Read Paper Republic – A Rebellious Love Letter: Composing Taiwan Between Languages

My story is bitter, my wood is used to make pillars
My black book bag carries the granite cliff of last night’s dream
Because in this world, everyone is always on the road

This series brings together poems by three of Taiwan’s distinctive literary voices: Yang Mu (楊牧), Chen Li (陳黎), and Wu Ming-Yi (吳明益), exploring nature, sensation, and the question of identity. For the first time, these poems appear in English translation.

Born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s, these poets lived through eras of upheaval, uncertainty, and shifting notions of identity in Taiwan. Yang Mu’s Love Poem is a love letter to the endemic Taiwanese plant Aglaia formosana, gently uncovering a quiet yet resolute connection to a homeland that is, in his own words, ‘so very dull’. Chen Li’s Spring Song No.4 draws its rhythm from the Qingshui Coastal Cliffs and the Liwu River in Hualien, lingering between nostalgia and modernity, resisting any attempt to interfere with ‘the progress of a fledgling poem’. Wu Ming-Yi’s If Someone Were to Give Me a Mountain gives voice to Yellow Butterfly Valley in Meinong, Kaohsiung, threatened by an ecological crisis caused by reservoir development, yet ultimately refuses to name all the butterflies or to discriminate against migrant species, because ‘in this world, everyone is always on the road’.

"The spirit of resistance lives in Taiwanese literature" (Wu Ming-Yi, National Liberal Club, Cambridge, 2018). This series, curated by Nero Huang (黃恭敏) and translated by Wen-chi Li (利文祺), Colin Bramwell, Elaine Wong, and Nero Huang, is a rebellious love letter from the world of Taiwanese poetry to the English-speaking world. Rooted in a shared reflection on nature, identity, and existence, this letter invites its readers to encounter a Formosan red wood among coastal mixed forests, carries birdsong from the fissures of Hualien’s granite cliffs, and lets loose the transient lemon butterflies passing through the yellow valley of Meinong.

—Nero Huang, series curator