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{{Short description|Chinese poet}}
{{Unreferenced|date=December 2009}}
{{family name hatnote|[[Zha (surname)|Zha]]|lang=Chinese}}

'''Zha Liangzheng''' ({{zh|t=查良錚|s=查良铮|p=Zhā Liángzhēng}}; 5 April 1918 – 26 February 1977), 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 [[Allies of World War II|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 [[Jin Yong|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 [[Translation#Literary translation|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, prophetic of his sudden death of a heart attack in early 1977.

==References==
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==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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