Tu An: Portrait of a poet and translator

By Li Xiao, Chen Boyuan: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, May 31, 2017

In 1940, Tu came across a poem titled Not Yet, My Soul by Robert Louis Stevenson, a famous British writer in late 19th century. He loved the poem so much that he had to pick up a pen and tried to translate it. This marked the beginning of his poetry translation work. The first translated collection of poems that he published was Drum-Taps (Whitman), which was actually a coincidence. In 1948, a year before the dawn of New China, inflation in Shanghai went through the roof and the "gold yuan notes" issued by the Kuomintang government were virtually worthless. Tu and his brother exchanged the notes they had for paper sheets, with which they wanted to use to publish poems Tu'd written. As the War of Liberation was winding down and the culminating Huaihai Campaign broke out, Tu, his brother and their friends all agreed that given such circumstances, publishing ballads of "la petite bourgeoisie" would be "inappropriate." As a result, he used the paper sheets to print the Whitman poems that he translated -- Drum-Taps. The original was written during the American Civil War, and Whitman expressed his support for the northern cause of President Abraham Lincoln, and opposing slavery in the south. By translating and publishing this collection, Tu showed his own support for the two main revolutionary bases in Yan'an and Xibaipo in northern China, and his objection to the Chiang regime in the south. [Photo by Chen Boyuan/China.org.cn ]