Elasticity of the Chinese Language

How nice it would be to be the type of wordsmith as described by contemporary Chinese poet Yu Guangzhong (于光中).

Writing about his modernistic aesthetic in his creative work, Yu said: "I tried to condense, flatten, elongate, and sharpen the Chinese language, rip it apart and piece it together again, fold it this way and that, so that I might test its speed, density, and elasticity."

A wordsmith is like a craftsman, and Yu's quote conjures in my mind an image of a craftsman kneading dough the way an expert chef does, except that in place of dough, language is the malleable object.

Incidentally, apart from being a poet, Yu is also writer and critic. Born in Nanjing in 1928, he had to flee with his family in 1937 from the Japanese invading forces, and after returning to Nanjing in 1947 he again fled the Communist advance in the civil war. His family settled in Taiwan in 1950.