Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
The four outskirts are not yet safe and quiet.
I am old, but have no peace.
All my sons and grandsons died in battle,
so what use is it to keep my body in one piece?
Throwing away my walking stick, I walk out the door.
The other soldiers are saddened, pitying me.
I'm lucky to still have all my teeth
but I regret the marrow has dried in my bones.
Wearing a soldier's helmet and armor,
I salute my officers before departure.
My old wife is lying in the road weeping.
The year is late and her clothes thin.
Though I know at heart this is our death farewell,
her shivering in cold still hurts me.
I know I will never come back,
yet hear her out when she says, “Eat more!”
The city wall around Earth Gate is very strong,
and the Xingyuan ferry is hard for the enemy to cross,
so the situation is different from the siege of Ye City,
and I will have some time before I die.
In life we part and we rejoin;
we have no choice, young or old.
I recall my young and strong days,
and walk about leaking long sighs.
War has spread through ten thousand countries
till beacon fires blaze from all the peaks.
So many corpses that grass and trees stink like fish,
rivers and plains dyed red with blood.
Which land is the happy land?
How can I linger here!
I abandon my thatched house
and feel my liver and lungs collapse.
After the Rebellion of 755, all was silent wasteland,
gardens and cottages turned to grass and thorns.
My village had over a hundred households,
but the wild world scattered them east and west.
No one knows about survivors;
the dead are dust and mud.
I, a humble soldier, was defeated in battle.
I ran back home to look for old roads
and walked a long time through the empty lanes.
The sun was thin, the air tragic and dismal.
I met only foxes and raccoons,
their hair on end as they snarled in rage.
Who remains in my neighborhood?
One or two old widows.
A returning bird loves its old branches,
so how could I give up this poor nest?
In spring I carry my hoe all alone,
yet still water the land at sunset.
The county governor's clerk heard I'd returned
and summoned me to practice the war drum.
This military service won't take me from my state.
I look around and have no one to worry about.
It's just me alone and the journey is short,
but I will end up lost if I travel too far.
Since my village has been washed away,
near or far makes no difference.
I will forever feel pain for my long-sick mother.
I abandoned her in this valley five years ago.
She gave birth to me, yet I could not help her.
We cry sour sobs till our lives end.
In my life I have no family to say farewell to,
so how can I be called a human being?
Wind howled angrily in high autumn's September
and tore off three layers of reed from my thatched roof.
The reeds flew over the river and scattered on the bank.
Some flew high and hung from the trees.
Some flew low and swirled and sank into pools.
The kids from the southern village took advantage of my old age,
played pirate and stole my reeds while I watched them
openly carrying armfuls into the bamboo groves.
My lips cracked, my throat dried, and I couldn't yell out.
I returned home and leaned on my stick, sighing.
In a moment the wind stopped and clouds stood ink black,
the autumnal sky stretched into darkness in desert silence.
My cotton quilt is tattered from use and cold as iron.
In an ugly dream, my small son rips the lining with his feet.
The roof is leaking by my bed's headboard and nowhere is dry.
The rain like yarn spins down forever.
I've had little sleep since the An Lushan Rebellion.
Such a wet and long night, when will it end!
I wish I had a house with thousands of rooms
to shelter all the cold people under the sky and give them happy faces.
We'd be calm as mountains when it stormed and rained.
Oh, let this big house appear before my eyes
and I will die of cold in my damaged hut, happy.
My young servant tied up a chicken to sell at market.
Roped tight, the chicken struggled and squawked.
My family hates seeing the chicken eating worms and ants,
not knowing that once sold the chicken will be cooked.
What's the difference between chickens and insects to a human being?
I scolded the servant and untied the chicken.
I can never solve the problem of chickens and insects
so just lean against my mountain pavilion, gazing at the cold river.
This famous foreign horse comes from Dawan,
with sharp joints and slender bones.
Two ears stand firm like bamboo slips,
wind carries his four hooves lightly.
Space disappears when he gallops.
You can trust your life and death to him.
With strength and speed
he prances over ten thousand miles.
Spring subtracts itself with each falling petal.
I am sad to see ten thousand dots swirling in wind.
I watch the last petals pass through sight,
but don't complain of suffering when wine passes my lips.
Green birds nest in the small house by the river.
Tall tombs by the flowers, their
qiling
guardian statues
1
decayed.
I meditate on this, decide to live this life with joy.
Why let this body stumble over floating reputation?
Each day I return from the court, and pawn spring garments.
Each day I return from the river roaring drunk.
It is nothing to have wine debts wherever I go,
since from ancient times few have lived to seventy.
Deep, deep in the flowers butterflies can be seen.
Dragonflies stop and go, touching the surface of water.
Let my words come to the wind and light, and we'll flow together
for a moment, appreciating each other without disappointment.
1
Originally
qiling
statues. A
qiling
is a Chinese mythical guardian creature, a combination of a dragon, a lion, and a horse, that guards against negative forces and energies.
A longtime guest in the southern capital, I plow southern fields;
though the north-gate view hurts my spirit, I still sit by the north window.
One morning I take my old wife on a small boat and when it is sunny,
watch my little son bathe in the clear river.
Butterflies flying in pairs chase each other.
Twin lotus flowers are blooming on one stalk.
We carry all the tea and sugarcane juice that we need,
and porcelain bottles are as good as jade jars.
North and south of my house flow spring waters.
Every day only gulls come to visit me.
I've never before swept petals from the path for guests,
but my wood door is open today for you.
The market is far off so I cook no taste twice.
