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The initial outburst of the pandemic, in early 2020, forced China and the rest of the world into seclusion, anxiety, social alienation. In the Sinosphere, a human response to the aporia of isolation is the lyrical production, a prosperous literary activity through which the individual gives shape to a collective consciousness. The present paper examines a collection of Sinophone verses sprung from the Covid-19 threat and dismay, as a psychic necessity to re-organize the perception of the outer world. Specifically, it studies a body of fifty-two poems composed by twelve lyrical Sinophone voices, published in Chinese in a spring number of the respected literary journal Jintian 今天. This investigation primarily focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, and psychological value of a lyrical polyphony embodied by unchained Sinophone voices, which sing against the background of a common predicament. In parallel, it reads the collection as a collective memory and a cultural repository, engendered by a narrative projection of experience: to that end, it combines a narratological approach with the observation of certain lyrical features of a “poetics of distress”.

The polymorphous oeuvre of the artist Gao Xingjian 高行健 – born in China (1940), French citizen since 1998, now fully bilingual and bicultural – witnesses the devoted longing for a broader expressive richness in language, resulting from the elaboration of his primary linguistic and cultural awareness, and of another linguistic and cultural heritage, that has been consciously chosen and assimilated. This article examines one aspect of literary creation, that is the Sinophone critical oeuvre, through the essay Ziyou yu wenxue 〈自由與文學〉(2014). By observing the thematic and linguistic profiles we will discover that: firstly, there is a complementary plurality of languages, a tension towards a stratification of discourses and codes drawing from different – diatopically and diachronically speaking – linguistic and cultural systems, revealed by an intertextual and transcultural reading; secondly, in this essay characterized by heteroglossia – as a Bakhtinian concept (Bakhtin 1979) – the ontological clash arising from a plural linguistic and cultural awareness can often be solved by an intra-textual dialogic dimension.

Gao Xingjian, Lun chuangzuo 《论创作》 (Hong Kong, Mingpao yuekan chubanshe 明报月刊出版社, 2008, 426 pp. ISBN 978-988-7576-2-3) di Simona Gallo