Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Magnolia oars. A spicewood boat.
Jade flutes and gold pipes fill the air at bow and stern.
We have a thousand jugs of tart wine
and singing girls who drift with us on the waves.
Like a Daoist immortal floating off on a yellow crane,
my wandering mind empties and soars with white gulls.
Qu Yuan's poems hang overhead with sun and moon
but the Chu king's palace is an empty mountain.
Inspired, each stroke of my brush shakes the five mountains.
The poem done, I laugh proudly over the hermit's land.
If fame and money could last forever
the Han River would flow backward.
The Shu monk carries a green silk lute
west down Omei Mountain
and each sweep of his hand
is the song of a thousand pines in the valley.
Flowing water cleans my wanderer's heart
and the sound lingers like a frosty bell
till I forget the mountain soaking in green dusk,
autumn clouds darkly folding in.
Blue mountains past the north wall,
white water snaking eastward.
Here we say good-bye for the last time.
You will fade like a hayseed blowing ten thousand miles away.
Floating clouds are the way of the wanderer.
The sun sets like the hearts of old friends.
We wave good-bye as you leave. Horses neigh and neigh.
A pot of wine in the flower garden,
but no friends drink with me.
So I raise my cup to the bright moon
and to my shadow, which makes us three,
but the moon won't drink
and my shadow just creeps about my heels.
Yet in your company, moon and shadow,
I have a wild time till spring dies out.
I sing and the moon shudders.
My shadow staggers when I dance.
We have our fun while I can stand
then drift apart when I fall asleep.
Let's share this empty journey often
and meet again in the milky river of stars.
From Yellow Crane Tower you sail
the river west as mist flowers bloom.
A solitary sail, far shadow, green mountains at the empty end of vision.
And now, just the Yangtze River touching the sky.
Clear as empty sky, the Chu River
meanders to the far blue sea.
Soon there will be a thousand miles between us.
All feelings distill to this cup of wine.
The cuckoo chants the sunny day;
monkeys on the riverbanks are howling evening wind.
All my life I haven't wept
but I weep here, unable to stop.
The whole forest is a blur
woven by fog.
Cold mountain is color of melancholy,
mauve.
Twilight comes into a tall house.
Someone is unhappy upstairs.
Standing on the jade steps,
a woman is wasting time, nothing to do.
Birds wing off for home
but what road can take me there?
Pavilion after pavilion join far, far, far.
People in his homeland thought him mad so
He Zhizhang wandered with rivers and winds.
When we first met in Changan
he dubbed me the “Banished Immortal.”
He loved good talk and his cup,
who lies under bamboo and pine.
Through a veil of tears,
I see poor He hocking his ring for wine.
Translated by Sam Hamill
There was wine in a cup of gold
and a girl of fifteen from Wu,
her eyebrows painted dark
and with slippers of red brocade.
If her conversation was poor,
how beautifully she could sing!
Together we dined and drank
until she settled in my arms.
Behind her curtains
embroidered with lotuses,
how could I refuse
the temptation of her advances?
Translated by Sam Hamill
The birds have vanished down the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
Translated by Sam Hamill
You ask me why I live in the jade mountains.
I smile, unanswering. My heart is calm.
Peach petals float on the water, never come back.
There is a heaven and earth beyond the crowded town below.
It's long since I've gone to the East Mountains.
How many seasons have the tiny roses bloomed?
White clouds—unblown—fall apart.
In whose court has the bright moon dropped?
Facing wine, not aware it's getting dark,
I've been sitting so long my gown brims over with petals.
Drunk, I rise to follow the moon in the brook
long after birds and people have gone home.
We raise our cups where mountain flowers bloom.
One cup, another cup, and another cup.
I'm drunk and want to sleep. Leave me now.
Tomorrow, if you feel good, come with your lute.
This room was all flowers when my beauty was here.
Gone now. Only an empty bed.
The embroidered quilt is folded up. I can't sleep.
Three years gone, yet I still smell her fragrance.
Why doesn't the fragrance dissipate?
Why doesn't my beauty come back?
I miss her until yellow leaves drop
and white dawn moisture soaks the green moss.
About to sleep a night in Summit Temple
I raise my hand and touch the stars.
I have to whisper just to keep
from bothering people in heaven.
Lazy today. I wave my white feather fan.
Then I strip naked in the green forest,
untie my hatband and hang it on a stone wall.
Pine wind sprinkles my bare head.
Bright moonlight before my bed.
At first I think the floor is all frost.
I gaze up at the mountain moon,
then drop my head in a dream of home.
Green water washes the plain moon clean.
The moon's brightness startles egrets into day flight.
A young man listens to a woman collecting water chestnuts.
They walk back together at night, singing.
To live in this world is to have a big dream;
why punish myself by working?
So I'm drunk all day.
I flop by the front door, dead to the world.
On waking, I peer at the garden
where a bird sings among the flowers
and wonder what season it is.
I think I hear him call, “mango birds sing in spring wind.”
I'm overcome and almost sigh.
But no, I pour another cup of wine,
sing at the top of my lungs and wait for the bright moon.
When my song dies out, I forget.
Can't you see the Yellow River
pours down directly from heaven?
It sprints all the way to the ocean
and never comes back.
Can't you see the clear hall mirror
is melancholy with our gray hair?
In the morning our braids are black silk.
In the evening they are snow.
When happy, be happy all the way,
never abandoning your gold cup
empty to face the moon alone.
Heaven gave me talent. It means something.
Born with genius, a failure now, I will succeed.
Although I waste a thousand ounces of gold
they will come back.
