Introduction

The poems presented here represent the essential part of a written heritage that I know by heart. Excerpted from my work, Entre source et nuage (Between Spring and Cloud), they exemplify a poetic tradition whose richness is inexhaustible. This tradition, which dates from the Tang dynasty (618–907), corresponds to the golden age of Chinese classical poetry. Poets at that time were able to perpetuate, by building on it further, a literary culture whose origin goes back nearly a thousand years before our era. For about four centuries, thanks to a coming together of circumstances that were favorable on all levels—political, economic, and cultural—as though fulfilling a sacred mission, they took poetic creation to a level of intensity and accomplishment that has never been reached again since. It reached a point where poetry, in association with calligraphy and painting—known in China as the Triple Excellence—became the expression of the highest spirituality. We know that this spirituality was nourished by three currents of thought: Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. At one and the same time opposed and complementary, ceaselessly intermingling, these three religions contributed to the enrichment of Chinese thought by endowing it with a multiple viewpoint, and by preventing it from remaining one-dimensional and fixed. In its own way, poetry participated in this movement of a body of thought that was in a continual process of internal transformation.

In the Tang period, China recovered its unity after the collapse of the first empires (the Qin and the Han) and the long period of disorder and division resulting from barbarian invasions. At that point the three currents of thought, now recognized as the ideological foundation of society, came to pervade the realm of artistic creation. In the domain of poetry, three representative figures stand out. Li Po, who was inclined toward Taoism and in love with freedom, sings of total communion with nature and with beings. Du Fu, who was essentially Confucian, gave voice primarily to humanity's painful destiny, but also its greatness. Wang Wei, an adept of Ch'an Buddhism toward the end of his life, captures his meditative experiences in verses of perfect simplicity. Beside these giants, there are a great number of other poets who were their contemporaries or who came one or two generations after them. Each in his own way exalts the themes dear to him: Meng Haoran and Jia Dao reveal in spare, unadorned verses, their desire for escape and spontaneous communication. Bo Juyi denounces social injustice and describes the suffering of humble folk while harking back to the form of ancient popular song. Li Shangyin makes himself the ardent singer of passion and love. Qian Qi discovers the poetic rhythm that animates nature from the inside. Du Mu, at the end of the Tang period, expresses the stillness of nostalgia felt for happiness experienced or dreamed. Wei Yingyu is one of the major figures of the generation immediately following that of the great poets of the "prosperous Tang." Li Yu, the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty, helped to bring new life to the language of poetry.

What is the future fate of Chinese poetry? No doubt it will have to reinvent itself once again. Its path to salvation is one that passes through ever new metamorphoses, which could never come about without profound encounters with other poetic traditions and other artistic traditions, such as that of calligraphy. Poetry is the search for communion. The road its development takes, while always remaining one, has divisions and forks all along the way.

François Cheng