Biography

Luorui published since the early 1940s. She gained a PhD (for a dissertation on Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

) from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in 1948 and returned to teach English and North American literature at Peking University, Beijing. She was married to Chen Mengjia

Chen Mengjia

Chen Mengjia was a Chinese scholar and archaeologist. At the height of his career Chen was Professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was married to Chinese poet and translator Zhao Luorui...

, an archaeologist and expert on oracle bones. Chen committed suicide after denunciation and persecution during the Cultural Revolution

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

. Zhao Luorui herself was also considered an enemy of the state by Chinese officials.

Works

She translated T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

(1937), Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

's The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft...

and eventually saw a mass publication of her translation of the whole of Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

's Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman . Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death...

(1991). She was a co-editor of the first Chinese-language History of European Literature (1979).

External links

• Walt Whitman in China

Further reading

• Price, Kenneth M. An Interview with Zhao Luorui.' Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 13 (1995): 59-63. Publ. 1996.
• Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature