compairative narrative can be taken as dealing with the consequences of the accident of meaning.
The selection of texts is to some extent arbitrary, based on many interconnected subjective and intersubjective factors that made the trajectories of these specific poems intersect within my personal milieu. I am not always able to identify the so-called foundational event that initiated a given compairison, but there are two cases where I can precisely reconstruct the process that led to a particular association, and I will share them in the next section. Regardless of the circumstances of the texts’ collision, my aim is to optimize their trajectories as they continue traveling together through global cultural space. I consider the potential local disruptions their fusion may cause in the global textual universe, and try to predict various implications of these interferences, possibly maximizing gains and minimizing losses. Gains and losses are obviously anything but fixed, objectively measurable categories, and Attridge rightly notes that
[t]he effects of the literariness of certain linguistic works (whether or not they are conventionally classified as “literature”) are not predictable and do not arise from planning, and although artistic inventiveness may play a crucial role in the ethical status of a culture—since a culture that does not continually find ways of opening itself to the excluded other on which it depends can hardly be said to be ethical—there can be no guarantee that the alterity brought into the world by a particular literary or other artistic work will be beneficial. In the worst case, the introduction of alterity could destroy a culture. This is the risk involved in any welcoming of the other.11
Destroying a culture is certainly not a goal I pursue in my academic work, and it would be vain to claim that this modest book can cause such an effect even if it tries. My responsibility as a director-compairatist is to ensure that the alterity brought to the world by the con-versations between Polish and Chinese poems which I arrange and document prove possibly stimulating and transformative, and not destructive.
3 Genesis: Two Stories
This section tells two personal stories that illustrate just how unpredictable, and even miraculous, poetic enterprise can be. They also say a lot of the genesis of this book, especially two of its sections: the discussion on Wisława Szymborska and Wang Xiaoni in chapter 4, and the compairison of Tomasz Różycki’s and Li Hao’s long poems in chapter 5. On a more abstract level, they constitute a record of the complex processes of the emergence of meaning from singular reading events that accumulate and gradually develop into more complex constellations which the author can ultimately package into a tidy academic argument. The openness with which I invoke those personal experiences stems from my conviction that starting from one’s subjective point of view does not violate academic ethos as long as the argument is not meant to serve one’s own subjective interest. Moreover, in the pursuit of nonsubjective interest, the subjective point of departure is reevaluated and readjusted, and this self-correction feeds back into the quality of research. A violation of academic integrity is to pursue one’s own subjective interest based on pseudo-objective premises that are adopted to make one’s self-serving argument pass as scientific. Transparency matters, and it is particularly important in studies such as this one, which cannot, to my knowledge, be verified by confrontation with other accounts of the same subject.
3.1 Story No. 1: Wisława Szymborska and Wang Xiaoni (ad Chapter 4)
Ever since I can remember, I have been attracted by complex, tantalizingly difficult things that far exceed my limits of understanding. My favorite poets were those who shared their hardest metaphysical struggles with the reader. At the top of my reading list was Miłosz, whereas “boring and childish” Szymborska languished near the bottom. One day in grammar school, our teacher asked us to write a poem for homework. I do not remember whether there was any specific topic, nor do I remember what I wrote, but I can recall that I was quite satisfied with my work. Apparently, the teacher was satisfied too. She gave me the top mark, and although she did not offer any words of appreciation, she must have talked about it with other students, as the next day a friend told me that the teacher had compared my poem to … yes … Szymborska. I knew it was intended as a compliment and that I should be happy, but I, with all my teenage hubris, felt hugely disappointed. Sometimes I entertain myself with a thought that who knows, had the teacher compared it to Miłosz, I would have kept writing and been a famous poet by now. But this is, of course, just an innocent illusion. I have thus far not discovered sufficient deposits of creativity and artistic sensibility in myself to write poetry, and I suppose that if I were to read that grammar school poem today, I would blush with embarrassment. For that reason, I have no intention of ever digging it up.
I would have probably long forgotten that poetic moment at school if it were not for an experience I had ten years later. As a graduate student, I showed a pile of my translations of Chinese poets to my master’s thesis advisor, Anna Legeżyńska, a specialist in Polish poetry. Among the translated texts, there were several poems by Wang Xiaoni. The professor was enthusiastic. One of the first things she said was that these poems reminded her of … yes … Szymborska. Again, I should have probably taken this as a compliment, but my first thought was that my translations must have been catastrophic if they inspired such an association. How was it possible that I translated Wang Xiaoni into something that could be taken as Szymborska’s style when I had not even read much of Szymborska beyond what was assigned in school? While translating Yu Jian’s early works about “simple gray people” (zwykli szarzy ludzie), to use Różewicz’s signature phrase, I was aware of some influence of Różewicz’s poetry style on this kind of verse in the Polish language. Also, my decision to translate “File 0” as “Kartoteka 0” was based on a careful reflection on the interactions between the two texts/plays. But in the case of Szymborska and Wang, the convergence apparently stemmed from something else.
