Liu Zhengzhong, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University

Luo Fu wrote the opening sections of Death of a Stone Cell when he was sent to the island of Jinmen to serve as press liaison officer in 1959. There, he spent ten months on the frontline before being transferred back to Taipei. Just prior to his arrival in Jinmen the August 23rd Artillery Bombardment (The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis) had taken place, and bloodstained, smoke-filled bunkers still echoed with the roar of cannon fire. This experience is linked with the poet’s earlier warzone encounters on the mainland (at the time he had already been separated from his home and relatives in China for ten years, and hopes of returning were growing increasingly slim), and in the years that followed much of his writing focused on those ordeals. Published in 1959, Death of a Stone is made up of sixty-four ten-line poems, with the images “stone cell” and “body” standing in clear opposition to each other.

I swept my gaze over the stone wall

At the top two bloody runnels were bored into it

                       (No. 1)

The “stone wall” (an underground tunnel and a metaphor for that era’s omnipresent sense of confinement) blocked off vitality and freedom; the impatient sweep of the poet’s “gaze” embodies a strong desire to break free of the confined space. Here sight represents subjective intention, while the “bloody runnels” “bored” into the stone wall are exaggerated symbols of the violent obstruction of that intention, reflecting a loss of physical mobility. With his body confined by stone, watching and bleeding – expressions of voiceless sorrow – are all that the imprisoned poet is capable of. 

In fact, actual “stone cells” only appear in a few of the poems, but “situational stone cells” (a feeling akin to being placed in a grave) are constantly deepened and widened. Symbols of death’s universal dominion reappear throughout the work.

With robust steps a coffin kicks over all the lights on the street

This is truly a strange power

Like a silk pillow the women have carefully folded

I travel afar, seeking a gravesite

To bury an unsolved crime 

                 (No. 11)

The death/life contrast between “coffin” and “lights” are linked with “robust steps” to form a dynamic process. “A silk pillow the women have carefully folded” on the one hand shows that death has an unexpectedly lovely touch and charm, and on the other hand symbolizes sexual love – the bed has become the most fitting “graveyard” for the “deathlike I.” Caught between sexual confusion and death’s despair, life is an “unresolved issue” awaiting burial.

Death of a Stone Cell is filled with two types of violence: One is the world’s violence against humans (war, torture, blood and injury, sickness and death), the other a subjective inner violence (rage, lust, revenge, and human beings’ monstrous and bestial natures). In dealing with these manifestations of violence the poet has refined a fractured, compressed, and cacophonous language, controlling the ten-line poems by dividing them into verses of five lines each. Thus, aestheticism’s tendency to cryptic expression, existentialism’s philosophy of emptiness, and surrealism’s irrationality are the work’s three major characteristics.

Liu Zhengzhong, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University

Lo Fu (1928- ) is the penname of Mo Luofu, a native of Hengyang City in China’s Hunan province. Lo Fu came to Taiwan with Nationalist forces in 1949. He studied at the Political Warfare Cadres Academy (today’s Fu Hsing Kang College), the Military Officers’ School of Foreign Languages, and Tamkang University’s Department of English. In 1957 he cofounded the Epoch Poetry Quarterly with Zhang Mo, serving as the publications chief editor for many years. Exiled from his homeland at an early age, Lo Fu has a deep first-hand understanding of war, death, and religion. Strongly influenced by surrealism, his early poetry was characterized by strong, complex imagery and strange, solemn language. In 1957 he began publishing his “Death of a Stone Cell” series of poems. The works were issued as a collection in 1965, winning Lo Fu recognition as one of the most creative and experimental poets of his generation. In 1965 he published “Sirius Doctrine,” commencing a literary battle with Yu Guangzhong. From the 1970s onward he carried on debates with poetry critic Yan Yuanshu and members of the Li Poetry Society, ever at the center of literary controversies.

Lo Fu’s mid- and late-period poetry exchanged complexity for refinement edginess for maturity and wholeness, a sense of the times emerging in everyday situations, the simple, the powerful language paying homage to classical poetry’s euphony, the works quaintly charming and philosophically profound. His poetic artistry reached new heights with Demon’s Song (1974), which employed “demon” imagery to interpret “self” or “ego,” hence Lo Fu has been dubbed the “demon poet.” Important later collections include Time’s Wound (1981), Stone Vineyard (1983), Moonlight House (1990), Angels’ Nirvana (1990), and Hidden Titles (1993). Since 1980s Lo Fu has received a number of prestigious literary prizes, including the China Times Recommended Literature Award, the Sun Yat-sen Academic and Cultural Foundation’s Literary Creativity Award, the Wu Sanlian Literary Arts Award, and the National Literary Arts Award, establishing his reputation as one of Taiwan’s greatest modern poets. After relocating to Vancouver in 1996 Lo Fu continued to break new ground, publishing Driftwood (2001), a poem of three thousand lines, to great critical acclaim. The four-volume Complete Poems of Lo Fu (2009) fully displays the poet’s creative richness. Recent works such as Dancing with Demons (2011) and Deconstructing Tang Poetry (2014) mark a return to stark simplicity and deep philosophical inquiry. Because of the Wind – Selected Poems (1998), Lo Fu’s Century – Selected Poems (2000), and Times Like These (2013) represent each period of the poet’s career. Lo Fu is also an accomplished calligrapher whose work has been exhibited the world over.