Born in Nanjing, Yu Guangzhong (Yu Kwang-chung being his preferred spelling) matriculated at Nanjing and Amoy Universities in China. He received a B.A. from National Taiwan University in 1952 and an M.F.A. from University of Iowa in 1959. He has taught at various universities in Taiwan and Hong Kong and was twice a Fulbright scholar in the United States, in 1964–66 and 1969–71. He is Chair Professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Gaoxiong, Taiwan, where he was also Dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1985 to 1991.
A prolific and versatile writer, Yu has published fifty books; eighteen are poetry and the others are collections of lyrical essays, literary criticism, and translations (of Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Anglo-American poetry, Turkish poetry, etc.). A dozen or so of his poems are well known either as popular songs or as textbook selections, most notably, “Nostalgia,” “Nostalgia in Four Rhymes,” and “A Folk Song.” Recipient of all major literary awards in Taiwan, including the National Literary Award in Poetry, he was president of the Taipei Chinese Center, PEN International, from 1990 to 1998.
When I am dead, lay me down between the Yangzi
And the Yellow River, and pillow my head
On China, white hair against black soil,
Most beautiful, O most maternal of lands,
And I will sleep my soundest, taking
The whole mainland for my cradle, lulled
By the requiem that rises on both sides
From the two great rivers, two long, long songs
That on and on flow forever to the East.
This the world’s most indulgent, roomiest bed
Where, content, a heart pauses to rest
And recalls how, on an icy Michigan night,
A young man from China used to look
Intensely toward the East, through
The darkness to the dawn of China.
So with hungry eyes he devoured
The map, eyes that for seventeen years had starved
For a glimpse of home, and like a new-weaned child
He drank with one gulp all the rivers and lakes
From the mouth of Yangzi all the way up
To Boyang and Dongting and to Koko Nor.
(1966; revised 1998)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Let war rage on beyond the double bed
As I lie on the length of your slope
And hear the straying bullets
Like a whistling swarm of glow-worms
Swish by over your head and mine
And through your hair and through my beard.
On all sides let revolutions growl,
Love at least is on our side.
We’ll be safe at least before the dawn;
When nothing is there to rely upon,
On your supple slope I can still depend.
Tonight, let mountains topple and earth quake,
The worst is but a fall down your vale.
Let banners and bugles rise high on the hills,
Six feet of rhythm at least are ours;
Before sunrise at least you still are mine,
Still so sleek, so soft, so fully alive
To kindle a wildness pure and fine.
Let Night and Death on the border of darkness
Launch the thousandth siege of eternity
As we plunge whirling down, Heaven beneath,
Into the maelstrom of your limbs.
(1966)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Who, after all, can argue with the grave
When death is the only permanent address?
When all the condolers have left,
What if the undertaker’s back door
Faces the south or the north?
The coach looks always ready for exile,
And none can dissuade it from the trip.
So-called immortality
May prove nothing but an empty password
For whoever must travel at night,
Even if it works and convinces.
None ends up taller than the bristlegrass
Unless his name soars to the stars
To join Li Bai or Rilke
while the rest
Is left behind beneath the grass.
Keep names to names, dust to dust,
Stars to stars, earthworms to earthworms.
If a voice calls under the night sky,
Who, indeed, is going to answer
Except a glimmer from above
Or a cricket from below?
(1967)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
If a war is raging afar, shall I stop my ears
Or shall I sit up and listen in shame?
Shall I stop my nose or breathe and breathe
The smothering smoke of troubled air? Shall I hear
You gasp lust and love or shall I hear the howitzers
Howl their sermons of truth? Mottos, medals, widows,
Can these glut the greedy palate of Death?
If far away a war is frying a nation
And fleets of tanks are ploughing plots in spring,
A child is crying by its mother’s corpse
Of a dumb and blind and deaf tomorrow;
If a nun is squatting on her fiery bier
With famished flesh singeing a despair
And black limbs ecstatic round Nirvana
As a hopeless gesture of hope. If
We are in bed, and they’re in the field
Sowing peace in acres of barbed wire,
Shall I feel guilty or shall I feel glad,
Glad that I’m making not war but love,
And in my arms writhes your nakedness, not the foe’s?
If afar there rages a war, and there we are—
You a merciful angel, clad all in white
And bent over the bed, with me in bed—
Without hand or foot or eye or without sex
In a field hospital that smells of blood.
If a war O such a war is raging afar,
My love, if right there we are.
(1967)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
When I was young,
Nostalgia was a tiny stamp,
Me on this side,
Mother on the other side.
When I grew up,
Nostalgia was a narrow boat ticket,
Me on this side,
Bride on the other side.
But later on,
Nostalgia was a low, low grave,
Me on the outside,
Mother on the inside.
And at present,
Nostalgia becomes a shallow strait,
Me on this side,
Mainland on the other side.
(1972)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Once I looked through the city’s fanciest shops
Just for a graceful desk lamp
With a firm stand, a slim upright post,
And a classical shade trimmed with lace,
Like a parasol soft with yellow halo
To offer me such gallant shelter
Against the night, the dark downpour
Of the night. Just for a cozy lamp
To share night after windy night
All in the aura of fellowship.
For when night falls, the lamp stands on my side
With history out there on the night’s side,
And in between an endless whirlwind blows.
Is night, then, for the bed or the lamp?
Is it with the asleep or with the awake?
In the end will always come a time
In utter silence and solitude to face
Whispering ghosts up on the walls, to face oneself
And shoulder all the dark weight of night.
The asleep are launched on a thousand pillows
To be ferried to a thousand dreams.
