Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
We are growing old together, you and I;
Let's ask ourselves, what is age like?
The dull eye is closed ere night comes;
The idle head, still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors,
One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper, one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer, one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk,
Is great as ever, when you and I meet.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Since I lay ill, how long has passed?
Almost a hundred heavy-hanging days.
The maids have learned to gather my medicine herbs;
The dog no longer barks when the doctor comes.
The jars in my cellar are plastered deep with mold; My singers' mats are half crumbled to dust. How can I bear, when the Earth renews her light, To watch from a pillow the beauty of spring unfold?
Translated by Arthur Waley
At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain
Going out alone with my staff of hollywood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys—
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body—both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking—both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts—
Between the two, I
get
as much as I
lose.
Translated by Arthur Waley
*
*Written when the poet was only sixteen years old, this was an assignment poem (with a predetermined title) to practice for the imperial exams.
*
This poem recounts the story of Yang Guifei, the famous beauty and the concubine of the Tang emperor Xuanzong (685–762, ruled 713–756). Xuan-zong was among China's greatest emperors, but he neglected his rule once he met Yang Guifei and made her his concubine. Yang was close to An Lushan, the Turkic general, and adopted him as her son. When An rebelled in 755 (in the famed An Lushan Rebellion that devastated the empire), Yang and her brother, the prime minister, were blamed. As the emperor and his court fled the capital in the face of a rebel advance, the furious royal guards killed Yang's brother and forced the emperor to have Yang strangled at Ma Wei.
2
Sharing-wing birds are legendary birds with one eye and one wing; only by sharing wings can they fly.
Liu Zongyuan was one of the finest prose writers of the Tang dynasty and one of only two Tang dynasty writers included among the “Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song.” A friend of Han Yu, he was one of the followers of the Ancient Style Prose Movement, which emphasized clarity and utility over ornament in prose writing. As a poet he was relatively minor. He was born and raised in Changan, the capital during the Tang dynasty. After a highly successful early career in civil government, he was reassigned to a post in the provinces (in Yongzhou, Hunan province) after the abdication of Emperor Shunzong in 805. A decade later
he was banished even farther away, to modern Guangxi. His works in exile are considered his finest. While he was in the capital, his writing was bureaucratic in nature, and he considered it primarily a means to advance his career; in exile, however, he wrote a number of delightful didactic pieces, showing a neo-Confucian synthesis of both Daoism and Buddhism (unlike Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan was not averse to the wave of Buddhism that was then sweeping across China). He is particularly known for his allegorical writings and for his fables, which, like Aesop's, often feature animals. His poem “River Snow” is considered a prime example of “minimum words, maximum message” and has been the subject of numerous landscape paintings.
A thousand mountains. Flying birds vanish.
Ten thousand paths. Human traces erased.
One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape—an old man
alone, angling in the cold river. Snow.
Sharp-pointed cliffs by the sea are swords
that slice my homesick guts in autumn.
If I could split into millions of selves,
I'd scatter them on all the peaks to gaze home.
Damp summer in Nanzhou intoxicates like wine;
with northern windows open I take a nap on the tea table.
I wake at noon alone and hear nothing but the sound of mountain
boys pounding tea leaves in stone mortars in the bamboo grove.
A fisherman spends the night under West Rock,
pails clear river water and burns bamboo.
Smoke vanishes, sun rises, and no one is seen.
The swishing oar turns mountains and water green.
Floating the central current, he turns to gaze at sky
above rock where mindless clouds chase each other.
Chill wind noisily sifts a hard frost
as a black eagle soars up the dawning light.
Clouds shatter, mist cracks, a rainbow breaks in half!
The eagle skims a hillock like thunder and lightning.
The sound of fierce wings cuts thorns and brush;
he snatches foxes and hares and soars through sky again.
Hair on claws, blood on beak, one hundred birds gone.
He stands alone, gazing round, often excited.
But fiery wind and damp summer suddenly come,
now caged, his feathers droop and his wings ache.
In the wilderness raccoons and rats are just pests,
but now ten times a night they come to startle and to attack.
If only wind would swell my wings again
and I could fly in clouds, all constraints gone!
Zhang Ji should not be confused with the other Tang dynasty poet named Zhang Ji whose work is also included in this volume (although their names are different in Chinese, they read the same transliterated into English). Zhang Ji was helped along in his career by a number of powerful friends and admirers. The
poet Meng Jiao, for example, arranged for Zhang Ji to work with him and Han Yu on the staff of the military governor of Xunwu. With Han Yu's help Zhang Ji passed the provincial and imperial examinations and became a tutor in the Directorate of Education, where, after a number of further postings, he eventually became the Director of Studies.
In Zhang Ji's
yuefu
(Music Bureau style) poem “A Soldier's Wife Complains,” he evinces a sympathy for the poor and the ordinary and participates in a Confucian critique of social injustice. It is modeled on the work of Du Fu, whose genius Zhang Ji was among the first to recognize. Of Zhang Ji's four hundred poems, seventy are in the
yuefu
style, and many decry the effects of war and taxation on the poor. His work influenced such poets as Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, who also used the Music Bureau style to critique social ills and try to convince the government to change.
In September the barbarians killed the border general
and all our Han soldiers died by the Liao River.
No one can travel three thousand miles to pick up white bones,
so the families tried to summon the lost souls and bury them.
