Source: umagazine

When I was a child, my homesickness was a tiny stamp, linking my mother at the other end and me this. When I grew up, my homesickness became a ticket, by which I sailed to and from my bride…

This is an excerpt from “Homesick”, the most widely-circulated poem by the Chinese-speaking world’s best-known poet and prose writer Yu Kwang Chung.

Yu has published more than 50 titles in what he describes as the “four dimensions” his works cover—poetry, prose, criticism, and translation. In writing he loves to travel across these different dimensions, and in life he also loves to travel. His love of travel has taken him around the world and has served as a constant wellspring of inspiration for his poetry. In December 2013, he visited the University of Macau (UM) to receive an honorary doctorate. Later he gave a talk entitled “A Major Source of Inspiration—On the Transformation of Artistic Experience” in a jam-packed auditorium—so packed, in fact, that even the aisles were overflowing. Those latecomers who tried unsuccessfully to squeeze into the hall were left sighing outside as the door closed unsympathetically on a cultural feast that was too good to be missed by any literature lover.

As if to make it up to those who had missed his earlier talk, Yu came back this March, this time as a writer in residence at UM. The news that Yu was going to stay in Macao for an entire month was like a welcome warm spring breeze, announcing the start of a “honeymoon” for those in love with his works. The “honeymoon” opened with a talk on “Travel and Culture”, in which he shared his life experience, and a poetry reading, where he read poetry with the students. These face-to-face interactions gave the students a chance to see a more intimate and humorous side of Yu, and for those who have never met Yu in person, we hope our exclusive interview for this issue of umagazine might give them a deeper understanding of this literary master as well.

Y: Yu Kwang Chung. | U: umagazine

U: What do you think of the honorary degree from UM compared to the other honours you have received? And what do you feel about what was said about you in the citation?

Y: It is also an honour. It is the fourth honorary doctorate I have received. I received my first honorary doctorate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003, which was about ten years ago. Receiving another degree from UM shows academia’s recognition of me, which is an honour and encouragement. I’m still writing—the well of inspiration for writing hasn’t dried up. Actually my relationship with UM goes back a little further—I gave a talk at UM when Prof. Iu Vai Pan was the rector, and I remember the title of the talk was “Poetry and Music”.

The citation delivered at the degree conferment ceremony mostly consisted of kind words of praise which I don’t think I fully deserve; and perhaps due to time constraints, some aspects of my work were not elaborated in the citation. Actually, apart from poetry, I’m also a prose writer. I have published more than ten prose collections. I once said that poetry and prose are like two eyes, which, only when working together, can present the world in all its dimensions and richness. I often quote this line from Robert Frost, “As my two eyes make one in sight,” which about sums it up. I started out on the journey of writing as a poet, but now I’m involved in all the “four dimensions”—translation, poetry, prose, and criticism, without negligence to any of them.

U: You have the reputation as a “homesick poet”. How do you feel about that? Are you entirely happy or are there mixed emotions?

Y: Part of me feels happy, and part of me feels it’s perhaps a bit too narrow. “Homesick” is short, and has a straightforward metrical pattern, which makes it easy to memorise and recite. It started to circulate widely after it was included in the textbook. CCTV [editor’s note: a TV channel in mainland China] made a song out of the poem. Later a dozen singers and songwriters, including Wang Luobin, Guan Mucun and Lo Ta-yu, also produced different versions of songs. If “Homesick” is a business card, then its inclusion in the textbook and its adaptation into so many different versions of songs has attracted more and more attention and increased its visibility to the point that the card has covered up the face. I wouldn’t say “homesick poet” is inaccurate, but I feel it is perhaps a bit too narrow. For example, later I wrote many poems about environmental protection, which apparently don’t fall into the “homesick” category.

U: How can “new Hanyu poetry” have a higher standing and a wider influence on the international literary scene? What’s your take on the chances of “new Hanyu poetry” winning the Nobel Prize?

Y: The international standing of “new Hanyu poetry” is yet to be improved, and it has yet to reach a wider audience. The international standing of “new Hanyu poetry” needs to be understood in context. Take classical Chinese poetry. Some sinologists are studying classical Chinese poetry, and some of the classical poems have been included in the curriculum for Chinese literature students. When we say “new Hanyu poetry”, we mean poetry written in vernacular Chinese which emerged after the May Fourth Movement. So it’s been barely 100 years, which is a very short period in the long literary history. Chinese is one of the three major languages in the world, and currently about 30 million people in the West are learning Chinese, which is actually not so many, and the fact remains that today’s world is under the hegemony of the English language, and so we really can’t say that Hanyu is being used extensively. I think maybe as more and more people start to learn the language, “new Hanyu poetry” will reach a wider audience.

