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The most inovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, François Cheng's Chinese Poetic Writing--now in its first expanded, English-language edition--is an essential read for fans and scholars of Chinese literature and the art of poetry in general. Since its first publication in French in 1977, Chinese Poetic Writing has been considered by many to be the most innovative study of Chinese poetry ever written, as well as a profound and remarkable meditation on the nature of poetry itself. As the American poet Gustaf Sobin wrote, two years after the book’s appearance, “In France it is already considered a model of interdisciplinary research, a source book, and a ‘star’ in the very spac...
"It opens to a spring day, when a middle-aged doctor named Dao-sheng leaves the mountaintop Taoist monastery where he has been living and sets out for the Region of the South, to the city he had once visited thirty years earlier and where his life had been irrevocably changed. He had then been a strapping but poor young musician traveling with a theater troupe. One evening, during a performance, he caught the eye of a well-born young woman named Lan-ying. Their contact lasted but a minute, but to them it felt like an eternity. For this act of audacity he was banished to hard labor by the girl's jealous fiance, the dissipated scion of a powerful family, who had witnessed their exchange and grasped its significance. Across the decades of a life spent either on the run or hiding out in monasteries, where he mastered medicine and divination, Dao-sheng never forgot Lan-ying. One exchange of glances had sealed something forever, something whose enduring power would decide their fates."--BOOK JACKET.
Philosophical discussions on the ways that death makes life meaningful and sacred • Reveals how being conscious of death gives our fate its full meaning, inviting the reader to contemplate life in the light of their own death • Examines the author’s experience of ancestor worship in his native China and the beliefs that underlie it • Explains how death is a transition in a longer living process not visible from the modern “black and white” view of life and death • Translated by award-winning translator Jody Gladding Born from intimate discussions with friends, these five meditations on death from poet-philosopher François Cheng examine the multiple ways the prospect of death s...
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Chinese painting might be called "philosophy in action", for it is one of the highest expressions of Chinese spirituality. Both a medium for contemplation leading to self-transcendence and a microcosm embodying universal principles and primal forces, it is a means for making manifest the Chinese worldview. At the heart of this worldview is the notion of emptiness, the dynamic principle of transformation. Only through emptiness can things attain their full measure and human beings approach the universe at the level of totality. Focusing on the principle of emptiness, Francois Cheng uses semiotic analysis and textual explication to reveal the key themes and structures of Chinese aesthetics in the practice of pictorial art. Among the many Chinese writers, poets, and artists whose writings are quoted, he gives special emphasis to a great Ch'ing dynasty theoretician and painter, Shih-t'ao. Twenty-seven reproductions of the words of Shih-t'ao and other masters illustrate the interpretive commentary.
Five meditations on the role of beauty in human life and its direct connection with the sacred • Looks at how beauty has the power to elevate and counterbalance the negative side of the reality facing us • Presents the role of beauty in transforming individuals and transforming the world from a Taoist perspective In a time of mindless violence and widespread ecological and natural catastrophes, François Cheng asks if talking about beauty may not seem incongruous even scandalous. Yet this is actually the most appropriate time to revisit a subject that was a philosophical mainstay for millennia. The power of beauty to elevate and transcend counterbalances the negative side of the reality ...
Verses from Chinese poetry's acclaimed golden age are elegant and precise examples of spiritual beauty and of the economy of language. Illustrations.
Lyrical, image-driven and provocative, Cheng's novel is composed in the form of an artist's memoir, reording not just what is seen but the consciousness of seeing.--Starred Review, Publishers Weekly
The deepest and most varied of the Tang Dynasty poets, Tu Fu (Du Fu) is, in the words of David Hinton, the “first complete poetic sensibility in Chinese literature.” First published in 1967, this book presents thirtyfive Chinese poems with a pinyin transliteration, a characterbycharacter translation, and commentaries on the subject, form, and historical background. Hawkes gives us a nutsandbolts account of how the poems of one of the world's greatest poets are constructed. It's an irresistible challenge for readers to invent their own translations.
This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguisti...