Guest of the ilb 2005
Zheng Chouyu was born in Jinan in Shandong Province
in 1933 and grew up in Beijing. He is the son of a high-ranking
military officer, a background that deeply influences his work which
only on first sight seems to be of a purely lyrical nature; neither are
his political leanings immediately apparent in his poems. Despite his
left-wing sympathies, Zheng decided to flee to Taiwan, where he was
forced to burn his first volume of poetry in order not to place himself
in danger. Yet even his early, ostensibly apolitical poetry got him
into trouble. Time and again he found himself having to change
particular words in order to get his books published; still it was
mainly the poems from the fifties which brought him fame as a man of
letters.
His requests for permission to leave the country for a student
residency in the USA having being turned down on political grounds for
many years, Zheng was later denied re-entry to Taiwan and finally
settled in the U.S., where he taught Chinese at Yale University from
the seventies until 2004. There have been many translations of his
poems which also feature in school text books in Taiwan and Hong Kong,
although he lived only briefly in Taiwan. This inclusion can be
justified by the fact that the poet has recently settled in Quemoy – an
island under Taiwanese rule, situated between mainland China and
Taiwan. It was bombed by the mainland multiple times and was considered
an operational zone up until the nineties. For the past few years this
place has been Zheng’s preferred topic in terms of writing and
meditation.
Zheng is considered the most »Chinese« of all modern poets. He
masterfully understands how to combine classical Chinese imagery with
European Modernism. From this emerges the impression of a poetry that
is very accessible and has therefore been translated by many artists
into other media – into songs, paintings, symphonies and operatic
pieces. In some instances the poems have – for all their subtlety –
taken on the character of popular songs. As a result the poet has
achieved the status of a media star and today can sometimes be seen on
the streets of Taipei accompanied by fans. Zheng’s extensive work is
presently being published in a complete edition entitled »Zheng Chouyu
shiji« (2003; t: The collected poems of Zheng Chouyu), of which two
volumes have already appeared in Taiwan. The first volume covers the
period between 1955 and 1968 and the second the years from 1969 to
1986.
Translator: Wolfgang Kubin
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