No place is a place

Borges in Contemporary Chinese poetry

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between Borges and contemporary Chinese poetry, and more specifically the poetry of the so-called "third generation", based on a series of poems which focus on the figure of the Argentine writer. Inscribed within what has been described as a kind of subgenre in contemporary poetry, that of "poems commemorating the great Western masters", they offer a good perspective to analyze the construction of the image of Borges and the relationship that Chinese poets establish with that image. After a brief introduction and a second point in which we will briefly introduce some characteristics of contemporary Chinese poetry, in the third section we will present the reception of Borges' work in China and among Chinese poets, before moving on, in the last point, to the analysis of four poems which raise, among others, questions about the role of the poet and of poetry and about the opposition between the local and the universal.