There has been much ado about Shakespeare in celebrating his 400th birthday—even here on Taiwan, an island half a globe away from the beloved "sceptered isle" of the old bard. In honor of the anniversary, articles swarmed in magazines and newspapers, poets and scholars gathered to read and recite poetry, a Chinese version of Hamlet was performed on the stage of Taipei, professors were interviewed on radio and television, and translations of the tragedies and comedies were published or reprinted. The first months of 1964 were poetic indeed. But the Bard of Avon, fascinating as he is to lovers of poetry in this country, is not the sole inspiration. On June 14 of this year the Chinese, literate or illiterate, observed the 2,254th (?) anniversary of the death of a much older bard, Ch'u Yuan.
The year of 1964, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, is auspicious in the awe-inspiring image of the dragon. The Dragon Boat Festival of the Dragon Year fell on June 14, when Taiwan poets of both traditional and modern schools gathered to commemorate, each in his own way, the tragic death of the first great poet of China. Descended from royalty, Ch'u Yuan was a high-ranking courtier of the State of Ch'u during the period of the Warring States. He was a man of political integrity and moral fervor as well as poetic sentiment, and these qualities became manifest when he was exiled by the king, who listened to his slandering rivals at court. Haggard and woebegone, the frustrated statesman gave way to the passionate poet in him when, wandering down the country's deep south, miasmal with marshes and rivers, he composed one rhapsodic poem after another until, in a moment of intense final despair and sorrow, he drowned himself in the Mi-lo, a river flowing into Tung-ting Lake. Subsequent generations, sentimental over the dramatic end of such an unhappy great man, have come to make a festival of the day, which falls on the fifth of the fifth month in the Chinese lunar calendar, and send dragon-shaped boats in quest of his wave-washed, fish-eaten body. Nor have the poets failed to pay homage to their great predecessor. The elegiac memory of a poet who was himself elegiac has naturally inspired generation of poets. That this memory has lost none of its intensity was made clear when, 25 years ago, the Chinese government in Chungking decreed that the Dragon Boat Festival be observed as national Poet's Day.
Poet's Day this year saw a meeting of some 80 poets of the modern school at the City Hall in Taipei. Poems were recited and prizes awarded to three young poets who had distinguished themselves during the past year. The Blue Stars Society, one of the leading influences in contemporary poetry, issued the annual publication of The Blue Stars 1964, featuring translations from Garcia-Lorca, D. H. Lawrence, and Henri Michaux as well as creative works by native poets. At the same time, the Fifth Moon painters held their eighth annual exhibition at the Provincial Museum in Taipei. Books of and on poetry were published, including Yu Kwang-chung's Associations of the Water Lily and Lo Men's The Tragic Spirit of Modern Man and the Modern Poet. Nor was Poet's Day the only occasion for poetic activities. On March 31, An Evening of Modern Poetry Reading was held under the joint auspices of the Modern Literature Quarterly and the Blue Stars Society and attracted an audience of 600 who applauded poets, scholars, and students reciting verses in Chinese, English, French, and Spanish. Another significant event was the May 1-17 exhibition of Poetry in Crystal at the Tien Educational Center. It showed 30 modern American poems together with 30 photos of crystal sculptures inspired by the poems. Spectators were encouraged to take part in contests to write new poems suggested by the pictures as well as to translate from the 30 poems. Contributions streamed in and the Center awarded two prizes each to the poets and the translators.
