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I'm here

The mainland is over there

By Dempsey DavisPublished about a year ago 5 min read
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"Homesickness" was written in 1971, when the direct flight between the two sides was still a dream, it was difficult for Taiwanese compatriots to go back to the mainland to visit their relatives, and returning home was a distant thing. Yu Guangzhong's "homesickness" is exactly the despair of homesickness. And now, Yu Guangzhong can return to the ancestral, comfort homesickness.

Now, more than 80 years old Yu Guangzhong is busy what? He is still writing poetry, prose, translation, and commentary - he is not divorced from words.

In 2010, a Taiwan literary and art community held a celebration party for Yu Guangzhong's 80th birthday, and Nine Songs Publishing House published three of his new books, namely, Lotus Root God, a new poetry collection, Raise Your Glass to Heaven, and Smile, an anthology of literary criticism in the past decade, and a translation of Oscar Wilde's play (The Woman Who doesn't Matter). In the summer vacation of 2011, he translated two poems by British poet John Keats that are more than 1,000 lines long, including a narrative poem that is more than 700 lines long and another that is more than 400 lines long. Singapore Youth Books also published the Anthology of Yu Kwong Chung in 2011, a collection of his new poems, essays, and commentariat written between the ages of 60 and 80.

Of course, Yu Guangzhong did not forget to write poetry. He once said: "All my life, since I have been writing poetry, if I have no poetry for three consecutive months, I am not a poet." His new collection of poems, Lotus Root God, is his 19th. The poem takes its name from the Ou Shrine near Daming Lake in Shandong Province, which is Li Qingzhao's memorial shrine. Yu Guangzhong has always been very fond of Li Qingzhao's works, so he took this name as a souvenir. "Lotus Root God" is based on the theme of singing people, the book of 60 or 70 poems, in addition to Li Qingzhao into the poem, but also written Qu Yuan, Du Fu, Lin, Chopin, and other poets, painters, and musicians, ancient and modern, freely selected, like an array of lines with words as a sketch.

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Tianya to return, not a traveler

There is also a legendary poet in Taiwan's poetry circle. His poetry collection is listed as one of the "thirty books that have influenced Taiwan for thirty years". In the 1980s, he was voted Taiwan's "most popular writer" several times, topping the list. His famous works established the height of his life in the poetry circle _ He is Zheng Chouyu, this famous work is called Error:

I hit Jiangnan past

The appearance such as the lotus blossom in the season

East wind does not come, catkins do not fly in March

Your heart is like a little lonely city

Just as the bluestone streets turn to night

Close, March spring curtains will not be uncovered

Your heart is a little casement shut

My Dada's hooves are beautiful mistakes

I'm not a homecoming, I'm a traveler...

- The "sound of Dada's hooves" has been ringing for more than half a century, and the wonderful melody still echoes in the ears of readers. As for the last sentence, Zheng Chouyu has a more philosophical interpretation -- in his view, "returning" or "passing through" cannot be interpreted only from the place. Enlarge to the category of life and death, no one in the world is to return, are all travelers, and for nature, no travelers, are to return.

Zheng Chouyu also used his life to explain the philosophy of "passing away" and "returning to others". He spent the best forty years of his life drifting abroad. He was perfectly capable of settling himself down, and yet he floated on for 40 years with no place to turn to. This kind of drifting seems to be a kind of independent choice, a kind of questioning of life. Until a few years ago, he returned to the motherland and left his household registration in Kinmen, which is across the water from Xiamen. In his view, Kinmen is a bridge between the mainland and Taiwan, a view expressed in one of his poems, The Bridge. He has paid close attention to the cultural exchanges between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits and expressed his views on traditional Chinese characters and Taiwanese students studying on the mainland. He supports anything that helps the cultural exchanges between the two sides.

After SETTLING DOWN, ZHENG Chouyu was over 80 years old, but he still kept ON poetry and drinking. His talent and chivalry were still there, and his creativity was still there. Taiwan officials choreographed a dance about Taiwan Aborigines, and he wrote a long poem with acts 3 and 4 as a background for the dance. At other times, he taught literature, edited poetry, and participated in poetry fairs. He stood not so far away from the poem, sometimes watching quietly, sometimes participating, just at a good distance.

Perhaps, this era is not the best era for poetry, but fortunately, people are familiar with the poets, and still insist on poetry or art, and the light of idealism has not completely sunk. Whether they return or linger on the fringes of poetry, that generation will never forget that, together with poetry, they were once young.

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Dempsey Davis

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