.

Meeting Xu Zhimo

by Margaret Coats

Three Chinese girls behind me in the line
Escape King’s College Chapel evensong;
They show a phone, ask where, at once decline
Sought-after seats, to rush away headlong.

They’re seeking the poetic presence of
Not Milton, not Wordsworth, but Xu Zhimo who wrote
Of Cambridge as his lost, life-changing love
In lines that millions elsewhere know and quote.

Like Lycidas, he met an early death
Soon after he had visited anew
The place whose air supplied his poet’s breath:
Romantic English spelled what he would do.

King’s College holds his words on cloudlike stone;
A Chinese garden translates feelings flown.

.

Poet’s Note

Milton and Wordsworth studied at Cambridge University, as did Edward King, the poet friend for whom Milton wrote the elegy “Lycidas.” Xu Zhimo (1897–1931) planned graduate study at King’s College in economics and politics, but became enthralled by English Romantic poetry. After a year, he returned to China writing romantic and modern verse. During a visit back to Cambridge in 1928, he composed his most famous poem, untitled but often called “A Second Farewell to Cambridge.” A few lines in Chinese are inscribed on a marble memorial stone near a bridge at King’s College. In a small adjacent garden, two stanzas appear line by line with this translation:

.

The golden willow on the banks of the Cam
Stands like a bride in the sunset.
Her reflection shimmers in the water
And ripples in my heart.

The rushes in the soft riverbed
Sway and glisten underwater.
I’d gladly be a river reed
Tossed by the current of the Cam.

.

.

Xu Zhimo’s Cambridge Farewell Poem

paraphrased by Margaret Coats after reading
several literal translations

Lightly, lightly I leave,
As lightly as I came,
And lightly wave goodbye
To clouds in the western sky.

These willows gold at riverside,
A bevy of brides in setting sun;
Their glimmers, mirrored on the flow,
Rippling through my heart have run.

Smooth ribbon weeds with roots in mud,
Splendidly, splendidly sway within
The gentle waves of River Cam;
A water plant’s play I would win.

Upon that pond in elm tree shade,
A heavenly rainbow, not a spring,
Dissolves among the floating grass,
Remains nearby, a dreamlike ring.

Want dreams? Go out and pole a punt
Toward grass that’s greener still upstream,
A skiff to glow among the stars,
Freely loaded with sparkling light.

But freely I sing not.
My silence says farewell:
The summer crickets mute,
The Cambridge evening hushed.

Quietly I leave,
As quiet as I came;
I slightly shake my sleeve,
To take no wisp of cloud.

.

Original Chinese

再别康橋

輕輕的我走了，
正如我輕輕的來；
我輕輕的招手，
作別西天的雲彩。

那河畔的金柳，
是夕陽中的新娘；
波光裡的艷影，
在我的心頭蕩漾。

軟泥上的青荇，
油油地在水底招搖；
在康河的柔波裡，
我甘心做一條水草！

那榆蔭下的一潭，
不是清泉，是天上虹；
揉碎在浮藻間，
沉澱著彩虹似的夢。

尋夢？撐一支長篙，
向青草更青處漫溯；
滿載一船星輝，
在星輝斑斕裡放歌。

但我不能放歌，
悄悄是別離的笙簫；
夏蟲也為我沉默，
沉默是今晚的康橋！

悄悄的我走了，
正如我悄悄的來；
我揮一揮衣袖，
不帶走一片雲彩。

.

.

Margaret Coats lives in California.  She holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University.  She has retired from a career of teaching literature, languages, and writing that included considerable work in homeschooling for her own family and others.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


Trending now:

30 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    These two dreamy poems are from a poet who is a remarkable romanticist. What a beautiful tribute you provide us to Xu Zhimo, as he once paid tribute to his proud academic institution. I can feel the attachment to the university and the serenity of the surroundings in both poems with your amplification via comments that give us the background for his love of poetry. I believe you are blessed with a similar romantic heart and singing soul that marvelously floods our own hearts and souls with original concepts via your linguistic capabilities and sensitivities.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you so very much, Roy. Who would have thought that a prospective political economist turned Chinese poet would become the mythmaker of an English university town? But with this lyric, and a gorgeous lengthy ode in five sections, he has put Cambridge on the map for thousands of tourists each year. For Chinese students accepted to study here, Cambridge is a dream come true as no other institution in the world could be.

