Manoa ("vast and deep" in Hawaiian) is a prestigious literary periodical of Pacific Rim writing that is published twice a year in Honolulu. This issue's special topic is contemporary poetry from Taiwan and is titled Mercury Rising, a reference to a poem by Hsia Yu. Because everything is in English, it offers a particularly convenient way for English speakers to gain an overview of what is otherwise a local and largely inaccessible art form.
Various topics emerge from this compilation, either in the poems themselves or in the interviews and mini-biographies of the contributors. One topic is the perceived absence of musicality in contemporary poetry. People who complain of this often assert that the true poets have fled to the world of pop music where they are busily at work writing lyrics for singers.
The veteran poet Ya Xian, interviewed by the editors by phone from his home in Vancouver, touched on the subject. Poetry used to be considered one thing and songs very much another, he states, but this changed in the 1970s. He then praises the first issue of the new Taiwanese journal Now Poetry (現代詩), edited by Hung Hung, who called it "earthshaking." One of its features, said editor Michelle Yeh, is that it devotes considerable space to song lyrics.
Hung Hung himself is represented by three poems translated by Steve Bradbury, a teacher of poetry and children's literature at National Central University. Bradbury has published a book of his translations of poems by Hsia Yu (Fusion Kitsch, Zephyr Press, 2001), and Hsia Yu is a professional song lyricist who currently divides her time between Taipei and Paris.
It so happens that Hung Hung also works as a theater and film director. He directed the December 2003 production in Taipei of Hector Berlioz's oratorio-cum-opera The Damnation of Faust, a production characterized by a dream-like playfulness that had a lot in common with some Taiwanese pop music.
These things tie up, in other words, and no art can afford to remain an isolated fortress of self-scrutiny for very long.
Poetry in translation always presents a problem; of all the literary forms, poetry is the hardest to translate. Indeed, in many ways it's impossible. Words that rhyme, scan or have particular shades of meaning -- double meanings, even -- are simply not going to go into another language with the same patterns, echoes and allusions they had when the poet wrote them.
What's more, song lyrics, more likely than most to scan and rhyme, are the hardest of all. So if I write that there doesn't appear from this selection to be a truly major poet writing today in Taiwan, how can I be sure? Everything's in English, so how can anyone tell from a mere translation whether there's a Taiwanese Charles Baudelaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins or Walt Whitman?
And as for finding out whether there's an equal to Li Po or Tu Fu in modern Taiwan, the problem is even harder. Most of us know these classical Chinese poets in translation, too, and in the final analysis have to rely on commentators from over the ages when it comes to assessing their standing. Reading poetry in translation is a bit like someone trying to describe what music is like to a deaf man (in writing, of course).
Even so, outstanding individuals are not really the point; the vitality and variety of the genre as a whole is perhaps more important. It's a pity, nonetheless, that no one in Mercury Rising attempts a comprehensive survey of Taiwanese poetry today.
The brief general introduction, though, interestingly opts to stress Taiwan's diversity and concludes that immigration has been the society's hallmark. As a result of immigration, the culture is both varied and has wide international ramifications.
For the rest, there are interviews with three well-established poets of the older generation, but after that we are on our own, and have to rely on a small handful of poems from each of 18 practitioners.
Judged by these alone there are great riches to be found. For what it's worth -- and remember these are all translations, none by the poets -- the writers who struck me most were the blind Paiwan poet Monaneng with his ringing rhetoric full of the imagery of mountain and ocean; the Hualien poet Chen Kenhua; the ecological protests of Wu Sheng; Li Jinwen especially in his sardonic poem "The Reporter"; the Atayal poet Walis Nokan; and Chen Li, also a native of Hualien. But it's impossible to tell.
In addition, this publication contains four short stories from Vietnam (an excellent one reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway by Phan Trieu Hai), some black-and-white photos of a Hawaiian theater group called Iona Contemporary Dance Theatre, a complete play by a fourth-generation New Zealander of Chinese ancestry, and a story from the Philippines. It also has some reviews of books by more mainstream writers, notably Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields, Huraki Murakami and Tim Winton.
In conclusion, we must rely on the judgment of Arthur Sze, one of the book's three editors, which has implications beyond the world of poetry. "Some of the best modern Chinese poetry comes from Taiwan," he writes, "and the evolution of modern Taiwanese poetry is the story of how the periphery has transformed itself into the frontier."
In contemporary Taiwan, one of the editors proclaims, "cohesion and difference are not in opposition."
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