Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Every year at the jade mirror stand,
it's harder to paint myself into a plum flower.
You didn't return home this year,
and each letter from across the Yangtze fills me with fear.
I drink less since our separation,
my tears exhausted in sorrow.
I see deep Chu clouds when I think of him in distance.
My man is far and the world's edge is near.
When the Cold Food Day has just ended
the east wind becomes cruelly strong.
I'm in no mood to hunt flowers in the wilds
and even when idle I don't spend my time on swing sets.
My jade body is so thin my skirt can be folded at the waist. Silk clothes feel so sheer when I feel this sick. I don't have the heart to roll up my curtain and look. Just let the pear flowers fall in solitude.
Spring night,
my jade body is soft as a gold hairpin
as, back to the lamp, I unfasten my silk skirt.
But the quilt and pillow are cold. The night's fragrance is gone.
Spring is a deep courtyard of many locked doors.
Petals falling in falling rain make the night seem forever.
Regret comes to me in dream. There is no escape.
I walk alone, sit alone,
sing alone, drink alone, and sleep alone.
Standing lone, my spirit hurts.
A light cold caresses me.
Who can see how
tears have washed off half my makeup,
sorrow and sickness have joined hands,
how I trim the lamp's wick till it's gone and dream still does not come?
Returning from dream, sobering up, I fear spring sorrow.
Smoke dies in the duck-shaped incense burner, but the fragrance lingers.
My thin quilt can't stop the dawn chill.
Cuckoos sing and sing till from the west tower the moon drops.
1
Patricia Buckley Ebrey,
The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 123.
Zhu Xizhen, the daughter of Zhu Jiangshi, came from Jiangan. According to
Talks in the Garden of Lyric Songs (ciyuan congtan)
, she is also known as Zhu Qiuniang and was the wife of Xu
Biyong. Her husband was a merchant who traveled often, sometimes not returning for years. Zhu Xizhen wrote poetry that expressed her longing for him. This is essentially all that we know about her. Her poems are found in
Complete Song Lyric Songs (quan songci)
, where she is put in the category of figures that appeared in
Vernacular Fiction of the Song Dynasty.
People who appeared in
Vernacular Fiction
could be real or fictional; the works attributed to them could be their own or could have been composed by other people under their names.
1
Shaking his head, he walks out on the dusty world. Awake or drunk, he is outside of time. Wearing green cape and bamboo hat to make his living, he is used to wearing frost and charging into snowflakes.
The wind ceases toward evening and his fishing line idles.
The new moon is above and below.
For a thousand miles water and sky are the same color.
He watches a lonely swan goose brightening up and fading out.
2
In my sight are a few idlers.
Of them the fisherman is most relaxed.
Wearing the seal of the palace of underwater immortals
he fears no bad wind or waves.
His heart can't be fathomed by common folk
since names are only empty counterfeits.
His one oar crosses five lakes and three islands.
He just lets the tip of his boat play.
3
The fisherman arrives standing up.
I know it's him by the fishing rod.
He spins his boat around at will,
traceless like a bird across sky.
Blooming or fading, reed flowers have their own floating lives
so the best strategy is get drunk all the time.
Last night, a riverful of wind and rain.
No one heard anything.
4
Steering the fishing boat around.
All rivers and seas are my home.
I'm going to Dongting Lake to buy wine,
Leaving Qiantang River behind, a bamboo hat on my back.
My drunk face turns redder in the cold.
The tide goes down the moraine.
Passing Ziling shoal
I see in bloom one plum flower.
5
Short oars and a light fishing boat.
Evening mist veils water along the river.
Fortress wild geese and sea gulls take separate flights,
highlight the autumn scene between the river and heaven.
Metallic fish scales clash in the crowded fish basket. Just enough to buy some wine. A sail returns in smooth wind. No one can hold it.
Li Qingzhao is China's finest woman poet, a master of the
ci
form. She was born in what is today Qinan, Shandung province, to a gifted literary family; her talent was recognized in her teens. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingzheng, the son of a powerful politician, who shared her tastes for literature, painting, and calligraphy and who soon embarked on a career as an official. When China went through the tumultuous transition from the Northern to the Southern Song dynasties, Li Qingzhao's husband's career was cut short, and they devoted themselves to art collecting and cataloging. An invasion of the Qin Tatars in 1127 sent Li Qingzhao fleeing from the capital with just a few belongings; her husband was away from Nanjing at the time, attending his mother's funeral. Li Qingzhao traveled across China for months, finally joining her husband in Nanjing, where he had become mayor. Just two years later her husband died en route to a new posting, and Li Qingzhao drifted across China, settling at last in Linan (modern Hangzhou), where in 1132 she entered into a brief marriage with a minor military official. Her poems are the best evidence of her life, capturing the sorrow she endured over separations from her husband and over his death and sketching her life as a society woman. From her voluminous writings (six volumes of poetry, seven volumes of essays) only about fifty poems have survived, but what does remain is powerful and masterful enough to have cemented her reputation as a major world poet.
Slight mist, fat clouds. This endless day is torture.
Lucky Dragon incense dissolves in the gold animal.
