Kuo-ch'ing Tu

Tu retired in 2021 and was appointed Professor Emeritus.

Tu Kuo-ch'ing has published twenty-five collections of poetry, including editions published in Japan, China, and Korea. In his largest anthology, Light Shines Through the World of Dust, Illuminating the Myriad Objects光射塵方，圓照萬象 (2017), the verses are divided into three major categories and a total of eleven subcategories. The first major category “The Substance of Things” 體物篇carries on the long tradition of exposition on the nature of  “things” or “objects in Chinese poetry. “Substance of Things” poems also find resonance in the “New Objectivity” school of Modernism which advocates for artistic engagement with the realities of life rather than with emotions or purely aesthetic experience.

As a literary scholar, he has several volumes of collected essays and one monograph in English, a study of the Tang dynasty poet, Li He, based on his Ph.D. dissertation. Tu's reputation as a translator was established in the 1960s and 70s with his renderings of Modernist verse and literary theory, particularly the work of T. S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire. His translation of Les Fleurs du Mal remains a standard reference in the Chinese-speaking world. He has also introduced James J. Y. Liu's English language studies of Chinese poetics by translating them into Chinese. Among contemporary Chinese-language poets, Tu Kuo-ch'ing is considered one of the most daring and honest with regard to matters of love and Eros, however his poetic oeuvre is highly diverse and his influence has not been limited to the expression of love with passion.

Kuo-ch'ing Tu (Chinese: 杜國清; pinyin: Du Guoqing; born 1941) is a poet, scholar, translator, critic, and professor. He is a Professor Emeritus in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he held the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair from its establishment in 2003 until his retirement in 2020. He was also founder and director of the Center for Taiwan Studies. In 1996, he founded the biannual journal Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series《台灣文學英譯叢刊, and remains its editor.

Tu was born in Taichung, Taiwan in 1941. He graduated from National Taiwan University in 1963 with an English Literature degree and earned a Master of Arts in Japanese literature from Kwansei Gakuin University in 1970. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Stanford University in 1974. His research interests have included Taiwanese Literature, Chinese literature, Chinese literary theories, comparative literature, and international literatures in Chinese.