The Fusion Of China And The West Through Poetry

Liang Zongdai(1903-1983)is a famous poet,translator and literary critic in the history of modern Chinese literature.He spent seven years(1924-1931)in Switzerland,France and Germany to learn European languages and literature before teaching at several renowned Chinese universities.He was particularly familiar with English,French and German languages and literature.He introduced western poetic theories and a large number of literary works(mainly poetry and poetic prose)into the Chinese intellectual milieu.The five years of study in France have deeply marked him.He has forged much closer ties with French literature than with other Western literature.During his literary apprenticeship in France,by actively participating in French literary life,he not only formed his poetic conception,but also got rich experiences in poetic creation,criticism and translation.His literary practices are not one-way,from the West to China,but two-way communication,with the aim of merging and rebuilding Chinese and Western cultures.Since the 1980 s,Chinese poets,publishers and researchers have not stopped collecting and publishing Liang Zongdai’s works.Academic research projects on his poetry,translation or creation have been realized.Through these researches,Liang Zongdai’s contributions to the development of modern Chinese poetry have become clearer,but the role he has played in the history of literary communications between China and the West deserves further study.The following study examines the interaction between Liang Zongdai and French literature through poetry from 1924 to1944.Although it does not cover all of Liang Zongdai’s literary exchanges with the West,it is the most important and representative part of these exchanges and reflects his literary ideal: a cultural fusion by and in literature.With comparative literature analysis approaches,we will on the one hand study the influence that the French literary field and literary education in the academic milieu have exerted on Liang Zongdai and on the other hand the reception by French writers of the classical Chinese poetry translated by him.We will examine the French and Chinese literary history and literary fields to recover the historical dimension of the intercultural literary practices of Liang Zongdai and analyze in depth the texts written or translated by him in Chinese and French to reveal the intimate links between his literary conceptions and practices.The thesis will be divided into five chapters:In the first chapter we will present the germination of Liang Zongdai’s vision of the cultural fusion between China and the West around the 4 May movement and the expressions of this cultural vision in his poetic creation.In the second chapter,we will follow Liang Zongdai from his learning stay in France to his literary career in China to understand the why and how of his reception of a form poetic of Paul Val(?)ry.Under Val(?)ry’s influence,he tried in his poetic creation and translation Western versifications that he believed could be used for the development of modern Chinese poetry.We will discover in the third chapter how Liang Zongdai built the notion of symbolism from French symbolism and traditional Chinese aesthetics.The commonalities between these two aesthetics justified for him a “state of soul” poetic according to which one could evaluate all the poets of the world.His reading and criticism of Baudelaire,Mallarm(?)and Val(?)ry reflected the poetic differences he had with these French poets and his own conception of symbolism.The fourth chapter will show Liang Zongdai’s negative attitude towards positivism in literary studies characterized by historical method and rational mind,an academic paradigm originating in France and in vogue in Chinese academia.To this academic paradigm in the criticism of poetic works,he preferred a critique based on the intuition and subjectivity of the reader.The fifth chapter will focus on Liang Zongdai’s efforts to translate classical Chinese poetry into world literature.According to his poetic ideal embodied in the notion of symbolism,the quintessence of classical Chinese poetry stood out among the classics of the world,which aroused his desire to promote Chinese classics in the real world literature.We will study with the case of Les Poèmes de T’ao Ts’ ien the strategies of linguistic and cultural fusion in his poetic translation from Chinese to French.In the 1920 s,just after the First World War,Paul Val(?)ry and Romain Rolland’s reading of Tao Yuanming’s poetry reflected the different attitudes of French intellectuals towards the cultural relationship between the East and the West,suggesting the potential challenges that Chinese culture might face today when it wants to make its presence in the West more visible.This thesis attempts to find a better understanding of Liang Zongdai’s vision and practices on the cultural fusion of China and the West by and in literature: to discover in ancient or modern Chinese and Western poetics,eternal and universal values with which world-class classics can be defined,the generation and dissemination of classics in the world literary can be promoted.Our research makes contributions to Liang Zongdai’s study as follows: firstly,to better clarify his vision and practices of the cultural fusion of China and the West by and in literature;secondly,to deepen our knowledge of the translation and reception of Les Poèmes de T’ao Ts’ ien in France;thirdly,to reveal his relationship with modern academic research characterized by the division of labour and the rational.