Tagore’s China, Yeats’ Orient

Tagore’s Nobel Prize came just after the 1911 Chinese Revolution and coincided with young Chinese poets’ crafting a new vernacular language. Tagore inspired them. Guo Moruo, an aspiring poet translated Tagore’s ‘Crescent Moon’ into modern Chinese. Another major romantic poet, Xu Zhimo, served as Tagore’s interpreter during his 1924 China visit and established a Chinese poetry journal called Crescent Moon. Yeats was introduced to the Chinese public by China’s Short Story Magazine, which in 1923 published his Preface to Gitanjali. Chinese intellectuals looked to Yeats as a poet and champion of anti-colonial Irishness. But Yeats, unlike Tagore, seemed disinterested in the Chinese social reality, China remaining bound up with his Anglophone, bourgeois, Orientalist vision of the East. Tagore, however, engaged with poets and others who were about imagining a new Asian culture.