The Flower of Empire
Question: Lucilla Trapazzo
Answer: Cao Shui
1- Dear Cao Shui, when and why have you started to write poetry?
I started writing poetry in Yushe Middle School in 1999. I remember my first poem was "I / wearing a broken straw hat / Snooping the whole world". Later I read the famous saying of Caesar "I come, I see, I conquer", which means the same thing. I trace my writing purpose, and I want to give the order of the world spirit at first. I was a child of inexplicable fear of darkness, I would be afraid of shadows, so that there must be a special person to hold me in the evening. I think this is the deep reason for my writing, that is the pursuit of light, hope to light the darkness with literature. I started from writing diaries, which included poems, novels, plays and essays. I began to keep diaries since 1997. This has become a habit of my life. Now, I have recorded 72 diaries, which can be said to be the cradle of my writing. I came to Qinghai in 2002 and started writing a lot there. I realized that it is a global era, which formed the main style of my later writing, that is to create a kind of "Great Poem".
2- One of your books of poems is coming out in Italy, I Fiori dell’impero, Fiori d’Asia Ed. Is there anything you would like to say to your Italian readers? Tell us briefly about your book.
My collection of poems, The Flowers of Empire, has been published by Fiori d’Asia Ed in Italy. Both paper books and e-books are on the market at the same time. It will be distributed in dozens of countries around the world, such as the European Union, the United States and Japan. This book is translated by Fiori Picco, an Italian translator, Sinologist and writer. She recites the translated "Prince Snow Leopard" in the video, and I feel the musical beauty of Italian. This collection of 40 poems is published in Italian, English and Chinese. The name of this collection of poems, The Flowers of the Empire, has aroused a lot of speculation at China and abroad, so I would like to introduce this book from the title of the book, which is the name of a poem I wrote. In ancient Chinese, the original meaning of the word empire "Di" in ancient Chinese is the meaning of flower base, and the original meaning of flower “Hua” in ancient Chinese is China. I later lived in Beijing. This city is the representative of Chinese culture. In terms of urban layout, it takes the Forbidden City as the center and spreads out in a symmetrical ring, like a huge flower in full bloom. Chinese culture is a kind of centrism culture, which is opposite to the non-centrism of modernism. In this contrast, I find the significance of Chinese culture in the world. Because the French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire wrote Flowers of Evil(Les Fleurs Du Mal), which is a strange symbol of Western civilization in modern transformation. I also hope to write the strange form of Eastern civilization in modern transformation through Flowers of Empires, which is the theme of this collection.
3-What are the challenges of writing for an audience from a culture so distant from your own?
That's a very good question. Every aspiring writer will face such a problem, because your works have to spread to all kinds of cultures outside the native culture. The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, written by Spencer wells, an American geneticist, states that 99.99% of the genes of yellow, white and black people are the same, and so are our cultural differences. Although there are great differences between Eastern and Western civilizations, I think the commonality of human civilization is far greater than the difference. So as long as we write the unique human nature, I think readers in the Eastern and Western civilization environment can feel it. But I also want to talk about the 0.01% challenge. I began to learn English when I was very young, so I am familiar with the history and culture of the West. One of the themes of my works is "Integration of Multiple Ancient Civilizations" which is mainly the Western civilization inherited from the Roman Empire and the Eastern civilization inherited from the China Empire. Therefore, in my poems, I often find the corresponding points of the two civilizations and other ancient civilizations like Persia, India, Israel, Egypt and Mesopotamia. I will extend this issue to the following comparison of eastern and Western cultural elements. This kind of challenge is not only a challenge to me, but also a challenge to the development of world civilization, that is, how to build a world civilization in such a pluralistic culture and create the "Weltliteratur" (World Literature) put forward by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1827.
4-In your poems we can feel a strong sense of belonging to your culture of origin, China, but at the same time a broad view of the World. Which elements of your homeland inspire your poems and which ones of the comparison with different cultures?
Lucilla, you have a very good view, especially the concept of "elements" bellow. In my poems, we should not only extract elements from Chinese traditional culture, but also find the corresponding elements of western culture. As the ancient Greek philosophy thought that the world was composed of four elements: "earth, gas, water and fire", Chinese traditional philosophy also thought that the world was composed of five elements "mental, wood, water, fire and earth". Human civilization had the same mother at first. Later, the Eastern and Western civilizations developed different forms of civilization, but they were relative, I agree with the “objective correspondence” that T. S. Eliot said, although he meant the correspondence between image and the world, it can also be used to talk about the correspondence between Eastern and Western civilization. For example, in my poem “Pamirsburg: Nine Dragons and Nine Muses’ Wedding”, the corresponding relationship between the representative of Oriental civilization Nine Dragons and the Western civilization Nine Muses is found; In the poem “A Lion Lost his Mouth on the Eurasian Steppe”, the correspondence between Chang'an, the ancient capital of China and Rome, the ancient capital of Europe, was found; In the poem “Romeo and Zhu Yingtai”, the correspondence between the Western love stories "Romeo and Juliet" and the Chinese love stories "Liangshanbo and Zhu Yingtai" is found; In the poem "One Dream of Us Is More Than 100000 Kinds of Lives", we seek the corresponding relations among various cultural elements in the eastern and Western civilizations. In the past, the correspondence between Babylon, Israel, Egypt, Greece, Persia, India and China, the seven ancient civilization centers of mankind, was found. Like ancient philosophy, we extract elements from the world and finally form a new art world. For this reason, I advocate "Great Poetics" or “Great-poemism”, the core point of view is to integrate ancient and modern civilizations , Western and Eastern civilizations , spiritual and secular civilization , and create a kind of "Great Poem" like epic. The Divine Comedy by Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the Epic of Sun by Chinese poet Haizi, are probably the examples of this kind of poetry. Greatpoeism has become a trend of thought in Chinese poetry writing. From 2018 to 2020, there was a debate named "the Debate Between Cao Shui and Yi Sha", which swept the poetic circle. Cao Shui advocated Great-poeticism and Yi Sha advocated Post Colloquial Poetry represented two schools of debate, and more than 100 poets wrote more than 500 papers, I think the poetry of the final world needs to create a kind of integrated "Great Poem". From such a concept, it is natural to find the corresponding elements of the Eastern and Western civilization or various civilizations. Han Dong, a modern Chinese poet, put forward the slogan "Poetry Ends With Language". He is against metaphor. I understand, of course, that he proposed to be obscure for Chinese Misty Poetry, but it is like opening Pandora's box, which makes poetry lose its most core metaphorical function. This is also the spirit of poetry that I call for return in "Great Poetics".