About Nobel Prize—I think the reason why it has received so much attention is because first, there have been a lot of promotions, and second, it is organised by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which makes it look more grand and prestigious, because unlike awards organised by governments, it doesn’t seem to carry as much political undertone. But even so, I still think that Nobel Prize is just a “Western literary prize”, not a “world literary prize”. We have to remember that unlike translation between different European languages or Latin languages, which is relatively easy, it is very difficult to translate Hanyu into English. A major reason Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature is because he wrote in English. So we needn’t care too much about Nobel Prize. We shouldn’t put it on a pedestal and regard it as the sole standard, because it’s not.

U: UM proposed the concepts of “new Hanyu literature” and “new Hanyu poetry”, hoping to eliminate the boundaries between “centre” and “periphery” and integrate modern and contemporary literature; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao literature; as well as overseas Huayu literature. What’s your opinion on this?

Y: I agree—but only up to a point. I think it could indeed help with integration in terms of teaching and research—it could help to eliminate the boundaries between “centre” and “periphery” and gives one a complete picture where research is concerned. But I don’t think it’s a very good idea to use these concepts in our everyday life. We use the term “Hanyu” to distinguish it from languages used by ethnic minority groups in China, such as Huiyu [editor’s note: the language of the Hui ethnic minority group], and Zangyu [editor’s note: the language of the Tibetan ethnic minority group]. The language spoken outside of China is referred to as “Huayu”, while the one people in China use in their everyday life is called “Putonghua”. “Huayu” doesn’t have any political undertone, and it can be used throughout the world. So if these concepts are only to be used in academic research, that’s fine—actually it makes a lot of sense; but I don’t think we should use them in our everyday life. Even Hu Shih, when advocating the creation of new forms of literature, merely proposed “a literature of the national language, a national language of the literature.”

U: What’s your impression of UM’s new campus?

Y: I’ve seen the new campus. It has very good teaching and residential facilities, with beautiful surroundings, which will make teaching and event organisation very convenient. I hope UM teachers and students seize the opportunity and treasure the new campus and work together to help the university scale new heights.

 

Master’s Talk–Yu Kwang Chung on the Source of Inspiration

During his visit to UM in 2013, Yu gave a talk entitled “A Major Source of Inspiration—On the Transformation of Artistic Experience”. He also led a workshop where he shared his experience with beginning writers and answered their questions.

Transformation of Artistic Experience

Yu believes that there are three prerequisites for artistic creation, namely knowledge, experience, and imagination. Only when all three are present can “art prevail where nature fails”, he quoted a line from one of the poems by the Tang dynasty poet Li He. He thinks that art is, as Malcolm de Chazal put it, “nature speeded up and God slowed down,” and contrary to popular belief that art imitates life, Yu agrees with Oscar Wilde who once observed that, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

He used mountain climbing, along with his own poems and poems by Tang dynasty writer Liu Zongyuan and Song dynasty writer Wang Zhi, to illustrate that mastery of metaphor is the mark of a genius, and that truly ingenious metaphors are created by finding similarities where none seem to exist.

Realism: Direct Experience VS Indirect Experienc

The famous Song dynasty poet Su Shi once wrote a poem which goes like this, “Beyond the bamboo grove, several peach trees are in bloom/The river is warming, which the ducks are first to know/Beach wormwood is teeming, the asparagus just sprouting/Ah, the season when globefish are coming upstream!”1 Legend has it that some of the poet’s contemporaries took issue with the word “ducks”; why ducks had to be the first to know, they asked the poet, why not geese? Actually, explained Yu, as the title of the poem, “Inscription on Huichong’s Painting of a Spring River”, implies, this knowledge did not come from the poet’s direct experience, but from his indirect experience, which was his observation of a painting. Yu used this example to stress the importance of using both direct and indirect experience to find more sources of inspiration for poetry.

But Yu also pointed out that some subjects do not lend themselves very well to realistic reproduction, citing the different versions of the painting The Last Supper by different artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Dieric Bouts, Philippe de Champaigne, etc, all of which were based on the same story of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples recorded in the Gospel of Mark.