Old Order Passeth
For the half century since the epoch-making May 4 Movement of 1919, poets of China, like practitioners of other arts, have found themselves confronted by a dilemma. On the one hand there remains an accumulation of the rich traditions of more than 3,000 years which, through centuries of unconscious transfusion, bas shaped the aesthetic sentiment of the Chinese but threatens to submerge their less independent talents. On the other there is the ever-strengthening and irresistible impact of Western ways of thought and expression in arts and literature that appeal strongly to the young and creative but are resisted by the conservative and the uninitiated. Thus a poet of artistic integrity is continually harassed and, at the same time, invigorated by the need to learn from foreign models without risking his national identity. Few writers have been fully aware of the seriousness of the challenge; less independent minds have drifted to either of the extremes. The tamer temperaments stick to the petticoats of moribund convention and remain complacently suspicious of new experiments. The more adventurous ones, on the contrary, have gone a little too far in their pilgrimage to Europe and America, where they seek to learn metallurgy in art but forget that pure gold lies deep in the Chinese mines. They spurn native tradition in order to court, one after the other, the Marxist, the Freudian, and the Existentialist Muses. They have not yet begun to realize that in so doing, they are merely replacing conventions with fashions. It remains for these willful apprentices to find out for themselves that their practice is only a new form of imitation in disguise. For instance, they would never hesitate to adopt Prometheus in their poetry as a bold spirit in pursuit of truth; it never seems to have occurred to them that, turning back to Chinese mythology, they might as well exploit the image of Sui-jen, the inventor of fire. Likewise, on account of their comparative novelty in aesthetic associations, Aphrodite and Helen seem preferable in Chinese sensibilities to the worn-out images of the Goddess of the River Lo or Hsi-ssu.
As a matter of fact, it is no easy task to work out a happy blending or even a compromise of the native and the imported, for the same object or expression, in different cultural backgrounds, may call forth channels of widely different associations and images. Return to the dragon for example. To the Westerners it is an ominous symbol of sin and strife, sometimes identifiable with Satan and on various occasions slain by the Christian saints. In St. George and the Dragon, Raphael represents it as an ugly and malicious reptile with cumbrous wings, biting fiercely at the lance-head of St. George. In Norse mythology the poor creature is no, luckier. To the ancient Chinese, however, the dragon is a majestic being, imposing in form and supernatural in power, which inhabits all the elements except the earth. Furthermore, it is an awe-inspiring symbol of the masculine, the superlative, and the imperial. Emperors of Cathay were described as dragon-featured. Prancing steeds were pictured as dragon-spirited. And Confucius meant, to be laudatory when he said that Lao-tzu was dragon-like.
These examples indicate the supreme difficulty that confronts Chinese readers in their effort to appreciate either Western literature or modern Chinese literature strongly influenced by the West. To fully enjoy a poem, it does not suffice to know the language and the versification. One has to Jive and breathe in the cultural climate so as to share the historical sense, the modern awareness, and the aesthetic sentiment. No wonder average Chinese readers who have been brought up and schooled in the prosaic Confucian ideology find it uncongenial to accept the perplexing diversity of poetic expression in terms of Hellenism, Christianity, Marxism, and Freudianism. People keep accusing the so-called "new poetry" of not having begun to flourish as it once did in the Tang dynasty. Then they must be reminded of the fact that for the first time in Chinese history, we are exposed to such a great variety of influences that we are overwhelmed, not in orderly chronology, but in confusing anachronism and perplexity because they disagree so radically even among themselves. Impatient rebels as well as patient historians have to wait for a long time before the dust settles, the perspective shows, and the maze of tributaries meet in a main current.
First Attempts
Meanwhile, lengthy strides have been taken and monuments have been erected. The Chinese poets have had a long and frequently interrupted pilgrimage from the early "vernacular verse" through a more regular verse derived from rhymed stanzaic forms of Romantic poetry and a kind of free verse written for dramatic reading in public, and have now come to the threshold of the highly controversial "modern poetry" that borrows much from the various schools of Western poetry since the Symbolists. The eight principles of Dr. Hu Shih, as presented in his Suggestions for a Reform in Literature, show a more or less kindred spirit with the Imagist Movement that raged in the United States in the years when Hu was a student of philosophy at Columbia. However, Hu turned out to be a naive, easy-going poet insensitive to the more subtle and complex aspects of either classical or modern poetry. So did most of his colleagues with the exceptions of Wen I-tuo and Hsu Chih-mo at their best moments. The early "new poets" erred on the obvious side of both language and sensibility. In an iconoclastic moment they cast aside the stereotyped conventions and rigidities of classical Chinese poetry and with them the virtues of a long tradition. On the other hand, their flirtation with the Western Muse was too spasmodic and casual to end in genuine love and understanding. Thus the first generation of "new poets", guileless and helpless in their cultural void and premature independence, produced a kind of insipid and careless writing that wavered between cheap sentimentalism and thinly disguised didacticism. The importance of these forerunners is, therefore, more documentary than aesthetic, and the revolution is successful linguistically rather than artistically. Most of the poems written in the period amounted to nothing more than vernacular versions of platitudes and cliches.
