Interview with Melusine Lin
Melusine Lin received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. She was one of the founding editors of the Chinese poetry journal On Time Poetry. She has published her poems in literary magazines in Taiwan and in Mainland China.
Could you share some information about your personal background?I grew up in Taichung, Taiwan. As a child I was taught to recite classical Chinese poetry in Taiwanese. This kind of reciting is in fact singing in ancient tunes. The poems are in quatrains ( chueh-chu : the most concentrated Chinese poetic form that requires the greatest economy of words). Taiwanese, as a dialect from southeastern China, is known by linguists to be derived from the dialect in use around the capital area of the T'ang dynasty. The dialect has preserved much of the original intonation and pronunciation. I began reading classical poetry at the age of 10 or 11 and wrote my first poetry in modern Chinese at the age of 15. During my university years, I was taught to write classical poetry and sing poems of various forms in ancient tunes. At the age of 21, I won an award in a national contest for writing T'ang quatrains.
Whom would you identify as your poetic influences?
My influences include ancient Chinese and Greek lyric, as well as modern Western poets. If I had to name my favorite poets, I would probably list Sappho, Rimbaud, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot. These are poets I always return to studying and teaching. I'm an avid listener of Western classical music, and particularly like Schubert, Rachmaninov, and Chopin. In terms of visual art, I'm drawn to medieval European art and late 19th-century painters.
Can you identify the point at which you considered yourself to be a poet?
I first identified with being a critic or scholar. My initial identity as a poet – grounded in study of classical and modern Chinese poets – was interrupted by my academic study and work in the U.S. But though they affected a kind of interruption, my graduate studies also added more depth to my aesthetic development by putting me in contact with Western literature. As a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I began to write poetry seriously, but it is really only in recent years that I've been able to focus more on my poetic voice. I would definitely say that now poetry is part of my everyday life.
Do you translate your own work into English by yourself or collaboratively?
I translate my poems into English in an initial draft, and my husband Eric Mader and I finalize the translation together. Eric is a writer as well.
How do you address the issue of identity in your work?
One could perhaps get at the identity in my work by thinking in terms of a hybridity of classical and modern Chinese and modern Western culture. Of course my work reflects the hybridity of cultures that I live, having spent major parts of my life in both Taiwan and the U.S. and having spent much of this time studying and thinking about literature.
As a professor at Dong Hwa University, you teach creative writing to graduate students in Taiwan. Who are your poetry students and what are there interests?
My poetry students are men and women around 25 years old. They come from diverse undergraduate backgrounds such as medical training, Chinese literature or law. Some current interests would include linking poetry to Western music or classical Chinese drama, existential anxiety such as loneliness, gay/lesbian identity, travel and others. The MFA program at Dong Hwa University is the only graduate program in creative writing in Taiwan.
In your artistic practice, you often combine poetry and music. Can you please talk about the process of setting poetry to music?
My early experiences in classical Chinese poetry inspired me to sing poetry more than to write poetry. I tend to read music into poetry after living with a poem for a long time. Sometimes parts of poems I read or poems I've written are incorporated into a song by inspiration. For example, the poet Hsia Yu presented her lyrics on Taiwanese novelist Eileen Chang to a poetry group we were both in. I liked the poem's classical language and set the piece to a tune employing some retro music. There have been other songs I have composed to accompany Hsia Yu's writings. The collaboration on the Eileen Chang piece was particularly meaningful, in terms of exploring the spiritual connections between female writers from different generations.
Can you please talk about some of the differences you see between female and male poetries in Taiwan – the communities and trends in the work?
Communities and trends for female and male poets in Taiwan over the age of 50 differ greatly. Although both genders are mostly writing under the influence of Modernism, female poets tend to explore their subjectivity through love relationships and challenge their gender role as defined in the
status quo. Some female poets meditate on the metaphysical aspect of being as male poets do, in a dialectical way – microcosmic vs. macrocosmic visions. Male poets, such as Shang Qin, focus on the absurdity of being in an existential and surrealist manner. Many male poets including Wu Sheng, Li Minyong, Xiang Yang and others devote more attention to historical, social-political thinking in their poetry. There is the conflict between cosmopolitanism and nativism. The analogy of Ireland vs. England and Taiwan vs. China cannot be overlooked. Thus the poet Yeats becomes a central figure or canonical poet among the translated influences for Taiwanese male poets such as Yang Mu. Among them, the poet Yu Kuang Chong shows more nostalgia for the Chinese cultural tradition and is at the same time a proponent of cosmopolitanism.
Can you talk a bit about the French influence/connection in your work and some of your contemporaries? Why the connection to French poetries and avant gardes vs. the British/American lineages?
The French influence in my work comes from my study of French symbolist and modernist poets such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. This connection is mostly built upon spiritual consonance. I also like the American/English poet T.S. Eliot who was influenced by French poetry in his early days. Hsia Yu became interested in French poetry through translated works. Her early theater experiences in Taipei, and later living in Paris as a foreigner, contributed to the playful, experimental, avant-garde spirit of her work. Hung Hung is an admirer of Hsia Yu' and has followed her work since he was young. However, Hung Hung's poetry has none of the lengthy mid-life reflections seen in late Hsia Yu's work. Both their styles are quite different from the British/American lineages of Romanticism and High Modernism in Yang Mu and Yu Kuang Chung. Poetry in Yang Mu is more ornate or scholarly in wording – the work is polished. Poets such as Yu Kuang Chung, Wai-lim Yip and Lo Ching who follow the British/American lineages tend to use more colloquial or everyday language in their poems. All four of them are scholars as well. Wai-lim Yip's work links Chinese Taoist poetics with the American naturalist poets. Hsia Yu and Hung Hung study theater art and link poetry to the spectacle and surprise of stage effect, the poetics of contingent happenings, shocks and hazards. Hsia Yu especially enjoys enjambing or twisting phrases for sound and visual effect.
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