China and the West

Kenneth Rexroth and China : general.
Quellen :
Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise. [Ed. par] G[eorges] Margouliès [ID D7077].
Ayscough, Florence. Travels of a Chinese poet Tu Fu [ID D32199].
Ayscough, Florence. Tu Fu : the autobiography of a Chinese poet, A.D. 712 [ID D10473].
Cent quatrains des T'ang. Trad. du chinois par Lo Ta-kang [Luo Dagang] [ID D32200].
Du, Fu. Du Du xin jie. (Beijing : Zhonghua shu ju, 1961). 讀杜心解
Du, Fu. Du shi jing quan. (Taipei : Yi wen yin shu guan, 1971). 杜詩鏡銓
Hervey de Saint-Denys, Léon. Poésies de l'époque des Thang [ID D2216].
Hung, William. Du shi yin de = A concordance to the poems of Tu Fu. Vol. 2. [ID D10218].
Hung, William. Tu Fu : China’s greatest poet [ID D10264].
Mathews, R[obert] H[enry]. A Chinese-English dictionary dictionary [ID D8646].
Payne, Robert. The white pony [ID D32201].
Florilège des poèmes Song, 960-1277 après J.-C. Traduit du chinois par George Soulié de Morant [ID D7180].
Tu, Fu [Du, Fu]. Gedichte. Übersetzt von Erwin von Zach [ID D4951].

Sekundärliteratur
1984
Ling Chung : Kenneth Rexroth has never taken any formal lessons in the Chinese language. He has perceived an important aspect of Chinese poetics. Chinese landscape poetry often presents nature in its pure, original forms, and the interference of the poet's subjective consciousness is reduced to a minimum. As a result, the reader is brought to a closer contact with nature itself and is put in a state of mind quite similar to being placed in what Rexroth called a 'poetic situation'. He not only applies this rule to the writing of his own poetry, but also to the translation of Chinese poetry.
1988
Shu Yunzhong : Kenneth Rexroth not only translated and imitated Chinese poetry conscientiously but also argued strongly for the merit of Chinese literature in his literary criticism. As a poet, he repeatedly admitted he had saturated himself with Chinese poetry for decades, especially with the poetry of Du Fu. Rexroth's deviation from the original poem in both his translation and imitation of Chinese poetry is contextual and cultural rather than textual. More significantly, because of Rexroth's influence in contemporary American literature, study in this line can further lead us to understand how classical Chinese poetry was adapted to the contemporary American literary milieu.
Underlying Rexroth's poetry and translation is the central concept of 'communion'. This concept to Rexroth means a sensual, personal relationship between human beings. Poetry, including translation of poetry, is an expression of embodiment of this communion. Rexroth was an indefatigable critic of the conformist impulses that dominate the contemporary world. Influenced by an existentialist concept of alienation, he thought that in contemporary society human beings become more like things than persons, and the individual, as a result of his alienation from other human beings as well as from himself, loses himself in the end. Poetry, it seems to him, is a remedy that can deliver people from this plight.
Rexroth finds that Chinese literature, especially Chinese classical poetry, is very much to his taste because it possesses many characteristics which fit into his concept of 'communion'. The most important characteristic in Chinese poetry, it seems to him, is its humanness.
The Chinese philosophers Rexroth liked to talk about are Laozi and Zhuangzi. At first it seems that this is because these two Taoist philosophers deal with the concept of communion in their writings. In Rexroth's poetry the universe does not have its own meaning without human intervention. Ironically, he thinks this is a genrally held idea in Chinese culture. Once we realize the separation between man and the universe in Rexroth's poetry, we can better understand his cosmology which, at first glance, seems to bear some resemblance to Taoism because he sometimes uses Taoist terminology.
We may conclude that Rexroth's understanding of classical Chinese poetry is based on his central concept of 'communion', which is conditioned by his Western cultural heritage as well as by a perception of existential need in the contemporary social situation. Therefore his deviation from the Chinese original texts in both his translation and imitation of classical Chinese poetry should be explained in terms of his social milieu, personal philosophy and political learning.
2004
Lucas Klein : Every life in poetry is in some ways a development of a voice, and aesthetic identity that marks a poem as written by a certain poet. Even when poets actively rebel against the limits of a single unity, they are nonetheless working within the confines this voice entails. For Rexroth, whose stylistic shifts are soft and whose aesthetic is remarkably steady throughout his poetic career, each poem can illuminate all other poems in a cross-referencing art of light, as each poem benefits from the creation of the context to which it contributes. The reader who approaches this oeuvre is then granted a full view, and my task has been to show how, via prose and translation and notes, Du Fu and Li Qingzhao constitute a significant portion of Rexroth's complete aesthetic context. The key works are sensibility, sexuality, and spirituality. In focusing on these elements in the poetry of Du Fu and Li Qingzhao, Rexroth in turn shifts the focus into these elements within his own poetry. For Rexroth, and for the development of his poetics, the focal point of his contextual arc is his sensibility – his nervous system as completely open as Du Fu's – towards the combination of the sexual and the spritiual, creating a body of work whose love poems are, like those of Li Qingzhao, actually mystical.