Moon Kwan — Collected Poems
Moon Kwan—also known as Kwan Man-ching, Guan Wenqing, and Shan-yuet—made one of the most unusual careers in early Southern California letters. After arriving from Guangdong as a teenager, he moved to Los Angeles in 1915, worked across the silent-film production chain, wrote newspaper sketches of Chinese life, advised D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, and entered the West Coast literary circle around Witter Bynner. His privately printed A Pagoda of Jewels (1920) is the earliest identified American poetry book in English by a writer of Chinese descent. Kwan then translated Wang Wei and Li Po for The Liberator and Poetry, collaborated with composer Charles Wakefield Cadman, and expanded his work through A Chinese Mirror (1932) and the undated Hong Kong volume Songs of China. After returning to China, he became a formative director, teacher, screenwriter, and advocate for Cantonese sound film. This edition gathers every recoverable English poem and translation, collates the three overlapping books, and restores their accompanying comic prose, tale, and one-act plays.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Kwan, Moon. “To Witter Bynner.” W.B. in California: A Tribute. Privately printed, 1919.
———. “My Boyhood in China.” Two installments. Washington Herald, 3 and 10 Sept. 1919.
———. A Pagoda of Jewels. Joseph A. Eliason Enterprises, 1920.
———. “Moonlit Tears,” “Spring Longing,” and “The Streams of Fate.” Literal translations for Charles Wakefield Cadman’s song cycle, Op. 72, 1921.
———. A Chinese Mirror: Poems and Plays. Introduction by Manly P. Hall. Phoenix Press, 1932.
———. Shan-yuet Zi Ming Ji [山月自鳴集]. Shan-yuet Alumni Association, approximately 1960.
———. Zi Ming Ji [自鳴集]. Shan-yuet Alumni Association, 1965.
———. Zhongguo Yintan Waishi [中國銀壇外史; An Unofficial History of the Chinese Silver Screen]. Guangjiaojing Chubanshe, 1976.
———. Zi Ming Ji [自鳴集]. Revised ed., Shan-yuet Alumni Association, 1977.
———. Songs of China: Poems and Plays. Wing Fat & Co.
Wang Wei. “The Green Brook,” “A Farm House by the Wai River,” and “Passing the Heng Tze Temple.” Translated by Moon Quan and Max Eastman. The Liberator, vol. 3, no. 11, Nov. 1920, p. 7.
Li Po. “Goodfellowship”; Wang Wei. “Lonely.” Translated by Moon Kwan. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, vol. 18, no. 3, June 1921, p. 130.
Li Bo. “Four Poems.” Translated by Moon Kwan, Renditions, vol. 23, spring 1985, pp. 104–07.