Arthur Yap

a list of things

jezik: angleščina

a list of things

A market at Ueno:

gesticulating fingers of lentil, unwriggly eels,
spearheads of bamboo shoot, soothing water chestnuts,
green snakes of cucumber, jetsams of seaweed,
wrinkled-nose pickles, earspans of brown mushroom,
calm persimmons, outlandish roly-poly apples,
air-licking clams, dry earth-crust of fish,
icy-eyed bream, powdered kabuki faces of cake,
paragraphs of beancurd, exhaling piles of garlic,
empurpled piccolo noses of aubergine, lazy grapes,
no-nonsense tangerines, arms-folded-over squid,
shrine-pillars of celery, bullets of green chilli,
hibernating squares of handkerchief, fat tabi,
expandable sweaters, ventilated t-shirts, healthy cod,
alliterative clogs, knobbly topshell, discusses of sole,
lumpy puffy octopus, cheap skate, tight-jaw oysters,
brisk aprons, tough-guy pork, sectional ropes of radish,
whispery crinkled lettuce, placid sweet potatoes,
smarting capsicum, defiant crabs, sensuous musk melons,
humpy peanuts, leathery heels of abalone,
aerial spring onion, hourglass pears, rotund avocados,
rib-caged pumpkins, chlorophyll piles of iparella,
grumpy red mullet, macho beef, sassy tomatoes

are all there.

Arthur Yap

叶纬雄

Foto © The Old Parliament House Ltd

* 1943, Singapore, Singapur
† 19.06.2006, Singapur

Arthur Yap Chioh Hiong was a Singaporean poet, writer and painter. Born in Singapore in 1943, Yap was the sixth child of a carpenter and a housewife. Yap attended St Andrew's School and the University of Singapore, after which he won a British Council scholarship to study at the University of Leeds in England. At Leeds Arthur earned a master's degree in Linguistics and English Language Teaching, later obtaining his PhD from the National University of Singapore in the years after he returned from Leeds. He stayed on in the University's Department of English Language and Literature as a lecturer between the years 1979 and 1998. Between 1992 and 1996, Yap served as a mentor with the Creative Arts Programme run by the Ministry of Education to help inspire students and nurture young writers at local secondary schools and junior colleges. Yap was then diagnosed with lung cancer, and received radiotherapy treatment.

Foto © The Old Parliament House Ltd

Known to be an intensely private man, Yap’s poetry is distinctive for an unusual linguistic playfulness and subtlety that is able to bridge the rhythms of Singlish with the precision of acrolectal English. Unsurprisingly, the craft of Yap’s voice has the admiration of other writers. Anthony Burgess has written that he encountered Down the Line "with elation and occasional awe”.

His first collection of poems Only Lines was published in 1971, when he was 28. It had a first print run of 2,000 to 3,000 copies. Its whimsical, wordplay-based humour captured the hearts of poetry lovers, and it won the first poetry award from the National Book Development Council of Singapore in 1976. Yap's third collection, Down The Line (1980) was nationally acclaimed and won Yap his second Book Council Award. In 1983, Yap was honored with Singapore's Cultural Medallion for Literature and the South-East Asian Write Award in Bangkok. Yap described this as one of the high points in his literary career. Translations of his books were published in many Asian countries, mainly in the Japanese, Mandarin and Malay languages. In 1988, Yap won his third Book Council Award for Man Snake Apple & Other Poems (1986).

After a two-and-half year battle with throat cancer, Yap died in his sleep at home on 19 June 2006. He was 63.

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