It would be unfair, of course, to say that the first generation of poets was utterly devoid of creative talents and fine tastes. But such good lyricists as Feng Chili, Tai Wan-shu, Li Chin-fa, Pien Ch'ih-ling, and Ho Ch'i-fang were no compensation for the general immaturity and vulgarity of their contemporaries. During the war against Japan even these scattered promises were submerged by noisy propaganda. The Marxist Muse ruled supreme over literary China in the early 1940s as she did in the 30s over American and British letters, and writers of liberal sympathies were either outcried or hushed and were so misrepresented by leftist vilification that they came to be estranged from their readers.
They Are Not Alone
However, the past 15 years have seen an accelerated progress in poetry on this island. The transformation of recent Chinese verse here, from the early pseudo-mainlandish or post-May 4 styles to the wayward and exciting experiments of "free verse" in the mid-1950s, and finally the more steady and fruitful growth of "modern poetry", has been quick and spontaneous. Poets of the so-called "modernist school" have been martyr-like in their refusal to copy the mawkish pseudo-Romanticism of the May 4 veteran writers, their contempt of immediate but transient popularity, their enthusiastic discipleship to modern literature and arts in Europe and America, and their insistence on creating a new poetry that better interprets modern sensibility and the contemporary world and allows more room for free expression of the poet's individuality. Much have they learned from modern Western literature and arts, mostly through translation and criticism, and partly, as with those who are formally educated, through the originals. Fang Ssu, Hu Pin-ching, Huang Yung, Yeh Wei-lien and Yu Kwang-chung are among the translators and scholars who have done much to acquaint their fellow-poets with 20th century poetic forms and thought in the West. Nor are the poets alone in their struggle against the unimaginative indifference or obstinacy of their countrymen. Future literary and art historians will point out that the late 50s and early 60s are the beginning of a new age when a new sensibility become more and more articulate in every form of the devoted pursuit of beauty. While this new sensibility, this fresh consciousness and understanding of the intensity, complexity, multiplicity, and inconsistencies of the inner experiences of modern man, manifests itself everywhere in the arts—in poetry, painting, fiction, prose, drama, music, and even architecture—it is "modern poetry" and "abstract painting" that first gave utterance to the growing, painful, shocking, luring, sophisticating awareness of a world.
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,*1
Yet these trail-blazing young writers and artists have struggled against difficulties and disillusionment, have survived suspicion and controversies, and have at last come to a beginning of recognition by the public. What the old have misunderstood and ridiculed begins to be taken for granted by the young. The contemporary scene is pictured by the leading article of the May issue of the Apollo (Wen Hsing) monthly when it flatly announced Half-Mast for May 4!:
"The great May 4 Movement is dead. Let us mourn her with half-mast and salute her in battle array. Though her children, Messrs. Democracy and Science, have gradually grown up and her third child, the vernacular literature, bas celebrated his 40th birthday, he herself is now dead. Amid the fanfares and thundering drums of new arts and literature, the pale mother is dead, dead for years. Pale she was, and suffering from serious heart disease. As the gigantic shadow of Hu Shih fell at last at the Academia Sinica in Nankang, the opening chapter of the history of new Chinese literature was finished. The pens that are busy writing the second chapter are held by the generation under forty. There still remain a few, scattered veteran writers of that age, but the rusty pens now hang limp and helpless in their shaky hands, capable, at most, of repeated anniversifying. Their pens, indeed, are no longer steady enough to write the title of the second chapter, though now and then they still add some footnote, to the first."*2
Ample Controversy
Yet the young poets are far from unanimity in their attitudes towards native tradition and Western influences. Comparatively, they form a minority in Taiwan literary circles. The Chinese Poets' Club in Taipei has a membership of 150 and is much outnumbered by clubs of the old school bards who keep scribbling conventionalized verses more as gentlemanly, diversion than as serious expression of life. Yet theirs is a minority that continually commands pleasant as well as unpleasant attentions. Paradoxically, they have proved more intellectual, more critical-minded, and therefore more open to theories and technics from abroad than other members of the literary family, where traditional taste expects them to be passionate and unrestrained. This accounts for their readiness to engage in controversies with unsympathetic critics and also among themselves. There had been complaints against the difficulty and distastefulness of modern poetry, but it was not until the middle of 1959 that the murmur broke out into open censure which provoked personal as well as promiscuous debates between the criticizing and the criticized. The usual charges against modern poetry are that it is ungrammatical, unmusical, unintelligible, unpleasant, and unmemorable. To these the poets' ready retort is that the prosaic public is unintelligent, unimaginative, and therefore unsympathetic. Like all quarrels of an aesthetic nature, it ended without a conclusion and neither party was converted. Yet the controversy had its more fruitful aspects. Somehow it checked the misdirected impulse and experimental excesses of some immature scrawlers and acquainted some of the accusing party and the less prejudiced of the readers with the true nature of the new verse.
