Mu Dan: Abundance and the Pain of Abundance

Mu Dan (1918-1977), a native of Haining, Zhejiang, was both a poet and a top Chinese translator. He was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University in 1935, fled to the south after the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, and taught at National Southwestern Associated University formed by Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University. At National Southwestern Associated University, Mu Dan was fully influenced by Western modern poetry, enthusiastically translated and introduced works of Western modern poets such as Eliot, Rilke and Auden, and actively discussed new poetry's development and poetry theories.

The poetry collections Expedition, Collected Poems by Mu Dan and Flag published by Mu Dan in 1940s became important achievements in China's poetry circles in that period. The works created by Mu Dan in this period are solemn and serious, fully expressing strong doubt about traditions and order and rebellious spirit in the pursuit of integration of sensibility and sense. He hurriedly jumped into the vortex of the times, showed the conflict and struggle between the soul and body, and clearly demonstrated the qualitative difference between his poetry and traditional poetry. In The Besieged, he fully expressed the spirit of rebellion against traditions, "A circle: the work of so many years, Our despair will make it complete. Destroy it, friends! Let us ourselves Be a gap in it: worse than mediocrity. Then lightning and rain, new temperature and hope Can pour in, topple reverence. For we are besieged multitude, Only when we stir can the new land awaken." In his view, the traditions with the "circle" as the model were just "mediocrity" completed by "our despair," and though incompleteness meant destruction, danger and even sacrifice, it would bring the hope of new life. Such "siege-breaking" consciousness was not only an artistic thought, but also a modern attitude towards life and realistic spirit, closely associated with a series of changes including the poet's poetic spirit and life experience.

Violence is the core of Mu Dan's poems full of eternal violent binary opposition: sense and desire, gods and demons, pain and hope, exile and permanent homes... "From compulsive collective foolishness to civilization's meticulous calculation, from the overthrow of our life values to their establishment and reestablishment: we still trust your iron fist the most. From our present nightmare to tomorrow's paradise hard to come by, from a baby's first cry to his unwilling death: everything is inherited from your image." (Violence) But for Mu Dan, violence was not only devastation of human nature, but also a test of human nature. Therefore, he automatically abandoned the emotional parts of traditional poetry, experienced the cruel reality of relationships between different people and between people and society through serious reflection, perceived human nature from a rational perspective, revealed people's absurdity and despair, and sublimated a specific hardship in real life into an abstract philosophical thought. In self-analysis, he felt an anxiety of life: "After coming out from the womb, I lost warmth. The missing part longed for help. I am always myself, isolated in the wilderness, Separated from the group in a still dream, Feeling the stream of time painfully, grasping nothing, And reminiscing constantly, but I cannot bring myself back." (Self) The "self is isolated in time and space, cannot integrate into the whole history and group, cannot seize and grasp anything, and has lost overall harmony and become an "incomplete self." Here the "self is not Mu Ji himself. Instead, it has sublimated into man's general individual existence. In Spring, Mu Dan expressed passionate adolescent desire like "green flames flickering upon the grass," but such desire of life to embrace spring is curled and prohibited and finds no home: "Under the blue sky, obsessed by an eternal enigma is Our tightly-closed body of 20-year-old, Just like birdsongs earth-cast. You are kindled, curled, but find no home. O light, shade, sound, color, all now naked, And in pain, waiting to enter into new combinations." The manifestation of oppression of such desire of life in Mu Dan's poems comes from not only "historical conflict," but also invisible inhibition of individual rationality.

However, Mu Dan's thought does not lead to decadence and despair. His poems reveal a kind of unrest consciousness of life and stubborn spirit in the soul's struggle: "Stay alive on the dangerous land. Live in the dying group, When all phantoms turn hideous and all strengths are like exposed seas, cruel, devastative and ferocious, Just like you and I gradually get strong but die, that immortal person." The significance of life is struggle in the life of "hope, disillusionment, hope and the will to live on" (Stay Alive).

Mu Dan's poems are deeply rooted in his times. On the one hand, he was greatly oppressed by reality, and on the other hand, he boldly intervened into and embraced reality with the consciousness of an upright intellectual and a sense of social responsibility. He cried excitedly in the poem Glorification:

I will, with the desolate desert, bumpy roads, and mule-drawn cart,

I will, with a trough boat, a mountain of wild flowers, and overcast and rainy weather,

I will embrace you with all, you,

The people I see everywhere, O,

People living in humiliation, stooping people,

I will embrace you one by one with my blood-stained hands,

Because a nation has stood up.

In 1942, Mu Dan burning with patriotic fervor joined the Chinese Expedition Force, fought on the battleground of Burma in the War of Resistance against Japan, and experienced all kinds of hardships in the Battle of the Wild Man Mountain that shocked the whole world. So he wrote Enchantment of the Forest - Offering Sacrifices to the White Bones in the Hukawng River to commemorate his comrades-in-arms who died in this battle. It is full of the poet's philosophical thoughts on man's situation and way out in the 20th century marked by incessant war and dispute and is a representative work directly addressing war and death and eulogizing life and eternity in the history of Chinese modern poetry. Glint can be called the best epic created by Mu Dan in terms of either the poem's connotations or the poem's form. In Glint, Mu Dan focused on seeking to solve the issue of modern people's puzzles about their situation from the perspective of metaphysics. He saw that the nation was suffering and that people would lose themselves on the verge of spiritual collapse. This urged him to proceed from the specific times and region he lived in, rise to broader space and time, understand internal life and structural grandeur at a higher level and seek to realize a new world full of hope for people's spirit. He arduously explored paths to a new world in many aspects such as nature, society and life. Deep emotions run through Glint featuring grand structures, solemn sentence patterns and overwhelming vigor and momentum. This epic thought, in a certain sense, marked the depth of Chinese modern poets' metaphysical thinking about this war that deeply influenced the whole humanity, and marked Chinese modern poetry's expansion to the depths of reality and history as well as the essence of individual life.

Mu Dan's poems are full of abundant life experience, containing painful thoughts about diversified life.