Dai Wangshu

Who was Dai Wangshu?

Dai Wangshu was a Chinese poet, essayist and translator active from the late 1920s to the end of the 1940s. A native of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 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, Dai defended against the hard line taken by the May Fourth Movement veteran Lu Xun.

Between 1932 and 1935 Dai studied in France where he was a student at the University of Lyon's Institut Franco-chinois, and published several poems in French. He collaborated in translating modern Chinese literature with French writer and academic Étiemble, and met contemporary French poets such 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. It was during this period in prison that Dai developed acute asthma. After the war, he returned to Shanghai and then Beijing, and died there having accidentally overdosed on the ephedrine he took to control his asthma.