From the book of changes to the book of changing : a route to world literature through Chinese culture
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From the book of changes to the book of changing: a route to world literature through Chinese culture Ming Dong Gu1,2
Received: 28 July 2020 / Revised: 14 August 2020 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 / Published online: 9 September 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
The I Ching (Yijing), also known as the Zhouyi (the Book of Changes), is the first Chinese classic and has served as both inspiration and source material for writings of history, philosophy, literature and art. While numerous Chinese poets have made major use of it in their poetic writings, it has never given rise to a complete poetic work in a Western language. The English poet Richard Berengarten has changed this situation. His recent poetic work, Changing, is, as the author informs us in his ‘Postscript,’ “based closely on the Chinese Book of Changes or the I Ching, and it is intended in part as an act of homage to this ancient text” (CH 521). Indeed, this remarkable book is not only the most ambitious poetic work ever to have been inspired by the Chinese classic, but also constitutes an admirable artistic achievement that contributes to cross-cultural dialogues in poetics and poetic practice. In terms of poetic themes and techniques, Berengarten’s opus charts a direct route from the Book of Changes, through ancient Chinese poetry and Anglo-American modernist poetry, to a remarkable work of world literature. And although it draws its creative inspiration and thematic sources directly from the first Chinese classic, the book is “not a translation or a commentary” on it, as it is “to be read first and foremost as a poem, or gathering of poems, in its own right and for its own sake.” (CH 521). Since the Book of Changes is a philosophical text or divination handbook, a reader might well ask: In what way is it related to Berengarten’s poetic collection, other than being the main source of inspiration for it? In the author’s postscript, he gives us a brief account of how the overall conception, planning, structure, and themes have been configured through the Book of Changes. He also tells us how closely he has modelled his poetic work on the * Ming Dong Gu [email protected] 1
Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
2
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA
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Chinese classic, from both macrocosmic and microcosmic perspectives, by “replicating and adapting its architectonic patterns” and by following the Yijing’s sixtyfour hexagrams with their image statements and line statements, with the result of producing 450 poems (each of the hexagrams yields a group of seven poems with two additional poems for the first two hexagrams: 64 × 7 + 2 = 450). Moreover, he informs us: “Consisting primarily of visual symbols patterned on binary mathematical option, which are combined with verbal ‘images’, ‘statements and judgements’, it is, rather a generative and transformative structure which remains entirely passive and latent until it is ‘activated’” (CH 524). In terms of poetic composition,
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