      Reply
  2. Warren Bonham

    A Chinese student from 100 years planning to study economics and politics at Cambridge but making a head-fake and switching to romantic poetry is a story that no one else would have thought to tell. Exceptionally well done!

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Yes, Warren, and then going home to become a popular poet as well. Too bad the sincerely talented young man ran out of luck with life, but at least he didn’t waste it on poorer pursuits. Glad you liked the story.

      Reply
  3. Evan Mantyk

    Margaret, it’s an excellent translation that wisely leans on alliteration and has a similar amount of rhyme as the original. Well done!

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Evan! I’m glad to have your assurance that relying on others to do most of the work of translation resulted in success with the artistry I was able to add.

      Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Bruce, thank you for your interest and appreciation. Presenting SCP with an unknown modern poet who wrote in a foreign language means taking a risk. Still, having just spent a month in Cambridge, I was fascinated enough to consider Xu worthwhile.

      Reply
  5. Brian A. Yapko

    Margaret, this posting of poems and notes is both educational and moving, offering a portrait of a poet utterly unknown to me. Xu Zhimo seems like a most interesting young man whose love of Cambridge is touching. His two stanzas are beautiful as is your version of his Cambridge Farewell. It is fascinating to read poetry on Western subjects written with an Eastern sensibility. I note in both Xu poems extensive discussion of water and river plants. I also note Xu’s reference to the cloud in his Farewell which is subtly echoed in the “cloudlike stone” (a great image) in your beautiful tribute sonnet.

    Very well done indeed!

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Brian, thank you for your attention to several key things here. One is water imagery, including clouds that make moisture visible. You see a picture of the cloudlike memorial stone in the post illustration, and I must say it looks far more cloudlike when one is standing in front of it. There are clouds in the first and last stanzas of the poem, contributing to a highly poignant conclusion. In Chinese and Japanese literature, damp sleeves are an indication that the speaker has been weeping and trying to dry his tears on flowing sleeves of traditional garments (something like the academic gowns worn occasionally by English university students, but in America seen only at Commencement). When Xu shakes his sleeve to take no wisp of cloud with him, this may mean he refuses to let any Cambridge tears of sorrow accompany him home to China. Whatever western clouds there were cannot spoil his happy memories or affect the heartfelt love he feels, despite sorrow in leaving Cambridge once again.

      I should clarify that the two stanzas above, quoted exactly as they appear in the memorial garden, are the second and third stanzas of Xu’s famous poem that I paraphrase. I had to offer an English version of the whole, and chose to do my own because I am not entirely satisfied with available translations. Take a look at comparable lines. In the garden, we read,

      Sway and glisten underwater

      while my version gives

      Splendidly, splendidly sway within

      I read little Chinese, but I can count characters. Here and at several points in this poem the author makes immediate, in-line repetition of a character–so much so that it seems a part of his style. I was able to reproduce that also with “lightly” in the first stanza, but it is more pervasive and deserves notice. Here I borrowed “splendid” from a conscientious amateur translator. These repetitions supply energy in the original!

      I’m glad you liked the tribute sonnet, too. Those three girls really did run off, oblivious to great architecture and stained glass and music in the chapel, to get closer to the atmosphere of a poem that I understand is read in Chinese schools.

      Reply
  6. Cheryl Corey

    After reading the Guohua Chen 1928 translation on the Wikipedia page and comparing it to yours, I would say that yours is more Romantic to my ear. Do you know – what was it about New York in 1920 that he found so “intolerable” that he left for Europe? Was that the onset of the Jazz Age? How unfortunate that he died so tragically.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks for your comment, Cheryl! My version of the poem may well sound more Romantic than the one on the Wikipedia page, though that was not a consideration. The Chen translation is good; it is one of those I consulted when making my paraphrase. By the way, Chen is alive and too young to have translated anything in 1928: that’s when Xu wrote the poem. Wikipedia wrongly makes it look like the translation date by placing it under the English.

