Tempest in a China Teapot: Friends, Enemies, Fraudsters and Bringing Chinese Poetry to the World – Shanghai International Literary Festival – 10/3/13

Posted: March 9th, 2013 | No Comments »

Excellently we have both of my initial Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai–Hong Kong University Press “China Monograph” authors in one place at the same time and while the Shanghai International Literary Festival is on….so, obviously, we put them together to chat…with you….on this great topic…as a special RAS Shanghai event at the SILF 2013.

Tempest in a China Teapot – Friends, Enemies, Fraudsters and Bringing Chinese Poetry to the World

Sunday 10/3/13 – 4pm

M on the Bund, Shanghai

Tickets here

Anne Witchard, University of Westminster (Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, Lao She in London)

Lindsay Shen, Shanghai Sino-British College (Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai)

Moderated by Susie Gordon

One of the culturally significant exchanges that took place in the West’s engagement with China at the beginning of the twentieth century was the race to publish translations and interpretations of Chinese poetry. Ezra Pound emerged from this somewhat controversially as the ‘inventor of Chinese poetry for our time’ – according to TS Eliot. Not so well known are the fierce rivalries, malicious point-scoring and unabashed mud-slinging that he and his contemporaries were embroiled in as they battled for Sino-poetic pre-eminence. Amy Lowell (cruelly dubbed ‘the “hippopoetess” by Witter Bynner and Pound), Shanghailander Florence Ayscough, Lowell, Harriet Monroe and her journal Poetry, Bynner and the infamous Spectra Spoof – there’s a lot more backstabbing, bitchiness and ego involved in translating Chinese poetry than simply words on a page!

Monroe

Authors and academics Anne Witchard and Lindsay Shen discuss the tempest in the China teapot that rumbled on through the interwar years in Chinese poetry studies and read some of the major Chinese works in translation that were at the centre of the storm.

Pound

Speaker Bios:

Anne Witchard teaches modernism and literature at the University of Westminster in London. She is also author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie,  Lao She in London for the RAS Shanghai-Hong Kong University Press China Monographs series and was co-editor of Gothic London; Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. Anne also runs the conference series and research project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities. She is currently working on a collection of essays on Modernism and Chinoiserie for Edinburgh University Press and a biography of the pioneer of modern dance Margaret Morris.

Lindsay Shen is Associate Professor at Sino-British College, Shanghai. She is Honorary Editor for journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai. She has published in the fields of design and museum studies in Europe and the United States.  Her latest publication is Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai for the RAS Shanghai-Hong Kong University Press China Monographs series.

Susie Gordon is a British writer based in Shanghai. She is the author of Moon Handbooks Beijing & Shanghai guide, and writes for magazines including Shanghai Business Review and China Economic Review. Her poetry collection Peckham Blue was published in London in 2006, and she has contributed to literary journals such as Unshod Quills and HALiterature. She is currently working on a novel set in Shanghai.

 

 

 

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