The below originally appeared as brochure text for a video installation of 王宝菊 Wang Baoju’s《配乐诗朗诵：荒原》 Recitation of Music Poems:The Wasteland Performance Video, 65′06″ 王宝菊 2020 shown in September 2023 at Philadelphia’s Pollinator.
What can a notoriously “difficult” 100-year poem written in England by a white male American expatriate poet based in the “unreal city” of London tell us about life today?
And what if a female Chinese artist recites it in a Chinese translation in the hyper-unreal city of Beijing in the pandemic year of 2020, in rhythm to the “soundtrack” of a beeping of a crosswalk traffic light?
When I was a kid, it was popular to do poetry recitations to music. The background music was usually very melodious, and the poetry was recited in a very emotional vocal style. But when I stood there reciting “The Waste Land” under a traffic light accompanied by the rhythm of the traffic light’s beeping, it became fragmented, and the emotional element was also fragmented. In this way, poetry loses the poetic flavor it should have. The whole work is totally absurd, wasted, ridiculous.
–Wang Baoju on her performance recitation of T.S. Eliot’s
“The Waste Land” in Chinese translation
In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”
But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.
The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.
What are we, as viewers, to do with this?
Can we relate to interminable waits?
To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes
Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….
We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?
That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul?
That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?
That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?
All of this may be true of our responses, and all of this would be as true, in many ways, of Eliot’s 1922 poem, published just a few years after World War I (1914 – 1918) and the 1919 global flu pandemic together killed around 90 million people.
But of course, a lot has happened in the past 100 years, and Eliot’s critique of his time isn’t the same as Wang’s critique of our time. A poem like The Waste Land doesn’t work the same way today as it did in 1922. For example, Eliot rhetorically asked in his poem:
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
We, today, can no doubt relate to the idea of “falling towers” and cities that have fallen and risen many times over, leaving ruins beneath newly built edifices that themselves are destined for ruin. We can imagine how war and pandemic can give rise to such a worldview, and a feeling that it’s all somehow “unreal.”
But note, too, how Eliot’s world arises from the “West” — the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian and then European-imperial heart of the West’s self-conception. It’s not that the poem is simplistically Eurocentric — it famously ends with a quotation of the Sanskrit lines from the ancient Indian Brihadaranyak Upanishad, written down some 2,700 years ago: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih.”1* Eliot,in his endnotes, translated Shantih as the “peace which passeth understanding,” though he added that it is “a feeble translation of the content of the word.” Datta, dayadhvam and damyata, respectively, may be translated as “give,” “be sympathetic,” and “control,” though these translations too are inevitably “feeble.”
In fact, Eliot, like many of his modernist peers, was looking beyond “the West” to Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific for teachings and traditions that, following the disaster of Europe’s first World War, promised to speak to a common humanity and redeem a West that seemed to have, through industrialization and capitalism, severed something essential between humankind and the world of nature, the spirit, and our deep past.
Still, Eliot couldn’t foresee precisely what shape the future would take, and that a century later, a China transformed by war and revolution and led by a Communist party would rival the Anglophone United States in a world of emergent AI, human-driven climate change, nuclear weapons, social media and so on.
It’s here that Wang Baoju steps in and steps up to a curb in Beijing, adding a contemporary Chinese sense of 荒诞 huangdan absurdism to a poem that quickly gained fame in Eliot’s time in Chinese literary circles as 荒原 huangyuan, “The Waste Land.” Today, one could argue that nearly every trend of Eliot’s time has accelerated and intensified, become even more 荒 huang.
Our technological capacities, interconnections, and ability to create convincing media representations of reality have all intensified — in service not only of growth and development and cooperation, but also of destruction, inequity, and conflict.
It’s here that we might stop and stand beneath a Beijing stoplight with Wang Baojun and wonder whether the “unreal city” of Eliot’s Waste Land is, in our times, even more “unreal,” more absurd, more wasteful, wasting and, ultimately, wasted.
In the 1980s, thinkers, including French philosopher Jean Baudrilliard, asked if, in our hyper-mediated world, we weren’t entering a time of the hyperreal in which images and media are more “real” to us than the real, material world.
Does Wang Baojun’s 荒诞荒原 absurdist Waste Land invite us to confront what we might call the hyper-unreal city of Beijijng, and the hyper-unreal nature of our times? And what might that mean?