Dai Wangshu

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Dai Wangshu (Chinese: 戴望舒) (also Tai Wang-shu or Tai Van-chou) (March 5, 1905—February 28, 1950) was a Chinese poet, essayist and translator active from the late 1920s to the end of the 1940s. A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, he graduated from the Aurora University, Shanghai in 1926, majoring in French.

He was closely associated with the Shanghai Modernist school, also known as New Sensibility or New Sensation School, a name inspired by the Japanese modernist writer Riichi Yokomitsu. Other members of the group were Mu Shiying, Liu Na'ou, Shi Zhecun, and Du Heng, whose Third Category thesis (that a writer could be on the left but remain independent), Dai defended against the hard line taken by the May Fourth Movement veteran Lu Xun.

Between 1932 and 1935 Dai studied in France, and published several poems in French. He collaborated in translating modern Chinese literature with French writer and academic René Étiemble, and associated with such poets as Jules Supervielle.

During the Sino-Japanese War, Dai worked in Hong Kong as a newspaper editor. He was arrested and put into jail for several months during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. After the war, he returned to Shanghai and then Beijing, and died there.

His early poetry has numerous inter-textual links with the French Neo-symbolist poetry of Paul Fort and, in particular, Francis Jammes; yet numerous references to pre-modern Tang Chinese lyric texts can also be discerned in his early poems. Some scholars have assumed that this "symbolist influence" came from more well-known French poets such as Verlaine and Baudelaire. However, while Dai Wangshu and other poets in China knew Verlaine's work through the versions of the English symbolist Ernest Dowson, there is no evidence of an early close inter-textual relationship with Baudelaire. In the late 1940s, when he had returned from Europe, and already shifted from Neo-symbolism to a more generally modernist style (that drew also on Daoist texts), Dai did translate Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal into Chinese. Dai, who had visited Spain before the Spanish Civil War, was the first to translate the poetry of Federico García Lorca into Chinese.

[edit] References

• Gregory Lee, Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989).

Persondata
NAME	Dai Wangshu
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	戴望舒; Tai Wang-shu; Tai Van-chou
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Chinese poet
DATE OF BIRTH	March 5, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH	China
DATE OF DEATH	February 28, 1950
PLACE OF DEATH	China