Forbidden Games and Video Poems

The Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch'ing

Yang Mu, Lo Ch'ing, Joseph R. Allen, Joseph R. Allen

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806990
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Two contemporary poets from Taiwan, Yang Mu (pen name for Wang Ching-hsien, b. 1940) and Lo Ch'ing (pen name for Lo Ch'ing-che, b. 1948), are represented in this bilingual edition of Chinese poetry ranging from the romantic to the postmodern. Both poets were involved in the selection of poems for this volume, the first edition in any language of their selected work. Their backgrounds, literary styles, and professional lifes are profiled and compared by translator Joseph R. Allen in critical essays that show how Yang and Lo represent basic directions in modern Chinese poetics and how they have contributed to the definition of modernism and postmodernism in China. The book's organization reflects each poet's method of composition. Yang's poems are chronologically arrangd, as his poetry tends to describe a narrative line that closely parallels his own biography. Lo's poems, which explore a world of concept and metaphor, are grouped by theme. Although each poet has a range of poetic voices, Yang's work can be considered the peak of high modernism in Chinese poetry, while Lo's more problematic work suggests the direction of new explorations in the art. In this way the two poets are mutually illuminating. Each group of poems is prefaced by an "illustration" that draws from another side of the poet's intellectual life. For Yang, who is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, these are excerpts from his academic work (written under the name C.H. Wang) in English. The poems by Lo, a well-known painter living in Taiwan, are illustrated by five of his own ink paintings.

FORBIDDEN GAMES

The Poetry of Yang Mu

From Taiwan to Iowa

From Ritual to Allegory

Risking the danger of endorsing excessive theorization of literature or, still worse, of tolerating the corruption of literary study currently evident in the games of critical jargon, I maintain that a proper approach in the comparative study of literature genetically unrelated is through the application of a tested theory. A tested theory is one that has been formulated first to assess an individual work in a particular tradition, used repeatedly on other works of similar nature and thereby revised and validated in that tradition. We apply it to the interpretation of works in another tradition. Often it is possible that, in so doing, we will illuminate these works with a strikingly new light and discover traits and messages never appreciated before. What we can find in literature of several traditions are not parallels or influences, but a common sense, a shared aspiration defined before individual backgrounds, an encyclopedia diversely cataloged, a poetry as a means of humanistic education. We fail if, instead of this, we fall back to piling more jargon upon jargon, confusing ourselves in the murky, infinitesimal units of the terminology popular in literary criticism but unknown in literature. For better or for worse, literary criticism is a key to literature. Literary criticism is not literature.

. . . Aware of the pitfalls scattered in various fashionable theories, I have chosen to adhere to what poetry itself has taught me, and to an organized set of literary concepts in the scholarly tradition. . . . If the poetry should appear to be inadequate as an expression of the progress of the Chinese humanities in that stage, I, not poetry, should be blamed. This book, written in English, seeks to identify the Chinese experiences of antiquity as the poets undertook to record their joys and sorrows in poetry, which, I believe, is immediate to our judgment when it is classified and subtitled according to the set of concepts. As much as I am eager to uncover the mysterious and the beautiful from a comparatist point of view, I am cautious to be obedient, as far as possible, to the great tradition of classical Chinese philology. I have tried to adjust our attitude toward affirming the position of some poems in a critical way, but I never wittingly invent anything to divest traditional philology of its authority. We are removed from these poems by twenty-three to thirty centuries and, in the present case, by a greatly changed semantics under the impact of which I consider them, and further, by an entirely different language in which I manage to write about them. I hope that, in spite of all this, my efforts may still bring early Chinese poetry to a modern context to be appreciated by an audience unbelievable to its creators. Had it not been for this purpose, I would always write in Chinese.

From the preface, xiii-xiv.

The News

Over the bay, not plotting the dimensions of my pallor

With calipers.

The road home is strewn with the bodies of dead birds,

Their smiling eyes stare blankly.

In teahouses men armed with rifles wipe their sweaty brows,

Looking out at the scenery . . .

Nine times now we have talked of clouds,

This fool who is always so pretty—

The moss on the stone bench has succumbed to our sitting,

The smokestacks have all been counted,

And still she giggles, still so pretty.

And so, we have talked of clouds one hundred seven times,

And still she giggles, still so pretty,

The road is still strewn with dead birds.

Armed with rifles, men in teahouses still wipe their sweaty brows,

Looking out at the scenery . . .

1958

The River’s Edge

I have sat here these four endless afternoons

And no one has come—not even the tread of footsteps

(in silence)

The phoenix ferns have grown from thigh to shoulder

Concealing me for no apparent reason

Claiming that the murmur of the river is a memory I can’t shed

I can only let it be inscribe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Written with People in Mind
• A Poem Is a Cat in One’s Mind
• Yang Mu and Lo Ch’ing: A Profile
• Forbidden Games: The Poetry of Yang Mu
• Video Poems: The Poetry of Lo Ch’ing
• Translator’s Notes
• Density and Lucidity: The Poetics of Yang Mu and Lo Ch’ing
• Sources
• Bibliography of Selected Works by Yang Mu and Lo Ch’ing