The English Department of the University of Macau held a forum discussing the development of experimental poetry across cultures and languages last week, and well-known Taiwanese poet Chen Li was one of the invited guests.
Invited by the English Department of the University of Macau (UM), Taiwanese Poet Chen Li joined the international Round Table of “Poetry and Experiment across Languages and Cultures” held last week at UM, together with Scottish poet Peter McCarey and English poet Chris McCabe, to discuss the development of experimental poetry – particularly concrete/visual poetry – across cultures and languages, especially in English, Portuguese and Chinese.
In the forum, Chen Li gave a presentation entitled ‘Poetic Experiments with Chinese Characters’, introducing his research results and creative works of visual poems, including one of his best-known, A War Symphony, playing with the Chinese character to reveal the cruelty of war . The characters that he used include “兵”(meaning soldier)、“乒、乓”(which looks like a one-legged soldier, and together are two onomatopoeic words imitating the sound of a collision or gunshots)、and “丘”(meaning grave or waste land).
The poem has been translated into many languages, and was selected for textbooks in Taiwan, and even in America. Published by McGraw-Hill in 2009, the university level textbook Literature: Craft and Voice introduces Chen Li as having “gone through several stages in his own poetry, first taking up Modernist technique, then demonstrating political and social consciousness, and finally broadening to an eclectic mix of subject matter.”
Born in Hualien, Taiwan in1954, Chen Li is regarded as one of the best representatives of contemporary Chinese poetry in Taiwan, and has received almost all the important prizes for poetry in Taiwan. After been invited to Rotterdam International Poetry Festival in 2009, he began participating more on the international stage, and more of his works have been translated into other languages since. In 2012, he was invited to the Olympic poetry festival (Poetry Parnassus) in London, representing his homeland.
Apart from being the author of over 14 books of poetry, he is also well known as a prolific translator. Together with his wife Chang Fen-ling, he has translated over 20 volumes of poetry into Chinese, including the works of Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Wisława Szymborska, Tomas Tranströmer, and Yosano Akiko.
His substantial translation of Latin American poetry not only helped him to build up his own writing style, but also helped to break down political barriers and crossed the Taiwan Strait to mainland. Chen Li’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry was well received in the 1990s among the mainland’s intellectual youth. His over 600-page translation work, Latin American Modern Poems, has been gradually typed out word-by-word and shared on the Internet by his readers in the mainland, as a result of books from Taiwan being difficult to buy at that time. His translation of Wisława Szymborska, published in Mainland China in 2012, sold over 100,000 copies within one year.
For years, Chen Li was the first translator to introduce many non-mainstream poets to the Chinese world. During the interview, Chen recalled an interesting story about how he started to translate Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who was awarded in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The night before the unveiling of the prize in October 1980, at around nine clock in the evening, Chen received a phone call from editor of China Times, one of the most influential newspapers in Taiwan, asking him whether he was familiar with Milosz’s work. They’d been calling all night but hadn’t found any Chinese who knew about this poet. Chen happened to have an English poetry book of Milosz on hand at that time, so the editor invited Chen to translate one poem immediately to meet the publishing deadline of the newspaper. At the time, without a computer or the Internet, Chen did a quick translation of one poem and read it to the editor word by word over the phone. The next day, China Times was the first newspaper to publish Milosz’s poem.
From the age of 18, Chen was an avid reader, reading anything he felt was interesting: literature history, philosophy, music catalogs, even a Japanese mathematic text book. Broadly reading led him to start to translate, and his translations in turn, affected his writing, combing in his poetry the elements of Western modernism and postmodernism with the merits of Oriental poetics and the Chinese language.
“Writing and translation help me to handle complexity by simplicity, and make me self-sufficient.” Chen commented, “I don’t want to concur with the world. I just want to be a hand that pushes the world of reading, doing my best to share the joy with others.”
Imagining Portugal
Chen mentioned to CLOSER that he has a natural connection with Portugal. In one of his prose named Imagining Portugal he wrote, “I don’t like going abroad… But when asked which country I’d like very much to visit, my answer is Portugal”.
“The first name of my hometown, Hualien was given by the Portuguese in 1500. They came here and found the Liwu River produced gold, so they named this place Rio de Ouro, ‘the river of gold’,” Chen explains. In his poetry book My City, Chen writes, “The beautiful island, conquered them, with its untranslated beauty”
Chen’s love of Portugal is also inspired by Fado.
“I’m longing for Coimbra’s Fado.” Chen recalls how he was touched when he first heard the song Coimbra: “On graduation day, the students were all wearing different ribbons at the school; the Faculty of Law is yellow, the Faculty of Literature is pink. You needed to sing to the lady teacher’s window until she was touched and nodded that you shall graduate…”
Chen has collected over 100 Fado albums, bought expensive books from Amazon, tried all the ways to understand the meaning of the lyrics, and has even translated many lyrics into Chinese. The first thing he did after his retirement was to sit down and write a 10,000 word article about Fado.
“I can say I’m the only Chinese writer who has ever written about Fado in such detail,” Chen says proudly, “among all the Fado history, all the touching stories are included in this prose.”
Because of this, Chen was invited to Peking University to give a speech especially on Fado.
“I played some Fado, and someone cried immediately,” Chen recalls. The article is included in one of his books about music, and the simplified Chinese version will be launched in Mainland China next year.
“The reason I accepted to come to Macau this time, on one hand was to meet other poets here; on the other hand, I was hoping to find some of Fado’s aura here as well. But unfortunately I’ve been only staying at the University of Macau for such short time.” Chen says, “Macau is my dream of an oriental consulate of Fado. I hope I can come back soon to find more.”
