Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
A dying lamp's low flame tosses the shadows.
This evening, told you've been demoted to Jiangzhou,
I am so startled I sit up in my final sickbed.
Dark wind is blowing rain into cold windows.
Calm day through the thin curtain, swallows talking fast.
Pairs of fighting sparrows kick up dust on the steps.
Wind at dusk, a brushwood gate swings shut.
Flowers drop their last petals. No one notices.
At sunset the Jialing River flows east
and thousands of pear petals chase the river wind.
What twists my stomach as I watch the river flowers?
Half have fallen in the river, half drift on the air.
A mountain spring randomly flows over the steps:
a small house among thousands of peach flowers.
Before getting up, I leaf through a Daoist book
and watch her combing her hair under the crystal curtain.
Liu Caichun, a native of Zhejiang, was a well-known Tang dynasty courtesan. Though she was a singing girl, she was married to the actor Zhou Jinan. Between 823 and 829 she visited Yuezhou and became a friend of Yuan Zhen, the well-known Tang poet. Their friendship was recorded in a book entitled
Cloud Brook Friend Discussions, (yunxi youyi).
Six of her poems are included in the
Complete Tang Poems (quan tangshi).
Don't be the wife of a merchant.
He'll use your gold hairpins as divination coins.
Every morning I look at the river mouth,
and over and over run to greet the wrong boat.
I don't like the Qin and Huai Rivers.
I hate the boats running on the water.
They carried away my husband.
It's already a year, and then another year.
That year on the day you left
I thought you went to Tonglu
but no one could find you there at Tonglu.
Today I got your letter—from Canton!
Distantly related to the imperial clan and extremely talented, Li He was nevertheless an unsuccessful scholar who attained only the lowest posts in his brief life (he died at the age of twenty-six). His poetry, like that of Meng Jiao, can be bitterly sarcastic and reflects the frustration he must have felt in his career. In his fifth “Horse Poem,” for example, he compares himself to a fine desert horse without an appropriate rider, which longs to be harnessed and directed by imperial (golden) reins. He also has a penchant for erotic, romantic, and even morbidly violent imagery, and his poems grate against the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts, the
weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was something of a Chinese Edgar Allan Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was, and like Poe his reputation suffered because literary culture couldn't stomach his unclassifiable works of genius. Sponsored in his day by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, Li He quickly disappeared from literary consciousness after his death, making a comeback only in the last two centuries. Two hundred forty of his poems have survived centuries of neglect, though legend states that what remains was part of a larger collection that was thrown into a toilet by his vindictive cousin.
This horse is no ordinary horse.
It is celestial like the Horse Constellation.
Walk up and tap its thin bones
and they'll sing like bronze.
The great desert of sand is snow and the
Yen Mountain moon is a hook.
When will I be harnessed with golden reins,
galloping clear autumn beneath my hooves?
After three years away from you,
I'm back at last for one day, and more.
We drink green Luling wine this evening
and I see yellow cloth-wrapped books, like when I left.
My sick bones still exist,
so nothing is impossible in this world!
Why bother to plead with the cows-and-horses dice,
1
just throw and let them roll!
All day writing, I stopped at dusk,
startled by my own frosty hair.
I laughed at myself in the mirror.
Is this the way to live as long as South Mountain?
I have no wrapping on my head
and my clothes are cheaply dyed with bitter bark.
Just look at the fish in the clear brook;
they drink and swim, pleased with themselves.
Flying light, flying light—
I urge you to drink a cup of wine.
I do not know the height of blue heaven
or the extent of yellow earth.
I only sense the moon's cold,
sun's burn, sear us.
Eat bear, and you'll grow fat;
eat frog, and you'll waste away.
Where is the Spirit Lady?
And where the Great Unity?
East of the sky is the Ruo tree:
underneath, a dragon, torch in mouth.
I will cut off the dragon's feet
and chew the dragon's flesh:
then morning will never return
and evening cannot bend.
Old men will not die
nor young men weep.
Why then swallow yellow gold
or gulp down white jade?
Who is Ren Hungzi,
riding a white ass through the clouds?
Liu Che, in Maoling tomb, is just a heap of bones.
And Ying Zheng rots in his catalpa coffin,
wasting all that abalone.
Translated by Arthur Sze
Among the saplings, a path revealed at dawn,
long grass blades wet from night mist.
Like a snowy river mouth the willow catkins amaze.
A wheat season rain swells brooks and field.
Sparse bells echo from an ancient temple.
Broken moon hung over a far mountain.
On a sandbank someone strikes stones to make a fire.
Burning bamboo lights up fishing boats.
Dew on lonely orchids
like eyes brimming tears.
I find nothing to tie her a heart-shaped knot.
I can't bear to cut the misty flowers.
Grass is her soft green cushion,
pines are her parasol.
She wears the wind,
and water tinkles her jade pendants.
In her lacquered carriage
she waits in the evening
while like a cold emerald candle
a will-o'-the-wisp sparkles
and under the Western Tomb
wind blows the rain.
Black clouds press the city till it's almost crushed,
and our armor reflects moonlight on shifting metal fish scales.
The sound of horns fills the sky with autumn colors.
Night congeals purple on the fortress like rouge.
With half-furled scarlet banners we approach the Yi River
and in heavy frost our cold drums seem muted.
To live up to the king's expectation on Yellow Gold Tower,
1
we will wave our jade-dragon swords and die.
Hungry and cold under the Pingcheng City wall,
every night we guard the bright moon
but our parting-gift swords have lost their gloss
and sea wind breaks our hair.
This long fortress extends into white space.
