ИСТИНА

Exploring the possibilities of language constitutes one of the focal points in contemporary Chinese poetry. Different ways of thinking about language are actualized in the works of contemporary poets – in poetic oeuvre and essay-manifestos, theoretical and critical works, and interviews that make up the main information media in the controversy about the language of ‘new poetry’. Two distinct creative paradigms are involved in the process. The first, ‘intellectual’, is linked to the construction of a complex subject, the second, ‘popular’ or ‘minjian’, is based on the idea of maximizing the similarities between the language of poetry and colloquial speech. Both are based on the ‘philologism’ of the poetic text in XX-XXI centuries. The representatives of two paradigms share a general perception of poetic language as a measure of language in general, complicated by the ‘textocentrism’ of Chinese tradition and the late formalization of the literary standard. This conceptualization of poetic language somewhat ignores the ever-present deviant nature of poetic expression, thus creating the paradox of language and text perception in contemporary Chinese poetry. The quest for a new philosophy of the poetic word goes two ways – through the accommodation of Western ideas about language and through the reinterpretation of the classical tradition. Interaction between the two occurs both in authors gravitating to the direction of ‘popular’ poetry and in authors belonging to the ‘intellectual’ camp.