My memories

Dai Wangshu. - My memories. The Poetry, mister nobleman, 2006. Introduction, notes and translation from the Chinese of Javier Martín Ríos.

Dai Wangshu (1905-1950) was the introductor in China of Federico García Lorca and of the Generation of 27, which he translated, as well as to Rubén Darío, Blasco Ibáñez, Unamuno or Azorin. He formed in French literature since he studied in the University that the Jesuits of this nationality had in Shanghai. It resided in France (1932-1934) and Spain (1934-1935).

It intervened in the literary polemics that were generated on up to where it would be necessary to integrate the western literature inside the tradition of his country. The magazine founded Contemporaries, fundamental for the Chinese poetry of the XXth century. Affiliated to the communist party from young man, it was imprisoned by the Japanese invaders (1941) and later by the nationalists.

Departing from the French symbolism, it opened a proper way, which did not forget the forms and topics of the Chinese traditional poetry, in a curious parallelism of innovation and force with what the Hispanic modernists did.

His first book is my memories, published in 1929 - written between 1924 and this year - it contains the two most significant poems of his work: "Alley under the rain" and "My memories".

The tone is of sadness and solitude, the topics are the love, the sleep, the evasion, the gap... The nature - as regards the frames of mind - plays an important role. In spite of the solitude, the poet sees in the night a moment for the calmness, but also for the memories that constantly assault him. Across the alienated beings of the society, it expresses his wish for the death, a possible route to finish with the sufferings. This melancholy aureole - that produces a sweet serenity to us - is marked by the not corresponded love. The ephemeral of the life, the youth that goes out secretly, worries appellants under the symbol of the "withered flower".

In My memories it is possible to observe the Wangshu evolution: from a more formalist and traditional beginning to a major later freedom in the strophes, metrics and in the extension of the poems; from a major darkness to a more diaphanous style and a more distant feeling. In the end, it uses resources surfs creating an ambience surreal and avant-garde.

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