The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (10 page)

This is one of the most famous poems in classical Chinese poetry. Opera songs are typically highly colloquial and direct, though some of them are highly imagistic. In this example the absence of verbs in the first three lines makes them unfold like a series of cinematic scenes,
and the juxtaposition of images carries on the Tang tradition. A Chinese reader can learn this poem by heart after reading it just once or twice.

When the Han Chinese regained the throne from the Mongolians in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the creative talent was more involved with fiction than poetry, and it took some time for the Chinese to reconnect with their poetic heritage. In the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) the Chinese were again invaded by outsiders, and the Manchus ruled China for about three hundred years. It was a time of literary inquisition, and individuality in poetry writing was stifled. In fact very little innovation can be found in poetry during the Ming and Qing dynasties, as the poets were largely engaged in searching for their roots back in the Tang and the Han dynasties. Although some of the literary output of this period has been reeval-uated, it seems unlikely that there will be a rediscovery of a major poet who can match the caliber of the Tang talent.

Ambiguity in Classical Chinese Poetry

To understand the reasons why the move from classical Chinese poetry to the poetry of the modern era is often perceived as a further decline from the tepid and imitative poetry of the Ming and Qing dynasties, a discussion of aspects of ambiguity in the classical Chinese poem is helpful. With the emergence of the five-character line as the dominant form and the increasing employment of parallelisms in the classical Chinese poem, functional words were gradually reduced to a minimum. As a result, the lines often work like a shooting list for a movie director, conveying an amazing sense of cinematic time and space. But for all the gains in intensity of content and imagery, there was a corresponding rise in ambiguity, since words were juxtaposed without any signs of relationship between them. Given the fact that Chinese characters do not have inflections in themselves, it is almost like writing in English with only nouns, verbs, and adjectives and without personal pronouns to indicate speaker. Consequently, classical Chinese poetry, especially Tang poetry, possesses an exceptional intensity and ambiguity.
Ranging from general to specific, various ambiguities exist in classical Chinese poems. One of the most common is the indeterminacy of perspective. Wang Wei's “Birds Sing in the Ravine” is a good example:

The first character in this poem,
ren
(human), forces a choice in the translation. It refers to the poet himself, and yet the sense is that the speaker observes himself as well as nature from the third-person perspective. In English it is difficult to reproduce the effect of having the speaker himself in the picture yet seen from the outside. In Wang Wei's world, human beings and nature exist in great harmony, and the poet registers activities both in nature and in himself like a monitoring camera. And yet the sensory effects in this poem require more than a camera to discern. The intoxicating sweet smell of the acacia flowers cannot be captured with lenses no matter how powerful they are. Moreover, the tiny acacia petals' landing is rendered with such ambiguity that it cannot be captured with a camera, either. The effect at first seems to be visual, but it is only when the first two lines collide with the last two that the reader realizes that the poet experienced the falling of the petals totally in the dark, before moonrise. This realization intensifies the effect of the first two lines and clarifies the meaning of being “at rest”—the mind must be totally free either to hear the soft landing of the acacia petals on the ground or to feel their weightless impact on one's clothes. The quietness of the night, the emptiness of the mountain, as well as peace in the mind, are all captured in the motion of the falling petals. The poet is there in the picture, and yet he observes himself from outside, with internal and external experience combined. By contrast, the second pair of lines is purely external. The scene is loud and dramatic, even though it is only a description of a
chirping bird startled by the rising moon. One can almost see the bird dart across a huge, low moon, followed by an eye-line tele-photo lens tracking the intermittent sound of the bird. In a moment, after the collision of these two pairs of lines, tranquility reigns again, and the sudden movement and sound of the bird only heightens the emptiness of the mountains. What derives from this ambiguity in perspective is a new appreciation of nature through a transparent and perceptive Zen mind.

Ambiguity also arises when natural syntax comes up against the expectation of symmetrical structure in paired lines. For example, the couplet “
” (“A time so bad, even the flowers rain tears./I hate this separation, yet birds startle my heart.”), from Du Fu's “Gazing in Springtime,” contains an ambiguity that is often lost in translation. According to the natural syntax, an initial reading of the first half of the couplet would be “A time so bad, even the flowers rain tears,” taking the flowers as the subject of the whole line. But the second half immediately suggests a different reading. It is very clear that the poet himself was startled by birds, and the symmetrical structure strongly suggests that the subject in the first half is the same person. Thus, when we read the poem again, the first half may be read as “sad about the times, flowers make me shed tears.” This ambiguity results from two legitimate readings according to syntax or symmetry. Since it is impossible to keep two interpretations in the translation, we chose personification of the flowers to avoid making the second half of the couplet too expected. This sort of conflict between natural reading and reading for symmetry can be found in many seemingly unambiguous lines in Chinese poetry.

Ambiguities can also be quite local and involve indeterminacy in grammar or definition of words. Two of the lines we discussed earlier from the first poem from the
Book of Songs
contain such ambiguity:

The last two characters can be read as
“hao
(i)
qiu
(2)” (first tone plus second, meaning “good spouse”). But they can also be pronounced as
“hao
(4)
qiu
(2)” (fourth and second tones). In that case the character
hao
is no longer an adjective modifying the noun
qiu
(spouse) but rather a word meaning “love to” (
hao
[4]
) modifying a verb
qiu
(to marry). In that case the line indicates a man's strong desire for the hand of a lady, and perhaps should be translated: “Full of grace is the lady./The gentleman is obsessed with marrying her,” or “… seeks her hand.” Although a translation can keep just one of the interpretations, the effect of reading the Chinese is that the text is wavering between readings, a door swinging open and shut.