“Homage to the Ruins” 向 and probes and criticizes the
drifting way of life, the anxiety it produces and how it leads ultimately
to a decline and even destruction of culture.
As milestones at opposite ends of Luo Fu’s career, Driftwoodand
Death of a Stone Cellnaturally beg comparison. At one point Luo Fu
had considered rewriting his first long poem, but soon dismissed the
idea. It was a product of its day. In Driftwood, Luo Fu sought to main-
tain the same linguistic tension and purity as those of the earlier work,
but without the overly hermetic results arising from the difficult
imagery and private symbols. There remain major differences between
the two works. In Death of a Stone Cell, Luo Fu expressed his
thoughts on life and death using a Surrealist technique; in Driftwood,
on the other hand, he offers a detached, rational critique of the many
aspects of the contemporary Chinese-speaking world.
Luo Fu chose the long poem as a recapitulation for several reasons.
Although the separate parts are largely written in different forms and
styles, opting for the long poem required him to articulate a compre-
hensive worldview. He had to proceed in a rational way to develop his
themes as well as to create the appropriate forms to best convey the
content. He had to stretch his linguistic resources. Taiwan has pro-
duced few long poems in the last fifty years and the best ones have
largely been historical narratives. Many more have been written in
mainland China, but they tend to be narrative poems, of an especially
political or historical nature. Luo Fu’s ambitious project is therefore
largely unprecedented in the annals of contemporary Chinese poetry. I
quote from the second part of the poem in order to convey a sense of
the work:
The moment an eagle swoops down 當R12
Out of the sky above a river valley and 7 '
Seizes s
A diaphanous layer of moonlight 面1薄薄的月光
from the water’s surface 時間噤聲
Time is silenced 故# 要
As our tale unfolds
Once we swim upstream from the sea 我們 1 ¡¢進內陸
The Adam’s River becomes eloquently ¥當G成s¦¦的
mute 兩草色 ̈©
The grassy banks dreary 霧, Í 3 ª¢ÏG 5 «
The fog harder to control than ever ¬晨q
imagined 1 到'午 ̈色G, YoÔ}
So pale the morning 1 m^Ôwñ® ̄ 4 °
Changing by afternoon, speech slurred ó±失的=
82 John Balcom