      My issue with the Chen translation is that it looks like free verse, with English lines of anywhere from three to six beats, and not in any regular pattern. Guohua Chen is not to blame. According to one of my fellow graduate students, Chinese-born and now a professor of comparative literature, this is standard for English language translations of Chinese poetry. Such heavy emphasis is placed on the impossible goal of precise meaning for words and phrases that rhyme and form are lost in the process. But Chinese poems do have form! The long translation just published by Evan Mantyk has in Chinese a countable character array (just look at that block of form!), which Evan renders with rhymed regular meter, not worrying that some of his word choices might therefore not be exact, due to the need for formal artistry in English. When I first looked at the Xu Zhimo poem, I saw different numbers of characters per line, but in a pattern that was close to regular. Most important, shorter lines occurred in the first and last and next to last stanzas. Thus I used trimeter for those stanzas, and tetrameter for the middle stanzas, which gives the poem a shape similar to the original. My word choices are almost always those of some other translator, as I know the meaning of few characters. However, “heavenly” in line 14 is mine, because I see “heaven” in the Chinese text (and some others, but not Chen, have made this same choice).

      I don’t know why Xu found New York in 1920 “intolerable.” It could have been an impression of urban blight, and he may have thought the same of London when he arrived there, then went on to his dream locale in Cambridge. But I’m reading a book with much detail about his life in relation to Cambridge, and if I come up with another answer, I’ll post it here.

      Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Cheryl, Stuart Lyons says in his 2023 book that Xu Zhimo’s “intolerable” complaint was directed not just against New York, but against America. Xu had spent 1918-1920 studying first at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, then at Columbia in New York. Makes it all the harder to imagine what he couldn’t tolerate!

      Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      America felt “intolerable” compared to England because of lack of decorum and propriety in social interactions. This may sound odd coming from Xu, who accepted the Romantic idea that love should be natural and unforced. But he was clearly in his element among English aristocrats and intellectuals who sponsored him at Cambridge, brought him into exclusive clubs, and introduced him to important persons. Some of his connections might be avant garde, but they were not formed out of democratic or egalitarian camaraderie. One thing to remember is that his studies and travels were financed by his father; he was by no means an unpolished or impoverished foreigner.

      Reply
  7. Joseph S. Salemi

    The work of Xu Zhimo (and Margaret’s labors here in translation) prove that anyone with the will and the ability can appreciate another culture. In the ancient world, persons without a drop of Greek blood appreciated and accepted Hellenic culture, leaving us excellent Greek poems; and Graeco-Roman culture was widely accepted by anyone who had learned both Latin and koine Greek, no matter what their personal ethnicity.

    It’s very easy to fall in love with the English university towns.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Joe, for the credit you give me in struggling with Chinese. Xu Zhimo was better prepared for dealing with English, and won the reward of a poetic vocation for it, working through what must have been tough years of study. It’s challenging to know enough to understand speech or writing, yet experience a time lag in ability to respond because the language of the desired culture is not perfectly natural yet.

      Your example of the common culture of two languages in the ancient Mediterranean is very much worth recalling. And I agree wholeheartedly about English university towns.

      Reply
  8. Paul A. Freeman

    What a rare talent Xu Zhimo had.

    The incorporation and personification of Nature in his poems is awesome. Is this a facet of Far Eastern poetry, perhaps? Some of the lines and stanzas read like extended haikus.

    Thanks for the reads, and for your own fine tribute, Margaret. I see what you mean by the ‘cloudlike stone’.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Paul–you tempt me to an explication. The Cambridge farewell poem is very rich in extended imagery; to my mind haiku are brief and spare by comparison. Xu’s work here, for its length, rivals the most elaborate Chinese descriptive poetry that I know in translation. And the stanza-to-stanza motion is uniquely transcendent.

      I’ve already spoken of cloud imagery, and its relation to Far Eastern convention, to Brian Yapko above. Clouds are fine moisture in the air, and it is interesting that they appear in the shorter-line stanzas (1, 6, and 7). The stanzas with slightly longer lines (more flow!) hold the water imagery. Stanza 2 depicts scenes at the riverside in relation to the clouds above. Stanza 3 goes into and under the water, where the speaker wishes to immerse himself in the Cam and be a river plant playing and swaying in the current. His reed or weed may be related to the symbol of the lotus, rooted in mud, but perfect in beauty as it rises out. He doesn’t rise out, but in stanza 4 seems to depart from the river and envision a pond where a heavenly rainbow dissolves. That is a dream concept, and in stanza 5, the speaker says how to take action and gather dreams, which involves the work of moving a punt upriver by sheer strength of pushing against the current. And that work is the only way to light, freedom, and collecting a boatload of starlight where the grass is proverbially greener. The shift in stanza 6, back to shorter lines, and away from earlier transcendence, is striking. It’s the inability to say a meaningful farewell, while being required to leave. I’ve given an interpretation of the end above, but that has to be left open to each reader’s feelings. This is one reason the poem is touching to so many! I find it as rare as you do, and thanks again for saying so.

