Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
In water lands, night frost on reeds,
a cold moon the color of the mountains.
Who says our thousand-mile separation starts tonight?
My dream can travel to the farthest border pass.
Everyone writes poems in their own manner
but only I know delicacy of wind and light.
When writing of flowers in moonlight, I lean toward the dark.
Of a willow in rainy dawn I write how twigs hang down.
They say green jade should stay hidden deep,
but I write candidly on red-lined paper.
I'm old now but can't stop writing,
so I open myself to you as if I were a good man.
Behind a ribbon of evening mist, a chill sky distills,
and a melody of far waterfalls like ten silk strings
comes to my pillow to tug feelings,
keeping me sleepless in sorrow past midnight.
Willows are green, green and the river water flat.
I hear a man on the river singing me songs
and see sun on my east, rain to my west.
The sun is shying off, but I feel his shine.
1
Flowers bloom but we can't share them.
Flowers fall and we can't share our sadness.
If you need to find when I miss you most:
when the flowers bloom and when they fall.
I pull a blade of grass and tie a heart-shaped knot
to send to the one who understands my music.
Spring sorrow is at the breaking point.
Again spring birds murmur sad songs.
Wind, flowers, and the day is aging.
No one knows when we'll be together.
If I can't tie my heart to my man's,
it's useless to keep tying heart-shaped knots.
Unbearable when flowers fill the branches,
when two people miss each other.
Tears streak my morning mirror like jade chopsticks.
Does the spring wind know that?
In February, light, fine willow catkins
play with people's clothes in spring breeze;
they are heartless creatures,
flying south one moment, then north again.
Washed clean by dew, cicada songs go far
and like windblown leaves piling up
each cicada's cry blends into the next.
Yet each lives on its own branch
Its spirit leans like a thin hook
or opens round like a Han-loom fan,
slender shadow whose nature is to be full,
seen everywhere in the human world.
1
The last line literally means: “If you say there is no sunshine, yet sunshine there is,” but the word for sunshine,
qing
, and the word for love,
qing
, sound the same, creating a double entendre here. Of course, this is one of those delightful, impossible translation problems. We did our best to include a similar punning homophone with “shying” and “shine.”
Liu Yuxi came from Luoyang in Henan province. An official who passed the highest imperial examinations when he was twenty, he worked alongside the poet Liu Zongyuan. Demoted for political reasons, he was sent to work for nine years in a minor position in Langzhou in Hunan province. Recalled to the capital, he continued to have political problems, offending officials with his satirical writing and finding himself again exiled to various postings around the country, though he ended his life working in a good position as president of the Board of Rites. An important poet in his day, Lui Yuxi showed an interest in adapting folk songs to poetry (as in the “Bamboo Branch Song” included in this collection) and wrote very strong political poems. His repeated exile was a direct result of the political views evinced in his poetry.
When evening wind rises from reeds,
the autumn river is scaled like a fish.
Leftover sunset clouds suddenly shift color
and songs echo after wild geese roam off.
When military drums are no longer heard
a fisherman's lamps are bright.
No one knows what to say about history.
I walk alone in moonlight.
Wild grass blossoms by the Red-Bird Bridge.
Sun sets at the open end of Black-Uniform Lane.
The old swallows who built nests under the prime minister's eaves
now fly into the households of common folk.
Lake light and autumn moonlight in harmony;
the calm lake surface is an unpolished metal mirror.
From afar the green mountain by Dongting Lake
is a green field-snail on a silver plate.
Bai Juyi was born in Henan to a poor family of scholars. He took the imperial exam at age twenty-seven and dreamed, with his friend Yuan Zhen, of being a reformer. However, his career as an official was less than illustrious, and his attempts to criticize incidents of injustice only caused him to be banished from the capital (Changan) in 815. He was the prefect of Hangzhou (822–825) and then of Suzhou (825–827) but eventually retired from political life, which he found to be a disappointment. He turned to Buddhism and fared somewhat better as a writer than as a politician. He was popular in his lifetime, both in China, where his poems were known by peasants and court ladies alike, and in Japan, where a number of his poems found their way into
The Tale of Genji
and where he was the subject of a Noh play and became a sort of Shinto deity. More than twenty-eight hundred of his poems survive, as he was careful to preserve his work; in 815 he sent his writings to Yuan Zhen, who edited and compiled them into an edition of his collected work in 824–825.
Bai Juyi's poems show an interest in recording both his times and his private life and often reveal an empathy with the poor that belies the heights of his own career. They are often written in a deliberately plain style, and some of his poetry is written in imitation of the folk songs collected by the Music Bureau (
yuefu
poems) in the second century bce. According to a popular account, Bai Juyi used to read his poems to an old peasant woman and changed any line that she couldn't understand. There is a benevolent directed intelligence in his poems that comes through the refractions of culture and translation and makes us feel the powerful presence of this poet who died more than a thousand years ago.
Green and thick, weeds in the field.
Every year they wither and bloom.
Wildfire cannot destroy them;
they come back again with spring wind.
Distant grass invades ancient roads;
its sunny green links abandoned cities.
Now I'm seeing off my friend again.
The sorrow of parting is a field of rampant weeds.
Chirp of an early cricket. Silence.
The lamp dies then flares up again.
Night must be raining outside the window:
plink, plunk
on the banana leaves.
A ray of setting sun paves the water,
half the river is emerald, half the river ruby.
I love the third night in the ninth month—
dewdrops turn into pearls, the moon into a bow.
I grieve for the red peony flowers by the steps.