The awake keep watch over the same night
That closes in on us, and in ceaseless silence
It seems we’ve been sleepless thousands of years.
And the lamp by the elbow, candle’s child
And torch’s remote heir, seems to have shone
Through the long night that spans the centuries.
Yet, however deep the night and loud the snore,
A few lamps will always shine and drill
Holes through darkness to echo the stars
That shone before the patriarch torch.
(1977)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
—ON A WATCH
Uncountable unless under a magnifying glass,
Handled with care by tweezers only,
Such dutiful and skillful little slaves:
By what mischievous sprites, from where,
And with what tricks, were you kidnapped
To this curious device of a crystal prison?
Shut behind the round steel gate, waterproof,
Day and night, to a pressing beat, push
Around the center of quietude,
Push all the golden wheels of a mill
That grinds the heartless flow of centuries
Into years and months, days and hours,
And hours into fine flour of minutes,
Of minutes and moments and seconds.
So out it drips stealthily, through the gate
Called “waterproof.” This is the tiniest
Factory, that, tick-tock-tick, knows no rest.
If you doubt it, gently press your ear
Down to your wrist and closely listen
To the slaves’ songs in the crystal prison,
Time’s ever-chewing, gnawing monotone
When wheels meet wheels, teeth fitting zigzag teeth.
Are the prison songs, you ask, happy or sad?
Happiness or sadness is for you to tell—
A sad, slow tune or a brisk, happy tune.
Listen, the turning wheels are neither sad
Nor happy, even though rivers flow
From your wrist. Gently put your ear down
To the two pulses racing day and night,
Warm blood racing against cold steel,
Blood running faster, seventy-six beats to sixty.
At first the young blood runs at a hundred and forty,
The carefree hare jumping way ahead,
But the steely steps are closing in.
Lay your ear to your wrist and carefully listen.
Which pulse taps the rhythm of your life?
(1978)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Sunset says, behind the dark writhing pines,
That scribble of a burning cloud
Is the signature he left,
Changing from fiery red to ashy purple,
Valid for the evening only.
Some homeward birds
Flying over for a closer look
Are soon lost in the twilight, no, the dark,
With not a bird coming back.
This tale is most prevalent
In autumn among the hills.
(1979)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
If evening is a lonely fort,
The west gate open to sunset glow,
Why are all the travelers,
Who hurry on horseback,
Allowed only a passage out
And never an admission in?
And, once out, they’re all ambushed,
When sunset clouds switch to black flags
And the west gate shuts behind.
Often I turned to ask the garrison,
But was answered only by bats
Flitting up and down an empty fort.
(1982)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Dusk is a sneaky spider
That steals across the water,
Trotting on its multiple legs,
Not a trace on the tranquil sea.
You never know where, for sure,
The landing is to be,
And find only too late,
At a surprised backward glance,
That we have all been captured
In the vastness of its webs.
(1984)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
Rolled away in the recesses of memory,
The precious years that we had shared,
Never expected to be recovered,
Were displayed on a blue porcelain plate
By the salesgirl of the jewelry shop,
Who came up to us and, smiling, asked:
“Would this one of eighteen inches do?”
So thirty years were strung along:
Dear years, where a year spanned hardly an inch,
Where each pearl, silver and shimmering,
Warm and full, was calling back
A treasured day we spent together:
Each pearl a fine day dewdrop,
Or on a wet day a raindrop,
Or a bead in a rosary told
And retold on days of mutual longing.
So the thread goes all the way
Through the sun and the moon, around your neck,
And in eighteen inches through our joint life.
(September 2, 1986, on the poet’s thirtieth wedding anniversary)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
WHAT IS THE RAIN SAYING THROUGH THE NIGHT?
What is the rain saying through the night?
The lamp upstairs asks
The tree by the window,
And the tree by the window asks
The car down the lane.
What is the rain saying through the night?
The car down the lane asks
The road to the horizon,
And the road to the horizon asks
The bridge up the stream
What is the rain saying through the night?
The bridge up the stream asks
The umbrella of my boyhood,
And the umbrella of my boyhood asks
The shoes wet inside out.
What is the rain saying through the night?
The shoes wet inside out ask
The frogs croaking all around,
And the croaking frogs ask
The fog falling on all sides.
What is it saying, the rain, all night?
The falling fog asks
The lamp upstairs;
And the lamp upstairs asks
The man under the lamp;
And the man under the lamp
Looks up and asks:
Why is it still raining
From antiquity till tonight,
From a drizzle to a downpour,
From the eaves to the ocean shore?
I’m asking you, snail-slow moss,
What is the rain saying through the night?
(1986)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)
—ON A PAINTING BY VAN GOGH
A clanking drawbridge with rattling chains
Joining the banks of the canal:
Was this where once you trudged across
To a gas lamp, sooty and yellow,
To meet the family of potato-eaters
Hunched around a greasy table?
Did you really cross the bridge
To the wanen who grudged you love,
To pits even deeper than hell,
To Rachel’s scream and Gauguin’s scorn,
Flashing a razor in your hand,
To the asylum’s endless corridor
Beyond the sanity of common men,
To Lamartine Square’s scorching heat,
The loneliness of roadside cafés
And the lonelier haloes of moon and stars,
To the golden fields when July came on,
The swooping crows and the surging corn?
Yet what you lifted to the sun
Was not a brush but a gun.
The bang that didn’t startle the world
Till after a century the echo came
Bringing five million across the bridge
To flood hotels, restaurants, museums
And jostle in long waiting lines to see
What none, except your younger brother,
Had cared to turn and look at:
The sunflowers,
The irises,
The starry night,
The whole splendor of a new world.
(1990)
(translated by Yu Guangzhong)