Wandering Mind and Metaphysical Thoughts: 遊神與玄思

Gao Xingjian

maalis 2018 · The Chinese University Press

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Gao Xingjian does not write many poems, but the ones he has written are real gems; they are snippets of his reflective moods. To those of us who know the man, he is poetry incarnate, with the essential purity and density of a good poem. The present collection, his first and only poetry anthology in English translation, affords insights into Gao's philosophy of freedom and the independence of spirit, and elucidates his ideas as a novelist, dramatist and painter. Modern art, claims Gao, is at a crisis point, under attack from all sides by onslaughts coming especially from politics and the marketplace, which results in what he calls the "annihilation" of beauty. We see Gao Xingjian as a natural, warm, and insightful thinker capable of grace, beauty, and his own brand of esoteric wisdom, at times almost honest to a fault but not without a touch of humor and wittiness. A riveting and compulsive read.

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GAO XINGJIAN is the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known for his critically acclaimed novels and plays, he is also a noted painter, poet, photographer, translator, theater director, movie director, and literary theorist. GILBERT C.F. FONG is the Provost and Professor of Translation at Hang Seng Management College in Hong Kong. An acclaimed translator and literature scholar, he is known for his English translations of the plays by Gao Xingjian, which were published in The Other Shore, Snow in August, Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, Of Mountains and Seas, and City of the Dead. He also translated into Chinese the poems by contemporary poets Anne Waldman and Major Jackson and several plays for performance on the Hong Kong stage.