Yu shared his experience with the audience from the perspectives of colour, composition, and modelling in painting. He used one of his poems, which was inspired by Liu Guosong’s painting Walking on the Moon, as an example to explain how a new work can be created by transforming artistic experience. When he was creating the poem, he said, he was imagining himself as Neil Alden Armstrong taking a leisurely stroll on the moon, when it suddenly occurred to him that the two lines from the famous poem by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, “Looking up, I see the bright moon; looking down, I think of my hometown,” perhaps should be re-written into “Looking up, I see my hometown; looking down, I’m walking on the bright moon.” This transposition came naturally from his active imagination, giving birth to a new poem with a fresh aesthetic appeal and dimension the original poem didn’t have.

Reading and Imagery

At the workshop, Yu encouraged the students to read more, as one could always benefit from reading, but he also stressed that if one believes everything one reads, one might as well not read at all. He loves classical Chinese literature, which was written in a language in between vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese, for their beauty of words. He advised the students to put the beauty of words before story-telling in their own writing.

He advised beginning poets to write about personal experiences and emotions instead of life and philosophy. He believes that the abstract theme or emotion of a poem needs to be expressed through concrete imagery. He cited “The Quatrain of Seven Steps”, a poem by Cao Zhi from the Three Kingdoms period, which he thinks is one of the best examples of expressing an abstract emotion with concrete imagery. In addition to imagery, he told the students, rhythm is also very important for poetry. Indeed, he explained, imagery and rhythm are the two key tools by which poetry express beauty, and he advised the students to start with practicing how to become better at using imagery.

He suggested that beginning poets should start with reading and imitating works by established poets and practicing writing every day, even when it feels hard to come up with anything and even if there are no other readers except themselves; and if they keep doing this, it is possible to surpass their role models within three to five years. When he first started writing poetry, he told the students, he used to imitate the Crescent Moon School and wrote some awkward modern metrical poetry and later, under the influence of classical Chinese poetry, started to write poems with no stanza breaks. As his understanding deepens, his poems began to acquire a much greater breadth both in style and in subject.

Travel and Culture

“The universe is a temporary inn for all living things. Time is the transit visitors over the span of one hundred generations” ( “Preface to the Feast in Peach and Plum Garden on a Spring Night” by Li Bai2).

Travel is the translation of languages, and translation is the travel of languages. There is a metaphysical connection between the two. Literary masters across the world, from ancient times to the modern day, have all understood the value of travel—only through travel can one gain a deep understanding of the histories, cultures and customs of different places, thereby broadening one’s horizons and enriching one’s knowledge.

At the workshop, Yu introduced students to famous literary works with travel as the main theme, from Western works like Odyssey, Exodus, and Don Quijote de la Mancha, to Eastern ones such as Journey to the West, Journey to the West in the Great Tang Dynasty, and Xu Xiake’s Travel Diary. He explained how travel, in its temporal and spatial changes, is similar to life’s journey. While helping students to see the value of the travel diaries in these works, he also explained how these travel diaries later became symbols, or rather, ways of expressing human existence.

Yu talked about his travels in Europe when he was young, noting that everyone travels, and each travel allows one to experience a culture unique to that journey. He encouraged the students to take in each moment while travelling and stay open to what these little moments have to teach.

About Yu Kwang Chung
Yu Kwang Chung is a renowned poet, prose writer, critic, translator, and editor. He first studied at the Private University of Nanking and then transferred to the University of Amoy (now known as Xiamen University). He went to Taiwan in 1950. After graduating from Taiwan University’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, he went to the United States where he later received a master’s degree in fine arts from Iowa State University. He was professor at Taiwan Normal University, Chengchi University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan, and is currently its Kung Hua Chair Professor. He has given lectures and served as visiting professor at numerous Asian, European and American universities. He has received honorary doctorates from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan), and UM. He is a poet in residence at Peking University. This year he became a writer in residence at UM under the Writers-and-Artists-in-Residence Programme. He has published more than 50 titles, including a poetry collection White Jade Bitter Guard, a prose collection Untrammeled Traveler, and a translated work, Lust for Life, which is a fictional biography of artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Notes: 1, English translation of this poem is by Wen Shu, Wang Jinxi, and Deng Yanchang. 2, English translation of this poem is by E. C. Chang.