The Quest for Bilingual Chinese Poetry: Poetic Tradition and Modernity

: Chinese poetic tradition presents such a self-centred system that it seems almost impossible to imagine a bilingual poet working with two languages, one of which is Chinese. It is highly significant to explore what changes in this situation (if any) one can observe in the realm of contemporary Chinese poetry with its openness to foreign influences and important shifts in the poet ’ s persona. The first part of this exploration is an analysis of poets ’ critical and theoretical writing that elaborates themes of poetic language and cultural identity. These are further examined with the help of a series of interviews with poets representing different faces of multiethnic Chinese society. The result shows discrepancies between the projected identity of a globalized “ Chinese poet ” and the vision of a bilingual poet as one rooted in the culture of minorities. The second part is dedicated to a case study of the Australian-Chinese poet Ouyang Yu, who represents a unique case of Chinese – English bilingualism. Ouyang Yu uses several strategies for constructing his multicultural identity, maintaining an illusion that it is the reader and not the author who is an alien in need of the poet to guide him through an unfamiliar linguistic landscape.