Yung Man-Han, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Cheng Kung University

Translated by Wai-lim Yip (1966)

Four poems comprise “Feel of the Door,” a mutually echoing synthesis. Each poem is composed of two sections; in the first two poems the two sections are of equal length, but the third poem is unbalanced – the first section is made up of only two lines, while the second section consists of nine lines. Positioned midway through the work, this imbalance marks a turning point. The distribution shows that the poet devoted the most ink to the first poem, while the succeeding poems grow dimmer and more distant, the whole resembling a roving dragon: The startling, vibrant head comes bursting in, then an instant later the distant tail wags briefly and disappears.

A rarity among modern poets, Huang Hesheng has inherited the powerful voice and feel of classical Chinese poetry: He uses uninterrupted sound to transmit emotion and string ideas together. Formally, the work seems to be composed of entirely Western-style sentence structures, but owing to the orderly arrangement and variation of conjunctions, readers won’t feel that the adjectives are superfluous decorations. Examined carefully, every bit of language contains a story, like a TV serial in which one episode leads to another. In telling the story, however, Huang Hesheng reveals the whole through the sum of the parts. For example, the lines “shut in again / …its pale throbbing heart and the fading yellow hands” are full of expressiveness and the psychological state that underlies such expressiveness. Stranger still, the poet employs math and physics jargon to express emotion: “the lines leading to the far-off point of intersection”; “no more outer chord of contact, no more straight line, no more angle symbolic of infinity, no more intersection.” Life’s vicissitudes adhere to the grave and sober world of science, yet the language is apposite and moving. A high-school student inadvertently turns the content of a textbook into poetry; we remember the people from the time of the Classic of Poetry; we see a donkey, a fish, a tree, even the moving axle of a horse-cart – all express emotion. Unfortunately, most people believe that only the things of nature are alive, and see no use in offbeat and unfamiliar items. Nor do they understand why Huang Hesheng could write four poems about a door, and not about subjects such as love, homesickness, war or death. They don’t understand that the high-school student has blazed a new trail in Chinese poetry: a looking back on the separation and reuniting of an object’s inner qualities, such as one’s own life experiences, ineffable destiny or separation, a kind of even purer thought. Grammatically, the poet very naturally transforms Chinese into Western analytics, much like the extensions and collisions of cells dividing. In this way a group of things can be divided into scores of features to complete the grasp of their depth. Aren’t these thoughts absolutely necessary in the realm of science? And aren’t we eager for this power in every kind of situation?

Layer by layer, the poem reveals the appearance of objects and their life essences. The things the poet writes about fully present the message he receives at the moment of contact in that special time and space; because this message is unique, we can see the position and plenitude of people in the world – a sense of self confidence and affirmation are the most precious part of Huang Hesheng’s poetry.

Weng Wenxian, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Cheng Kung University 

Huang Hesheng (1939- ) is a Taipei native. In his first year at Cheng Kung Senior High School he met the poet Ji Xian, an art teacher at the school, and began to submit to Ji’s Modern Poetry Quarterly. Huang thus became the first member of the “modern faction” that formed in 1956, publishing the collection Tactile Life that same year. A second-year high school student, Huang was seventeen years old at the time. He continued to write for one or two more years, publishing primarily in Hong Kong’s New Tides of Literature and Art magazine. At age nineteen he stopped writing; after high-school graduation Huang took over his father’s printing business, which he still operates today.

Although Tactile Life was Huang Hesheng’s sole published volume of poetry, the language is strikingly original, the work a classic of modernist Chinese verse. In the 1958 March issue (No. 21) of Modern Poetry Lin Hengtai praised Huang’s unique achievements in form and rhythm. Six of Huang’s works appear in English translation in Ye Weilian’s Modern Chinese Poetry: Twenty Poets from the Republic of China. After Modern Poetry resumed publication in 1983, the magazine’s first issue was devoted to Huang Hesheng, with poets Lin Hengtai, Mei Xian, Shang Qin and others weighing in on Huang’s literary accomplishments. Lin Hengtai called Huang modern poetry’s “spiritual eye,” Ji Xian said, “Huang He Sheng’s work completely eliminates the layers of maxim and meaning, going straight to the heart of the abstract world,” lauding Huang as poetry’s “Kandinsky;” Shang Qin noted that Huang gave “feeling and emotion” to abstract concepts, creating a mood of “lyrical abstraction.” 

When Tactile Life came out in 1956, many in the poetry world were “unable to make sense of it;” thus, only five hundred copies of the collection were printed. To mark the 1993 tenth anniversary of Modern Poetry’s republication, Taiwan poet Hong Hong traveled to Hong Kong to collect thirty of Huang’s works that had run in New Tides of Literature and Art, publishing them together with the first edition of Tactile Life and assorted critical writings on Huang. Scholar Wen Naoxian has taken another perspective on Huang’s life and poetry, calling him Taiwan’s “Rimbaud.” Unfortunately, because of the influence of the vernacular movement and the memory of older poetry, many readers are unable to appreciate his work – hence, unlike the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Huang Hesheng has failed to gain wide acceptance.

Note: Six of Huang Hesheng poems were selected for Ye Weilian’s Modern Chinese Poetry: Twenty Poets from the Republic of China are: “Feel of the Door,” “At the End of the Season,” “Before Sadness Begins,” “Will Be Blown Up,” “Image of the Arc,” and “Hunger and Thirst.” Unfortunately, the poems were deleted at the time of publication; “Feel of the Door” is reprinted here with Ye Weilian’s permission.