Yu began his teaching career in 1954 at the English Department of National Taiwan Normal University, and rose from the ranks of lecturers to a full professorship. For the year 1973, he served as chairperson of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of National Chengchi University.
From 1954-1973, he visited the United States three times - in 1958-1959 he worked for his Master of Fine Arts degree at the State University of Iowa; in 1964-66 he taught as Fulbright visiting Professor of Chinese literature at several U.S. colleges and universities; in 1969-71, he served as foreign curriculum consultant at Temple Buell College in Denver.
Currently, Yu is a reader in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1980, he was persuaded via a long-distance phone call to serve for a year as chairperson of the English Department of National Taiwan Normal University by NTNU's president. During his term he was credited with bringing successful innovations, and confronting thorny and long-standing problems. Though that is part of what executive ability is about, Yu is noted as a versatile writer, without any formal training in personnel management or administration.
To teaching, Yu has added careers as a poet, an essayist, a literary critic, and a translator. Although Yu has won acclaim in each field, he himself most cherishes his poetic achievement. However, the critics, including C.T. Hsia and Wang Lan, insist that Yu's popularity results largely from his spell-bound prose. Whatever the case may be, Yu Kwang-chung will surely figure in the history of Chinese literature, both for the excellence and the far-reaching innuences of his multitudinal works.
Poetry and prose, to Yu Kwang-chung, are muses springing from his hands, the former from the right hand, the latter the left. Both "hands" have been powerful and prolific for over 30 years. Considering his impact on Chinese literary circles in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, Yu Kwang-chung is by definition a literary giant.
Although his innuence on modern Chinese literature is huge, Yu, himself, is small of stature - about 5 feet 2 inches tall. He has noticeably long "creative" hands. His eyes, charged with boisterous sparkles, are searching always for the invisible, and mystic. When reciting poetry, his voice resounds with a melodious rhythm, a clear resonance of comfortable clarity. His audiences, in and out of the classroom, are sometimes lured to a poetic dreamland - or within a melancholy lamentation, as if they were under the spell of a demigod. In short, listening to his lectures, in Chinese and English alike, is a delightful experience, within which sound and sense converge in harmony.
While Yu's lectures and poetry recitation have helped make him a popular poet, putting his inspirations into book form has more amply spread his fame both at home and abroad. Associations of the Lotus was translated by Andreas Donath into German, with the German title Yu Guang-Dschung: Lotos Assoziationen Moderne Chinesische Liebesgedichte (published by Horst Erdmann Verlag in Tubingen, West Germany). Another of Yu's books, in English translation, is titled Acres of Barbed Wire; it includes poems taken from Associations of the Lotus, Music Percussive, and In Time of Cold Wars (published in 1971 by Mei Ya Publications, Inc., Taipei). Associations of the Lotus (1964), a book of love lyrics featuring the triple image of the legendary maid, the lotus and the nymph, was so well received that it has now seen ten printings in its first nine years. Other major publications in poetry include:
Sailor's Sad Songs (1952)
A Blue Feather (1954)
Stalactites (1960)
Halloween (1960)
A Youth of Tang (1967)
The Celestial Night City (1969)
Music Percussive (1969)
In Time of Cold Wars (1969)
White Jade and Bitter Melon (1974)
Writing for Immortality (1979)
To Yu Kwang-chung, poetry is, in William Wordsworth's words, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected through tranquility." By poetic instinct, he might instantaneously feel "lightening" as irresistible pulses, flashes of revelation, "glad recognition" sweeping across his mind. But when it comes to getting these feelings down on paper, it takes hours, days, weeks, or even months. In fact, Yu confided to a TV interviewer, "it is possible for me to squeeze out something for newspaper/magazine editors who solicit an article on short notice, but it is an entirely different story with poems. My mind - for poetry - may remain blank for days!"
A highly condensed art form, poetry requires of the best minds that it be pondered over and over until the chord is sounded; it is produced through the transformation of intuitive responses/impulses into an organized structure enriched by images, symbols, hyperbole, metaphors, etc. "To do creative writing," Yu insists, "solitude is necessary, if not absolute."
What kind of poetry does Yu write? About what does he write? His recurrent themes are: obsession with China's traumatic experiences, social chaos, emotional frustrations, nostalgic passion, war, love, anecdotes of humanity, legends, myths, Taiwan scenery, friendship, flowers, and daily happenings. He writes on as many subjects as you can imagine. And nothing is too trivial. Yet, thematically, underlying his poems, especially in recent years, is a general reflection of "the political and cultural climate of China, of her (China's) past glory and present humiliation, of how this contrast weighs heavily on the conscience of a poet who tries to maintain his moral integrity and to spread his message among the young, and of how he still looks forward to the birth of a new China after all the throes and universal confusion." So did Yu proclaim in the preface to his Acres of Barbed Wire (see W.B. Yeats' An Acre of Grass for Yu's clever adaptation of Yeats' "poem of triviality").
