As a scholar of Western literature and the then youngest chief of Yanching University’s foreign language department, Wu was known as a multi-lingual genius for his fluency in English, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek.
With a rare vision, he was the first one to introduce and translate in part for a local literary magazine James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the full Chinese version of which wasn’t published on the mainland until 2012.
As one of the earliest Chinese Shakespearean scholars, he published a translated version of Henry IV in 1957, five years before he started working on a Chinese version of Dante Alighieri’s epic Divine Comedy.
In both translations, as an ambitious experimentalist, Wu attempted to recreate not just the meaning but also the linguistic skeleton of the original works, by applying blank verse and terza rima, two Western rhyme schemes, in Chinese language texts.
He later infused his experimentalism into his original creations as a poet. He was known for writing Chinese poems in the early stage of his academic career using a wider variety of Western rhyme patterns, such as blank verse, sonnets, ballads and Spenserian stanzas.
Among all his accomplishments, his poetry still draws controversy today. In a time when the influence of 19th century British romanticism dominated Chinese poets, wrote poet and translator Bian Zhilin in an article that discussed Wu’s poetic style, Wu adopted an “anti-romantic approach” that adopted reasoning and irony. Meanwhile, Bian wrote, Wu leaned toward Chinese poetic traditions.
Chinese literature at the threshold of 20th century, poetry in particular, was characterized by a resolute breakaway, in both form and spirit, from traditional genres. That attempt practically made the “new poetry” orphaned and exiled, Fung Hei-kin wrote in an article. In his grapple with tradition as a poet of a new era, Wu was one of the few that embraced the past.
On the surface, he wrote modern-language poems while strictly following the rule of jueju, a widely adopted style of Tang Dynasty (618-907) poetry, in which each of a poem’s four lines contains five or seven characters.
On a deeper level, Wu’s poems were known among academics as being meticulously crafted to allude to ancient thoughts and imagery. Some references were explicit and easily detectable, others crafted in a more subtle and playful manner. An appreciation of Wu’s works requires a high level of historical and cultural erudition, a rare quality that led even the most learned critics to label his poems as difficult.
The fact that few people understood his poems frustrated him and made him feel lonely, Fung quoted Wu as complaining in a letter he wrote to a friend. But Wu insisted, as he wrote in another letter, that true lovers of poetry should “pull themselves together” and the poets’ painstaking efforts deserved meticulous reading. A capable writer should load each character with substantial meaning so that a piece of work can spark numerous associations in readers’ minds, Wu argued in a review of ancient prose. “In traditional poetry,” he wrote, “the relationship between the reader and the poet is a very close one. The poet does not have to worry whether the reader will understand or not.”
Wu’s stance on poetry appreciation mirrors one of the enduring faiths shared by great literati like T.S. Eliot, who in “Tradition and Individual Talent,” according to Fung, believed poets or artists of any art should never be evaluated in isolation and instead should be set for comparison or contrast among the dead.
If Wu had any wisdom to be cherished today, Fung said, it is primarily on the value of poetry. To understand a good poem, Fung said, is to understand its relation to other works and the various kinds of connotations its text generates.
Therefore, when Wu’s poems are deemed difficult, Fung argued, it’s not the poems’ problem at all. It points to the disappearance of a literate and capable audience and the “dying of a reading era,” Fung said, a foreseeable prospect that seemed to have already saddened Wu back in the 1940s.
Despite Wu’s sufferings caused by politics, Tang Yi recalled, he never talked about politics after he was labeled a “rightist.” There was only one exception.
When the two talked about Plato’s dialogues and The Republic one day, Wu said, all of sudden, that politics today was still the same.
“That was it. One sentence. Nothing more,” Tang wrote.