Women depend on their sons and husbands,
happy to live together, even in poverty,
but my husband is dead in a field and my son's in my belly
and though my body remains, my life is a candle in daylight.
You know I'm married
yet you gave a gift of two bright pearls.
Grateful for your affection
I tied them on my red silk skirt.
My home's tall buildings and gardens extend afar
and my husband holds his halberd in the Bright Light Palace.
I understand your intentions are honest as sun and moon,
but I've sworn to share life and death with my man.
I return two pearls to you, and two tears drop.
Why didn't we meet before I married?
1
The fisherman's house is near the river mouth.
Tides flow into his brushwood gate.
A traveler, I wish to spend the night here
but the host is not back yet.
The bamboo grove is deep and the village road long,
fishing boats are few when the moon rises,
but look, on the distant sand bank,
a straw cloak flapping in spring wind.
*
Since they didn't have the bodies, the families buried the dead soldiers' clothes and summoned their souls to lie at rest.
1
This is actually a poem written by a man to another man, declining an invitation to leave his current post and work as an adviser.
Wu Ke's original surname was Jia. He became a monk at an early age and was the cousin of the poet Jia Dao, whose monk name was Wu Ben (they had the same grandfather on the father's side). Born in Juo County, Hebei province, Wu Ke lived as a monk with Jia Dao in the Green Dragon Temple in the capital. He was friend to many poets. His own poetry is written mostly in five-character lines, and he is known for his ability to describe things without explicitly naming what he is describing. For example, in the first of the lines “I listened to rain till the last night drum ceased/and opened my door to find fallen leaves deep,” Wu Ke is describing not the rain but the sound of falling leaves. His poems are found in the
Complete Tang Poems (quan tangshi).
Dark insects noisy at dusk
as I sat in meditation in the West Woods.
I listened to rain till the last night drum ceased
and opened my door to find fallen leaves deep.
Because we used to suffer from the illness of ambition
1
we turned our minds to Dongting Lake.
This same old business in the capital
still keeps you far away.
Jia Dao was a Buddhist monk who gave up the monk's life around 810 after meeting the poet Han Yu and moving to the capital, Changan. Along with Zhang Ji and Meng Jiao, Jia Dao followed the aesthetic principles advocated by Han Yu, who celebrated the didactic and moral effects of literature and presented the poet as an honest Confucian rectifier of societal wrongs. With the encouragement of Han Yu, he tried to pass the imperial examination but failed repeatedly. Although he was not a successful official, he gained a strong reputation as a poet. Here is a famous story about the first meeting of Jia Dao and Han Yu, from the compilation of poetic anecdotes titled
Notes of Xiang Su:
1
The illness of ambition refers to Jia Dao's continuous efforts to pass the national imperial exam, which he failed many times. Even after passing it he was assigned only a very minor position. Supposedly he and his cousin discussed the possibility of living a hermit's life, like that of a fisherman on Dongting Lake.
When the monk Jia Dao came to Luoyang, monks were forbidden to leave the monastery after noon. Jia Dao wrote a sad poem about this and Han Yu liked the poem so much he helped him get permission to become a layman.
When he was concentrating on his poems he would often run into important people without being aware of it. One day, riding his donkey, he was thinking about these lines: “Birds return to their nests in trees by the pond./A monk is knocking at a door by moonlight.”
He couldn't decide whether to replace the word “knocking” with “pushing,” so he was making wild gestures on his donkey, acting out first a knock and then a push. While doing this he encountered the procession of the mayor, Han Yu, and neglected to give way. Arrested by the bodyguards, and brought before Han Yu, he was asked to explain his actions. He explained how he was trying to decide between these two words. Han Yu considered this for a long time, and said, at last, “knocking” is better. They became fast friends after that.
The great Song dynasty poet and statesman Ouyang Xiu admired Jia Dao's intense evocations of hardship: “Like Meng Jiao, Jia Dao was a poor poet until his death and liked to write lines reflecting his hard life…. He writes: ‘I have white silk in my sideburns/but cannot use it to weave a warm shirt.' Even if one could weave hair, it wouldn't do him much good. Jia Dao also has a poem ‘Morning Hunger' with these lines: ‘I sit and hear the zither on the western bed:/two or three strings snapping in the cold.' People say that this poem shows that hunger as well as cold is unbearable.”
1
Beneath a pine I question a boy.
He says, “Master has gone to gather herbs
somewhere on the mountain
but who knows where? The clouds are deep.”
1
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. 62–63, 75–76.
Known as Yuan the Genius, Yuan Zhen was among the most brilliant poets and statesmen of the Tang dynasty. He was born in Changan to a family descended from the royal house that ruled Northern China in the fifth and sixth centuries during the Northern Wei dynasty. Though his father died when he was a child, he became a brilliant scholar under his mother's tutoring. He passed the examinations in the category of “clarification of the classics” when he was fourteen, and when he was twenty-four he passed the “highly selective” examination, which landed him an appointment in the imperial library with Bai Juyi, the poet who was to be his lifelong friend. Several years later he took the final palace examination, monitored by the emperor, and gained the highest score, resulting in a position close to the emperor. Like his friend Bai, Yuan dreamed of being a reformer, a dream that was to result in a series of banishments. He did, however, help to create “The New Music Bureau Songs Movement,” which attempted to recapture the formal freedoms and the simplicity of diction of the Music Bureau (
yuefu)
form of the Han dynasty and to use poetry for the serious ends of social reform.