Hawk of the Mind - (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan) by Yang Mu (Paperback)

About the Book

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu's poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

Book Synopsis

Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history.

Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu's poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu's work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor's introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet's major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu's oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.

Review Quotes

The work of Taiwanese poet Yang Mu brings vivid and playful pastoral imagery. He examines both Chinese and Western literary and cultural traditions through his personal lens, and his writing retains its beautifully lyrical nature through the translation.-- "World Literature Today"

Braiding images of nature with self-aware literary reference and linguistic terminology, Yang Mu shifts between intimate and expansive realms as he adopts personae. Occasionally retaining in their rich and piquant translations some of the nonspecific agency that typifies Chinese grammar, the translators deftly lavish attention not only on semantic meanings but on meanings made by sounds and tonal sequences.--Forrest Gander, author of Core Samples from the World

An expertly translated, edited, and introduced collection, showcasing the distinctive craft of a consummate lyricist. "Poetry is insistence, not compromise," writes Yang Mu. What a sumptuous feast he has served us in that remarkable spirit!--Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

These are superb translations of a sovereign poetic oeuvre. Yang Mu's writing is at once delicate and forceful, reasoned and imaginative, cosmopolitan and grounded. Sixty years of poetry unfurl through a voice that breaks new ground time and again yet retains its constancy. Hawk of the Mind is a major achievement--and a delight.--Maghiel van Crevel, Leiden University

Yang Mu is always at or near the top of any list of contemporary modernist Chinese-language poets. Thanks to Michelle Yeh and her colleagues, the translations of his poems in this collection offer a generous selection of his lifetime of erudite engagement with both Chinese and Western cultures.--Edward Gunn, Cornell University

Widely recognized as the most significant lyrical voice now writing in Chinese, Yang Mu is a national figure in Taiwan who has been recently promoted as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Moreover, the translators are undoubtedly the very best in the English world. The renditions are superb and meet the linguistic challenges of the originals with dexterity and imagination.--William Tay, University of California, San Diego

About the Author

Yang Mu (the pen name of Wang Ching-hsien) was born and raised in Taiwan. He is the author of more than two dozen poetry and prose collections, including Propositions of Temporality, Interventions, Long and Short Ballads, and the memoir Memories of Mount Qilai: The Education of a Young Poet (Columbia, 2015). Among the many literary prizes he has received are the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Cikada Prize (Sweden).

Michelle Yeh is Distinguished Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She is coeditor and cotranslator of No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu (1998) and The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan (Columbia, 2014), among others.