Content area
Full Text
What keeps the sleepwalker walking is as much the inalibility of awakening from the sleep of history as the eternal lure of that most mystic "green" laid in the depths of dreams.
1
Federico Garcia Lorca's reception in China has been a story in itself. In 1933 Chinese poet Dai Wan gsh ii traveled from Paris to Spain and was impressed by Lorca's lyrical popularity on his native soil. lie became the first translator of Lorca's poetry in Chinese right afterward and was determined to continue working on this project upon the news of Lorca's murder in `936. In 1950, barely a few months after the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, Dai died of a sudden heart attack in Beijing. In 1956 his translation, Selected Poems of Lorca, was published in book form. Da i Wangsh us translation has until this day been acclaimed for its marvelous rendition of Lorca's A ida I usian imagery and sound in modern Chinese. But Lorca's real long-lasting influence would have to wait to he realized among another generation ol young poets, the later so-called Misty Poets who started writing during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and thirsted for any new inspirations that were beyond the rigid confines of socialist real sm and orthodo propaganda.
Bei Dao, the leading figure of the Misty Poets group, recoil nts this most unlikely encounter of his generation with Lorca:
I fist read Selected Poemss of Lorca in Dai Wangshu's translation in the early 1970s. That great book-banning Campaign only deepened our spiritual thirst and hunger.....When Selected Poems of Lorca passed through our hands hurriedly, it made quite a stir. Lorca's shadow once loomed over the underground poetry scene in Beijing. There was Lorca's echo in Fang Han (Sun Kang)'s poetry; as for Mang Ke's long-lost poem "Green within Green," its title was obviously derived from "Sleepwalker's Ballad"; in the early 1980s, I introduced Lorca to Gu Cheng, so his poetry was also tinted with Lorca's color.1
We can see the echo of Forca's "Sleepwalker's Ballad" and its haunting "green" in Bei Dao's own work - not just his poetry, but also his fiction. His novella Waves was first drafted in November 1974, revised in June 1976, revised again in April...