Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Meng Jiao was fairly popular in his own time, but his reputation went into a tailspin some centuries after his death, because his brash, disturbing, and jarring verse was seen to lack grace and decorum. His verse has inspired not so much neglect as active hatred, even in such a distinguished reader as Su Shi, who states baldly in his two poems “On Reading Meng Jiao's Poetry” that “I hate Meng Jiao's poems,” which sound to him like a “cold cicada wail.” There is no doubt that Su Shi is a master of the literary put-down, and while a number of Meng Jiao's poems do come across as shrill, self-obsessed, and self-pitying, therein lies much of his interest. The great Song dynasty politician and poet Ouyang Xiu admired Meng Jiao precisely because he was a “poor poet… who liked to write lines reflecting his hard life.” Ouyang writes: “Meng has a poem on moving house: ‘I borrow a wagon to carry my furniture/but my goods don't make even one load.' He is saying that he's so poor he hasn't anything to move. He has another poem to express his gratitude to people who have given him some charcoal. ‘The heat makes my crooked body
straight.' People say one cannot write lines like this without actually experiencing such suffering.”
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The glaze of decorous objectivity that is so beautiful in much of Chinese poetry is scraped off in Meng Jiao's poems, revealing a didactic would-be Confucian moralist who ends up writing startling, ghostly, and elegiac poems about his sorrows and idiosyn-cracies, happy to portray himself as despised and sick with illness and self-doubt. If it seems strange to celebrate so fallible a figure, consider his own words: “these sour moans/are also finished verse.”
Let's compete with our tears,
let them pour into a lotus pond;
then we'll wait this year and see
whose flowers drown in salt water.
Tears and ink brushed into a letter
sent to my family ten thousand miles away.
My soul leaves with this letter.
My body becomes a dumb shell here.
Sleeping in a cold bed, dreams don't go far.
As I listen to autumn, our separation feels sour.
Wind through high and low branches,
thousands and thousands of leaves whisper.
A shallow well won't give enough drink.
Fields of thin soil are unplowed and abandoned.
People don't deal with each other as in ancient times:
no one listens to a poor man's words.
South Mountain fills both earth and sky;
sun and moon emerge from its peaks.
Sunset lingers into night behind a tall summit.
Deep valleys stay dark in broad daylight.
Mountain people are straight and natural,
minds level though the road is rugged.
Long wind drives pine and cypress trees,
skims ten thousand gullies and flows out clear.
At this moment I regret studying books,
morning after morning chasing empty fame.
Write bad poems and you're sure to earn a post,
but good poets can only embrace the empty mountains.
Embracing mountains makes me shake with cold.
My face is sad all day long.
They are so jealous of my good poems
swords and spears grow out of their teeth!
They are still chewed by jealousy
of good poets who are long dead.
Though my body's like a broken twig
I cultivate a loftiness and plain austerity,
hoping in vain to be left alone.
The mocking crowd glares at me and howls.
I borrowed a wagon to move my furniture,
but my goods don't make even one load.
Don't snap your fingers, wagon owners;
poverty is not worth one sigh.
I run like a servant for my hundred years.
All things bloom and fall like flowers.
Why even mention the shabby old days?
This morning I roll free, my thoughts boundless.
Spring wind is joy below my fast horse's hooves
as I race to see all Changan's flowers in just one day.
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See
The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters
(Boston: Sham-bhala Publications, Inc., 1996), translated, edited, and with introductions by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, pp. 75–76.
Lady Liu, according to the Tang story “Biography of Lady Liu,” was a concubine of a rich man, Mr. Li, who was a good friend to Han Hong, who was then a poor scholar but was later recognized as one of the ten talented men of letters in the Dali Reign (he passed the national imperial civil examination in 754). Liu secretly admired Han Hong. When Mr. Li found out, he married her to Han. During the An Lushan Rebellion, Liu protected herself by hiding in the Faling Temple and cutting her hair to make
herself look ugly. When peace was restored, Han sent people to look for her and sent her a poem. She replied with the lines that appear below. Eventually they were reunited and their story became widely known—recorded not only in
Taiping Records (taiping guangji)
, vol. 485, but also in Meng Qi's
Narrative Poems: Emotions (benshi shi: qinggan)
, though the two versions of the story are slightly different.
