Cambridge celebrates poet Xu
The late Chinese poet Xu Zhimo, widely recognized for promoting China’s affinity with the University of Cambridge, is being celebrated with an annual festival at his former college in the city this week.
This year’s Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival, on Thursday and Friday, brought together poets and artists at King’s College, Cambridge, to celebrate the cultural exchange between the United Kingdom, China and other countries that share a close link with the life and work of Xu (1896-1931). His poem Farewell to Cambridge, written in 1928 when he was revisiting King’s College, Cambridge, after studying there in the 1920s, is learned by millions of schoolchildren across China.
It also is one reason Cambridge has become a magnet for many Chinese.
The first and last lines of the poem have been carved into a granite stone that lies at the back of King’s College, one of Cambridge’s most popular tourist attractions.
Alan Macfarlane, chairman of the Cambridge Rivers Project and professor at the University of Cambridge, said the poem has such an impact because, in a few lines, Xu condenses several kinds of love.
“Love associated with the beautiful willow and water landscape which he had experienced as a child in Haining (in Zhejiang province) and then found again, when very homesick after a long absence, in Cambridge. Love for the newly found world of British Romantic poetry, which converted him to becoming a poet, and love for Lin Huiyin (one of Xu’s lov- ers), who was strongly associated with Cambridge.
“All this love is combined with aching loss — saying goodbye — to a place he loved, to memories of early love, and to his own childhood, hopes and dreams,” Macfarlane added.
The festival, jointly organized by the Cambridge Rivers Project and the King’s College Development Office, aims to honor the arts of poetry and painting as vital expressions of human dignity, aspiration, originality and hope.
Speaking at the festival in Cambridge, Liu Zhengcheng, a contemporary Chinese calligrapher, said the festival plays a vital role in deepening and broadening international understanding and in promoting the exchange of ideas.
The theme of this year’s festival is gardens. That is because gardens have always been a great inspiration for poetry, and many of the world’s greatest poets have written some of their best poems on this subject, Macfarlane said.