Khlebnikov in China

The question of how Velimir Khlebnikov’s work was perceived in China is among the little studied ones. We have a definite idea of the forms the Chinese theme took in Khlebnikov’s philosophical and aesthetic consciousness as a part of the general orientalist views of the Russian futurist poet. At the same time, the problem of the actual Chinese development of V. Khlebnikov’s artistic heritage (the dialogue among cultures presupposes their two-way connection, interlacement of assessments and judgments) remains open. Thus, the article highlights the most relevant literary and translation aspects of V. Khlebnikov’s reception by the Chinese.

These two aspects of research are traditionally closely related, regardless of national culture issues. The measure and depth of literary interest in foreign-language poetry is determined by the volume of translated texts; in a similar degree, the stability and quality of translation corresponds to the literary vector of the foreign word perception. For the Russian research into Far Eastern literature, this state of affairs is quite axiomatic (since without a preliminary theoretical and historical-literary, as well as hermeneutic analyses, it is impossible to truly understand the poetics of ancient Chinese or medieval Japanese lyrical poetry; all other approaches will be considered amateurish with good reason, which, however, does not exclude the presence of a special, “naïve” charm of these translations from Chinese or Japanese, taken in isolation from the original). The above thesis is also applicable to the Chinese research into Russian literature (Chinese studies of Russian literature), which has been intensively developing in recent years.

The article traces the stages in scientific and philological studies of V. Khlebnikov’s work in China, explains the reasons for Chinese interest in the Silver Age in general and the work of the author of the “Khadzhi Tarkhan” in particular, analyzes the strategies of individual translations of Khlebnikov’s poems into Chinese, taking into account the increased complexity in the transmission of “zaum'” by means of the linguistic system so strikingly different in its internal structure and writing system from Russian.

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