A Walk Through Cambridge, Where Words Once Lingered
My name is Jacqueline Lam (Jacqui for short). I am a Cambridge Green Badge Tourist Guide who believes that this city is best understood not only through its colleges and courtyards, but through the feelings it quietly leaves behind. Many visitors from China arrive in Cambridge already knowing Xu Zhimo's famous Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again. It is a beautiful poem, but also a familiar one. I prefer to invite you a little further off the well-trodden path -- to a quieter, more intimate connection between Cambridge and Chinese hearts. During the 1920s, Xu Zhimo lived and studied in Cambridge. He walked the same streets you will walk, crossed the same bridges, and paused beneath the same skies. What is less known is that here, he translated a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti -- When I am dead, my dearest. This was not merely translation. It was resonance. Christina Rossetti herself was deeply connected to Cambridge through her family, and her poetry reflect...