Dai Wangshu

Dai Wangshu was a 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 , Shanghai in 1926, majoring in .

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 , 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 ?tiemble, and associated with such poets as Jules Supervielle.

During the , 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 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 , 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.