what was all the fuss about? 409Furthermore, as we shall see, Yu Jian and others use ⇥䯈 in two dif-
ferent ways, which further complicates its translation. Hence, Popular
remains the preferred option after all, with upper-case P—and upper-
case I in Intellectual—flagging usage that is specifically linked to the
Polemic. The possibility of throwing up our hands at an instance of
untranslatability and simply transcribing it as minjian is denied us, be-
cause the word’s usage in the Polemic is equally problematic in the
original.^6
But let’s return to the scathing criticism of Cheng Guangwei’s
scheme of things put forward by Yu Jian in “The Light.” Yu expands
the scope of the conflict to that of total warfare between two camps in
poetry, one of Intellectual Writing and one of Popular Writing. Not-
withstanding his 1993 statement that an intellectual standpoint was
a minimal condition for mature poethood,^7 Yu presents himself as a
champion of the Popular. His argument hinges on a rhetorically clever
usage of Popular that invests it with two profoundly different implied
meanings, one institutional and the other aesthetic, along the lines of
a similar ambiguity in the term unofficial, discussed in chapter One.
In Yu’s essay, Popular sometimes takes on the institutional meaning
‘published outside state control,’ as a proud epithet of groundbreak-
ing journals such as Today, Them and Not-Not. At other times he uses
Popular in an aesthetic sense, so that the question What is Popular po-
etry? is implicitly rephrased as What is good poetry? or What is poetry
that matters? He contends that good poetry is inherently opposed to
knowledge / intellect, and describes Popular poetry as a reflection of
the experience of everyday life, craftsmanship like that of a carpenter,
the movement of language which cuts through forgetting and returns
to the home of being, the light emitted by wisdom and the soul, and
so on. Other, equally vague and high-blown definitions abound. The
most interesting among them spring from Yu Jian’s concern with lan-
guage itself rather than things like truth and beauty.
Yu’s impassioned advocacy of Popular Writing in both the institu-
tional and the aesthetic sense implies the identification of Intellectual
Writing with state-sanctioned orthodoxy on both counts. If Intellectual
Writing is presented as alien to Popular Writing in the aesthetic sense,
the non-specialist reader may well assume that institutionally, it had
(^6) Cf Wang Guangdong 2002.
(^7) Yu Jian & Zhu 1993, published as 1994: Question 5.