Between “Plum Blossoms School” and “Dissenters” A Sidelight of Chinese Contemporary Poetries at Confucius Institute Freiburg

At Friday night, 31st, March the Confucius Institute Freiburg (CI) invited the editor of the first billingual poetry collection “Chinabox: Neue Lyrik aus der Volksrepublik”, as well as sinologist Ms. Lea Schneider (27) from Berlin and inter-discipline of Sino-German Studies Ms. Sara Landa (29) from Freiburg to a fully youthful literature talk at the special Artjamming Café.

 Lea and CI Chinese native speakers read together some of the poems with various themes, such as poems wrote by different genders and by different identities. She also exchanged thoughts with the host Sara and listeners about why she edited the book, about the realism and artistic in these poems. “A Fade life, hard poems” by Sun Wenbo, “Mr. Zhang San got through the city by bus” by Zhou Zan and “the Shape of the Sea” by Jiang Hao... are something completely new. Neither the typical German clichés for the Chinese modern poetry as “Plum Blossoms School”, nor “Dissenters’ contemporary poetry”, but these new poems found the editor very breathtaking, for she had only known classical Chinese poetry or Cultural Revolution Poems before. World literature view by the Chinese modern poets, same themes they concern and their artistic techniques that Western poets can learn from are the reasons for her to introduce this book to German readers, so they can experience the brand new world of Chinese contemporary poetry.

At the end, Chinese CI director Prof. Yin Zhihong made a summary. She said, half year ago during the tea talk at Confucius Day, Sara pointed out that the artistic level of Chinese literature had been badly underestimated, by which Yin was highly impressed but not convinced. The new poetry collection Chinabox opened her mind. The Editing and publishing of this book was an icebreaking exchange for Chinese and German literature.