Wong Phui Nam was a pioneering Malaysian poet and literary critic.1 His posthumous book of poems In the Mirror: New and Selected Poems of Wong Phui Nam edited by me (Brandon K. Liew) and Daryl Lim Wei Jie is scheduled for publication in September 2025 by National University of Singapore (NUS) Press.
Phui Nam would always speak his concerns for younger writers when I came over to visit. He had a reputation for being an outspoken writer and critic, and at times that had meant disagreement with the literati. There in his living room, I came to know how deeply he cared for his family, community, and country through his work and his deeds.
Recording Session of “Against the Wilderness” verse 11, conducted 16th August 2022. Wong Phui Nam passes away two weeks following this interview.
Eleven, Memory – this is a reading of Meng Haoran孟浩然 , another Tang poet.
Some people like the free translation, some people say I’m making a travesty of the Chinese Poetry! To me, if you write something – you write a poem in English – you must follow the way English Language works where they don’t try to imitate Chinese syntax and all that.
Because it’s not English, neither is it Chinese.
But then they say, oh it’s more closer, the more accurate, the more authentic. But I don’t think so. You just recreate it as if you’re writing an original poem in English. That’s how I see it. But there is a controversy over this.
It's almost a… like an empty language?
The more academic people, they would want to stick close to the Chinese… and they even go – one word in Chinese and one word in English. And that becomes a telegram…
1. Wong Phui Nam’s seminal works of poetry include How the Hills Are Distant (1968), Ways of Exile (1993), and Against the Wilderness (2000) along with two plays Anike (2005) and Aduni (2006). In the early 50s he was involved in The New Cauldron, one of Malaya’s first publications of poetry in English. As a student, he was encouraged and mentored by Wang Gungwu at the University of Malaya (now National University of Singapore) to pursue his literary ideals. He later moved to Kuala Lumpur to work in finance. After the National Cultural Policy in 1971, many of his peers left the country as they no longer felt welcome as Malaysian writers. Phui Nam himself stopped writing for almost three decades. For Phui Nam, the richness of culture and tradition are inherent in the languages that we write in.
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Publisher: Victorian College of the Arts
University of Melbourne