We see Chinese flags red in the distance,
hear short flutes from their black tents.
Mist and smoke soak their dragon banners.
Standing on the city wall at dusk,
we see things blurred under the wall.
Wind throws withered bitter fleabane about,
and our thin horses neigh inside the city.
Please tell us, officer in charge of wall construction,
how many thousand miles are we from the pass?
Our one worry: will our bundled corpses be sent home?
We're ready to turn our halberds on ourselves.
1
Jade rush, jade rush! A man needs to find emerald jade
to be made in vain for love of beauties into hairpins that quiver at
each step.
The old man is so starved and cold even the water dragon is worried.
The waters and air of Blue Brook can never be clear again.
Night rain on the hills where the old man munches hazelnuts,
the cuckoo sings till its beak drips blood like an old man's tears.
The water in the Blue Brook loathes living men
and men still hate these waters a thousand years after their deaths.
Slant mountains, cypress wind, and howling rain,
and he dives to the bottom of the spring, a rope tied to his foot
dangling in the green. Thinking of his cold village of white huts he misses his fragile babies
by an ancient terrace where stone steps are scattered with hanging
guts grass.
2
On the western hills the sun sets, the eastern hills darken,
Horses blown by the whirlwind tread the clouds.
From colored lute and plain pipes, crowded faint notes:
Her flowered skirt rustles as she steps in the autumn dust.
When the wind brushes the cassia leaves and a cassia seed drops
The blue raccoon weeps blood and the cold fox dies.
Dragons painted on the ancient wall with tails of inlaid gold
The god of rain rides into the autumn pool;
And the owl a hundred years old, which changed to a goblin of
the trees,
Hears the sound of laughter as green flames start up inside its nest.
Translated by A. C. Graham
Lacquer dust and powdered bone and red cinnabar grains:
From the spurt of ancient blood the bronze has flowered.
White feathers and gilt shaft have melted away in the rain,
Leaving only this triple-cornered broken wolf's tooth.
I was searching the plain, riding with two horses,
In the stony fields east of the post station, on a bank where
bamboos sprouted,
After long winds and brief daylight, beneath the dreary stars,
Damped by a black flag of cloud that hung in the empty night.
To left and right, in the air, in the earth, ghosts shrieked from
wasted flesh.
The curds drained from my upturned jar, mutton victuals were my
sacrifice.
Insects settled, the wild geese swooned, the buds were blight-
reddened on the reeds,
The whirlwind was my escort, puffing sinister fires.
In tears, seeker of ancient things, I picked up this broken barb
With snapped point and russet flaws, which once pierced through
flesh.
In the east quarter on South Street a peddler on horseback
Talked me into bartering the metal for a votive basket.
Translated by A. C. Graham
The old rabbit and the cold toad
1
are weeping sky color
and a cloud tower is half open, revealing a slant white wall.
The jade wheel rolling over dewdrops is a wet ball of light;
on a cassia-fragrant road chariots meet jade pendants.
2
Yellow dust, clear water under the three mountains;
the change of a thousand years is rapid as a galloping horse.
In the distance China is nine wisps of smoke
and in a single cup of water the ocean churns.
*
This poem was written because Li He was deprived of his candidacy for the imperial exams on the grounds that the degree “Jinshi” he was seeking sounded like the name of his father, “Jinshu.” According to the Confucian tradition, it is a violation of filial piety to mention directly one's father's name. It was therefore taboo for Li He to sit in an exam for “Jinshi.”
1
Cows-and-horses is a gambling game.
*
The allusions in “Flying Light” are extremely difficult. The speaker of the poem laments the brevity of life and wants to slay the dragon that draws the sun across the sky, to stop time and recover peace. He considers it ineffective to use elixirs (yellow gold, white jade) to become an immortal and derides Liu Che (Emperor Wu-di of the Han) and Ying Zheng (the first emperor of Qin) for their attempts to build massive, grandiose tombs and immortalize themselves.
There is a story that Ying Zheng died on a journey; his followers, anxious to keep his death a secret, filled a carriage with rotting abalone to disguise the stench of his decomposing body, then smuggled his corpse back into the capital.
One commentary says that the Spirit Lady was worshiped by the Han emperor and that the Great Unity was the supreme deity of the Daoists. I think the speaker is searching for ultimate knowledge and believes the Spirit Lady has it.
The Ruo tree is a mythical tree in the far west, whose foliage is supposed to glow red at sunset. Intriguingly, Li He places the Ruo tree in the east.
Ren Hungzi appears to be an immortal; the emperors are “just a heap of bones,” whereas Ren Hungzi, an utter unknown, has somehow achieved the transcendence that they sought.
*
Su Xiaoxiao was a well-known courtesan from Qiantang who lived in the fifth century. In this poem, her ghost, manifested in the sounds and sights of nature by her tomb, is tinkling jade, lighting candles, and waiting for lovers at dusk.
1
Yellow Gold Tower is located six miles northeast of the Yi River. In the Warring States period, it was the site where King Zhao of the State of Yan placed one thousand pieces of gold to attract talented soldiers.
1
The last line has been interpreted in various way to mean, heroically, “We're ready to die upon the halberds,” or mutinously, “We're willing to turn our weapons against our side,” or suicidally, “We're ready to turn our halberds on ourselves.”
2
“Hanging guts grass” is also called “departure grass” or “missing children vines.”
1
In Chinese mythology the old rabbit and the cold toad are creatures who live on the moon.
2
The jade pendants suggest the presence of fairy moon women, or perhaps specifically of Chang E, the woman who stole the potion of longevity and was banished to the moon in punishment.