      Reply
  9. Yael

    This is amazing! Thank you for the cultural enrichment Margaret and your beautiful poetry, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading today.

    Reply
  10. Adam Sedia

    Thank you for introducing me to this poet, tragically lost too early like so many. I especially enjoyed how you both gave us some of his work and a work of your own inspired by him. I am only learning Chinese right now, but I can appreciate how your translation retains the rhyme and meter of the original. It is unfortunate that so many western poets use a difference in writing systems as an excuse to disregard the strict metrical and rhyming patterns of Chinese poetry.

    Both Xu’s work and your own underscore the universality of poetry. In an age plagued by woke dogmas rooted in self-hatred, it’s refreshing to see how English Romantic poetry, far from being “colonial” or “oppressive,” has served as an inspiration to those from other cultures, uniting them.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      I agree, Adam. It is very much worth paying attention to the craft of poetry in other cultures, insofar as we can. I had read Chinese poetry in translation for years, thinking its main beauty is the imagery, when I found that it has elaborate form and rhyme. Best wishes on your study of the language! I have some very small understanding because the characters usually mean the same in Japanese, though the spoken languages (and reading aloud) vary. Yet the knowledge is most valuable. As you say, it helps to correct and transcend faults we observe in our own milieu. I’m happy to have your response to this work of mine and of the Chinese poet whose perspective is easy to share, despite personal and cultural differences. My husband does say that Xu, who was very much a devotee of art for art’s sake, would not have fared well under communism.

      Reply
  11. BDW

    Ms. Coats’ look at Xu Zhimo is delightful.

    M. Coats remains, for many reasons, interesting for
    her dalliance in poetries, like as a troubadour:
    French, Latin and Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, and Chinese,
    as well as English, Scotch, American and Japanese;
    from ancient times, to the medieval, up to modern times,
    she broaches many topics in her lyric lines and rhymes.

    In sooth, she seems like as th’ embodiment of springtime song…

    One can learn so much from the study of poets and prosets of other lands and times. From him, and other Chinese writers, I have learned several things, in addition to their individual voices and topics, for example, their courtesy names, which is one reason for my many personae. Another is the transforming and reshaping of traditional poetry into new forms: the Japanese and the Chinese are intriguing for this, though as for that so too many other writers of many lands and times. Mr. Salemi has here pointed out the significance of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.

    Among the dozens of Chinese Modernists I have studied (in a Pound-like, and dare I say Coats-like manner). Xu Zhangxu, in particular, aided me in my push into new realms. Here, for example, is a prosem [sic] of 2007:

    Xu Zhimo
    by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

    He flew into the clouds, like a Shelley, Xu Zhimo, a rarefied bird of love, a Byron, or a wind-borne Rossetti, seeking for that beautiful world above and that lovely woman below. He chased the crescent moon across America, Europe, and China, feeling but distaste for science, religion, and politics. Tagore’s East Asian guide and Liang Qichao’s brilliant, but wayward, student, who oft clashed with the mundane world of man, running out of time and life itself, when his plane crashed in the fog near Mount Tai, Shandong Province, and he died at the age of thirty-four.

    Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of China.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Bruce, thank you and Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei for this lovely lyrical tribute to Xu Zhimo. There could hardly be a better line to begin such a memorial than “He flew into the clouds.” And you include so much about his character in this compact piece!

      Many thanks as well for your poetic compliments to me. As you show here, and have shown elsewhere, you are adept at learning from other lands and times. These new realms do enable us to transform and reshape poetry. From my point of view, they offer a wealth of forms to revive. I often look for one appropriate to my intended subject. But here, I did make something new in English, I believe, with significant variation on the Chinese model, by the method I chose to recreate Xu’s second farewell to Cambridge.

      His highly energetic style (as I find it) of in-line repetitions of the same character, was not something I could easily transfer to my paraphrase. This makes me wonder how I could use such a feature in English. We so often attempt to pack lines with meaning and artistry of different kinds, that simple word-repetition seems a new technique. I’ll remember it, and perhaps think of a suitable subject.