It's Autumn Festival, a good season,
but by midnight the chill will pierce
my jade pillow and thin silk curtains.
I drink wine by the east fence in yellow dusk
and a secret fragrance fills my sleeves.
Do not say my spirit isn't frayed.
The west wind tangles in the curtains.
I am thinner than a yellow flower.
The scent of red lotus fades and my jade mat is cold as autumn.
Gently I loosen my silk robe
and enter the magnolia boat alone.
Who has sent an embroidered letter via clouds?
Wild geese form a character in the sky:
return.
The west tower fills with moon.
Blossoms drift and water flows where it will,
but my heart is still sick,
split between this place and where you are.
I can't kill this desire.
Even when my eyebrows relax,
my heart flares up again.
The wind fades. Dropped blossoms perfume the earth.
At the end of the day, I'm too lazy to comb my hair.
His things remain, but he is gone, and the world is dead.
I try to speak but choke in tears.
I hear that spring is lovely at Twin Brook.
I'd row there in a light craft
but fear my grasshopper boat
is too small to carry this grief.
I don't need deep cups of thick amber wine. My feelings will warm before I drown in drink. Already sparse bells are answering the night wind.
Lucky Dragon incense fades as my soul-dream breaks. From my loose hair drops a soft gold hairpin; I wake alone and watch the red candle die.
I'll never forget sunset at Brook Pavilion— drunk with beauty, we lost our way. When the ecstasy faded, we turned our boat home, but it was late and we strayed into a place deep
with lotus flowers and rowed hard, so hard the whole shore erupted with herons and gulls.
My courtyard is deep, deep, how deep is it,
with cloudy windows and misty tower always shut?
Willow leaf tips and plum blossoms take shape
as spring returns to trees at Moling Tombs.
In the City of Good Health, I am aging.
Once I felt the moon and chanted poems of wind,
but now I am old and have done nothing.
Who could care for this withered self?
I haven't the will to light the lantern
or even to walk in the snow.
Translated by Willis Barnstone and Sun Chu-chin
Rattan bed, paper netting. I wake from morning sleep.
I can't reach the end of saying: I've no happy thoughts.
Incense flickers on, off. The jade burner is cold,
a companion to my feelings, which are water.
I play three times with the flute,
astonishing a plum's heart.
How I feel spring's ache!
Slender wind and thin rain, tapping, tapping.
Down come a thousand lines of tears.
The pipe-playing jade man is gone. Empty tower.
My chest is broken. On whom can I lean?
I break off a blossoming twig.
On the earth and in heaven,
there's no one to send it to.
Translated by Willis Barnstone and Sun Chu-chin
Sky links cloud ways, links dawn fog.
A star river is about to turn. One thousand sails dance.
As if in dream my soul returns to a god's home,
hearing heaven's voice,
eagerly asking: Where are we going back to?
I say: The road is long, the day near dusk;
in writing poems startling words come invisibly.
Ninety thousand miles of wind, the huge
peng
bird takes off.
Wind, don't stop.
The frail boat is to reach the three holy mountains.
Translated by Willis Barnstone and Sun Chu-chin
Warm rain and sunny wind start to break the chill.
Willows like eyes, plums like cheeks.
I already feel spring's heart throbbing.
Wine and poems.
Whom can I share them with?
Tears dissolve my makeup. My gold hairpin is heavy.
I try on a light spring robe threaded with gold and lean against a hill of pillows. The hill damages the gold phoenix pin. Alone I hug dense pain with no good dreams. Late at night, I am still playing as I trim the wick.
Translated by Willis Barnstone and Sun Chu-chin
*
Written after her husband's death.
Lu You was the most prolific poet of the Southern Song dynasty. He wrote approximately ten thousand poems. He is known as the Patriotic Poet for his fervor in exhorting the government in his poems to go to war and reunify China. In 1153 he was successful in passing the examinations necessary for a government position, but as the prime minister was his enemy, he found himself without a post until the prime minister's death in 1160. His military service on the border of Sichuan and Shaanxi deeply affected his outlook and his writing. After some years in the capital, he was dismissed from office for his outspokenness and went through a series of provincial posts until his retirement in 1190. His poetry is noted for its criticism of Song bureaucracy, its celebration of wine and Daoist individualism, and its sympathy for the poor.
Lying stiff in a lonely village I don't feel sorry for myself;
I still think of defending Luntai for my country.
Deep in night in bed I hear wind blowing rain,
and iron horses on an ice river enter my dream.
A chaos of clear horns rings in the snow dawn
of a place I visit in dream,
I don't know where.
As iron cavalry silently rivers past
and I think of frontier waters
west of Goose Gate,
or of the Blue Sea of Qinghai.
I awaken in cold lamplight.
The water clock has stopped dripping.
Slant moonlight through the paper window.
I still wish to be knighted ten thousand miles from home.
Hear this:
though the hair on my temples is snow
my heart is not yet old.
As the east wind gusts rain, travelers struggle
on a road of thin dust now paved with mud.
The flowers are napping, willows nod, even spring is lazy.
And I, I am even lazier than spring.