Monday lecture: “An Ardent Obliquity”. The interaction between the poets Che Qianzi and J.H. Prynne
Lecture
Date: Monday 3 November 2025
Time: 10.00 – 12.00
Location: E319, Södra husen
A Monday lecture by Cosima Bruno, SOAS University of London, UK.
In this lecture Cosima Bruno aims to trace the interaction between a poet of the Nanjing Language Poetry Group, Che Qianzi 车前子(1963-), and a poet of the Cambridge School, Jeremy Halvard Prynne 蒲龄恩 (b.1936-). This is a story of collaborative translation projects and exchanges spanning roughly 20 years, which fed into the poets’ own creation and fostered the inclusion of contemporary Chinese poems in the curricula of British poetry. What were the dynamics of the Che Qianzi-Prynne collaboration? What were the outcomes of this cross-cultural conversation?
Cosima Bruno will provide an integrated account of both the analytical and theoretical insights drawn from the following key events:
In 1991, Che Qianzi and other poets founded the journal Original 原样. In the same year, the British poet J. H. Prynne visited Che Qianzi in Suzhou, and three years later, as guest-editor of the British journal Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing, he invited American scholar Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas to translate the first issue of Original. In 2002, Prynne also organised the publication of the English translation of Che Qianzi's 文化旧作Old Cultural Work. In the same year, Che Qianzi came to the UK to participate in the Cambridge Contemporary Poetry Festival, where for two hours he performed “Poetry as Possibility of Action”. On the same trip, he also came to SOAS, performing again some poems in front of an audience of PhD students, poets, and scholars in Chinese studies. When in Cambridge, Prynne asked Che to copy his poem “白桥” (White Bridge) on a fan, where Prynne had copied the 8th poem from his Pearls That Were. In June 2005, the English Poetry Institute convened the first Pearl River International Poetry Conference, at Sun Yat-sen University, in Canton. A select group of British poets accompany Prynne on this visit to China, “to make forded crossings from English into Chinese and from Chinese across into English”. Three years later, Prynne gave a keynote speech at the second Pearl River International Poetry Conference. In December 2010, Sun Yat-sen University Press published 蒲龄恩诗选 Selected Poems by J. H. Prynne.
In the lecture Bruno will highlight these events as linguistic, cultural, ideological and political activities, looking at the two poets’ main aesthetic claims, analysing one or two poems, and interrogating their mode of international collaboration, translation and cross-cultural creation.
Cosima Bruno is a Reader in Chinese Literature at SOAS University of London. Her research interests include contemporary Chinese and multilingual poetry, translation studies, visual and sound poetry. She is the author of Between the Lines. Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), and coeditor with Lucas Klein and Chris Song of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (2023). Her most recent research articles include “The Oikos of the Mother Tongue: Ecology and Maternality of Language in Two Yi Poets” (2025), “The Form of Music: Polyphony and Contra-dictions in Ouyang Jianghe’s Poetry” (2024), and “’It Can’t Be All in One Language’: Poetry in the Diverse Language” (2024).
Last updated: September 9, 2025
Source: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies