Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Ouyang Xiu's poetry is also marvelous, and he was instrumental in making the lyric (
ci)
form (poems written to fit popular songs) a widespread and important Song poetic style. His plain style and use of colloquial expressions made his poetry accessible to larger audiences and helped preserve its freshness for audiences today. Like Andrew Marvell, he was a sensualist known for his carpe diem poems. Just before his death he wrote a poem about how “Just before the frost comes, the flowers/facing the high pavilion seem so bright.” He was also an individualist, both
in his approach to writing and in his interpretations of the classics; sinologist J. P. Seaton sees this individualism as an outgrowth of his self-education. A man with many talents and dimensions, Ouyang Xiu is considered a prime example of the Chinese ideal of the multifaceted scholar-official, equivalent to the Western ideal of the Renaissance man.
I'm quite a loose and free person,
and the same kind of official.
I look like a big wine pot
carried around in a wagon.
Fashion chasers won't bend their heads to look at me.
To whom can I talk? I just stay silent.
Fortunately I have talented friends from Luoyang
who keep me company each day.
We get drunk from redistilled pure wine,
and wear spring orchids for the scent.
After mulling over official documents,
poetry and wine are enough to make me happy.
The wild geese flown, spring also goes.
I pick over the thousands of loose threads in this floating life.
They come like a spring dream, ephemeral,
then are gone like morning clouds, traceless.
Hearing my zither, she gave me her jade pendant with an
immortal's love,
I couldn't make her stay, though I held onto her silk skirt until it tore.
Listen to me, don't be the only sober one.
The rest of us are rotten drunk among the flowers.
The lamp-wick's ashes, blossoms droop, the moon like frost, now light of sun and moon together through the screen. Almost too drunk, she has a fragrance of her own. Two hands, the dancing done, grasp blue-green sleeve. In the sound of the song we'll drain the cup again. Don't turn your pretty face away, you'll break my heart.
Translated by J. P. Seaton
You've left and I don't know if you're near or far.
Everything I see is broken and dull.
The farther you go, the fewer letters come.
Who can I ask? This river is so broad it drowns the fish.
1
In deep night the wind beats the bamboo—it sounds like autumn,
ten thousand leaves making a thousand cries of grief.
Alone on my pillow I search for dreams of you.
No dream comes. I watch the lamp—guttering, out.
A light frost on the curtain in early morning, she rolls it up,
and blows her hands warm, begins to paint her face new.
Longing for him, she draws her eyebrows long as distant mountains.
Thinking about the past,
she sighs over the flowing petals
and easily drops into grief.
She almost sings, but stops herself.
She almost smiles, then knits her brows.
It's enough to tear your heart.
Sound of a spring waterfalling down rocks.
Silent mountain deep in night.
Bright moon washes the pine woods clean.
A thousand peaks, all one color.
Watering flowers is always a pleasure.
I can't wait for spring color in Zhenyang.
Officials are moved around like relay messengers,
but at least for three years I've been master of this place.
Falling petals swirl in wind against my face.
The willows are dense, the mist is deep,
and snow-white catkins shift and float.
After rain a light chill remains
like spring sorrow and this melancholy hangover.
The bed-screen mountains circle my pillow like green waves.
On my emerald quilt with ornamented lamps
I am alone night after night.
Lonely, I rise and lift the embroidered curtain
to a dazzling moon, pear blossoms glowing.
Ten years ago I used to indulge in cups of wine
under a white moon, in clear wind,
but cares have withered me,
and age has come with startling speed.
Hair at my temples has changed color, but my heart is the same.
I grasp a golden goblet
and listen again to old tunes,
familiar, that carry me into old days, drunk.
Cold rain swells the Jiaopi Pool.
No one on the solitary mountain slope.
Just before the frost comes, the flowers
facing the high pavilion seem so bright.
1
Your letters (“fish”) can't reach me across this distance.
*
This poem was written in 1072, just before Ouyang Xiu's death. The
jueju
form is a four-line rhyming poem in either five or seven characters.
Wang Anshi was born to a modest family with a history of government service. Although he started out as a provincial official, under the Emperor Shenzong (reigned 1067–1085) he became the most important politician of his time, a reformer who sought to regulate many aspects of Northern Song culture, from education to the military. When the conservative forces in the government opposed his reforms, he fell from favor and resigned. He was a protégé of Ouyang Xiu, who praised his work. Like Ouyang, he saw literature in the Confucian tradition of promoting moral
and social improvements. His collected poems number above one thousand five hundred, and a number of his prose pieces also survive. He is known for the simplicity and clarity of his poems, especially those written in the regulated verse form, and as one of the “Eight Masters of Song and Tang Dynasty Prose.”
Where the wall turns, several branches of plum flowers
unfold blossoms on their own against the cold.
From afar I know they are not snow
as an invisible fragrance spreads.
Spring wind took flowers away.
It paid me back with clear shade.
Dark flourishing trees quiet the road on the slope.
The garden house is deep behind waves of branches.
