Article Title：The well-tempered jade flute: a Chinese turn in early twentieth-century European literature
Abstract：
In the first half of the twentieth century there is a marked uptick in Western interest in Chinese literature. This manifests especially in poetry, with many translations, adaptations, and imitations. Well-known examples include Ezra Pound, Victor Segalen, and Bertolt Brecht, but there are many more instances, less well known. Among the latter figure a number of Dutch-language writers, both from the Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium. The relationship of Dutch writers, i.e. from the Netherlands, to Chinese literature has been fairly well studied in the Netherlands itself. Most of the pertinent material is available only in Dutch. Flemish literature has been less well studied from this perspective, and what there is is again only available in Dutch. After a more general sketch of the impact of Chinese literature upon European literature and the Dutch input in this regard, I turn to the Chinese poems of the Dutch J. Slauerhoff (1898-1936) and the Flemish Gaston Burssens (1896-1965). As with their better-known and more celebrated other-language contemporaries, their Chinese turn served both Dutch-language poets to find their own bearings in a modernist context.
Keywords: European literature; Dutch-language literature; Chinese literature; World literature
DOI: 10.1007/s11059-024-00753-w
Source：NEOHELICON
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