China and the West

Li, Ch'ing-chao [Li, Qingzhao]. Complete poems. Transl. and ed. by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung [ID D32233].
Sekundärliteratur
1985
William Lockwood : The poems are Rexroth's approach to the task of making Li Qingzhao's poems accessible to an English-speaking Western audience. With a clear grasp of what had been accomplished in the western tradition of lyric poetry. I suggest that Rexroth brought, especially to Li's most sophisticated love poems, resources of language and of sensibility that made him more fully adequate to the task. If he were to succeed in making Li's world familiar, that success would have to originate in such a resourceful capacity for discovering in his own ordinary world such extraordinary satisfaction as Li found in hers. Rexroth's attentiveness to his own vital dwelling place was linked to a comprehensive awareness of what had been achieved by men and women of articulate imagination in the history of civilized thought and feeling.
The English-speaking reader has not often found language so witty and so finely elegiac, within the lyric mode, over recent centuries of literary history. In this occasion of translating Li, Rexroth makes it available again. Among Li's most complex poems, those written out of occasions of separation from her husband during his travels to the mountains or his duty as magistrate in another town, seem most resistent to translation. Such poems project into the geographical landscape of Li's Shantung province the landscape of her own heart and mind.
Rexroth's versions of Li's song written in remembrance of lost love – following her exile from Shantung and the death of her husband – likewise retain a sensuous and luminous texture. We are grateful for Rexroth's ability to recreate the luminousness of Li's daydreaming songs and so to bring into our lives her bright, resourceful personality. In Rexroth's poems we have witnessed the affinity of one great love poet for another, at times, almost a merging of those kindred personalities, and the pleasure we take in those poems is very likely intensified by our own dreadful sense of living in 'the most loveless time imaginable'. The remarkable achievement of his versions of Li originates in his ability to make accessible and familiar to the English-language reader a sense of the fortitude with which he suffered losses as well as the resourcefulness by which she found satisfactions ; that he was impelled to recreate the wholeness of her world because he urgently felt the western world was losing such wholeness ; and that his own life-long journeying as an original poet and as a responsible man of letters had prepared him for the task. I began by suggesting that Rexroth at age 74, viewed Li's poems as a kind of garden or imaginary landscape in which he might recover the self-realizing resourcefulness of his youth ; and I would like to close by suggesting that it also became an occasion for acknowledging a world-wide sense of homelessness.
2004
Lucas Klein : Working with Ling Chung for the complete volume, Rexroth's translations – at least in the final versions – can be expected to be closer to the original Chinese, rather than representative of the partial portrayals found in his Du Fu. Comparing earlier translations with late, paying attention to the notes he offers for her translations, will elucidate the development of Rexroth's poetic, as well as how he uses words to create a specific reading of his poetry.