Liang Zongdai
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Liang Zongdai (Chinese: 梁宗岱) (1903 - 1983) was a Chinese poet and translator. Born in Xinhui, Guangdong, he went to Europe to study languages in 1924. His translation of Tao Qian's poems into French was published by Lemarget, Paris in 1930, with a preface by Paul Valery who had received the young poet in his home back to 1926.
He was one of the most popular "new poets", who write in free verse, after the May Fourth Movement in China. His most famous book is called Poetry and Truth (《詩與真》), a title he obviously borrowed from Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, where the Chinese poet expresses passionately his thoughts on poetry.
He translated the poems of Shakespeare, Blake, Rilke, and Valery, and some of Montaigne's essays, into Chinese. It is known that his translation of Goethe's Faust was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
He was much prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and devoted the last part of his life to the study of Chinese medicine. (He is known to have produced several useful ointments.) Known to be an enthusiastic and argumentative man, he married thrice. His last wife was a player of Cantonese opera, who wrote a little memoire recollecting her relationship with the poet.
[edit] External links
- A memoire (in Chinese)
