NOASS, AB DAMBIS, RIGA

While listening to the author’s recitation in Chinese and to Ieva Lapina’s translations, participants can use this opportunity to make themselves familiar with the poetry and person of Yang Lian. In the second part, Frank Kraushaar opens a perspective on today’s poetry scenes in China and on contemporary China’s cyberspace which up to date remains relatively open to a new subgenre of poetry. This is an interesting phenomena, characterised by a combination of classical Chinese prosodic forms and literary diction with cyberslang and Chinese regional languages (sometimes falsely called “dialects”). Thereby, search engines of Chinese state-censors are circumvented and, at once, a poetic language takes shape which responds to conditions of poetry in contemporary PRC.

Toward the end of the event participants will engage in a discussion about the meaning of poetic tradition and writers’ freedom of expression in contemporary Chinese society.

Languages: English, poems are read in Chinese and translations in Latvian.