Hadaa Sendoo (Mongolia)

Richard Berengarten: An English Poet Who Uses Poetry to Open the Door of Languages

For the 80th anniversary of Richard's birth

Richard is a poet with a universal, complex and open mind. Over half a century, Richard's poems have been translated into at least 90 languages, and more are being added. I would call it Richard's poetic phenomenon.

I remember it was the fall of 2009. I received three poetry books from Cambridge with a letter from Richard. Richard told me happily that he found a kind of poetic thought in my poem collection, Come Back to Earth, which coincided with his own – the poetic view of the universe.

Richard and I didn't meet through poetry festivals and conferences. We met through poetry. It was poetry that brought me into his poetic world and close to his beautiful soul.

Richard's poetry is a dialogue with the natural world and has a deep reverence for many of the world's ancient languages. In Richard's spiritual world, language is the most primitive voice of human beings and the blood of nature. The language of poetry can cross the borders of any single language, knock on the door of a strange country, and one can feel the warmth of the foreign country and the kindness of its people. And, as a professor of literature, Richard knows that there is more to language than linguistics, word formation, rhythm and tone and sentence combinations. He seems to have spent his whole life trying to discover the magic of poetry. Perhaps we can find the answer in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Richard spent his early years living and studying in Greece, and I'm sure he was inspired by the Muse. During his years of deep study of the classic Chinese Book of Changes, he came to the East. He seems to have found the serenity of the wind and a poetics of harmony with nature.

Looking back, I see that Richard's poetry transcends the boundaries of words, philosophy and religion. He has used his poetry to open the doors of different people’s languages because he wanted it to walk in the halls of poetic art.

Octavio Paz admired Richard's poetic vision. It is true that the poet really speaks to the poet.

In closing, I would like to say to Richard, you’re a poet of the universe, a poet who loves to be a citizen of the world.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.