A couple of years later, I found myself at Peking University as a visiting scholar. At the beginning of my stay, in October 2016, I was invited to participate in a poetry festival in Gansu province. I immediately clarified that I was not a poet, but the organizers assured me that it did not matter and asked me to just read “something” from Polish verse. The next day, they sent me a poem that they wanted me to read: Szymborska’s “View with a Grain of Sand” (Widok z ziarnkiem piasku). I accepted their choice, if reluctantly, trusting that they had selected something to suit the event’s program, but when we arrived at the venue, I instantly realized I was wrong. The festival turned out to be a large commercial event sponsored by a giant agricultural company for the establishment of a poetry foundation. Toward the end of the event, the company’s boss handed a huge check to the delegation of Chinese poets. I could not read the exact amount under all the bright lights, but I remember there were a lot of zeros.
The spectacle was in the open air. On a large stage, with dazzling special effects, several well-known Chinese poets emphatically read their works, most of which oscillated around the topic of Gansu. There were also actors and local TV presenters who recited other famous poems, including Haizi’s ecstatic praise of Chinese wheat fields. The event was crowned by the reading of a long, sentimental patriotic poem written and performed by the boss himself. He stood at the lectern with several rows of employees in work uniforms at his side. As he read, they hypnotically recited a chorus of refrains. Imagine, in this magnificent landscape, against the grandiosity of the Chinese native soil sinking into a flood of metaphors and epithets, Szymborska’s grain of sand which “calls itself neither grain nor sand. / It does just fine without a name, / whether general, particular, / permanent, passing, / incorrect, or apt.”12
When it came time for my performance, I could hardly keep my balance. In front of me were several girls wearing tutus dancing something like Swan Lake with Chinese characteristics, and around me were swirling celestial spheres projected on the three walls of the stage. Szymborska was probably turning in her grave. During the rehearsal, the director had insisted that I read more “poetically,” but I firmly refused and read it in a way that I felt true to the author’s intention. It was the only thing I could do to save her (and my) face. This was the first time that I felt a connection with Szymborska. As it happens, that autumn I was writing a section of my PhD thesis on Wang Xiaoni’s poem “Becoming a Poet Anew” (
3.2 Story No. 2: Li Hao and Tomasz Różycki (ad Chapter 5)
Just like the section devoted to Szymborska and Wang, the compairison between Li Hao and Tomasz Różycki in chapter 5 also originates in a translatorial experience—namely, my work on Li Hao’s collection Homecoming—preceded by a series of fortuitous coincidences. I met Li in late 2016 or early 2017 in Beijing, during my fellowship at Peking University, at a poetic event organized by Wang Jiaxin
In the summer of 2014, my Henan-born friend took me to Taiyuan city in Shaanxi province to visit his parents who, like millions of Chinese people, have to travel to more developed areas to find work. We spent several days living at a construction site in workers’ barracks. This experience made an even bigger impression on me than my time in the impoverished countryside, where there was only one public bathroom for several villages and no heating to speak of, so you never took off your winter coat, not even in bed. I learned from Li Hao that after dropping out of university, he, too, did construction work, and dedicated his poem “Elegy: Mourning a Fellow Worker” (
Homecoming was officially published in China in June 2017. A spectacular launch event was held in a hotel in Beijing. Several months later, in autumn, exactly one day after I managed to find a publisher in Poland, and before I managed to inform Li Hao about this, he sent me a scan of an official notification from the censorship bureau that his book would be taken off the shelves. After this intervention, Li started to experience rejection by other mainland poets, including those who had been very supportive before. On the opening pages of Homecoming, one can see several enthusiastic recommendations from renowned authors and critics such as Wang Jiaxin, Zang Di
When I tried my hand at translating some of Li Hao’s short poems to assess whether I would be able to take on the entire collection, I felt that my translation tended to slide into what I identified as echoes of Miłosz’s poetic idiom and rhythm. I should not have been astonished, because at the time I was helping another Chinese poet verify translations of Miłosz, so it was not unlikely that I was affected by Miłosz’s strong diction. This impression was followed by a general observation that Li’s imagery is somewhat reminiscent of Miłosz’s early and middle-age poetry, which is permeated with catastrophic visions, Manichean struggles between light and darkness, the intense presence of ghosts and spirits, elements of folk beliefs and rituals, and the persistent search for a “more capacious form” (forma bardziej pojemna) which included, for example, excerpts from local chronicles and legends; similar to Miłosz, Li Hao drew extensively from the diaries of Gu Zhun