In part due to this proclamation, Yen Yuan-shu, commonly known locally as an "acrimonious" literary critic, praised Yu as "the consciousness of modern China" in a commentary appearing in Literature Monthly (June 1970). The following lines from Yu's Music Percussive best describe the poet's feelings about China's past wounds, and his eager and compassionate longing for a mainland China in which he can take pride:
If still I am young, if young I have ever been (To die without ever being young deserves lament)
..........
I am a mainland China charged with tension,
I feel my pulse, convinced a heart is not yet dead,
Is still breathing breaths of the thunderstorm;
The Yellow River flows torrential in my veins.
China is me; I am China;
Her every disgrace leaves a box print on my face; I am defaced.
China O China, You're a shameful disease that plagues my thirty eight years.
Are you my shame or are you my pride?
I can not tell.
.............
Can you ever stop our endless difference
About my cowardliness and your innocence?
Haunted by mainland China's problems, Yu is still capable of looking forward with faith: his heart is now deeply rooted in the Republic of China on Taiwan. His homesickness looks to a 2-story apartment on Hsia Men Street, Taipei. The Communist regime on mainland China invited Yu more than once to visit his "motherland." Yu turned it down. The mainland that Yu yearned for is not today's wounded wasteland. Like many of his compatriots, he must resort to memories of the mainland before 1945.
Poems of nostalgia include Lament for the Dragon, The Death of an Old Poet, The Kowloon-Canton Railway, and White Jade and Bitter Melon. Commemorative or occasional poems range from When I Am Dead to I Dreamed of A King - for Wang Lan's Water Color Paintings. Poems like The Yin-Yang Dance, A Cat with Nine Lives, Pomegranate are rich in images of Chinese allusions. Nostalgia, Silo Bridge, and Starting from Thirty-Seven Degrees are anthologized in his own book, New Chinese Poetry (Heritage Press, Taipei, 1960).
Poet Yu - "A game of building blocks". (File photo)
Two of Yu's poems drew notably controversial critical reception: If There's A War Raging Afar and The Double Bed. Critics cite their sexual implications; adherents favor them because of the vivifying juxtaposition of love and war's repercussions. At least one long poem received universal praise: Associations of the Lotus. In it, Yu displays his verbal virtuosity, setting classical syntax against colloquial expressions, mono-structure against dual-structure, regular stanzas against irregular lines; and Chinese sentiment against Western craftsmanship. He is masterful, lining up contrasts in unique stanza form. In moments of spontaneous inspiration, the lines rise to sheer beauty... utter sublimation.
Yu has now published some 12 volumes of poetry, no easy task. According to Wang Lan, one of Yu's critical admirers, the poet has gone through at least four stages, namely, (1) a period of apprenticeship from 1951 to 1957; (2) a period of metamorphosis and neo-classicism from 1957-1964; (3) a period less of beauty than truth from 1964-1969; and (4) this period of coexistence of art popularity with poetic excellence. Yu came home from the U.S. in 1972 with the profound belief that the salvation of modern poetry lies only in restoring to it simplicity and broad humanity. He fosters modern versification, yet denounces any break with Chinese tradition.
There are two Western poets with whom Yu is especially familiar - W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost. From Yeats he draws the myth tradition, and from Frost he takes on the simple-in-style-and-profound-in-meaning impulse. By invitation, he posed with Robert Frost in a photo-taking session in Washington, D.C. on the occasion of a Frost poetry recitation. Yu found the New England poet so serenely charming that he wanted "to ask for a small streak of gray hair from Frost as a momento." Of course, it was only his heart's murmur. He did not get the "gift" of silver gray hair 20 years ago. Now in his mid 50's, Yu finds his own gray hair shining.
In his poem Building Blocks (Supplement to Free China Review, June 1972), Yu avows his faith in poetry, with a bittersweet sadness:
..........
"The passage of twenty years
Still finds me playing poetry,
A game of building blocks with words.
But such a game is too bad,
Played only by myself.
..........
The last loneliness is all my own.
And twenty years find me still in the game."
Yet, Yu Kwang-chung has clung to this first love – poetry – for 30 years and continues his courtship.
As Yu's right hand stays busy “building blocks" that his youthful playmates, in their later years, cease to share, his left hand has taken pleasure producing seven volumes of prose and criticism. His major books of prose include:
The Left-Handed Muse (1963)
Rain on the Cactus (1964)
The Untrammeled Traveler (1965)
Look Homeward, Satyr (1968)
Cremation of the Crane (1972)
Listening to the Cold Rain (1974)
Nostalgia Evergreen (1977)
Critically, Yu is recognized as a leading poet. Yet, in popular taste, it seems that it his prose that is held in especially high esteem - widely read by the general ' public (the so-called philistines), perhaps disappointing the poet. Most critics agree that Yu is most influential as a master of "autobiographical lyrical prose." He has shaped a poetic style unmistakably forceful, racy, resourceful, and melodious - a style that culminates in a happy blend of Chinese and English syntax. It is at once charged with a fresh vigor and verve. As in his poetry, the Chinese language in his prose is completely under his control. Chinese idioms, phrases, and slang become playthings that Yu hammers, twists, stretches, and compresses until they are refined to the poet's satisfaction. Semantic richness and syntactic complexity are fully developed for the sake of tone, variety, and effectiveness to the point of a linguist's surprise. Allusions to Chinese and Western classic works, insertions of phrases, reversals of word order, parallel structures, and periodic sentences abound in Yu's prose - let alone those literary devices usually lionized by poets such as the pun, hyperbole, and even alliteration.