We butcher cows, cook lambs,
for a wild feast, and must drink
three hundred cups at a time.
Friends Chengfuze and Danqiuchen,
bring in the wine
and keep your mouths full.
I'll sing for you. I'll turn
your ears. Bells and drums,
good dishes and jade are worth
nothing. What I want
is to be drunk, day and night,
and never again sober up.
The ancient saints and sages are forgotten.
Only the fame of great drunks
goes from generation to generation.
In the Temple of Perfect Peace
Prince Cheng once gave a mad party,
serving ten thousand pots of wine.
Long ago. Tonight, let no one
say I am too poor to supply
vats of alcohol. I'll find
my prize horse and fur coat
and ask my boy to sell them
for fine wine. Friends, we'll drink
till the centuries
of sorrowful existence dissolve.
I descend a green mountain at dusk,
the moon following me home.
Looking back at my path,
darkly, darkly I see a blue mist hanging.
You take my hand and lead me to your farmer cottage
where a boy opens the thorn-branch gate.
Green bamboo leads into a quiet footpath;
emerald vines brush my passing clothes.
Happily chatting while enjoying our rest,
we share a gorgeous wine.
We sing about wind through pines
and don't stop till the stars are scarce.
I'm drunk and you are happy.
Enraptured, we forget the world.
The fire dragon lives at Ice Gate
and light comes from its eyes at night,
yet why no sun or moon to light us here?
We have only the north wind howling furiously out of heaven.
On Yen Mountain snowflakes are as big as a floor mat
and every flake drops on us.
The woman of Yo Zhou in December
stops singing and laughing. Her eyebrows tighten.
Lounging against the door she watches people pass by
and remembers her husband at the north frontier
and the miserable cold.
When he left he took his sword to guard the border.
He left his tiger-striped quiver at home,
with its white-feathered arrows, now coated
with dust on which spiders spin their traps.
The arrows remain, useless. Her husband is dead
from the war. He won't return.
The widow won't look at the arrows.
Finally, it's too much, and she burns them to ashes.
Easier to block the Yellow River with a few handfuls of sand,
than to scissor away her iron grief
here in the north wind, the rain, the snow.
Delirium, battlefields all dark and delirium,
convulsions of men swarm like armies of ants.
A red wheel in thickened air, the sun hangs
above bramble and weed blood's dyed purple,
and crows, their beaks clutching warrior guts,
struggle at flight, grief glutted, earthbound.
Those on guard atop the Great Wall yesterday
became ghosts in its shadow today. And still,
flags bright everywhere like scattered stars,
the slaughter keeps on. War drums throbbing:
my husband, my sons—you'll find them all there,
out where war drums keep throbbing.
Translated by David Hinton
Frontier sons are lifelong illiterates
who know only how to hunt big game and brag about being tough guys.
They feed their Mongolian ponies white grass
to make them plump and strong in the autumn.
They race proudly on their horses, chasing the sun's shadows.
They brush snow off with the crack of a gold whip.
Half drunk, they call their falcon and wander far to hunt.
They stretch their bows like a full moon and never miss.
One whistling arrow flies and two gray cranes fall.
The desert spectators step back in dread.
These virile heroes shake the sands.
Confucian scholars are no match for them.
What good is it to lock one's doors and read books till one is gray?
Chu Guangxi's family came from Yanzhou, Shandong, though he himself came from Jiangsu and lived in the Tang dynasty capital, Changan, where he was friends with Wang Wei and other poets. He failed the imperial examinations at first, after which he traveled and might have lived in Henan. He eventually passed the imperial examinations in 726, returned to Jiangsu in 737, and in 755–766 was captured by the forces of An Lushan during the An Lushan Rebellion and pressed into service. After the rebellion failed, he was put in prison. Although he was pardoned, he was banished to the south for his collaboration. He died in the south, in Guangdong. He writes often of peasant and farming life.
Floating with the current I pull waterweed leaves.
Along the banks I pick tender reed shoots.
To avoid disturbing two mandarin ducks,
I let my painted boat slide gently.
If there is one undisputed genius of Chinese poetry, it is Du Fu. The Daoist Li Bai was more popular, the Buddhist Wang Wei was sublimely simple and more intimate with nature, but the Confucian Du Fu had extraordinary thematic range and was a master and innovator of all the verse forms of his time. In his lifetime he
never achieved fame as a poet and thought himself a failure in his worldly career. Perhaps only a third of his poems survive due to his long obscurity; his poems appear in no anthology earlier than one dated 130 years after his death, and it wasn't until the eleventh century that he was recognized as a preeminent poet. His highly allusive, symbolic complexity and resonant ambiguity are at times less accessible than the immediacy and bravado of Li Bai. Yet there is a suddenness and pathos in much of his verse, which creates a persona no less constructed than Wang Wei's reluctant official and would-be hermit or Li Bai's blithely drunken Daoist adventurer.
Most of what we know of Du Fu's life is recorded in his poems, but there are dangers to reading his poems as history and autobiography. By the time he was in his twenties, he was referring to his long white hair—in the persona of the Confucian elder. As Sam Hamill notes, “It was natural that many a poet would adopt the persona of the ‘long white-haired' old man—this lent a younger poet an authority of tone and diction he might never aspire to otherwise.” Du Fu is sometimes called “the poet of history” because his poems record the turbulent times of the decline of the Tang dynasty and constitute in part a Confucian societal critique of the suffering of the poor and the corruption of officials. He also records his own sufferings, exile, falls from grace, and the death of his son by starvation, but some critics have suggested that the poems on these themes are exaggerated and self-dramatizing.