Page 110 - AI WEIWEI CAHIERS D ART

AI QING AND EMILE VERHAEREN
In late 1928, Jiang Haicheng—a young nineteen-year-old Chinese student, who would become famous under the pseudonym Ai Qing— made the decision to leave his country for France. Originating from a family of landowners in Jinhua, in the province of Zhejiang, his ambition was to become an artist and he had attended classes at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts. Keen to embrace new horizons and deepen his artistic practice, he chose France. He landed in Marseilles early in 1929 and finally arrived in Paris: one of the most dynamic intellectual and artistic centres of the time. In challenging conditions—he was obliged to work part-time in a small Chinese lacquer workshop in Faubourg Saint-Antoine—he managed to complete his studies. He had great admiration for the works of Auguste Renoir and Vincent Van Gogh and began to study the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Above all, he discovered the innovative poetry of the age: the American Walt Whitman, the Belgian Emile Verhaeren, the Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Russian Vladimir Mayakovsky. It was in France, then, that the seed of poetry had germinated.
Four poets, but also four great personalities who together embody a significant poetic continuity. Whitman gained international recognition with his collection Leaves of Grass (1855) and was considered the pantheist bard of North America. Verhaeren was regarded primarily as a Symbolist poet, who sang of the sprawling modern city and also his native Flanders. With his technique of automatic writing and his experimental typography, Apollinaire revolutionized French poetry and brought it to the forefront of the avant-garde. With Mayakovsky, we pass from the experimental to the revolutionary: an emblematic figure of Russian futurism, he reinvented himself as the poet of the Bolshevik revolution. It is unclear whether Jiang Haicheng already harbored communist sympathies, but in the febrile atmosphere of the time, such partiality should not be discounted. What is certain is that the critical situation in China was to lead the young artist back to his homeland. By invading Manchuria, Japan had installed a ruthless regime of occupation. In January 1932, Jiang Haicheng embarked on a journey to China and Shanghai. This constituted the beginning of an artistic-political commitment: he joined the league of artists on the left, associated with the Communist Party. Because of this commitment, he was arrested a few months later and sentenced by the Chiang Kai-shek regime to three years in captivity. It was during those years behind bars that Jiang Haicheng adopted the name Ai Qing and began to write poetry. He took his first steps in poetry with his translations of poems by Emile Verhaeren, one of the poets he admired most.
This choice was no coincidence. Already in his lifetime, Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) was a poet of European renown. Influenced by Symbolism, he distinguished himself both by the social element of his verses and by his love for his native land. He began with Les Flamandes (1883), a collection inspired by Flemish painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth century: Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen, David Teniers, and Adriaen Brouwer. Verhaeren was
deeply interested in art and was among the earliest defenders of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Théo van Rysselberghe, Maximilien Luce, Fernand Khnopff, and James Ensor. He endured a period of despairing and melancholic poetry—the famous “trilogie noire” and then allied himself to the social problems of his time. In Les Campagnes Hallucinées and Les Villes Tentaculaires he articulates the decline of rural society and bears witness to industrial society with its growing metropolises. This same penchant for the social element can be found in collections like Les Villages Illusoires and Almanach, republished under the title Les Douze Mois. Many of these poems had appeared in an earlier edition in the literary supplement Les Temps nouveaux, one of the anarchist journals of the era. From this moment on, Verhaeren was viewed as a social poet, even a leftist. Yet he never allowed himself to be confined to any categorization and continued to develop his poetic œuvre. From the 1900s onwards he became the bardic defender of the modern age, a poet who firmly believed in the development of a society of progress and social harmony. At his lectures, especially in Germany and Russia, he painted himself as the apostle of “the culture of enthusiasm.” One of his maxims was “Admire one another!” While presenting himself to the European public, he at the same time created a series of anthems, hymns to his native country of Flanders. Verhaeren did not view a European influence and devotion to his motherland as a contradiction. Candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he became the national poet, the favorite poet of Belgian royalty. Nevertheless, his poetry continued to influence many younger writers. Here we might mention Jules Romains, Pierre Jean Jouve, René Arcos, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johannes Schlaf, Konstantin Paustovski, Vladimir Mayakovksy, Maximilian Voloshin, Geo Milev, Karl Neumann, Charles Plisnier, Mori Ogai, and Ai Qing.
Ai Qing thus discovered Verhaeren in Paris and began to translate his work into Chinese during his years in prison in Shanghai. First it was Les Douze Mois that drew his interest, a collection inspired by the rhythm of the seasons, but in which the malevolent rawness of nature and a sense of pity for the poverty stricken are also present. The best-known poem was “Les Pauvres” [The Poor] also known as “Les Errants” [The Wayfarers], which was widely disseminated with a lithograph by Théo van Rysselberghe (1897). In translating these poems, Ai Qing also introduced social themes into his own poetry. He translated several poems from Les Villes Tentaculaires and Les Campagnes Hallucinées, Les Blés Mouvants and even Toute la Flandre. Verhaeren’s poetry hugely influenced that of the young Ai Qing, especially with his expressive rendering and decadent crepuscular imagery of the modern city. The idea of the capitalist world posing a threat to the survival of the rural world was something dear to his heart. The description of rural life in Verhaeren’s poetry also influenced the way Qing’s Chinese campaign was written. From Les Forces Tumultueuses he especially retained the vital optimism and cosmic vision to which Verhaeren was dedicated. The influence was both thematic and stylistic: like Verhaeren, Ai Qing preferred
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