Xu Zhimo
Encyclopedia : X : XU : XUZ : Xu Zhimo
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| Xu Zhimo | |
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| 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) |
He is romanticized as persuing 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.
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.
One of his cousin is the finest Chinese wuxia writer, Louis Cha.
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 record the memoir of the aurthor's grand-aunt, Chang Yu-i, who at the age of 15 was arranged to married to Hsu Chih-mo as his first wife and later divorced with him after the birth of their second child. "Bound Feet & Western Dress" is a dual memoir of the aurthor's life as an American-Chinese, who suffered a sense of lost with her own culture in the West and Chang Yu-i, who born at the turn of the century of China and later moved to the West. This is definitely a page-turner and every details of Hsu Chih-Mo's early life in the West is being 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
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