198 chapter five
Indeterminacy operates at critical junctures in «Salute». Recalling the
discussion of exile poetry in chapter Four, this is not to say that the
following analysis aspires to do anything like framing the series in its
entirety. It adopts one possible perspective, to respond to the views of
the critics cited earlier and offer other avenues into Xi Chuan’s work.
The publication history of «Salute» runs from The Nineties (бकᑈ
ҷ), one of the small-scale, unofficial poetry journals out of Sichuan
that showed the poetry scene’s resilience during the cultural purge af-
ter June Fourth, to the large-scale, official all-genre journal Flower City
(㢅ජ), and from Xi Chuan’s individual poetry collections to authori-
tative multiple-author anthologies, both of the contemporary era and
of the entire twentieth century. Some textual differences between these
editions are clearly misprints. Others must be the result of Xi Chuan
changing his mind from one edition to the next, or from editorial in-
tervention. My analysis is based on the text published in The Nine-
ties, with corrections and changes made by Xi Chuan in November
1993—that is, the latest authorized version before the publication of
his 1997 collection This Is the Idea (ᛣབד), which follows the said
corrections and changes with very few exceptions. There are minor
discrep ancies with the Flower City text, the most widely available source
of the Chinese original, and I will note those which are of interest.
I quote extensively from all constituent poems in the series. An English
translation of the full text is found in Renditions 51 (1999).^14
«Salute»: Form«Salute» consists of eight sizable constituent poems, each a very full
page in length, with numbered headings and individual titles: «One:
Night» (ϔǃ), «Two: Salute» (Ѡǃ㟈ᭀ), «Three: Abode» (ϝǃሙ
ᅸ), «Four: The Monster» (ಯǃᎼݑ), «Five: Maxims» (Ѩǃᆅ㿔),
«Six: Ghosts» (݁ǃᑑ♉), «Seven: Fourteen Dreams» (ϗǃकಯϾ
Ṻ) and «Eight: Winter» (ހǃܿ). Xi Chuan has said that the series is
neither a poem nor a prose poem nor a narrative text. While its author
is unwilling to categorize «Salute»—although he did once call it a long
(^14) The Nineties, 1992: 94-106, Flower City 1994-1: 88-96, Wan Xia & Xiaoxiao
1993: 236-243, Xie Mian & Meng 1996: 545-549, Xi Chuan 1997c: 159-174, Rendi-
tions 51 (1999): 87-102.