Yang Mu – författare

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history.Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu’s work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor’s introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet’s major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu’s oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history.Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu’s work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor’s introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet’s major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu’s oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

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.

Yang Mu, a pivotal figure in the development of modern Chinese literature, is one of the most widely read living poets of the world’s largest literary audience: Chinese-speaking people. Providing a selection of poems from more than three decades of work, this book offers over one hundred translations that capture the poet’s haunting lyricism. Drawing on avant-garde traditions of Europe and the United States as well as on the traditions of classical Chinese poetry and prose, his work explores intense sensuality and the erotic, the anguish of war, exile, the colonial experience, and conflicting views of national and cultural identity.Born Wang Ching-hsien in Taiwan in 1940, Yang Mu lived in a rich cultural and linguistic environment, learning Taiwanese, a Hua-lien tribal dialect, Japanese, Mandarin, and English. When he arrived in the United States in 1964, the young poet added Old English, ancient Greek, Latin, and German to his repertoire. Yang Mu’s poetry fully reflects this dazzling range and diversity. This volume also includes an essay placing the poet’s work in the context of twentieth-century literary movements and in the long tradition of Chinese poetry.

Yang Mu (f. 1940), taiwanesisk litteraturforskare och poet, presenteras i en ovanligt vacker, tvåspråkig volym. För förord, översättning och urval står sinologen och Akademiledamoten Göran Malmqvist. Dikterna har ordnats kronologiskt, från den artonårige poetens romantiska kväden till den 70-åriga poetens senaste dikt. Därmed kan en egenartad utveckling följas i ett av samtidens främsta kinesiskspråkiga författarskap.