The first controversy involved people who disagreed on the merit of modern poetry. The second, which took place two years later, arose from difference in attitudes towards tradition. This time the poets turned on each other and gradually split into two groups. The radicals, discarding the long and rich heritage of Chinese literature, turned prodigal sons in their worship of masters of recent European and American poetry and in their gulp of foreignisms and theories in and out of fashion. At its best their poetry is interesting for its strong individuality, its ruthless search of the dark recesses of the soul, its brave acceptance of the excitement and vulgarity of life in the modern city, for it's haunting though often unpleasant imagery as well as its free and unpredictable rhythm. At its less fortunate moments it reads like sorry translation or unintentional parody of Western poetry. More often, it is simply unreadable. Soon the extremists of the group lost their heads and wallowed in nihilism, obscurity, and tasteless mannerism. They were duly disapproved of by the other group of poets who were of a more eclectic temperament and broader sympathies and sought to benefit by the virtues of foreign literature and at the same time to keep free from its less desirable aspects. Native tradition is important to these liberals, but it is not held infallible as the complacent conservatives think it is.
Island of Poetry
The absurdity of both the radicals and conservatives lies in the belief that tradition is stagnant: the radicals cast it away as a corpse, the conservatives cling to it as something already perfect and beyond change. The liberals, however, know very well that tradition is a continuous life that breathes perennial youth and vigor into every fresh work of art. They know that, without predecessors, the successors will get nowhere, that orientation of Western literature and arts is decidedly helpful to the creation of new poetry but is not an end in itself, and that the great masters of classic Chinese poetry are by no means dated and lifeless but are living inspiration for subsequent practitioners so long as they are read with fresh awareness and with insight and sensibility made subtler and keener by great writers in the West. It is made clear in their criticism as well as creative writing that the aphorism "Art transcends national boundaries" does not justify wholesale Westernization or the absence of national identity resulting from excessive internationalization of the arts. "The UN of the art's," says Yu Kwang-chung in Hail to Renaissance of Chinese Literature, "like those in politics, is open only to those who have obtained a nationality."
Apart from subjective comparisons, Taiwan is statistically as poetic an island as any in the world. The last decade has seen the foundation of some 20 societies and the publication of approximately 40 periodicals and 350 books of verse. The market is limited, as it is everywhere else in the world, but it is a sure one and keeps growing. The average circulation of a book in this category is between 600 and 1,000, but the more popular ones usually sell over 2,000 copies. The poets gathered and dispersed. Some went abroad and ceased their, lyrical singing altogether. Only two groups have stood the test of time and attained to national importance.
