RICHARD BERENGARTEN

The evening star

Hey, we’ve got a guitar. So let’s have a song.
Once we’re sozzled we can totter off home.

You sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar.
We reminisced. We mixed up fact and fable.
We drank all day. Out came the evening star.

You brought wine in a round-lipped clay-glazed jar.
I asked you in. Your jar sat on the table.
You sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar.

We bantered – how things were and how they are,
Friendship our knot and wine its plaited cable.
We drank all day. Out came the evening star.

We solved the world. Our talk got circular.
We fell about, increasingly unstable.
You sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar.

You tottered home, which wasn’t very far.
I sat and watched gnats clouding the west gable.
We drank all day. Out came the evening star.

Who could compare with this? What silk-clad Czar?
What Emperor of Zhou? What Queen of Babel?
We sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar.
We drank all day. Out came the evening star.

*

Rivers and hills

Our feelings can reach farther than ten thousand miles
But our bodies are barred by rivers and hills.

I’m barred by rivers and I’m blocked by hills.
All I wanted dissolves. As for desire,
Things pass the way streams thread through watermills.

The nightingale is back. What singing skills –
Incessant song that never seems to tire.
I’m barred by rivers and I’m blocked by hills

Fine-tuned, my earthbound soul wells up and fills
With song – encompassed, satisfied, entire.
Things pass the way streams thread through watermills.

But I’ve heard eerier sounds at window sills
By night out there, receding further, higher.
I’m barred by rivers and I’m blocked by hills

Bring liquor now. And take care no drop spills.
Then pour – so we can all join in the choir.
Things pass the way streams thread through watermills.

Our candle flickers but the wick instils
Its blue blade through the yellow heart of fire.
I’m barred by rivers and I’m blocked by hills.
Things pass the way streams thread through watermills.

Richard Berengarten,

The Wine Cup: Twenty-Four Drinking Songs for Tao Yuanming, Shearsman Books 2022

Sonnet-sequences have a history of nearly 1000 years, going back to Dante and Cavalcanti.  But a sequence of villanelles? Here, perhaps for the first time, is a suite of twenty-four of them.  Richard Berengarten’s poems are well known for combining tradition and innovation. These new poems of his are from a collection just published by Shearsman Books. The delicate instrument of the villanelle is played, lightly and gently, to salute Tao Yuanming – Chinese poet, Daoist, recluse, and a great Lord of Wine, who lived more than 1500 years ago.

This kiln-fired Chinese drinking cup dates from the Northern and Southern Dynasties Period (420 to 589 CE). Tao Yuanming (365? to 427 CE) might well have drunk from a cup such as this, though after he retired from public life to live, and drink, in rural seclusion – so the story goes, under the shade of five willow trees – he is unlikely to have used quite so elegant a vessel. The drawing is by Arijana Mišić-Burns (Richard Berengarten’s daughter).

In February 2019, an unexpected invitation arrived from the Luzhou Laojiao Distillery in Sichuan, to write some poems on the theme of “poetry and liquor”. At that time I happened to be reading some English translations of poems by Tao Yuanming (365–427 CE). As soon as the invitation arrived, an idea struck me. I started writing straight away and – relatively effortlessly and spontaneously – a set of twenty-four poems flowed from my pen. During composition, at times it even seemed that Tao Yuanming was sitting beside me, that his voice was echoing in my head, and that through these incipient new poems in English, his voice was telling me exactly how they wanted to be written and what needed to be said. All I needed to do was accept and follow this voice, at once intimately familiar and strangely other.
Among the many things I love about Tao Yuanming are his vulnerable humanness and his Daoism. To me these are inseparable. I dedicate The Wine Cup to his immortal memory, hoping this homage will fully clarify and endorse my belief that this miglior fabbro, this wise, gentle man, is a great and noble Lord of Poems and, equally, a great and noble Lord of Wine.
Most of these poems have an epigraph I’ve rendered into English from Tao Yuanming, sometimes as a collage from different texts. All the poems are villanelles. This form creates a song-like pattern of rhyme and resonance that embodies and echoes the cyclic rhythms of nature. I believe the villanelle’s structure reflects at least some aspects of the formality, economy and delicacy of Tao Yuanming’s poems.
The two-volume bilingual Chinese-English text of Tao Yuan-Ming I’ve relied on in making these poems is T’ao Yuan-ming, His Works and their Meaning by A. R. Davis (Hong Kong University Press, 1983, and Cambridge University Press, 2009). This translation delivers Tao Yuanming’s thoughts into English in a literal, modest and transparent way, without frills, affectation or adornment. A. R. Davis’s erudite notes, glosses, questions and uncertainties make it all-the-more valuable.