If intellectual life is a game of constantly polishing one's words and ideas, Yu Kwang-chung has learned to love the game deeply-indeed, more than as a game... as a transcendental power epitomized, a burning desire to express "the truth of imagination" in its most vivid, varied form. For instance, in The Ghost's Rain, Yu has translated his profound sorrow over his son's death into melancholy strains capable of summoning the God of Mercy. Professor C.T. Hsia of Columbia University found The Ghost's Rain easily comparable in quality to any elegy by the best of Western writers. It is magic!
Yu declares in one of his prose works that if the English proverb - The pen is mightier than the sword - bears some truth, then three pens are in his hands - those of the ivory tower, traditional Chinese culture, and Western civilization, respectively represented by chalk, the Chinese brush, and the fountain pen. And if academic institutions of higher learning mark the border line, then Yu is both the insider and outsider. His critical pen is omnipresent, slashing at both conservatives and extremists in literary circles. Yu's own basic criteria for language in prose, and in verse, are: (1) variety in expression, (2) intensity, and (3) structural richness. Adding to these elements are sensitivity, character, and intellect. What is most important about prose is, of course, the cooking up of all these elements for a pleasingly flavored treat for the reader's (and writer’s) palate. And, believe me, it takes a talented hand to do a good job! Yu has met all the requirements with distinction. He achieved control through many years of repeated practice and experimentation. The fact that he did it the hard way, and perhaps most assured way, without going in for so-called "automatic writing," is the most brilliant facet of his writing career.
Yu’s mastery of language for the purposes of expressing one culture in the language of another, has been demonstrated in several translations. The following are his major publications in this area:
Lust for Life (Irving Stone)
The Old Man and The Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
Anthology of American Poetry (in collaboration with Stephen Soong, Eileen Chang, Liang Shih-ch'iu, and others)
Modem English and American Poetry
Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
In rendering English into Chinese, and vice versa, Yu has pinpointed many problems in the usage of the Chinese language, the most serious being the Westernization of the Chinese language, as often shown in journalistic writing, especially in the translation of the news wires from English into Chinese. For example, the passive voice of English is often awkwardly rendered in the Chinese. Other un-idiomatic, "direct" expressions have become too numerous to count. Unfortunately, there is no handy computer for bi-lingual translation at this moment. Yu, along with other scholars, considers translation to be an art of re-creation. It is a mighty complex task to accomplish. Few can do it well. Result: many splendid literary works suffer from poor translation in meaning and structure.
Yu did not hesitate to call the attention of the participants/audience to this crisis of the Chinese language when he gave lectures in Malaysia and Singapore last June in a series of celebrations of Poet's Day (June 6). In the lectures, he also outlined the latest developments/ trends of Chinese literature in Taiwan. The poet saw a recent rise of neo-classicism in poetry. Commenting on the development of lyrical poems, and poems about current events, Yu noted "Taiwan has yet to work hard on the two areas." However, he discerned a happy phenomenon in the adaptation of lyrical poems by young folk musicians here. Both poetry and folk songs are nourished. Furthermore, Yu said, the increased literary criticism demonstrates the growing concern and, in some cases, better taste of academicians, the professional critics, the artists, and the reading public.
By any yardstick, Yu Kwang-chung is qualified to be a spokesman of men of letters in the Chinese communities of Hong Kong and Taiwan. It was with enthusiastic support and full consent that Yu represented the writers of Free China in the 41st and 43rd international P.E.N Congresses held in London (1976) and Stockholm (1978).
Robert Frost in Fire and Ice states:
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice...
For Yu, the world is current; the combination sought is: art and thought (beauty and truth). Yu's self-professed lifetime goals really represent the cardinal virtues fostered by loyal Chinese intellectuals at all ages in the history of China: (1) maintaining moral integrity; (2) contributing to the worthy writing and arts of the nation; and (3) fulfilling one's obligation to a profession and society.
For Yu Kwang-chung, poetry is both immediate and ever-lasting in its effects on the audience and on history. T.S. Eliot's Pure and Impure Poetry is no longer a significant issue for Yu: there is only good and bad poetry. For all great poets/writers the ultimate goal is no less than immortality. History, of course, will denote Yu's final place in modern Chinese literature.