Returning Home

Returning Home Tao Chi, Wen Fong tr. 91pp.

Wen Fong’s collection of Tao Chi’s poems, entitled Returning Home is a beautiful collection of poetry from the early Ch’ing dynasty of China. Fong’s translation is excellent, presenting the text in a careful and moderated tone. Again, I can unfortunately not comment on the reliability of the translation from the Chinese, but I can comment on Fong’s greatest achievement in the book. Returning Home opens with a long essay about Tao Chi’s poetry, placing it in context within the tremendous scope of the Chinese poetic tradition. Fong highlights how the high points of Chinese poetry tend to coincide with the foundation of new dynasties. At these points in history, the literati from the capitol are forced into the countryside, to live their lives away from the hectic politics of the new dynasty. Longing for home, these poets turn their eyes back and create a melancholy air with their poetry, setting their words down plaintively, returning home in writing-if not physically.

It is precisely this longing that Tao Chi’s poetry excels in portraying, through a combination of painting and calligraphy, Tao Chi’s poems drag the reader in through short, terse verses. Each poem accompanies a painting, six of them paintings of flowers and six landscapes. Fong’s commentary on the pieces is immensely instructive, in each case, he explains the style used in the painting and the calligraphy. Unfortunately, I am very uneducated in the distinctions between these styles. Happily, Fong’s commentary is remarkably useful for gaining, at the very least, a surface-level understanding of Tao Chi’s expression.

Onto the poems themselves, then. Tao Chi’s poetry is brief and poignant. Each poem paints a scene in itself, highlighted by accompanying painting. The landscape poems tend to be stronger than the flower poems, and I’ll use one of them as an example:

High on the mountain

the beautiful colors are cold,

Where flying white clouds

cease to look white.

In two leaves, Tao Chi’s poem is presented in a beautiful sparse style. The calligraphy is lovely, but I am not experienced enough with Chinese calligraphy to speak to its quality on the level it deserves. This painting, however, is beautiful. Sharp brushstrokes cut into the paper, fading into white spaces which block out sections of mountain and the lonely stand of trees clinging to the side of the outcropping. 

Tao Chi’s poetry is phenomenal, presented in a careful and scholarly tone by Wen Fong. The essays and exegesis on each poem are remarkably helpful for getting deeper into the poetry, even for someone with a relatively shallow experience in Chinese poetry. In other books of Chinese poetry I’ve read, there will be a frequent mention of the paintings which accompany many poems, but never actual reproductions of the paintings. The paintings do lose a little bit in being reduced to fit in a comfortably sized volume, but their presence is incredibly helpful.

Would I recommend Returning Home? Yes, very much so.

Score: 4.9/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? Yes.

-Mr. Cheddar