Xunmei Shao / Hal Swindall / Jicheng Sun
Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
This is the first English translation of the verse by the forgotten Shanghai poet Shao Xunmei (1906-1968). As a student at Cambridge, young Shao fell under the spell of poets like Gautier, Baudelaire and Verlaine, but above all the Englishman A.C. Swinburne. Back in Shanghai, Shao led a group of Western-influenced writers and artists who wanted to create a new culture for their country. Shao not only combined East and West in his life and art, but also turned his life into his art and vice-versa. Shao Xunmei was the epitome of a movement in 1930s Shanghai that aimed to reinvigorate the rest of China with a new culture derived from the energies of the European decadence. After the communists seized power, he had to work as a translator, and died during the Cultural Revolution. Today, Shao still stands as a representative of a certain moment when many Chinese artists looked westward for models, and he achieved a unique East-West synthesis in both his life and his art.Jicheng Sun earned a BA and an MA in English, the latter from Shandong University, where one of his professors was Hal Swindall, who introduced him to Shao Xunmei. Dr. Sun continued to earn a PhD in literary translation from Peking University, and is now an associate professor of English at Shandong Technology University.Hal Swindall earned a PhD in comparative literature at UC Riverside in 1994. A chapter of his dissertation was on George Moore, and he learned about Shao from a Moore scholar who knew that Shao had translated some of Moore’s works. Dr. Swindall has worked as an English professor at various East Asian universities for 20 years.
