The Development Of Tibetan Modern Poetry

From the 10^th century, when the classical Indian literary theory book The Mirror of Poetry was translated into Tibetan, until the 1980s, Tibetan poetry had changed very little. It was written mostly by monks on religious themes. Then several poets appeared, who under Chinese and Western literary modernist influences departed from traditional rules both in form and content, thus marking the beginning of modern Tibetan poetry. Using comparativist and Constructivist textual analysis, this research attempts to determine what constitutes modern Tibetan poetry, what are its basic characteristics and what are specific traits of its most representative poets. Donzhe Jha's poem The Waterfall of Youth, published in 1983 can be considered as the first modern Tibetan poem, but the most innovative poetry is that of Jampu. Now, their work inspires other modern Tibetan poets to write about their everyday lives, their emotions and their hopes in various creative metrical schemes. Despite the developments over the last 20 years, however, modern Tibetan poetry is still in a childhood stage. In order for it to mature and flourish, the development of Tibetan literary theory and translations of world literature into Tibetan are of greatest importance.