By this evening two branches have withered.
Tomorrow morning wind will blow away the rest.
At night I keep sad watch, hold flame over the dying red.
Spring's dusk comes to the imperial city.
Rattle, clatter, carriages and horses pass.
Everyone is saying, “It's peony season,”
and I follow them to buy flowers.
Expensive or cheap, there is no fixed cost,
prices shift with the number of blossoms.
Though a hundred red ones are like flames, flames,
even a small bouquet is worth five rolls of silk.
Canopies are used to cover the flowers
and bamboo frames protect them.
They are sprinkled and sealed with mud
so that, transplanted, their color doesn't change.
Every household follows this craze,
and no one wakes up from the addiction.
Now an old farmer
chances by the flower market,
lowers his head and sighs alone.
No one understands his sigh.
One cluster of deep-colored flowers
would pay the taxes of ten households.
Arrogance fills the road
and shiny saddles light up the dust.
If you ask who these men are
you'll be told, “Officials close to the emperor.”
Those in red are ministers.
Those in purple are generals.
They are off to attend the army banquet
on horses like racing clouds.
Famous wine brims over the jugs.
They have countless delicacies from water and land.
Their fingers break open Tungting tangerines
and they eat fine fish filets from the Celestial Lake.
They feel so content when full
and their arrogance swells with the wine.
This year on the South bank of the Yangtze River there is drought.
In the State of Chu, people are eating people.
Farmers have few slow months
and the fifth one is double busy.
Southern wind rises at night
and the wheat fields yellow.
Women carry food on shoulder,
kids bring water along.
They go together to feed their men
who are working at the South Hill
with feet burned by hot soil,
backs scorched by the bright and flaming sky.
But they are too exhausted to feel the heat
and don't want the long summer days to end.
There is a poor woman nearby,
carrying her son on her arm.
She gleans wheat ears with her right hand,
a broken basket hanging on her left elbow.
She looks up and tells me
a story that twists my heart:
all their harvest is gone to pay for the land rent.
She picks these ears to fill hungry stomachs.
What achievement, what virtue, have I
that I need not labor like a farmer?
I have an income of three hundred bushels,
and a surplus of food at the end of year.
I am ashamed, and these thoughts
nag at me for the rest of the day.
The old charcoal seller
chops wood and makes charcoal at South Mountain.
With a face full of dust and soot,
his hair is gray and his fingers all black.
How much can he make from selling charcoal?
Just enough to clothe his body and feed his mouth.
His clothes are very thin,
but he wishes it colder to keep charcoal prices high.
It snowed one foot outside the city during the night,
and he drove his charcoal cart through frozen ruts at dawn.
Now the sun is high, the ox is tired and the man hungry;
they take a rest in the mud outside the South Gate.
Who are those two men galloping near on horseback?
—messengers in white shirt and yellow gown.
They read a document in the name of the emperor
and turn the cart around, yell at the ox to head north.
A cartful of charcoal weighs about a ton,
but the palace messengers make the old man give it up
for just half a roll of red gauze and a piece of damask silk
they leave tied around the ox's head.
The Chinese emperor longs for a beauty who could topple empires
but for many years he cannot find one in his country.
There is a girl from the Yang family just coming of age,
hidden deep in her chamber and no one knows about her.
It's hard to waste such natural beauty in anonymity,
and one morning she is chosen to be at the emperor's service.
She returns his gaze and a hundred charms rise from her smile,
making all the painted faces in the Six Palaces seem pale.
In chilly spring she is privileged to bathe in the Imperial Huaqing Spa.
Her skin like cream is cleansed in the slippery hot spring water.
She seems so coyly weak when maids help her to her feet;
this is when she first receives the emperor's favor,
with her cloudlike hair, flowerlike face, her gait that sways like gold.
They spend spring nights warm in a bed with lotus nets.
Since spring nights are so short and the sun soon rises high
the emperor neglects to attend morning court.
Never at rest, she attends and serves him at banquets
and spring outings and his every night belongs to her.
There are over three thousand beauties in the palace
but his love for three thousand is focused on her alone.
When her makeup is done in the golden chamber she serves him at night;
after banquet in the jade towers they sleep together drunk.
All her siblings are bestowed with royal rank and land,
and she is admired for bringing honor to her family.
This changes the hearts of parents—
they want to give birth to girls instead of boys.
In a tall building rising into clouds on Li Mountain
her fairy music is carried everywhere by wind,
her unhurried songs and slow dances freezing strings and bamboo.
The emperor can never see her perform enough.
But suddenly military drums from Yuyang make the earth vibrate,
shattering her performance of “The Rainbow and Feather Garment.”
Smoke and dust rise from the nine city gates
as thousands of horsemen march northwest.
But their flapping green-pinion banners fall still;
the imperial column has only moved thirty miles out the west gate.
The six armies of imperial guards all refuse to move on
till the beauty with long moth-eyebrows twists and dies before their horses.
Her jewelry is scattered on the ground and no one picks up
her hairpieces of emerald, gold, and jade.
The emperor cannot save her. He just covers his face.
When he turns to look, tears and blood streak down together
and yellow dust spills everywhere in whistling wind
as they take the narrow zigzag mountain path up to Sword Pavilion.
Travelers are rare under Emei Mountain;
the flags and banners look blanched and the sun is thin.
The river and mountains in Sichuan are so green
that the emperor is lost in emotion each day and night.
In this temporary palace he sees a moon the color of heartbreak.
Through night rain he hears bells and the sound tears his guts.