      Reply
  12. BDW

    Examples of epizeuxis (immediate repetition) abound in literature. Take Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s “Words, words, words” or King Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never”, the latter one of the most poignant lines in English literature.

    In Euripides, L 1065: κατῆγεν, ἦγεν, ἦγεν ἐς μέλαν πέδον:

    note how, in the scene of the horrible tearing apart of Pentheus by his mother and other maenads, Dionysos exerts his great strength to slowly drag the top of the fir tree down, so as to place Pentheus upon it, where the sound, rather than a descriptive phrase, renders the slow ominous bending of the fatal wood.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks for the examples, Bruce. My favorite among similar usages is “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from Macbeth. But to work from this particular poem by Xu Zhimo, I am considering a somewhat different technique. To see clearly what I mean, look at the Chinese characters for lines 1, 2, 3, 10, 22, 25, and 26. That’s seven times in one short poem that the author repeats a single character, corresponding to a word or idea, among different characters. I find energy and emphasis in that, especially because some of these groups of two characters in fact repeat the same character in later lines. Hamlet with “words” and Lear with “never,” on the other hand, seem to be exhausted and prepared to dismiss an idea to go on to another–in a perfectly legitimate artistic way. Still imagining how to use what I observe!

      Reply
  13. BDW

    I do agree with Ms. Coasts; I likewise like the Shakespearean polysyndeton in “Macbeth”: “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, revealing, at the very least, his weariness of life.

    I think it would be a good thing for Ms. Coats to work out the repetition she is seeking in her poetry. Repetition is certainly one of the most important rhetorical devices of poetry, and was one of the most frequent observations pupils I taught made when we studied American and British poetry.

    Even though I know Ancient Greek poets (from Homer on) had a much greater understanding of all the various forms of repetition, it is Shakespeare to whom I frequently go for interesting examples.

    There is much exquisite repetition in his poetic dramas. One of my favourites is that found in “Merchant of Venice”, where Shakespeare, in the banter between Portia and Bassanio, uses repetition to make fun of the great English rhymester Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Here is the central piece of a whole series “rings”, both before and after these lines:

    Bassanio:
    If you did know to whom I gave the ring,
    If you did know for whom I gave the ring,
    And would conceive for what I gave the ring,
    And how unwillingly I left the ring,
    When nought would be accepted but the ring,
    You would abate the strength of your displeasure.

    Portia:
    If you had known the virtue of the ring,
    Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
    or your own honour to contain the ring,
    You would not then have parted with the ring…

    Shakespeare used “ring” in various positions in his lines throughout “Merchant of Venice”, as Ms. Coats says she would like to do; and it would be interesting to see what she might do.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks again, Bruce. This suggestion has great potential, as it turns the repeated word into a meaningful motif or even a symbol. I’m already thinking of what subject might lend itself to this kind of treatment. It would require considerable care to do what Shakespeare does in The Merchant of Venice, where the ring contributes to both comedy and to more serious tone and dramatic effect.

      Reply
  14. Tom Rimer

    Margaret, I was finally able to read your lovely poem and translation. It is quite a moving experience to read your own poem, which so beautifully provides the context, and then the poet’s wistful response to his experience in Cambridge. This speaks to so many things: the innate importance of poetry in the lives of the Chinese, and of the appeal of the West to young Chinese. whatever the political vicissitudes (how many thousands of Chinese students are there in England and the United States now?), as well as the political weight of all that has happened between China and the West since the communist takeover in the late 1940s. The whole sequence is quite wonderful. Congratulations on discovering beauty in heretofore (at least to me) places.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thank you, Tom, for these varied thoughts. Xu Zhimo and his poetic career bring up many questions impossible to resolve, but as you say important to consider. Although he had not intended to become a poet before encountering English poetry, it’s clear that he knew Chinese poetry well enough to take his place there, and to look forward to what it might be in the future. He hoped to make new impressions by introducing English romantic sensibility, and by greater attention to ordinary Chinese speech. Certainly he would smile upon the great numbers of Chinese students abroad at present. The political weight you speak of began to touch him in discussions of art for politics’ sake, to which he firmly opposed his belief in and practice of art for art’s sake. However that might have gone had he lived longer, he contributed beauty in poetry to China and beyond. I’m very glad you enjoyed my little part in presenting a bit of it here.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.