Richard Berengarten, Changing, with a preface by Edward L. Shaughnessy and Calligraphy by Yu Mingquan. Bristol, United Kingdom: Shearsman Books Ltd., 2016.
最近又把李道（Richard Berengarten）的诗集（或组诗）《变易》（Changing）读了一遍。上一次读这本书还是在2019年的时候，疫情还没有开始，再读时疫情基本上已经过去了。
Richard Berengarten给自己取的中文姓名是李道。据他自述，他是1962年第一次接触到《易经》的，那时候他还是一位19岁的剑桥大学本科生，专业是英语语言文学，而他出版这部以《易经》为基础而写的诗集则是54年之后了。（p. 521-523）现在的他，是剑桥大学教授、住校诗人、国际著名诗人。
他也自述，他的这部诗集，从结构上讲，是完全模仿《易经》（或确切说是《周易》）六十四卦的结构，每一首诗都有序部，相当于卦辞，也有六首小诗，相当于爻辞；由于乾坤两卦还有用九用六，所以这两首包括七首小诗。（p. 525）
另外，李道还将自己读别的中国文献，又与《周易》关联度很高的，也写入了这部诗集中，例如他曾将张载写入三首小诗，也许他对横渠四句也很认可，或者他也读了张载的易学著作。而且，他也把与《易经》息息相关的“Change”和“I Ching”也写入了诗歌之中，让人有互文之感。
将所有的诗读完，感觉李道先生是将汉语尤其是《周易》语言和英语的优势充分地结合了起来，创作出了非常高超的诗歌，读起来既让人不断思辨，又得到美的感受。读完之后，有一些诗节觉得能够给人特别多的启发，所以就摘录了部分，跟大家分享，希望大家喜欢。
第1诗节“Initiating”(乾)
2. What Zhang Zai thought
Out walking alone as an autumn
sun was going down and a yellow ball
of a hunter's moon coming up,
Zhang Zai sat on a tree stump
and quietly forgot about time and
mortality and himself awhile
as he soaked himself into
and through things. Not much of
a life, he thought, if you can't
or don't get a chance to see
patterns and images of heaven
and earth as merely sediment
of marvellous transformations.
And not much of a view if you've
forgotten it. Better be poor and
remember his than have power
and wealth and forget heaven is
text and context for all wisdom. (p. 6)
第2诗节“Responding, Corresponding”(坤)
3. Change
How shall changes
let alone Change itself
be understood and
measured? The one
immeasurable law that
governs all things, at
least in this universe,
is that everything every-
where is constantly
on the move through-
out spacetime, jsut as
reciprocally spacetime
itself is always on
the move through
things. The one
common inhering
condition that never
changes is Change. (p. 17)
7. Being simple
This is where we start
every time -- in purposeless
potential, in a before so far
'back' 'behind' all other
befores, it can't really be counted
as being in time of any kind,
let alone pertaining to or
belonging to time. Its isness --
meshed so tight and sheer
into its notness that neither
is extricable from the other --
yields a pointless point
neither passive nor active,
neither this nor that but both --
point of departuer and
eternal return -- and if an
image at all, then one that is
not-an-image, a not-image. (p. 21)
第6诗节“Clashing”(讼)
6. A white horse
Master Ni Yue enjoyed
arguing a white horse isn't
a horse. Effortlessly he
aruged strips off
all-comers. By alternately
confuting and separating
subcategory and kind
he ran rings around even
most sophisticated
intellecutal adversaries
never failing to walk away
laughing. But when
Ni Yue rode through
West City Gate on his own
white horse, imperial
frontier guards, following
standard procedures, taxed
him. For owning a horse. (p. 54)
第8诗节“According, Binding”(比)
2. Something and nothing
'Before any something, was
there a nothng? Or was there
a something else? if nothing
came first, wasn't that nothing
a something in its own notness, its
very elseness?' asked Duke Ai.
Zhuangzi said, 'Whether thinghood
came out of notness, of nothing else
or something else, how can I,
who know nothing abouth something
and nothing about nothing, possibly
tell the difference between the first
of all somethings and the very
first nothing? Skies pass and are
still and always sky. We, who
ask and watch, dream and
wake beneath them. Each one
of us, a something. A nothing.'
