thanatography and the poetic voice 121Chao’s Critical Anthology of Chinese Explorative Poetry (Ё㋶䆫䡈䌣䆡
, 1989). Chen completed the manuscript in 1988, when Haizi was
still alive. It contains discussions of two of his poems. In his comments
on «Clasps a White Tiger and Crosses the Ocean», Chen is puzzled by
the phrase mother leaning towards death but then notes that Haizi presents
life and death in equilibrium. He concludes:^42
The poem avails itself of the form of a dream, and reveals the true na-
ture of life: that magnificent, great force, duty-bound not to turn back,
conquering death.Ten years on, in the revised and expanded edition of his Critical Anthol-
ogy (1999), Chen adds discussions of three more of Haizi’s poems. He
inserts them between his two previous mini-essays, abruptly placing a
posthumous eulogy for the poet at the head of the first of his new com-
mentaries, which is the second of the full set. All three newly added po-
ems had received much exposure in the years following Haizi’s death.
Disregarding a possible contradiction with his earlier characterization
of “the true nature of life” emanating from Haizi’s poetry as “con-
quering death,” Chen says that in the 1987 poem «Ancestral Land
(Or: With a Dream for a Horse)», Haizi prophesied his fate. With or
without reference to the Chinese tradition of equating speaker and
author, this is a reasonable claim, as we shall see below. Still, the fact
remains that canonization of «Ancestral Land» was only triggered by
Haizi’s fulfillment of the “prophesy,” by the author doing what the
speaker had said. Chen’s anthology has a predilection for individual
poets’ “representative works”: «Ancestral Land», then, only became
a representative work, in the anthology’s second edition, once it was
endorsed by the poet’s life—that is, by his death. Chen’s commentary
confirms this when he compares the poem, in its “tragic emotion and
holy purity” (ᚆϢ⋕), to an epitaph. It is no surprise that he finds
that Haizi’s play in verse «The Sun»^43
was in a sense “completed” after all, and that the poet gave his life as a
final record of inspiration toward [the poem’s and his own] completion.In closing, Chen approvingly cites Luo Yihe’s Byronesque vision
of Haizi’s life and work and says that, among other things, reading
(^42) Chen Chao 1989: 615.
(^43) Chen Chao’s phrasing is ambiguous: 䖭䚼䆫䖬ᰃĀᅠ៤āњ, 䆫Ҏᰃҹ⫳
ੑЎ᳔ৢⱘਃ冫ᔩᅠ៤ⱘ(1999: 1161). Chen Chao 1999: 1158-1166.