The Blue Stars
Most active on the contemporary scene has been the Blue Stars, founded in 1954 by Chung Ting-wen, Chin Tzu-hao, Hsia Ching, and Yu Kwang-chung. Since then they have successively published such poetry periodicals as the weekly in the newspaper Kung Lun Pao, the Blue Stars Quarterly, the Blue Stars Monthly, and the annual Blue Stars 1964. For the last decade the society has also issued about 30 books of verse collectively known as the Blue Stars Series. The Blue Stars poets, by general consent, enjoy a greater popularity than those of other groups, partly because of their frequent publications in newspapers and magazines of nationwide circulation, and partly because some of them have also excelled in prose, criticism, and translation. Poets come and go, but others come to stay. Of the more regular members of the society, we can mention only those who have left a distinct mark on the contemporary scene:
Hsia Ching, with three volumes of verse to his credit, has also written essays, two verse dramas, and translated Frost and D. H. Lawrence. Chin Tzu-hao, who died of cancer in October, 1963, was the author of half a dozen books, of which The Gallery is the best collection of poetry, and a translator of French poetry. Hu Pin-ching, known in France as Patricia Guillermaz, came home two years ago. She won distinction in France as a translator of classical and modern Chinese poetry and has been prolific in poetry as well as criticism. Huang Yung, a fine critic as well as poet, has produced little since he became a chemist in the United States. Wu Wang-yao, at present in Vietnam, was once one of the most promising of young talents. La Men keeps up a continuous flow of long poems which are interesting and baffling in their ambitious scope as well as kaleidoscopic imagery; his wife Yung Tzu is one of the finest of poetesses since the May 4 Movement. Chou Meng-tien, who earns a hard living by selling second-hand books and la high reputation by publishing first-rate verse, has made his way in modern poetry, though his writing is deceptively traditional. Chang Chien, youngest of the group, has arrived at his present balanced style from his early Dadaistic abandon and is known as a prolific poet, critic, and short story writer. Yu Kwang-chung, who studied modern art and poetry at the Creative Workshop of the State University of Iowa and is now teaching English literature at three of the universities in Taipei, has produced much in verse, prose, and literary as well as art criticism, besides being an indefatigable translator of modern American and English poets, including Dickinson, Jeffers, Auden, Cummings, Eberhant, and others. Hsiung Hung is an inspired lyricist whose melodious lines are dreamy, drifting, and rhapsodic. Fang Hsin challenges attention with his experimental resourcefulness, his unfailing modern sensibility, and his masterly orchestration of words.
Genesis Group
The other leading "camp" of rising young poets is the Genesis Group which was formed in 1954 at Tsoying, a naval base in southern Taiwan. Unlike the Blue Stars, members of this group are mostly men from the armed forces and their leaders are naval officers once stationed together at the Tsoying naval base. For the last six years or so these poets in uniform have been characterized by a common tendency to follow the teaching of Surrealism and Existentialism, to dismiss everything before Symbolism as old-fashioned and utterly worthless, and to reject native tradition. Consequently, their writing has been found difficult and has been unpopular. Of the important members, Ya Hsuen and La Fu are generally considered as highly gifted and more genuine and have been taken more seriously than their associates. Yet one misses the charm and spontaneity of their early works when one reads their recent poetry, which is more ambitious and substantial but a bit too contrived. Yeh Wei-lien, translator of T. S. Eliot and Perse, is the critic of the group and also a poet in his own right who shows expanding interest in a sort of symphonic juxtaposition of phrases and passages. La Ma also practices the so-called "automatic writing" and at his best moments is an interesting experimentalist. The Genesis Quarterly is the organ of the group and has been successively edited by Chi Hung and Chang Mo.
Loosely associated with both the Blue Stars and the Genesis are a dozen of poets, distinguished among whom are Kuan Kuan and Yeh Shan. Kuan, a platoon leader of the Chinese army, is the most unpredictable of experimenters in verse form and is admired for his naive but unforgettable imagery. Yeh has fine taste and a delicate ear and his verse has a singing ease in its transfusion of a remote past with broken glimpses of reality.
Once a powerful rival to both the two main groups, the Modernist School has now disintegrated and its publication, the Modernist Quarterly, is going irregular. It was established with a magniloquent manifesto in 1956 under the patriarchal leadership of Chi Hsuen, once the most controversial of poets and critics. At first, the school was full of creative impulse in having such active talents as Cheng Chou-yu, Ling Ling, Fang Ssu, Yang Huan, and Chi Hsuen himself. Fang Ssu, who prefers to sign his name Fonce, is the most learned of the band and has published, besides creative works fastidious in taste and delicate in feeling, translations of Rilke and Jimenez. At the climax of its influence, the Modernist School seemed to dominate the stage, but gradually the followers of Chi Hsuen came to find it difficult to put into practice his teaching, which maintained that modern Chinese poetry should be the transplantation of the foreign and not direct inheritance of the native. Then one by one the Modernists left: Yang Huan was killed in a railway accident; Fang Ssu and Ling Ling went to the United States and have stayed there; even Chi Hsuen himself, once so vigorous and insisting a radical, has now become a demurely benign old man. In spite of all the absurdities and inconsistencies, Chi Hsuen has made his contribution to contemporary poetry in "shocking" the present generation out of its aesthetic stupor.