3. The third other
'And you and I together, by our
union itself, generate a third -- not
that passing shadow who walks
at times beside one or other of us,
whom both have glimpsed through
curtained windows, in half-light,
hovering behind a chair, or
behind half-closed eyes, between
sleep and waking -- but another
other, belonging to neither,
to neither one nor the other, formed
out of our eachness, our
isness, our othernesses,
our bothnesses -- our selves --
an entirely separate being.
Once this third other arrives,
history begins. How many more
shall time and space allow?' (p. 67)
第20诗节“Watching”(观)
6. Lines unbroken and broken
So we copied, counted
and measured, from what
we saw and heard --
eggs, shards, shells,
seeds, casings, stones,
cones, bones, entrails,
tails, scales, wings,
leaves, flowers, stems,
feathers, nails, bark,
thunder, waves, winds,
roots, shoots, shadows --
and so learned forms
and figures. So too we
carved necessity and made
patterns of our own
and from their cracks
and fissures drew lines
unbroken and broken. (p. 166)
第38诗节“Separating”(睽)
1. Chameleon
Regard chameleon -- if
you can find him. He was
on branch behind rock
before light below sur-
face inside rain between
morning and evening
(through glistening and
glistening) on star-dot and
through and in blinding
blaze of sun. Catch his
position and you will not
track his movement and
vice-versa. How beauti-
ful chaemeleon ungraspable
as moment leaping and
in less than whisper less
than breath -- gone. And
you? Who might you be? (p. 305)
第48诗节“Welling, Replenishing”(井)
4. I Ching
Fifty years my
friend, companion
and spirit-guide
always trustworthy,
never diffident
never irrelevant
solid yet flowing
firm yet yielding
radiating images
self-replenishing
inexaustibel
fathomless
ever-fresh well --
in pluming you
I soar
feet still
grounded rooted
in his here now. (p. 388)
第50诗节“Cooking, Sacrificing”(鼎)
4. What the Delphic Oracle said
I spy by butterfly. I dowse by bee
and I have filtered water's memory
to count for every droplet in the sea.
I sail disasters and ride distant storms
to track the links and paradoxal forms
reclusive among averages and norms.
My inner eyes read souls. My spirit-hands
finger sea-beds and uncroll distant lands
to calculate their particles of sands.
I coil hatched hurricanes in wax-sealed jars
and count on Chronos and his avatars
to read the rings and number of the stars.
I excavate gone dialects of bone
and know the thoughts forgotten men have thrown --
thining themselves unheard -- at rock and stone.
Your death's an empty window I've seen through.
I've walked out and surveyed the long dark view
as if it were an evening avenue. (p. 404)
第55诗节“Abounding, Brimming”(丰)
4. What Zhang Zai said
Zhang Zai said, Earth is
a thing. Heaven is a marvel.
One look up at the stars
at night far from any city,
and what he meant is clear.
Yet since this world
floats on, in, across
and through heaven, doesn't
being in and on the world
mean being in and on heaven
too? And if so, don't seas, rocks,
soil, air contain as much
heaven as stars and
interstellar spaces up there?
Therefore, isn't heaven
as much in my fleshed
mortal hands and yours as
it might lurk in any god's? (p. 444)
6. What Zhang Zai knew
Heaven is more
than discernible sky.
Your could never
see all of heaven
or even imagine it.
Zhang Zai knew
heaven is actually
where we are already --
fully empty and
emptily full,
unfathomable and
insubstantial, both
by substance and by
our irreducible material
sources and ends
in the way of ways.
Buoyed in void we
rise, fall, rise, fall. (p. 446)
第62诗节“Overstepping”(小过)
3. Looking for [the] Revolution
Brave Iulian Shchutskii,
sinologist, historian, translator,
knew Manchu, Mandarin,
Cantonese, Mongolian, Viet-
namese, Japanese, German and
English. Researched the I Ching.
His favourite joke: a Russian,
up a pole, scans [the] horizon
for [the] Revolution. When
asked to come down, the
Russian refuses, this being his
'permanent full-time job'.
For this, for being who
and what he was, Shchutskii
incurred Stalin's wrath, got
arrested by NKVD (1937)
and perished (1938) aged 41,
skull crushed by a chain. (p. 499)
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