The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (17 page)

Cao Cao, the founder of the Wei Kingdom, was an important warlord who carved his kingdom from the fragments of the Han dynasty in the north of China. He was also an important prose writer and poet whose literary reputation has grown in recent centuries. He was descended from a powerful palace eunuch, who adopted his father and left him wealth and assured political positions. Cao Cao's sons were also literary: Cao Pi (187–226), who upon his father's death accepted the abdication of the Han emperor and ruled as Emperor Wen, first emperor of the Wei dynasty, was an important poet, but he was jealous of his half brother Cao Zhi (192–232), an even more talented and imaginative poet, and kept him in isolation. Cao Cao, his sons, and the Seven Masters of the Jianan Period all made up a school of writing called the Jianan Period. A champion of literature as a Confucian rectifier in morally decadent times, Cao Cao is particularly noted for his ballad-form (
yuefu)
poems. Around twenty-two of his poems survive.

Ruan Ji was born in what is today Weishi County, Henan province. He was an official of the Wei dynasty, the son of Ruan Yu, an important official and poet. Considered one of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest” (a famed group of writers of the Wei and Jin dynasties), he had a reputation as a Daoist wild man and drunkard, and his verse is often concerned with the mystical questions that Daoism raises.

This poem is from his long and darkly cynical sequence “Chanting My Thoughts,” which encodes an elliptical protest against the general turbulence of his times and against the rise of the Sima family and the gradual decline of the Cao family to whose rule he was loyal. Though not explicitly a political poet, Ruan Ji managed, like the twentieth-century Misty Poets, to express quite a bit of political content through obscure reference and poetic sleight of hand and through the satire and pessimism of many of his works. Often in China, this sort of subtlety has been an essential survival skill for poets who are also politicians and whose words may come back to haunt them when the political winds shift.

Fu Xuan was a poet of the Western Jin dynasty who wrote primarily in the Music Bureau style. Sixty-three of his poems survive. He was known to have been extraordinarily prolific, but most of his work has been lost. Despite being impoverished and orphaned as a child, he became rich and famous, largely because of his literary genius.

In the Chinese tradition it is common for male writers to write in a female voice. The author usually assumes the mask of a particular female character—a vain, ambitious woman, a nouveau riche, a ceremonial goddess, or a wife separated from her spouse. Rarely, however, does the male poet achieve the compelling and enlightened sympathy for the maltreatment of women that is one of the hallmarks of Fu Xuan's poetry. The devaluation of women in Chinese society rests in part on economics, and these attitudes are likely to be shared by women as well as men. As one woman from today's Sichuan province puts it, “Girls are no use. They can't inherit your house or your property. You struggle all your life, but who gets your house in the end? Your daughters all marry out and belong to someone else.”
¹
Such attitudes are deeply rooted in Chinese culture. As the female hero of a Six Dynasties folktale states, “My unhappy parents have six daughters but no son… so they have no real descendants…. Since we cannot work to support them, but are simply a burden to them and no use at all, the sooner we die the better.”
²

The songs of “Lady Midnight,” or Zi Ye, were attributed to a young woman who lived during the Jin dynasty. The sexual frankness of her work suggests that she was a singing girl (courtesan).

The
History of the Tang
states that her songs were sung with intense grief, and the music to which they were set was supposed to have been deeply plaintive.

There are 117 poems called Zi Ye poems in the great anthology of Music Bureau poems. Whether there was one woman who wrote these poems or whether the Zi Ye poems represent a whole tradition is a question that remains unresolved. Nevertheless, the set of poems creates a powerful and unified effect, and they have been imitated by great poets such as Li Bai. Their direct, punning, erotic nature carries across the centuries with undiminished fire.

