‘Tradition and modernity’ in the process of creation of Modern Chinese Drama: Song Chunfang and Western drama

At the beginning of the 20th century, the role played by Italian literature in the renewal of the Chinese literary canon was certainly limited, especially when compared to other western literature. Nonetheless the Futurist literary avant-garde, which began in Italy in 1909, drew the attention of some Chinese writers. Among them was Song Chunfang (1892-1938), one of the most outstanding and original intellectuals engaged in the debate on new Chinese Drama. He translated some futurist plays and wrote some essays on Italian and western drama in order to offer some personal contributions to the renovation of Chinese drama. The paper aims to describe what was, if any, the contribution of the Italian avant-garde movement to the creation of modern Chinese drama, spoken drama (huaju), through the reading and analyses of some essays by Song Chunfang. His original opinions on how to renovate Chinese drama, often at odds with other intellectuals of the May Forth movement, and his positions on translation techniques of western plays (he proposed to use the gaiyi-adaption technique rather than the yiyi–literal translation or zhiyi–sense translation) were remarkable contributions to the literary and cultural debate of those years and an attempt to conciliate tradition and modernity in the process of creating new Chinese drama.