Tao Yuanming
Tao Yuanming ( Chinese 陶淵明 / 陶渊明 , Pinyin Táo Yuānmíng ) or Tao Qian ( 陶潛 / 陶潜 , Táo Qián ; * 365 , according to other sources 372 ; † 427 ), also as the master of the five willows ( 五 柳先生 , Wǔ liǔ xiānsheng ) was a famous Chinese poet during the Eastern Jin Dynasty .
Life
Tao Yuanming was born in 365 to an impoverished officer's family. Little is known about his youth; In 393 he took over a subordinate post in the district administration of Pengze . Because of the arrogance of some of the aristocrats who were in charge of him, he withdrew to his estate two years later, at the age of thirty, to pursue agriculture .
In 399 he entered the service of the provincial governor Huan Xuan , who was particularly notable for his tough crackdown on the suppression of peasant revolts . Not least because of this, Tao soon ran over to the camp of Huan's ultimately victorious opponent, Liu Xu . After working for Liu for a while, in 405, disgusted by falsehood and corruption, Tao retired to his estate again, this time forever. There he surrounded himself with selected friends, including Buddhists and Taoists , and devoted himself entirely to literature.
Tao Yuanming, like many great Chinese poets, had a particular passion for intoxicating drinks. This also prompted him to completely plant the community field with schnapps rice during a brief interlude in office ; only his wife was to persuade him to devote a sixth of the area to the edible rice. Ironically, his great-grandfather Tao Kan , a high imperial general of the Eastern Jin Dynasty , had made a name for himself in the troops by rigidly combating all alcohol consumption.
plant
Tao Yuanming left behind a comparatively narrow oeuvre of only about a hundred poems as well as a few biographies and victim speeches .
The central theme is withdrawing from the world. In particular, he has often addressed his return to his country estate in poems: "The wandering bird longs for the forest home, the fish in the pond will have an unforgettable lake", as it says in "Back to country life" ( Guīyuántiánjū , 歸 園田 居 / / 归 园田 居 ). The scene in the “Poem of Coming Home ” ( Guīqùláicí , 歸去來 辭 / 归去来 辞 ), where the poet's children greet their father at the east fence of his property and he picks a chrysanthemum there , the symbol of the in China , has also become famous genteel seclusion. In many cases it was later taken up by art and literature.
One of Tao's most famous works is the “Record of the Peach Blossom Spring ” ( Táohuāyuán jì , 桃花源 記 / 桃花源 记 ), originally written as a foreword to a poem : A fisherman from Wuling rows up a river and ends up in a peach grove. Following the watercourse to the source, he discovers a crevice at the end of the grove. He penetrates the crevice and arrives in a fertile land, where happy, lively and helpful people receive him with open arms and give him generous hospitality. Her ancestors would have withdrawn here as early as the terrible times of the Qin House . Since then they have lived here in isolation, but in happiness and peace. They ask the fisherman not to tell anyone about their existence after his return. He reveals the secret, but later neither the provincial governor's troops nor the honest scholar Liu Ziqi find access to the paradisiacal landscape.
Tao Yuanming is particularly remembered for his twenty-part cycle of poems "Beim Wein" ( Yīnjiǔ , 飲酒 / 饮酒 ), which is about drunkenness and sobriety, but also about fame and retreat.
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Tao Yuanming's poetry can be understood as the protest of a person who is turned towards the world, but who only has to withdraw from it. His poetry is of a simple style and no frills, and it embodies the type of the lonely, misunderstood by the world.
Tao was considered relatively little by his contemporaries; in Zhong Hong's literary history Shipin , for example, he is expressly referred to as “second class”. Three hundred years later, the famous Tang poet Li Bai praised him as “incomparable and unreachable”. The great song poet Su Dongpo adored him so much that he considered himself Tao Yuanming's reincarnation . Tao is still highly valued for his poetry in China, and the communists emphasized the " anti-feudal " note that was supposedly attached to his work .
See also : Chinese natural poetry
literature
- James R. Hightower: The Fu of T'ao Ch'ien, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 17, No. 1/2, 1954, pp. 169-230
- James R. Hightower: Allusion in the Poetry of T'ao Ch'ien, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 31, 1971, pp. 5-27
- Tao Yuanming: Prose and Poems I .; Poems (II) ; Poems (III) . Translated from the Chinese by Ernst Schwarz . Booklets for East Asian Literature No. 5 (September 1986), pp. 9-23; No. 7 (June 1988), pp. 41-51; No. 8 (March 1989), pp. 63-76.
- Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer : History of Chinese Literature, Bern 1990, ISBN 3-406-45337-6
- Karl-Heinz Pohl (Ed.): Tao Yuanming. The peach blossom source: Gesammelte Gedichte, Bochum 2002, ISBN 978-3934453302
Web links
- Literature by and about Tao Yuanming in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tao Yuanming |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Chinese poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 365 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 427 |