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"Which
one of the world poetesses you like best?" I'd like to
say one is
the Chinese Li Tsingzhao, and the other is the American Emily
Dickinson.
Li
was born in a scholarly family in 1084 in the Sung Dynasty
(960-1279). She was much older than Dickinson who was born
in Amherst, Mass. Dec. 10, 1830. However, it's still significant
for us to make a comparison between the two. Either Li or
Dickinson has been well known for their perfect poetry. In
China perhaps everybody knows something about poetess Li Tsingzhao,
and Dickinson, too, in America. There have been a lot of people,
especially intellectuals or teachers and students who could
recite Li's works fluently. And in 1950, Harvard University
published all of Dickinson's poems and letters, since then,
an intensive interest in her poems started to prevail all
over America. Therefore we have reasons to make some research
on the two poetesses' works and try to understand why their
poetry has been attractive to everyone. Nowadays more and
more Dickinson's poems have been translated from English into
Chinese, but few of Li's verse has been introduced or translated
from Chinese into English or other foreign languages. It is
necessary for us to make still greater progress in promoting
mutual understanding in culture between China and her outside
world.
In
1987, I translated and introduced some of Dickinson's poems
in a Translation Journal (published in the third issue in
1988, Nanking, China). Today I'd like Dickinson's fellow countrymen
to know something about the Chinese great poetess Li Tsingzhao.
The main reason is that all her poems resulted from her inner-world
with true feelings or natural emotions. She had never taken
poems for earning a living or any payment. She wrote poems
but not want to have her poems published as the same as Dickins
on did. Both of them tried their best to communicate with
the human world in poetry writing way. They never were sensible
of their own great contributions to literature and art in
the world. Both of them were never reluctant to write anything
they didn't love or hate. Their works perfectly mirrors themselves
with their true flash ideas. |