I take short rests when the seat is set up,
with a walking stick and sandals I look for hidden scenes
but see only Northern Mountain birds
passing by and leaving a sweet sound behind.
Su Shi was born in Meishan in Sichuan province to an illustrious family of officials and distinguished scholars. He and his brother and father—the Three Su's—were considered among the finest prose masters of both the Tang and Song dynasties. Su Shi took the imperial exam in 1057 and was noticed by the powerful
tastemaker, politician, poet, and chief examiner Ouyang Xiu, who became his patron. Like Ouyang, Su Shi was a Renaissance man who, in addition to having a political career, was an innovator and master of poetry, prose, calligraphy, and painting.
Among the founders of the Southern Song style of painting, Su Shi felt that poems and paintings should be as spontaneous as running water, yet rooted in an objective rendering of emotions in the world. Around
2
,400 of his poems in the
shi
form survive, along with 350
ci
form poems. Like Ouyang, Su was important in expanding the uses and possibilities of
ci
poetry. His political career, like that of his patron, was unstable and included demotions, twelve periods of exile, and even three months in prison. During an exile in Huangzhou he began calling himself Su Dongpo (Eastern Slope), which was the name of his farm. His poems are informed by a knowledge of Daoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism, and like the earlier mystical farmer-poet Tao Qian, he was content on his farm, away from the political world.
A very personal poet, Su Shi wrote about the pain of his separations in exile, the death of his baby son, his joy in a simple walk in the countryside, and the pleasures of a good cup of wine. He is known for the exuberance he brought to his writing and is credited with founding of a school of heroic abandonment in writing.
In yellow dusk the slender rain still falls,
but the calm night comes windless and harsh.
My bedclothes feel like splashed water.
I don't know the courtyard is buried in salt.
Light dampens the study curtains before dawn.
With cold sound, half a moon falls from the painted eaves.
As I sweep the north tower I see Horse Ear Peak
buried except for two tips.
A broken moon hangs from a gaunt parasol tree.
The water clock has stopped, and people hush into sleep.
Who sees a hermit like me passing alone
like a shadow of a flying wild goose?
Startled and soaring off, I look back
with grief no one understands,
going from branch to branch, unwilling to settle,
and landing at last on a cold and desolate shoal.
A life touches on places
like a swan alighting on muddy snow—
accidental claw tracks left in the slush
before it soars east or west into the random air.
The old monk is dead, interred beneath the new pagoda,
and on ruined walls the poems we brushed are illegible.
Do you still remember the rugged path,
the endless road, our tired bodies, how our lame donkey brayed?
Wild rice stems endless on the vast lake.
Night-blooming lotus perfumes the wind and dew.
Gradually the light of a far temple appears.
When the moon goes black, I watch the lake gleam.
From the side it is a range; straight on, a peak.
Far, near, high, low, it never looks the same.
I can't see Mount Lu's true face
because I'm on the mountain.
2
The spring river is pushing at my door
but the rain will not let up.
My small house is like a fishing boat
surrounded by water and clouds.
In the empty kitchen cold vegetables are boiled,
wet reeds burning in the broken stove.
Who knows it is the Cold Food Festival?
Ravens carry the dead's money in their bills,
1
the emperor sits behind nine doors,
and my ancestors' tombs are ten thousand
li
away.
I want to cry at the forked road.
Dead ashes won't blow alive again.
Up in the tower a bell is talking to itself.
The typhoon will wash out the ferry by tomorrow.
Dawn comes with white waves dashing dark rocks
and shooting through my window like deflected arrows.
A dragon boat of a hundred tons couldn't cross this river
but a fishing boat dances there like a tossed leaf.
It makes me think, why rush to the city?
I'll laugh at such fury of snakes and dragons,
stay aimlessly till the servants start to wonder
—with this kind of storm, my family won't mind.
I look for my friend, monk Qianshan. He's alone,
meditating past midnight and listening for the breakfast drum.
1
For ten years we two, one live, one dead, have been lost in a vast mist.
I don't think always of you
yet cannot forget.
Your lonely tomb is a thousand miles away.
I have no one to tell my sadness.
Even if we could meet again you wouldn't know me
with my dusty face,
my temples coated with frost.
At night in a dark dream I suddenly found myself home.
By the small window
you were combing your hair.
We looked at each other without words,
just a thousand lines of tears.
I know you'll wait for me each year in that heartbreak place
through nights of bright moon
under dwarf pine by your mound.
“When will there be a luminous moon?”
I lift my wine and ask the black sky.
I don't know which year it is tonight in the sky palace.
I wish I could ride the wind and go there,
but I'd be afraid in heaven's jade towers.
It is too cold to be that high.
So I start to dance with my own shadow.
Nothing is better than the human world!
The moon circles a red pavilion
settling to the carved doors
and shines light on my insomnia.
I don't think it feels malice,
yet why is the moon so round when lovers separate?
We have sad and happy partings and reunions.
The moon has bright and dark fullness and waning.
Since ancient times nothing has been perfect
but love may last without end
since even a thousand miles apart we can share this full moon.