A poet, critic, and translator, Hu Xudong gained a master's degree in Comparative Literature and a doctorate in Contemporary Chinese Literature from Peking University, where he worked. Hu was also associate professor at the World Literature Institute and vice-director of the Brazilian Culture Center. The poet spent some time living in Brazil and during this period learned Portuguese.
Hu published nine books of poetry, also prose, essays, translations of poems, and poetry criticism. Hu Xudong’s published poetry collections include Waterside Book, Calendar Power, Lifetime Undercover, Travel/Poems, Pieces of Poems, and essay collections such as Floating Nonsense, Eating Random Thinking, among others. With them, he won several awards, such as the LiuLi'an Poetry Prize, the Tomorrow-Ergun, the Top 10 New Poets, and the Pearl River International Prize.
In addition, he participated in several literary festivals, such as the International Writing Program in the United States, Cosmopoetics Cordoba, International Poetry Rotterdam, Anglo-French Poetry Festival, Asian-Nordic Poetry Festival, Pacific Poetry Festival and The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival. He was also very active in organizing poetry activities in China.
Director of the Portuguese Department of the University of Macau, Yao Jingming, who was with him in Macau in 2014 as part of the The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, told Macau CLOSER that Hu Xudong’s death “is really a huge loss for Chinese poetry,” as the poet was “very respected” in China. “He is very important to contemporary Chinese poetry,” Yao points out, adding that his death “was news that shocked many people, especially poets, friends and students of his.”
Hu Xudong was “a talented poet, always full of emotion.” His poetry has “a style very much his own, just like his personality,” always with a hint of irony. He was also a funny person with a sense of humor, Yao recalls.
Hélder Beja, who was the program director of the Macau Literary Festival at the time, also commented on Hu Xudong’s death, describing him as “a young academic and poet, a generous and humorous man who spoke and wrote Portuguese.”
In 2014, at The Script Road, Hu Xudong joined António Graça de Abreu for a conversation about Chinese literature and Western literature. The two authors talked, among other topics, about the stong influence that Western works have had on contemporary Chinese poets.
Hu pointed out that this influence may be because, by eschewing the classics and opening up to writers from other geographies through their translations, young authors are able to widen their “feeding circuit” and thereby find a voice of their own; a problem for some sinologists.
“They value the classics too much and most of them are prejudiced against contemporary Chinese poets,” Hu said at the time, pointing out the case of Stephen Owen, an American sinologist who compared contemporary Chinese poetry to a low quality copy of Western poetry.
In conclusion, Hu Xudong said that one cannot dispense with tradition, but neither can one write like the traditional poets. That is why he believed that “it will still take a long time” for new Chinese poetry to be recognized.
The poet, who used to live in Beijing, also said that he had never written in the Chinese capital. “I have a very strange habit which is writing in hotels, on flights or on trains. I think that writing while traveling along a route is closer to the essence, because the poem is a metaphor of a journey.”