Of anthologies compiled during the last decade, mention should be made of The 1950s Anthology, edited by Ya Hsuen and Chang Mo; Decade Anthology, compiled by Shang-kuan Yu; Creative Anthology, edited by Chung Ting-wen, Yu Kwang-chung and others; Anthology of New Chinese Poetry, edited by Peng Pang-tsen and Mo Jen; and New Chinese Poetry, edited and translated into English by Yu Kwang-chung.
It is expected that the poets will stay creative and controversial among themselves, as their fellow-practitioners of the most chameleonically fascinating of arts have done and will be doing in other civilized parts of the world. Art is greater than the artist. When the poets have really lived their lives, have loved, hated, and loved again, when they have really sweated and bled and poured themselves into their works, genuine art will be born and survive its creators. The contemporaries may ignore, ridicule, and even censure the creative minds that dream dreams "no mortals ever dared to dream before", but it often turns out that history remembers only those who have committed themselves and that it has a very poor memory of those who have been inactive and unsympathetic in their wise indifference or suspicion. When there is so much life for us to experience and understand, when so many influences from the foreign climates rush in upon us, awaiting our choice and absorption, when the daily speech of the people, the literary language of a rich past and Western ways of expression get so entangled and in one another's way that poets are called upon to grind and cement them into a new utterance, we have to be very patient in watching the slow and wonderful process of a work whose difficulty is unprecedented in the history of Chinese literature.
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*1 Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
*2 Yu Kwang-chung: "Half-Mast for May4!" Wen Hsing, No. 79, May, 1964, p. 4.
* * *
EXCEEDING RED IS THE LOVER'S BLOOD
by Yu Kwang-chung
Exceeding red is the lover's blood that turns Icekmd into a rose.
The lover is mirrored in lover's eyes; the lover's eyes
Look blue on looking often at the skies; the lover's eyes
Flow salty, saltier than the Dead Sea brine.
Blind and quick, like the bat, lovers are
Somnambulists beyond cure. The lover's realm
Is the madman's realm, the demon's realm,
Impatient and impenetrable. The lover's time
Is eternal fragments. The lover's thoughts
Are rays ultra-violet, unseen but exceeding hot.
The lover's heart, proud and piteous, uplifts
The towering steeple, but harbors not a dot of doubt.
Wearing immortality on the finger, and crowned
With the halo of love, the lovers yet doubt
The sun is light, the sea is salt,
The flint is fire, but believe love
Is fiercer than vomiting volcano, deeper than the tomb.
Love's magnetic field pulls the distant doom.
Open always remain the lover's eyes, even
In sleep, even between teeth of death, save when kissing—
When closest is the soul's discourse, when lips on lips
Stamp flashing brands of ecstatic woes,
Save in this moment, a minor eternity,
The lover's eyes, your eyes never close.
Exceeding red hot red is the lover's blood,
When lover and lover (when you and I) flame oxidized.
THE-SHELL
by Chin Tzu-hao
The shell is the temple of the sea god.
At midnight, when its door opens to the starlight,
The shell on the coast calls your name,
O you beautiful daughter of the sea god!
My room is unraftered like a shell,
Like a shell my room is so small;
My door opens on the vaulted blue
And commands such a colossal view;
My window is nightly visited by stars and the moon.
Indoors, the sea tells stories of the sea god.
Music flows, and you sleep on the sea.
You slumber on the sea, reflected as a rainbow
On the smooth surface of the mirror.
And tremblingly I pay homage to
Your forty black roses
And a crimson camellia.
Says the sea: Flow on me.
Says the land: Stay on me.
Yet together remain we,
Free from time, free from space.