My poor house offers only unfiltered wine from last year.
If you don't mind drinking with my neighbor as well,
I'll call him over the fence and we'll drain our cups.
The lone wild goose doesn't peck or drink,
just flies and cries out, seeking its flock.
Who cares for this tiny piece of shadow
lost in ten thousand layered clouds?
Does he see them where vision ends?
Does he hear them through his deep sorrow?
The wild ravens have no feelings.
They just caw raucously, flapping, flapping.
A traveler's sleep never arrives,
yet the autumnal sky refuses to dawn.
I roll up the curtain and see a shadow of leftover moon,
stack my pillows high and listen to the far off river.
I'm at my wit's end for clothes and food.
At road's end my life depends on friends.
My old wife has brushed many letters to me
and knows the emotion of this unreturned traveler.
Through mountains and valleys I come at last to Jing Gate.
The village where Ming Fei grew up is still there.
She left the Purple Palace for endless desert.
Now only a green tomb remains in the evening sun.
Portraits don't know her face with a smile like spring breeze.
Jade rings echo in emptiness when her ghost returns in moonlight.
For a thousand years her zither makes a foreign song
and the melody sings clearly of her grudge.
In the past I heard of Dongting Lake,
and now I climb Yueyang Tower
and see Wu and Chu unfold east and south.
Heaven and earth float there night and day.
Not one word from my family and friends,
I'm old and sick and have just my lonely boat.
War horses charge north of the mountain passes.
I lean against the railing and sob.
Gibbons wail into a high sky of wild wind.
Birds circle a pure isle of white sand.
Leaves drift and shift from countless trees.
The Yangtze River boils and rolls without end.
I've wandered forever, a thousand miles of autumn woe.
I climb the terrace alone, sick as always in my lifetime.
Bitter pain has turned my temples to snow.
I'm so poor I can't even afford muddy wine.
An autumn window still shows the color of dawn
as leafless trees bend further in high wind.
The sun emerges from cold mountains
and the river flows in last night's leftover fog.
No one is abandoned by the celestial court,
but withered and sick, I've become an old man.
What is left for me in what life remains?
I drift helplessly like a rootless tumbleweed.
*
Written while captive in Changan, separated from his family.
1
A poetic epithet for the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province.
*
In the Han dynasty the Emperor Yuan asked the palace painter to do portraits of all the women in the palace so he could look at the pictures and choose which one to have. Many women bribed the painter to have their portraits done to make them look attractive. Only Ming Fei (also known as Wang Zhaojun) did not bribe the painter, who made her very ugly. When for political reasons the emperor had to marry off one of his palace women to a barbarian tribal leader to the north, he went through the portraits of the thousands of women in his harem and chose Ming Fei. On the day of Ming Fei's departure, the emperor summoned her to his presence. When he realized that she was the most beautiful woman in the palace, he was furious. He couldn't stop the marriage but took his revenge by killing the painter. It is in the Chinese tradition for the poet to talk about his political career from a woman's perspective to avoid offending the emperor.
*
Du Fu is looking down on Dongting Lake from Yueyang Tower and worrying about a Tibetan invasion of Lingwu and Binzhou in October 768, which has kept him from returning to the North.
Liu Changqing came from a distinguished family who lived in Hejian, Hebei province. He passed the highest imperial examinations in 733 and held a number of official posts in the provinces (he was a magistrate and was, by 780, governor of Suizhou), but his official career was a rocky path: he incurred the emperor's disfavor, was sent to prison and demoted, and was demoted again later in his career under trumped-up charges, banished, and finally dismissed from office. More than five hundred of his poems survive. He is often described as a master of five-character verse and as a poet in the landscape tradition of Wang Wei and Tao Qian.
Dark mountains recede when the sun sets.
So cold the white-thatched cottage seems shabbier.
A dog barks at the firewood gate:
someone approaching in the night storm.
Apes gibber as the guests leave this evening by the river.
For a man with a hurt heart, sorrow flows naturally as water.
We are both exiled, though you are sent farther away:
ten thousand miles of green mountains, and one lonely boat.
Jiao Ran was a monk poet from Changcheng in what is today Changxing County, Zhejiang province. He was the tenth-generation grandson of Xie Lingyun (385–443), the important Six Dynasties Period poet and politician. He was born in Zhejiang and after 785 resided in the Miaoxi Temple on Xu Mountain in Wuxing. Deeply steeped in the Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions, he was considered a very important poet, and his complete works were collected on the emperor's orders. He wrote significant literary criticism and was an important influence on the Ancient-Style Prose Movement of his time.
You moved to the city outskirts,
on a wild path leading through mulberry and hemp.
Chrysanthemums newly planted by your fence;
it's autumn but they're not in bloom.
No dog barks when I knock on the door.
I go to ask your neighbor to the west:
he says you disappear into mountains
and return through the slanting sunset.
Meng Jiao came from Huzhou-Wukang (present-day Deqing County, Zhejiang province) and was the oldest and among the best of the circle of writers who gathered around the great prose master Han Yu in the last decade of the eighth century. He met Han Yu in Changan in 791. A year later Han Yu passed the imperial examinations; Meng Jiao failed, as he did again in 793. He finally passed in 796 but did not receive a position for four years, and even then it was a humiliatingly insignificant post in the provinces. Meng Jiao lost this post within a few years and settled in Luoyang, where he lived for the rest of his life, dependent on patrons and friends. His personal life was one of tragedy and loss: his three sons died young, and he lost his wife as well. Approximately five hundred of his poems survive, most of them in the “old style” (
gu shi).