Lu Ji was born at the end of the Three Kingdoms Period in the state of Wu, at the family estate at Huading in the Yangtze Delta. He came from a family with a long and distinguished military tradition. His grandfather Lu Sun was a famous general who won the throne for the first emperor of Wu, for which he was awarded the title of duke and the estate at Huading. His father and two older brothers all had commands on the Northern frontier, but the weak Emperor Hao ignored Lu Ji's father's warnings of dangers from the neighboring state of Jin and lost his empire in a decisive river battle. Both of Lu Ji's brothers were killed in this battle. Lu Ji and his younger brother escaped to Huading, where they remained in virtual house arrest for ten years, devoting themselves to scholarship, poetry, and the study of Confucian and Daoist thought. At the age of twenty-nine, Lu Ji and his brother went to the Jin court and succeeded in launching themselves once again into official and military careers. In his forty-second year Lu Ji was a general for Prince Yin, who was engaged in battling his brother, Prince Yi. Because of the treachery of another general who refused to support Lu in a key battle, Lu's troops were decisively routed, and the river was choked with their bodies. His enemies denounced him to Prince Yin, and he was executed on trumped-up charges of treason. His two sons were also executed. It is said that the night before his death, Lu Ji dreamed he was confined in a carriage draped with black curtains,
from which he could not escape. His last words were said to be, “Will I never hear the call of the cranes at Huading again?”

Lu was a prolific writer, but his only major work was a rhyme prose piece of literary criticism titled “The Art of Writing” (
wen fu).
Its influence on Chinese literary thought cannot be overestimated. “The Art of Writing” sets out to “comment on elegant classics and talk about how strong and weak points find their way into our writings,” but it does much more than that. It is valued equally for its critical contribution and its literary merit. Its evocation of the writer's preparation and of the generation of new poems from readings of the classics culminates in a spirit journey of the imagination in which the poet summons great Daoist powers to conduct him through internal and external space and through the literary past.

“The Art of Writing” is both a cosmic treatise and an immensely practical one. From the internal journey of the imagination emerges writing in all its styles and genres, many of which Lu Ji catalogues. His
ars poetica's
sophisticated treatment of the process of writing is its own best exemplar, embodying the virtues and qualities that it champions. In addition to questions of style and genre, Lu Ji treats the question of revision and of key words that “will whip the writing like a horse and make it gallop.” In the preface he writes, “To learn writing from classics is like carving an axe handle with an axe—the model is right in your hand,” and yet the relationship of the writer to works of the past is complicated: what may inspire your work will also kill what you write if you fail to “make it new.” Lu Ji gives writing tips and discusses tone, high and low registers, poetic form, the “dead river” of writer's block, and the “thought wind” of inspiration. His spiritual view of the writing process is mirrored by his faith in the universal power of literature: “With heaven and earth contained in your head/nothing escapes the pen in your hand.”

Written largely in rhymed verse interspersed with prose passages and in lines paired in a kind of rhetorical parallelism, rather like Western poetry's use of chiasmus, “The Art of Writing” is commonly compared with Alexander Pope's
Essay on Poetry
(and with Pope's model, the
Ars Poetica
of Horace) as a great example of literary criticism in verse. The comparison takes on
particular relevance when one compares the balanced rhetoric of Pope's rhymed heroic couplets with Lu Ji's parallelism. With characteristic humility, Lu Ji doubts his ability to get at the essence of writing (“this art can't be captured by the finest words”), but this ineffable quality of writing itself expresses writing's spiritual nature. Writing can't express what writing is because it is more than itself; it is a spiritual voyage that connects impulse and action, word and music, and the self to the world.

Translating this notoriously ambiguous text poses special problems. A tortured and embattled critical commentary has built up around it, as many passages are riddles that have countless contradictory solutions. It would be possible to burden the text with footnotes; some translators have been known to produce ten lines of commentary for each line of poetry. Such valuable scholarship distracts from the poem, however, as each word or phrase becomes a trapdoor that drops you into a hypertext of criticism and linguistic exegesis. Our interest has been to chart a middle path between alternative readings and warring commentaries, to make difficult choices and produce a text that reads flu-idly, fluently, and, most important, as a poem in English.

After reading many talented writers, I have gained insights into the writing craft. The ways that words and expressions ignite meaning, varied as they are, can be analyzed and critiqued for their beauty and style. Through my own efforts I know how hard it is to write, since I always worry that my ideas fail to express their subject and my words are even further removed from insufficient ideas. The problem is easy to understand; the solution is more difficult. So I started writing this rhymed essay to comment on elegant classics and talk about how strong and weak points find their way into our writings. Someday, I hope, I will be able to capture these subtle secrets in words. To learn writing from classics is like carving an axe handle with an axe—the model is right in your hand, but the spontaneous skills needed to carve a new creation are often beyond words. What can be said, however, is verbalized in what follows.