Feng Zhi’s Spiritual Transformation in the Mirror of Du Fu: A Dialogue between the Modern and the Traditional

Abstract

Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–93) was not only one of the founders of German Studies in China, but he also was an important scholar of the Tang dynasty poet, Du Fu 杜甫 (712–70). The present essay attempts to analyze Feng Zhi’s “coming of age” by using Du Fu as a case study for the dialogue between the modern and Western-educated intellectuals on the one hand, and the twentieth-century political and nativist movements of China on the other. Feng’s admiration for Du Fu prompted him to write a biography for this precursor poet, this “Sage in Poetry” (shisheng 詩聖), which was not only a record of his life, but also a mirror that reflects Feng’s own spiritual transformation from a student of Western romanticism, individualism, and existentialism, to, in his own words, a “mouthpiece of the people.”

Key words： Feng Zhi; Du Fu; spiritual transformation; modernity; tradition