Edward L. Shaughnessy (U.S.A.)

 For Richard

I’m not sure when I first came to know of Richard Berengarten, though it’s been a while, even if we’ve only actually met twice in the flesh, once—briefly, over a pint—in Cambridge, and once—for rather longer, in Chicago. We were brought together because of our mutual interest in China’s Classic of Changes, the Yi jing, better known in the West as the I Ching, the first of the Chinese classics, which started as a simple divination manual and ended up understood as containing the wisdom of the world. Both Richard and I became interested in the Changes in our early twenties, he in Cary F. Baynes’s English translation of Richard Wilhelm’s German translation, and I in the Chinese original, he as a kind of psycho-analytical exercise, and I as a philosophical and linguistic puzzle. Since Richard is just about ten years older than I am, that means that he has engaged with the text just about ten years longer than I have, and I am quite sure that he has come to understand the Wilhelm/Baynes version of it far better than I have ever understood the Chinese original. Certainly Richard’s Changing shows that he has drawn profound insight from the text, whereas I continue to be puzzled by it.

The Changes is organized around sixty-four images each composed of six lines, either solid (—) or broken (- -); in the West these images are known as hexagrams. Each hexagram has a name; a short formulaic statement that pertains to the entire hexagram; and six statements, one for each line, that are typically evocative (one might say enigmatic), and often quite poetic. This structure has structured Richard’s Changing as well: for each of the 450 statements of the Changes, Richard has written a poem, or perhaps we should say that he has written one single poem in 450 sections. The poems are inspired by the images in the individual statements of the Changes, and like the Changes itself, they concern all of the many aspects of the world, and especially of life—from heaven and earth to birth and death, and so much in between.

Richard asked me to write a preface to Changing, and for the most part I indulged my typical scholarly inclinations to write about Chinese precursors to Richard’s project. However, I also brought in some other poetry—a poem inspired by a poem in China’s Classic of Poetry, and another translating another poem in that classic. At the time, I had just begun to translate the text, and of course it was to Richard that I sent my first clumsy drafts. I sent him digital texts, which he proceeded to print, and then covered with comments in three colors (red, green and purple), which he then sent back to me as pdfs. He was critical (“The [of] construction is gauche Translationese,” in bright red, one of the milder comments) but also very encouraging. I have tried to take his criticisms to heart and have since gone on to translate all 305 of the poems, though I haven’t sent the complete translation to him; maybe I will still do so. He referred to his several missives to me as “Poundings,” and they were certainly that, in both the normal English sense of the word and also in its onomastic sense. If ever I do publish the complete translation, I will certainly note his contribution: il miglior fabbro.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.