{{Short description|Chinese poet}} {{refimprove|date=January 2026}} {{family name hatnote|Zha|lang=Chinese}} thumb|upright|Mu Dan in the mid-to-late 1940s '''Zha Liangzheng''' ({{zh|t=查良錚|s=查良铮|p=Zhā Liángzhēng}}; 5 April 1918 – 26 February 1977),<ref>{{Citation |last=Zhang |first=Huiwen Helen |title=Mu Dan's Poetry as a History of Modern China |date=2018-10-24 |work=Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History |url=https://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/acrefore-9780190277727-e-138 |access-date=2026-01-26 |publisher=Oxford University Press |doi=10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.138 |isbn=978-0-19-027772-7|url-access=subscription }}</ref> better known by his pen name '''Mu Dan''' ({{zh|c=穆旦|p=Mù Dàn}}), was a Chinese poet. Born in Tianjin, he attended Tsinghua University at the age of 17, and graduated from National Southwestern Associated University in 1940. He served as an assistant lecturer of English at his alma mater for about two years. During World War II, he joined the Chinese Expeditionary Force in Burma and fought alongside the Allied forces against the Japanese. After the war ended, he attended the University of Chicago, where he obtained a master's degree in English literature. He was a distant paternal relative of the wuxia novelist Louis Cha.{{Citation needed|date=May 2010}} Most of Zha's poems were written during the late 1930s and 1940s. His poetry, which is characterised by impassioned speculation, abstract sensuality, and occasionally, restrained irony, is the foremost example of Chinese new vernacular verse absorbing modern Western techniques. Zha was a professed admirer of W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. He studied their poetry at Southwest Associated University under William Empson, himself a leading modernist poet. On the other hand, the patriotism{{Citation needed|date=May 2010}} and the compassion for the suffering and needy in his poetry fall easily in line with a great tradition in Chinese poetry.
Zha had to give up poetry writing several years after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and he turned to literary translation, for which he is also renowned. His works in this respect include the Chinese translations of Lord Byron's ''Don Juan'' and Aleksandr Pushkin's ''Eugene Onegin''. It was not until 1976 that Zha resumed writing poetry. He produced 27 poems that year; highly regarded among them were several moving elegy-style pieces. He died suddenly of a heart attack in early 1977.
==References== {{reflist}}
==External links== {{Wikiquote}} * [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mu-Dan Mu Dan]. Britannica.
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Mu, Dan}} Category:1918 births Category:1977 deaths Category:20th-century Chinese poets Category:Tianjin Nankai High School alumni Category:National Southwestern Associated University alumni Category:Tsinghua University alumni Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:Academic staff of Nankai University Category:Poets from Tianjin Category:Victims of the Cultural Revolution Category:20th-century Chinese translators Category:Chinese expatriates in the United States
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