The online lectures series on ‘Nature and natural imagery in ancient Greek, Latin, Chinese and Japanese literature’ of the Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens resumes with the talk of Didier Natalizi Baldi (DPhil candidate, Oxford) on ‘The tears in things: a comparative study of nature in Rutilius Namatianus’ (fl. 5th c.) “On his own return” (De Reditu Suo) and Yu Xin’s 庾信 (513-581) ‘‘Lament for the South’’ (哀江南賦)’.
The lecture will take place on Wednesday April 30 2025, 09.00 New York / 14.00 London / 16.00 Athens / 21.00 Beijing.
Abstract
The events of the external world stir the human mind, which reacts through thoughts, words, and literature – on this, classical Western and Chinese literary theorists would generally agree; but does the world outside, the universal macrocosm react to our human edifices of sense, our architectures of social life, down to our personal desires, our individual needs? When our entire socio-political structure collapses and the human effort to control the world proves vain, as millions of lives are smothered by iron and flame, this question becomes more than mere intellectual speculation. And it is such an urgent need to understand how could this all happen and why did the world suddenly turn against us, that pervades the poetry of Rutilius Namatianus (fl. 5th century) and Yu Xin’s 庾信 (513-581), who found themselves to witness respectively a progressively dissolving Roman empire and the fulminous fall of the Liang dynasty 梁代 (502-557). In this paper, I investigate how they grappled with this question. I begin by analyzing their portrayal of the relation between the human and the external world, discussing instances of harmony or contrast, domination, subjection, or common collapse. I then turn to sentiments, both those elicited by nature in man and those caused by man in nature. And I conclude with the interpenetration of natural and human world in the poetic texture of the two works, focusing on the employment of nature as metaphor or objective correlative of human events and on instances of stylistic mimesis, as poetic diction is, in turn, employed to represent the external world. The picture that emerges is one of a complex and continuously transforming interrelation between human and natural world, as both partake in a shared intellectual and emotional structure. A relation that is exploited and replicated in Rutilius’ and Yu Xin’s verse, as the natural world becomes mirror of the human one and human poetic creation comes to mimic and embody Nature herself.
To receive the ZOOM link email mkonaris@academyofathens.gr
For the series programme see here: https://www.academyofathens.gr/en/ereyna/kentra/ereyna-latinikis/kyklos-omilion-2025