T世纪神话

In this sequence of poems, taken from his collection 《造剑地》 (Where Swords are Forged), Singaporean poet Tan Chee Lay structures his unearthly narratives of Taiwan’s history using its English name—the T Century is made up of A, I, W, A, and N. The reader does not need to have much knowledge of Taiwanese or Chinese history to savor the mythical tropes and imagery Tan uses—when I was working on this translation more than ten years ago, it was the superbly surrealistic exploration of political themes that held my attention. Given my own preoccupation with the political oppression occurring in Singapore, it was easy to transpose those concerns onto the rapacious creatures and perilous landscapes in these poems.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the allusions in “Myths of the T Century” are very much influenced by Tan’s university years in Taiwan in the mid-nineties, and his observations of Taiwan’s move towards a more democratic government. He began studying at National Taiwan University in 1992, only a few years after President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987. The persecution of dissidents during the White Terror was still fresh in the memories of the Taiwanese, and the Chinese-speaking world had been particularly shaken by the Tiananmen massacres of June 1989. By the time Tan graduated, he had also witnessed the painful clashes between different ideals during the runup to Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996.

It is no surprise, then, that the speaker of the poem treads warily through Tan’s dreamlike landscapes, chronicling the helplessness of ideals against political forces. Ideals are compared to “a sailor’s rope” and “a hunter’s bow”—tools that human beings devised to control the natural world, but which are ultimately powerless to hold back “waves compelled to heave,” and their demise is only paid lip service by the “sable cats” of economic pragmatism. Tan’s vision of twentieth-century Taiwanese history offers little hope, but these poems have a bleak beauty that will resonate with anyone overcome by their own helplessness in the face of political injustice.