‘Would you be interested in translating some classical Chinese poetry from Taiwan?’ the translation project coordinator at the National Museum of Taiwan Literature asked. Translation? I found little reason to say no. After all, that’s what I have studied and been learning to do for several years. But ‘classical Chinese poetry from Taiwan’? – A long pause... I vaguely remembered the name Lìshè 櫟社, a poetry club founded at the start of the twentieth century, based in the infamously grand Lin Family Ancestral Residence on the outskirts of my home city of Taichung. I could not recall reading their poetry. I felt ashamed and embarrassed: was there ever any classical Chinese poetry produced in Taiwan? But I did, in the end, accept the invitation.

I started to look into classical Taiwanese poetry in a library nearby: six recently-compiled volumes of poems by a handful of poets whose names rang no bells. There were a couple of other smaller collections with annotations. The scarcity of published material was disturbing, and even more so my ignorance. The poems in these collections take the forms of classical Han Chinese poetry: lüshī 律詩, juéjù 絕句, cí 詞, etc., reminding me of poets from ancient Chinese dynasties, such as Li Po and Bai Jüyi, whose works I had been made to memorise. I recognised a handful of poets, primarily for their socio-historic significance rather than their literary achievement, but a large majority of the them, including many with Japanese names, were unfamiliar. Why would I – a reasonably well-educated Taiwanese man in his forties – not have been aware of poems like these produced in Taiwan by poets from ...