Polyphonic Bogs: Seamus Heaney’s Ecological Elegy and its Chinese Translations

In the half-century following World War II, East Asian nations experienced unprecedented economic growth, during which technological advancement and ecological awareness emerged as two of the most salient threads of social development. These dynamics have profoundly reshaped the critical trajectories of contemporary East Asian poetics. The composite relation of “ecology-technology” has generated and defined new literary spaces: ecologies shaped by technological intervention and mediation exhibit complex topological formations. These encompass not only the natural ecology and the multispecies ecology emphasized in posthumanism, but also the political-economic ecology, as well as the digital ecology intertwined with new media and generative AI. As poiesis, poetry inherently bears the qualities of technique, allowing us to explore the compound relation of “ecology-technology” from both within and beyond literature itself.

Specifically, in terms of contemporary ecological writing in East Asian, it often occupies a profound paradox: it celebrates nature’s abundance and mourns its disappearance. Timothy Morton rightly points out this tension (2010), stating that while ecological writing appears intrinsically elegiac—since nature becomes the ultimate lost object—the ecological threat actually reverses the traditional elegiac form.

This paradox reveals the predicament of contemporary East Asian poetics: How can we write about nature ethically? Can ecological writing transcend the elegiac mode to address ecological fragility? More broadly, what happens when poetry confronts the entanglements of technological mediation and ecological crisis? How do contemporary East Asian literatures register the interplay between natural environments and technical infrastructures, between cultural memory and the algorithmic present? These questions call for new theoretical frameworks that can articulate the intersections between place, loss, and literary expression.

Geopoetics, for instance, offers such a framework, operating on dual conceptual levels that directly address Morton’s paradox of ecological mourning. ‘Geo’ functions both literally through geographical and environmental specificity, and figuratively through the Chinese concept of ‘Geo’ (di地 ), which encompasses the tangible texture of place (zhidi 质地) and projections of the heart-mind (jiandi 见地). This dual framework enables us to examine how writers across cultures and environments negotiate the tension between celebrating place and mourning its vulnerability.

This panel invites contributions that explore how contemporary East Asian poetics—across poetry, manga, film, fiction, and internet culture—navigate these intersecting terrains. We are particularly interested in works spanning from the 1950s to the present, in which questions of ecological urgency, technological mediation, and intermedial fluidity intersect.