Shell pattern records not the tide;
Number return where the primitive
And the cryptic were. We are in a foreign place.
Thus says the sea: Flow on me.
The shell is calling your name.
FAR AWAY THERE LAUGH THE SEYEN SEAS
by Chi Hsuen
Far away there laugh the seven seas. Wildly and lustfully laugh the seven seas that are seven mysteries, seven fantasies, seven movements, seven dances. Such multitudes of islands, lighthouses, fishes, seaweeds, men-of-war, ocean liners, sails, fishing boats, fishermen, sailors, captains; they live on the seven seas where you can fight, shooting with batteries, machine-guns, torpedoes, where you gaze with binoculars at the constellations and the horizons, on the seven wildly and lustfully laughing seas, the seven mysteriously undulating and weirdly dancing seas.
And nightly in the moon they listen to the mermaids singing such melodious dirges.
(All poems translated by Yu Kwang-chung unless otherwise-noted)
MACKINLEY FORT
by Lo Meng
Here War sits and weeps for the dead.
Thirty thousand souls sink to a realm deeper than sleep.
Gold is the sun, cold the stars and the moon,
Cold lies the Pacific, once seething and sizzling with plunging
shells.
Smith, Williams, even glory stretches no arms to welcome you home.
Your names, telegraphed home, were colder than the wintry sea.
Betrayed by death, God is helpless about your helplessness.
The negative of greatness was developed in blood.
Here even War himself cries and greatness smiles not.
Thousands of crosses bloom into an orchard, a lily lane,
Unshaken against the wind, against the rain,
Silent to the gaze of Manila Bay and pate
To the tourist camera. Smith, Williams,
On the confused lense of death,
Where is the landscape often visited by your youthful eyes?
Where was kept the records and slides of spring?
Mackinley Fort, where birds have no heart to sing
And leaves, no heart to dance around,
Any sound will stab the silence and make it bleed.
Here is a space beyond space, time beyond clock.
Here even the speechless horizon speaks more than the dead.
Sound-proof garden of the dead, scenery of the living,
Here, where God comes and also come the motor-cars and the town,
Smith and Williams will neither come nor leave.
Motionless as a dial without a clock, sightless as the face of years,
In the darkness of high noon, in the starless· ness of the night,
Their eyes are shut upon the seasons and the years,
Upon a world that never dies a complete death,
And a green lawn, green beyond any grief.
Here death reaps a rich harvest in the marble fields,
Where gaze the stars and stripes, timelessness and clouds.
Mackinley Fort, where white crosses dash on white crosses
As dash the white surfs against the Pacific coast,
Where a great bas-relief of compassion is silhouetted
Against the blackest background of black doom,
Thirty thousand stories are burning in white restlessness.
Smith, Williams, when sunset sets the mango groves on wildfire,
Even God is ready to depart, and stars fall in a downpour.
You cannot go anywhere, anywhere.
There is no door to the grim bottom of the Pacific.
GOD OF WAR
by Ya Hsuen
At midnight, at midnight,
When there blossom many a black cross,
Up the sickly clock tower, dead are the two sisters:
The long and short hands, with their cold, rigid arms, Signal the final V.
V? There's only death, triumph of darkness.
This is the year of famine. Mothers are calling
The departed souls of their sons. The young Poplar, Aged fifteen, to-day she can't wear the skirt
That she wore yesterday.
Broken wine bottles, pierced by Damascus swords;
Mute are the bugles; the torches are mute.
Men are lying on battered, carved shields.
Women are gasping, their babes furled in torn colors.
Tramping across many fields where buckwheat wither,
And smeared with bloody eye-balls, at Waterloo,
The steely spurs drive the dragoon's complaint deep.
Now wipes the God of War his gory boots.
Black crosses bloom, bearing no names.
Cold feast of the vultures; how drearily they peck!
Up the sickly clock tower, the two dead sisters,
Their arms cold and rigid, signal the final V.
ON THE CREMATION OF CHIN TZU HAO*
by Hsia Chin
As noon rises high, so rises the flame
That burns the immortal phoenix, The martyr moth,
The sun-flower.
