Richard J. Smith (U.S.A.)
A Tribute to Richard Berengarten in His 80th Year
In a forthcoming chapter for the Dao Companion to the Book of Changes (Springer, 2024), I pay homage to a number of scholarly friends who have influenced my views on the Yijing (I Ching, or Book of Changes) over a span of some thirty years. Richard Berengarten is the most recent of these friends.
Richard’s engagement with the Changes dates back to the early 1960s when, as a student at Cambridge University, he discovered Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Yijing. From that point onward, he studied the Changes, divined with it, and eventually began writing poetry inspired by it. Along the way, he came into contact with a number of creative writers and academics whose interest in the Yijing matched his own. One such person was Octavio Paz. Richard’s eloquent essay in the Fortnightly Review, titled “Octavio Paz in Cambridge, 1970,” attests to their profound intellectual and poetic affinities.
Richard first started writing Changes-based poetry in the 1980s, but it was not until 2016 that he produced his magnum opus, Changing, a 518-page poem based on the sixty-four hexagrams, and covering an almost unimaginable span of thematic territory—ranging from language, philosophy, religion, literature, music, mythology and history, to dreams, images of nature, human relationships, life and death, joy and sorrow, and terrible tragedies (notably, the Holocaust). The multicultural orientation of the poems is especially striking. The book is graced by an elegant preface written by Edward Shaughnessy—one of several Yijing scholars sought out for advice by Richard in the 2000s. Others were Richard Kunst, Bent Nielsen and Tze-Ki Hon. Eventually, I, too, entered the fold.
Richard and I hit it off instantly, although initially only via email correspondence. At some point, after we first met personally in 2016 at a University of Chicago workshop hosted by Ed and attended by Tze-Ki, Richard mentioned the plans of a distinguished scholar of literature at Greece’s Ionian University in Greece named Paschalis Nikolaou, to put together a book of essays based on Changing. When Paschalis invited me to be a coeditor, I was overjoyed.
Meanwhile, Richard and I continued our robust and wide-ranging correspondence, from which I benefitted far more than he. Richard also sent me a number of his remarkable collections of poetry, all generously inscribed.
The co-edited work that Paschalis and I eventually produced is titled Under the Sign of the I Ching: Essays on Richard Berengarten’s Changing (Shearsman, 2023). Designed as a critical and interpretive companion to Richard’s book, it contains eighteen essays by contributors from nearly a dozen countries, including a philosopher, a historian, a philologist, an anthropologist, a Jungian analyst, several literary critics, several scholarly experts on the Yijing, experienced diviners, and practicing poets. I have learned much from these individuals about Richard’s poetry and his admirable personal values.
A nineteenth-century Chinese commentary on the Yijing states succinctly: “The Changes is the mirror of men’s minds” (易者人心之鏡也).” In other words, its great virtue is the capacity to stimulate creative responses on the part of creative readers. Thus, in my heartfelt back-cover “blurb” for Changing I was able to write: “For more than two thousand years the Yijing has served as a stimulus to great and fertile minds, giving inspiration to poets and philosophers alike. Berengarten’s magnificent book-poem stands solidly in this tradition, providing a wealth of new and creative ways of thinking about perennial human problems.”
Thank you, Richard, for helping me to approach a very familiar book with fresh eyes.
Rice University
July 9, 2023
Back to introduction here.
Next contribution here.