①There is really no reason for my writing the life of Su Tungpo except that I want to do it. For years, the writing of his biography(传记) has been at the back of my mind, but the regret is never quiet down. Now that I am able to apply myself to this task, I am happy, without any reasons.

②A vivid personality isn't that easy to be understood. One might say that Su Tungpo was an unchangeable optimist(乐观主义者), a friend of the people, a prose master, an original painter, a great calligraphist, an experimenter in wine making, an engineer, a secretary to the emperor, a dissenter in politics, and a poet. And yet that might miss the sum total of why people like Su Tungpo. Su Tungpo's complex personality gives a reason. Always deeply stuck in politics, he was always greater than politics. Without trick and without purpose, he went along singing, composing, and criticizing, to express something he felt in his heart, paying no attention to what might be the results of himself. He wrote just because he enjoyed writing, and today we enjoy his writing just because he wrote so beautifully, generously, and out of the clearness of his heart.

③As I try to find the reasons why for a thousand years in China each generation has a crowd of crazy admirers of this poet, I come to the second reason, which is the same as the first, stated in a different way. Su Tungpo had charm. The chief charm of Su Tungpo was a force of character (that could not be stopped by anyone), a force (that, started at the moment of his birth, had to run its course until death closed his mouth and stopped his laughing chatter). He wielded his pen almost as if it were a toy. He could be curious, or humorous or serious, very serious, and from his pen we hear various human emotions of joy, happiness, worry and love.

④On the whole, we get the impression that he played and sang through life and enjoyed it greatly, and when sadness came and unluckiness fell, he accepted them with a smile. That is the kind of charm which I am trying to describe in my way and which has made him the favorite poet of so many Chinese experts.