See the willow twigs
in flowering season:
what a shame each year the twigs are broken as a parting gift.
One leaf releases to wind, suddenly signaling autumn.
Even if you come back this twig is too old to be snapped.
*
Han's poem, to which Liu's poem was a response, goes as follows:
Willows at the Zhang Platform,
willows at the Zhang Platform,
is the old green spring still there?
Even if the long twigs still hang like in the past,
they must already be snapped by other hands.
Zhang Ji was a scholar-poet from Xianzhou who passed the imperial examinations in 753 and held a number of regional and central government posts. His forty-odd poems are not well known, and he is not considered a leading poet of the Tang dynasty, but his short poem “Moored by the Maple Bridge at Night” is extremely popular.
The moon sets, ravens crow, and frost fills the sky.
River maples, fishermen's lanterns. I face sorrow in my sleep.
The Hanshan Temple is outside Gusu City.
At midnight the bell rings—the sound rocks my traveler's boat.
Han Yu was born in Nanyang, Henan province, to a literary family. He is among China's finest prose writers, second only to Sima Qian, and first among the “Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song.” His father died when he was two, and he was raised in the family of his older brother, Han Hui. He taught himself to read and write and was a student of philosophical writings and Confucian thought. His family moved to Changan in 774 but was banished to Southern China in 777 because of their association with disgraced minister Yuan Zai. Han Hui died in 781, leaving the family in poverty; they returned north around 784. In 792, after four attempts, Han Yu passed the imperial exam (
jin shi).
A few years later he went into the service of the military governor of Bianzhou, and then of the military governor of Xuzhou. Finally, in 802, he obtained a post as instructor at the Imperial University, a job that he held periodically between other postings and several periods of exile; ultimately he was made rector of the university. After a number of other distinguished government posts, he died at the age of fifty-six in Changan.
Han Yu was a Confucian thinker and was deeply opposed to Buddhism, a religion that was then popular in the court. As scholar Liu Wu-chi notes, he came close to being executed in 819 for sending a letter to the emperor in which he denounced “the elaborate preparations being made by the state to receive the Buddha's fingerbone, which he called ‘a filthy object' and which
he said should be ‘handed over to the proper officials for destruction by water and fire to eradicate forever its origin.'”
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He believed that literature and ethics were intertwined, and he led a revolution in prose style against the formal ornamentation then popular, championing instead
gu wen
(old style prose), which was characterized by simplicity, logic, and an emphasis on apt and exact expression. He was at the center of a group of prose writers who adopted this style, a group that included Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi (Su Dongpo) as well as Meng Jiao, whose poetry Han Yu appreciated. While Han Yu's lasting reputation lies as a prose innovator, he was also a fine poet.
Ragged mountain rocks efface the path.
Twilight comes to the temple where bats hover.
Outside the hall I sit on steps and gaze at torrential new rain.
Banana leaves are wide, the cape jasmine is fat.
A monk tells me the ancient Buddhist frescoes are good
and holds a torch to show me, but I can barely see.
I lie quiet in night so deep even insects are hushed.
From behind a rise the clear moon enters my door.
In the dawn I am alone and lose myself,
wandering up and down in mountain mist.
The colors dazzle me: mountain red, green stream,
and a pine so big ten people linking hands can't encircle it.
Bare feet on slick rock as I wade upstream.
Water sounds—
shhhh, shhhh.
Wind inflates my shirt.
A life like this is the best.
Why put your teeth on the bit, why let people rein you in?
O friends,
how can we grow old without returning here?
Last year a tooth dropped,
this year another one,
then six or seven went fast
and the falling is not going to stop.
