Forbidden Games and Video Poems

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.

Joseph R. Allen is professor emeritus of Chinese literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Taipei: City of Displacements (University of Washington Press, 2012; winner of the Levenson Book Prize: Post-1900 China, Association of Asian Studies, 2014) and In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry (Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan Press, 1992); translator of Forbidden Games & Video Poems: The Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch'ing (University of Washington Press, 1993); and editor of a revised edition of The Book of Songs, translated by Arthur Waley (Grove Press, 1996; revised 2000, 2011).

"Forbidden Games & Video Poems presents neatly crafted, sympathetic, and authoritative renderings of the work of modern poets..The translations are always readable and enjoyable; the selections themselves revealing and appropriate..A highly personalized and imaginative approach."—Howard Goldblatt, professor of Chinese, University of Colorado at Boulder, translator of Red Sorghum by Mo Yan.

"These translations are readable and idiomatic, with a genuine sense conveyed of idiolect of each poet..The lay reader is brought to understand contemporary Chinese literature in Taiwan in both its classical antecedents and its modernist variants."—Helen Vendler, Porter University Professor of English, Harvard University, editor of The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry