The Shanghai International Literary Festival fumbled into its fourth year with a session entitled, "Love and Erotica in French and Chinese Poetry" and, evidently, discussing erotic poetry at 10am is not an ideal literary endeavor. I arrived to find the morning's stale white light assaulting the room, the stage, and the bleary eyed audience with unrelenting austerity. It took a number of awkward jokes, sweeping statements, and shifting around in stiff chairs before Shanghai-born poet, writer, and translator Qiu Xiaolong, and French writer, editor and literary critic Tang Loec embarked on a more focused discussion of French and Chinese erotic poetry traditions.

Initially, the session seemed destined to offer nothing more than stock comparisons between the "free" and "liberated" eroticism of the Western poetry tradition, and the "reserved" and "repressed" eroticism of the Classical Chinese. Qiu Xiaolong's volume of translated Classical Chinese love poems and Tang Loaec's contemporary French selections hardly presented a meaningful contrast from which to initiate a discussion.

Fortunately, Qiu Xiaolong began to undermine predictable rhetorical approaches. While acknowledging that to Western readers much Classical Chinese love poetry appears lacking in erotic qualities, Qiu offered subtler interpretations to the audience (largely expat), situating the poetry within the context of language and history. "Postmodern theory suggests that people don't speak a language, language speaks people," said Qiu, "It is important to realize that Classical Chinese language doesn't contain the word 'erotic' or even 'love' in the Western sense." Qiu continued to complicate conventional readings by placing Classical poetry tradition within its Confucian context. As Confucianism deemed even erotic thoughts unacceptable, poetry of an erotic nature could not exist within the dominant ideology. However, Qiu noted, erotic writings often surfaced in playful ways as a form of resistance and counter-play. "Poets of the Song Dynasty found excuses for their erotic writing, much in the same way that John Donne disguised his love poems in religious meaning." Such writing did not appear in the Classical compositions of the civil service, but rather in the "lesser" literary forms like novels, stories and plays. Qui recounted one such story in which the author explicitly celebrates love, lust and sexuality and ends in a blatant condemnation of it; a literary device that, according to Qiu, allowed the story sanctuary within the pressures of the dominant discourse.

Qiu's anecdote brings the deus ex machina ending of Moliere's Don Juan to mind, a plot device which, in Seventeenth Century France, similarly attempted to rectify acts deemed "immoral" by the religious doctrines of the day. It was through this tension in erotic writing that the two authors were finally able to draw a subtle parallel. Tang Loaec, too, characterized erotic writing as that which explores the border between the accepted and the illicit. "Erotic writing continually probes the limit between the erotic and the pornographic" said Loaec, "it is and has always been difficult to establish this border."

-Sophie Kalkreuth


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