| Songs of Gold Mountain and Island are two bilingual (Chinese and English) collections of poems written in Chinese by Chinese Americans in the early 20th century, but selected and translated by Chinese American scholars. There is currently not much research about these two collections by scholars both in Taiwan and Mainland China.The authors of Songs of Gold Mountain, men from Gold Mountain, created the images of a group of Chinese "Bachelors" in these two collections of poems. In dealing with their dreams, courage, sorrows, loves and desires in their eccentric life, the writer analyzes the psychological and cultural states of the poets and the Chinese Images embodied in the poems. In Island the images of a group of Chinese were created, who wrote their disappointment, anger and ideals into the poems, and showed their own situations by using a great number of historical allusions.This paper, with the two collections of poems as its central texts and with a combination of both the temporal and cultural backgrounds, by using theories of Close Reading and theories of image studies, does research work on the Chinese poetic writing within an intercultural context in the early 20th century, analyzes the self-created Chinese images in the collections of poems. This paper, from the perspectives of Diasporic Literature and Translational Literature, highlights the role of cultural communication in the process of literary creation. The images of early Chinese Americans created in these two collections of poems are real, cubic and of flesh and blood, subverting the inarticulate, ignorant and ugly images of Chinese in the writings of foreign writers of the past. |
