Xu Zhimo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Xu Zhimo | |
|---|---|
| Chinese family name: (姓氏) |
Xu (徐) (Pinyin: Xú) |
| Given name: (名) |
Zhangxu (章垿) (Pinyin: Zhāngxù) |
| Courtesy name: (字) |
Yousen (槱森) (Pinyin: Yoǔsēn) Zhimo (志摩) (Pinyin: Zhìmó) |
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Xu
Xu Zhimo (Chinese: 徐志摩; pinyin: Xú Zhìmó; Wade-Giles: Hsü Chih-mo) (January 15, 1897-November 19, 1931) was a twentieth-century Chinese poet. He was given the name of Zhangyou (Chinese: 章垿; pinyin: Zhāngxù) and the courtesy name of Yousen (Chinese: 槱森; pinyin: Yoǔsēn). He later changed his courtesy name to Zhimo.
He is romanticized as pursuing love, freedom and beauty all his life (from the words of Hu Shih). He promoted the form of modern Chinese poetry, and therefore made tremendous contributions to modern Chinese literature.
[edit] Brief Biography
He was born in Xiashi, in Zhejiang province, and died in Jinan in the Shandong provence. In 1918, after studying at Peking University (now a.k.a. Beijing University) he traveled to the United States to study Economics and Political Science at Columbia University in New York City. Finding the States "intolerable", he left in 1920 to study at Cambridge University in England where he fell in love with English romantic poetry like that of Keats and Shelley. In 1922 he went back to China and became a leader of the modern poetry movement. When the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore visited China, he played the part of oral interpreter. His literary ideology was mostly pro-western, and pro-vernacular. He was one of the first Chinese writers to successfully naturalize Western romantic forms into modern Chinese poetry. He worked as an editor and professor at several schools before dying in a plane crash on November 19, 1931 in Ji'nan, Shandong while flying from Nanjing to Beijing. He left behind four collections of verse and several volumes of translations from various languages.
[edit] References
Encyclopædia Britannica 2005 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, article- "Hsü Chih-mo"
There is a book titled "Bound Feet & Western Dress" written by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang which records the memoir of the author's grand-aunt, Chang Yu-i. At the age of 15 Chang Yu-i wed Hsu Chih-mo in an arranged marriage, as his first wife. She later divorced him after the birth of their second child. "Bound Feet & Western Dress" is a dual memoir of two characters. The first character is the author herself. It describes her life as an Chinese American who suffered a sense of loss and separation from her own culture in the West. The second is Chang Yu-i, who was born at the turn of the century in China and later moved to the West. This is definitely a page-turner and every detail of Hsu Chih-Mo's early life in the West was recorded accurately.
It is partly translated from the Chinese wikipedia site http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BE%90%E5%BF%97%E6%91%A9
