Yu Kwang-chung, poet, dies at 89

Yu Kwang-chung, a Taiwan writer, translator and poet, died at 89 on Thursday morning.

On the Chinese mainland, Yu was best known for his poem Nostalgia, in which he describes his feelings for his hometown. Included in primary school textbooks, the poem has been widely recited by people across the country.

In 1992, when Yu returned to the mainland after a 43-year absence, he read the poem to audiences on China Central Television.

Liang Shiqiu, one of the masters of Chinese contemporary literature and one of Yu’s teachers at Taiwan University, once praised him as a talent who “could write poetry with the right hand and prose with the left — unparalleled at the time”.

Although generally associated with Taiwan, Yu was born and grew up on the mainland. His writing was also deeply influenced by his English studies and experience traveling in many countries and regions.

“The mainland is my mother, Taiwan is my wife, Hong Kong is my mistress, and Europe is an affair. … I love the mainland the most,” he once said in an interview.

Born in 1928 in Nanjing, Yu spent his childhood in Chongqing, capital of the Republic of China from 1937 to 1945.

In 1947, Yu enrolled in the University of Nanking, and studied English. In 1949, his family moved to Hong Kong, and in 1950 moved to Taiwan. He studied English at Taiwan University until 1952.

In 1971, Yu wrote Nostalgia only in 20 minutes, but he said in many interviews that he had been preparing it for 20 years.

Though Yu is known on the mainland mainly as a poet, many critics, including Taiwan’s celebrated historian and writer Li Ao, said he was best at prose.

Yu published 21 collections of poems, 11 prose collections and five collections of reviews.

In addition, he spent a third of his life translating famous English works into Chinese and Chinese poems into English.

Even burned down to ashes, my soul of the Han and Tang dynasties will linger in that rich land.”

Yu Kwang-chung, poet

He translated a collection of poems by English poet John Keats, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and four comedies by one of his favorite writers, Oscar Wilde. He translated his own poetry collection, The Night Watchman.

In both poetry and prose, Yu set loose his imagination about China — an aesthetic concept of the country with its long and brilliant history. It was an emotional connection that could not be cut off by geographic distance, and gave rise to a sort of nostalgia that accompanied him everywhere.

“Even burned down to ashes, my soul of the Han and Tang dynasties will linger in that rich land,” he wrote.