4 The Making of This Book
In Search of Singularity was not an easy book to write, even though it is composed almost exclusively of material that I was well familiar with and did not require time-consuming research, such as additional fieldwork or library queries. Most of the poetry publications cited in it can be found on my own bookshelves. One major problem, however, were the logistics, in both a literal and metaphorical sense. As a study on Polish and Chinese poetry written in the English language in an ancient German city, the present work is a miniature of the complex global networks of culture transmission and knowledge circulation, which opens unprecedented opportunities for communication and exchange but also poses enormous challenges. Transporting several shelves of books by bus from my native Poznań to Trier, where I was based for ten months during which the first draft of this book was written, was arguably the easiest of them. Working out the details of balanced content and emphasis distribution between the passages focused on Polish poetry and those focused on Chinese poetry, maintaining efficient semantic and aesthetic load transfer between them via the channel of a third language, and finally unloading everything onto the open field of global literary discourse without overwhelming the audience, put my imagination to the hardest test. Many of my specific doubts are detailed in the following chapters. Here, I will focus on some of the concrete, technical decisions that directly led to the composition of this book.
As someone born and raised in Poland, with an academic background in comparative studies and sinology and an imperfect knowledge of English, I usually work with Polish and Chinese literature in the source languages; thus, writing In Search was one of the few opportunities I have had to delve more deeply into, and appreciate the mastery of, a number of cutting-edge English translations of the languages in question. Polish and Chinese contemporary poetry and, needless to say, its nonnative readers, owe a big debt of gratitude to outstanding scholars and translators whose renditions I extensively quote in this study. Where available, I use existing translations of the discussed poems and provide the translator’s name under the poem or in a footnote when a quote appears in the running text. The exceptions where I have translated or retranslated a poem myself (indicated by “trans. JK”) include cases in which my interpretation essentially differs from those offered by other translators or when the discussion of a poem requires a literal or near-literal rendition or a multivariant version in order to clarify some language-specific issues or bring out ambiguities. All poetry translations are followed by original versions of the poems. Excerpts from other texts are quoted exclusively in English.
The titles of literary and academic publications are, if translatable, provided first in English and followed by the original Polish/Chinese title at every initial mention in each chapter; if the English translation significantly strays from the original meaning, usually when the title is pun-based, I stick to the Polish/Chinese version. The Chinese characters in authors’ names and dates of birth/death are also usually provided at every first mention in a given chapter. I offer Pinyin transliteration of Chinese terms only in very specific cases: when the pronunciation of a word is relevant to the discussion of a poem or when a term is directly incorporated into the running text. Otherwise, for specific terms that may prove useful to Chinese-speaking readers, I include characters in parentheses.
I did my best to make the book accessible for non-Polish- and/or non-Chinese-speaking audiences by including information to help navigate the unfamiliar names, words, titles, dates, and broader cultural context. Those trained in Polish and/or Chinese literature will certainly find some of this information redundant, so I thank them for their patience.
It is my tacit hope that others will benefit from reading this book as much as I have benefited from writing it and, most importantly, will take as much pleasure in the poems as I have. This has been a wonderful intellectual adventure not least because it allowed me to rediscover Polish contemporary poetry on which—and actually with which—I grew up as a person born exactly three months and three days before the memorable June Fourth.
Felski and Friedman 2013: 1.
Krenz 2019b.
Ouyang Jianghe 2013: 189.
Cavanagh 2009: 241.
O’Hara 1995: 236.
The artistic affinity of members of the Brulion Generation with the American poet earned them the label of “O’Harists” (o’haryści).
Steiner 2010.
Kurzweil 2005.
Kanaan 2020: 132.
Attridge 2004: 59.
Ibidem: 60.
Szymborska 2016: 243, translated by Clare Cavanagh.
Quoted in Krenz 2018: 99–100, trans. J K.
Liu Ping 2018.
Li Hao 2017: 189–190.
Wyka 2013, chapter 6: “Children and Grandchildren of Miłosz” (Wnuki i prawnuki Miłosza).