All the rest are loose
and it will end when they are all gone.
I remember when I lost the first
I felt ashamed of the gap.
When two or three followed,
I worried about death.
When one is about to come loose,
I am anxious and fearful
since forked teeth are awkward with food,
and in dread I tilt my face to rinse my mouth.
Eventually it will abandon me and drop
just like a landslide.
By now the falling out is old hat,
each tooth goes just like the others.
Fortunately I have about twenty left.
One by one they will go in order.
If one goes each year,
I have enough to last two decades.
Actually it does not make much difference
if they go together or separately.
People say when teeth fall out
your life is fading.
I say life has its own end;
long life, short life, we all die.
People speak of the gaps in my teeth,
and all gaze at me in shock.
I quote Zhuangzi's story—
a tree and a wild goose each has its advantages,
and though silence is better than slurring my words
and though I can't chew, at least soft food tastes great
and I can sing out this poem
to surprise my wife and kids.
Softly lovers whisper to each other,
pouring out affection and complaints.
Suddenly the tune becomes daring,
heroes marching to the battlefield.
Floating clouds and willow catkins have no roots;
between heaven and earth they float.
Hundreds of birds chirp and call together
—suddenly only the phoenix is heard.
Now climbing up even one inch is hard,
but then it waterfalls thousands of yards.
I sigh that though I have two ears
they do not understand music.
When you started to play
I couldn't sit or stand still by your side.
I raised my two hands to stop you,
my tears wetting my clothes.
You are a master at this instrument, Yin.
Please don't fill my guts with ice and fire.
Two rivers meet at this corner of the city
where a one-thousand-step polo field is smooth as if planed
and a low wall stretches around three sides.
Drums clatter when red flags are raised.
Before sunrise on a chill early autumn morning,
why are you all dressed up like this?
It's been agreed, teams will be chosen to fight for the win.
A hundred horses draw in their hooves while brushing by each other.
The ball surprises and players gather and disperse with frantic sticks.
There are red pommels made of dyed ox hair and gold bridles.
A player turns aside and reaches over close to the horse belly,
a thunder rolls from his hand and the magic ball runs.
Players retreat and relax on both sides,
but suddenly things shift and they fight again.
The serve is hard, but the receiver is more skillful, such rude strength!
Cheers cascade from the surrounding crowd as strong men shout.
This is, of course, for military training, not for fun,
different than sitting calmly moving pieces on a map,
but these days it is hard to find loyal officers,
so please rein in your horses and fight real enemies.
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Liu Wu-chi,
An Introduction to Chinese Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 126.
*
Written in 803 when Han Yu was thirty-six years old. Zhuangzi tells the story of how he met a woodsman in the mountains who chose not to cut down a tree whose wood was useless. Afterward he visited a friend who wanted to slaughter for him one of his two geese, one of which could sing and one of which could not; he killed the one who didn't greet his guest. His student asked Zhuangzi, “That tree because it's useless was able to survive, but the goose because it couldn't sing was slaughtered. What do you think about that?” Zhuangzi answered, “I stand between the two,” meaning you shouldn't be too useful and shouldn't be too useless.
Xue Tao was a well-respected Tang dynasty poet. She was born either in the Tang capital, Changan, or in Chengdu in present-day Sichuan province, where her father, a minor government official, was posted. A story about her childhood, perhaps apocryphal, suggests that she was able to write complex poems by the age of seven or eight. She may have gained some literary education from her father, but he died before she reached marriageable age. She
ended up being a very successful courtesan, one of the few paths for women in Tang dynasty China that encouraged conversation and artistic talent. After the military governor, Wei Gao, became her literary patron, her reputation spread. She is said to have had an affair with another famous literary figure, Yuan Zhen. Late in life she went to live in seclusion and put on the habit of a Daoist churchwoman. More than one hundred of her poems survive. She is often considered (with Yu Xuanji) one of the two finest female poets of the Tang dynasty.