Resting titan of Taiwanese literature
Born in 1940 in Hualien,
Yang Mu (楊牧), an internationally acclaimed poet, graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of Tunghai University in Taichung and earned a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. The Taiwanese intellectual then taught at the University of Massachusetts, Princeton University, and the University of Washington for thirty years.
Upon his return to Taiwan in 1995, Yang fulfilled several roles with consummate ease and excellence. He was a distinguished research fellow and director of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, the foremost research institute in Taiwan. He also taught at National Taiwan University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and National Chengchi University.
The more Yang became established as a literary maestro, the more effort he made to cultivate upcoming writers in Taiwan. Apart from pushing for the establishment of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dong Hwa University, the writer-mentor also launched the nation's first-ever residency program for writers at the Hualien university.
Over a career spanning six decades, Yang won a string of awards, including the National Award for Arts, China Times Literature Award, Wu San-lien Literary Prize, and the Cikada Prize, which is awarded by the Swedish Institute to exceptional poets in East Asia.
Furthermore, in 2015, Yang was awarded the Order of Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon in recognition for his achievements in the literary fields. Other members of the prestigious order include celebrated author Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇), late poet Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), and prominent author of children's literature Lin Liang (林良).
For years, Yang had been a diligent poet, essayist, translator, and scholar whose creative writing style advanced with time. Relentless in literary breakthroughs, the prominent critical thinker has been widely recognized as a literary titan from Taiwan.
He was even described by Nils Göran David Malmqvist (馬悦然), a former selection committee member for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a translator of Yang’s works, as the Taiwanese poet who came closest to winning the prestigious award.
"To him, there are no short cuts to true scholarship, he taught himself old English in order to appreciate the epic poem Beowulf, Middle English in order to study works by Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries, Classical Greek in order to acquire himself with the works of Homer and Pindaros, and German in order to translate the first part of Ernst Robert Curtius' monumental work Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter into Chinese,"
the late Swedish sinologist said.