5-What is your personal approach to the subject matter of your works, from what does your writing stem?
I started with writing poems in 1999, and published ten poetry collections, including the Epic of Eurasia and, the Song of the Tower of Babel and the Flowers of Empire; In 2008, I also wrote novels and published ten books, including the Secret History of Kunlun (Trilogy), the Spire of the Tower of Babel and the Prince Snow Leopard; In 2012, I also created screenplays such as "King Peacock ", "War of Kunlun" and "Prince Snow Leopard". My writing themes are quite diverse, but there are three core themes: "the top of the Tower of Babel", "Kunlun Mythological World" and "the Republic of Human Beings". The core issues are "the integration of eastern and Western Civilizations", "the transformation of China's modernity" and "the significance of individual existence in the whole world order". I believe that human beings come from the same place and will certainly move towards the same Republic or Utopia. Related to the theme of my writing, my writing inspiration mainly comes from the events in the transformation of Chinese reality, the order from me to the world, and my exploration of the corresponding relationship between Eastern and Western civilizations. My son's name is Eurafrasia Cao, which is also my wish. Human beings, originated from ancient Eurafrasia, aka Asia, Europe and Africa, are bound to go to the World Republic.
6- In this past year of suspended time, has your writing changed? If so, how?
Although civilizations are diverse, people all over the world have experienced the same isolated life, and world integration is deepening. Although COVID-19 is a disaster for mankind, it gives me the inspiration that the world is merging into a community. This has also had a profound impact on my writing. I wrote a series of cosmopolitan poems "The Tower of Babel Project". I believe that people of all nationalities in the world are moving towards the "Tower of Babel" originally built by human beings in the Bible. In addition to writing poems, novels, screenplays, I also do translation work. In the past year, I have been more integrated into the world. I think translation is a magical work. The construction process of Tower of Babel is also a process of making people speak the same language, or we call it translation. Just as human literature has gone through lyric literature dominated by poetry in the agricultural age, narrative literature dominated by novels in the industrial age, and dramatic literature dominated by drama in the information age, my writing has probably experienced through this process. Therefore, in addition to the importance of language translation, I also believe that literary genre should be translated or transformed. There is a transformation relationship from poetry to novel to script, For example, my collection of poems, the Epic of Eurasia, has been transformed into a novel, the Secret History of Kunlun, and into a screenplay, the War of Kunlun. So I put forward the "Dramatized-Novel Movement", hoping that novels and drama can be transformed into each other, because all literary types come from the same idea and can be transformed into poetry, novels and scripts. This cosmopolitan transformation theme is deeply reflected in my new works. I think the spiritual Tower of Babel is built by different language and culture pillars. When these languages and cultures are translated into each other, the spiritual Tower of Babel will be completed.
(end)
Bio of Cao Shui
Cao Shui（Chinese: 曹谁;pinyin: Cáo Shuí), also Shawn Cao (born in Jun 5, 1982), is a Chinese poet, novelist, screenwriter and translator. He is a representative figure of Chinese Contemporary Literature. He leads “the Greatpoeticism” movement. In his “Manifesto of Greatpoem”, he aims to integrate sacred and secular cultures, oriental and occidental cultures, ancient and modern cultures in Chinese literature. In 2008, he resigned from a newspaper and traveled around Tibet and Xinjiang, which is the center of Eurasia or the World in his view. His novels Secret of Heaven trilogy tells the whole developing history of human civilization. His most notable works includes Epic of Eurasia, the already mentioned trilogy and King Peacock (TV series). In his works, he extracts elements of various ancient human civilizations, from Babylon to the west to Judea, Egypt, Greece, to the east to Persia, India, China, and uses these elements to reconstruct a new Utopian human homeland, which always described as Eurasia, the Top of the Tower of Babel or Kunlun Mountains (Heaven Mountains). So far twenty books of Cao Shui have been published, including five poem collections, three essay collections, ten novels, three translations and one hundred episodes TV series and films. His works have been translated into English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Danish, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Nepali, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Mongolian, etc. He is a member of China Writers Association, China Film Association and China Poetry Society. He is also chief editor of Great Poetry, deputy editor in chief of World Poetry, secretary general of Boao International Poetry Festival and vice president of the Silk Road International Poetry Festival. Currently he lives in Beijing, and works as a professional writer and screenwriter.
Lucilla Trapazzo is an Italian-Swiss poet. Her activities range among poetry, theater/performance (teaching workshops in Italy and abroad, directing, acting), installations, translations, and literary critiques. In her works she longs for a synthesis of the different artistic languages. Her poems have been published in International anthologies and literary magazines, and awarded numerous prizes (one for all, her book Ossidiana, won the First Prize “I Murazzi”, Turin, 2019). Featured in poetry International Festivals in Macedonia, Tunisia, Albania, Serbia, her works of art are shown at International exhibitions and festivals in the UK, USA, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and South America.
—《END》—