Rises the lustre, rises the fire
That soars and soars and soars
Towards the sun, towards the God,
Above the dust, above the praying hands,
Above all languages, all shapes.
But soon will it return, falling
Everywhere like a shower of oracles.
*Poet Chin Tzu-hao (1911-1963) died on October 10 and was cremated at the Taipei Municipal Crematory on October 15.
VARIATIONS ON NIGHT, No. 2
by Fan Hsin
O night,
Night that falls so impatiently,
Sing me not elegies,
Catch me not with sorrow,
Try me not with a suspicious look.
Sigh I only a little bit,
Sigh at this petty poverty.
December. On the tropic
Some one trailing a black cape
Is going through a white arch
To attend funeral of the sun;
Departed for home is the sun.
Home is the sun. I have no home.
I don't even know my native town,
Strange. As to my ancestors,
They're respectable, but I don't know them,
Nor know I the watch's phosphorescent dial.
But a successive impact there has been
Since the prayer of Galileo,
That steals away numbers not mine
And persists on wiping their stains
On my overcoat.
Whenever night stretches in the darkness,
I walk along the fourth string.
It is raining, and stars all are wailing.
The street lies long and shadowless.
Shadows wrap themselves up around me
And half the strolling earth.
No one can ever remember my name,
Really, even including myself.
It's only a forgetfulness,
An overcoat long, long lost.
I am so poverty-stricken,
Deprived even of memory.
Postcards sent by the penguins.
Cracks of freezing from under the ice-sheet.
And now the tide withdraws.
From the remote island universe
There rises the only voice
Whispering a story without a plot.
And all the listening stars are ascending.
I find it's all nothingness,
It's all a vast illusion;
Only emptiness lisps of emptiness.
Night multiplies fast, guised in darkness,
And heaps up multangular bubbles.
I lie on my back under the upset nest,
Hatched by the cool slumber of the firmament,
Tickled by the Great Bear's velvet touch.
Prokoffief whisks past me on a tailless comet,
As I smell the magnetic music of octopus nebula.
Then comes through the tunnel of transistors
A dull, contemptuous laughter,
Laughing that I should brew pleasure for my self,
While actually I haven't.
Nor dare I expect anything.
I dare not, before the dawn comes,
Sing and escape from this spiral universe,
Nor dare I speak anything
Lest this petty poverty
Ah, this night itself, be lost.
WE STEP ACROSS A LAND OF MIST
by Yung Tzu
We step across a land of mist,
But not along a flowery path.
Looking up, we see light
Descend and dance on a dewy web;
Everything, then, is suspended
On a gossamer slender and light.
Precarious and sere and anxious,
The clouds are insidiously masked
With multitudinous faces of dread.
At moments when lightning strikes,
Many echoes are drowned,
Many helpless rippling echoes
Are drowned in the storm.
Yet firmly do I believe
I would stand and wait long enough
To see a flash of awful truth
Unmasked of mist and miasma.
BIVOUACKING
by Yeh Shan
To the right is the sound
Of the mountaineers' drums.
The birds are enshrouded
In dizzy despair, despair and despair.
The bangs of the rifle yesterday.
Have not yet echoed back.
When shall we be crossing the stream?
When shall we be visiting
The deserted fortress, there to smoke
And think of the startled eyes,
The eyes of the feathered souls.
Pillowed upon the butterflies, we feel
The lowest southern star is tickling
Our ears. As we turn to poke the fire,
Gigantic rises the mountain mass,
Black and heavy on our brows.
(translated by the author)
STATUE OF THE AGE
by Chung Tin-wen
The lost age, the colossal age
Hardens into swarthy rocks
And rises, precipice-like,
Over the victims of our time.
Many are sighing, others are weeping
That doomsday so soon should come.
They cry lest the jagged rocks
Hurl from the sky.
A last Michelangelo am I,
Who seeks an image from the block,
When two arms dripping blood are seen
Tearing at the dark West and dark East.
Peace and war, creation and ruin,
The two gigantic arms of our age,
Nailed on the rood of destiny,
Bear the torment with serenity.
So will I sculpture a statue
For our age, in the image of Christ;
And from my chisel and my hammer
Will dart and scatter the flashing sparks.