Introduction 簡介 | This anthology, edited and translated by John Kinsella, comes as part of the ASM translation project led by Christopher (Kit) Kelen and follows such anthologies as I Roll the Dice and Portuguese Poets of Macau. The writers included in this collection share a distinguishing feature as poets who have had an engagement with the city of Macao though none of them was born there. They were all in some way displaced individuals, whose common home was this multicultural city in the southern periphery of China and whose work looks back to the cultural traditions of their place of birth and upbringing and the new environment to which they had to adapt. What underpins their poems is an intercultural embrace through which they achieve a dual awareness of the world left behind and another to which they have gained entry. One can detect in their poems the traces of a middle ground between the Lusophone world and China, an intermediate world of unusual juxtapositions, of alternative associations and connections. A spirit of otherness is both transmitted and transcended in a journey that shares a common axis. |