An ongoing journey of moving a stone: Repetition, rephrasing and resetting in Yam Gong’s poetry

Abstract

Yam Gong(1949- ), the Hong Kong poet, is well known for his playful experiment in a hybrid poetic language that mixes English, classical Chinese, modern Chinese and colloquial Cantonese. The poet has seldom shared his literary thoughts publicly and has kept a distance from literary circles. A few interviews between Yam Gong and other Hong Kong poets have engaged reviews’ attention, leading to the discussion on how French modernist poets like Paul Éluard inspired Yam Gong in the milieu of the 70s and 80s and exploring some metaphysical thoughts with mythic imagery. Yet it still left plenty of room to understand the poetic languages of Yam Gong further. How the verbal Cantonese shapes our ways of looking at the world? How do the ideas of “Wu” (無) and “Infinity” in the East and West play a constructive role in his poetic language and relate to quotidian scenes? This paper will discuss the ongoing process of Yam Gong’s vernacular experiments on two newest anthologies published in 2022, including the poet’s third Chinese anthology, And So Moving a Stone (Hide-and-Seek-Peekaboo), and his first English-translated collection Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong by James Shea and Dorothy Tse. Special attention will be given to the extensive use of repetition and rephrasing (also paraphrasing) and, of most importance, the act of resetting and retelling his poems in the previous anthologies, with the lens of philosophy of languages (Wittgenstein) and semiotic studies (Barthes).