Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
I open the door and see snowflakes flying night and day.
Three layers of embroidered quilt cannot keep me warm.
What I need is my man's hot belly.
The girl came back from the lane
where her man had torn her sash,
so she told her mom, “I have a pain in my stomach,”
and walked bent over, hands held to her belly.
The mother is clever
but the girl is clever, too.
Mom used a sieve to spread lime on the floor,
but the girl heaved her man up and carried him to bed
and back again, the two sharing one pair of shoes.
Having an affair is like a lantern;
don't punch holes or rumors will blow it out.
The woman tells the man,
“You come in secret without a light
but you ignite me inside
and make all my body burn red.”
Having an affair is like a bento box;
you can carry it with you like a wine warmer,
but just enjoy the taste of one or two dishes.
Don't work your chopsticks too much.
Having an affair is like a shooting star.
It penetrates the sky.
The woman tells the man,
“Whenever I see your fire I lust for you,
but you go too soon, like smoke.”
Having an affair is like a boat.
You raise the sail and toss in the waves.
The woman tells him,
“I know how to handle these wind-and-water storms;
keep a firm grip on the rudder and don't fall asleep.”
The man poles the boat.
The woman rocks the boat.
Playing with wind and tide,
they make a choppy ride.
She is an oar
that depends on the rower to hit water.
The more he uses his pole,
the happier she is.
In her orchid chamber solitude
her lust is a monster.
She is too lazy to beat her wooden fish.
1
Her book of prayers is closed.
She's in no mood to chant mantras.
As a nun she's suffered a thousand bitternesses,
but when she gets old there's no guarantee of nirvana.
“Sigh, I should find a handsome man while I'm still young.”
We're happy, only happy about tonight.
We're worried, only worried about parting tomorrow.
Tonight two mandarin ducks grind against each other
till all the plum flowers are gone.
Now the drum tower beats midnight.
Shadows on the window-gauze show the moon falling west.
If only we could hold the moon up in our hands!
*
Bento box: a tray for presenting small dishes and appetizers, common in Japanese cuisine but originating in China.
1
“Wooden fish” is a hollow drum used by Buddhist monks when chanting the canon.
Zhang Dai was a historian and essayist from Shanyin (Shaoxing), Zhejiang, born into a family of scholars and officials who lived lives of wealth and sensual pleasure. He was a tea connoisseur and like his family lived extravagantly, surrounded by elegant arts and fine antiques. After the 1644 Manchu invasion, however, things began to go badly for him. In 1646 his son was kidnapped by a military general who later pillaged Zhang's house and destroyed his property. In July of that year the Manchu invasion forced Zhang to flee to the mountains, where he lived like a hermit, penniless except for some books, and suffered hunger, cold, and poverty until his death. It was here, however, that he wrote two distinguished prose collections (a history of the Ming dynasty and a memoir of Ming society and practices) as well as other prose pieces.
A long bank and shade of a tall willow.
Sparse moonlight sifts through.
My feet step in the loose sand as if walking in snow.
DURING THE QING DYNASTY, CHINA WAS RULED BY THE
Manchus, one of five Jurchen tribes that had conquered the other Jurchens and invaded China from Manchuria. A emarkable dynasty in many ways, the Qing lasted for 267 years and was very prosperous. It saw China expand to an immense size, annexing Taiwan, Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang province), Mongolia, Tibet, and Manchuria. Tribute was exacted from neighboring nations, and progressive tax policies encouraged land cultivation and agriculture. The nation's population swelled to 300 million by the end of the eighteenth century, and to 400 million by 1850.
Weakened by corruption, rebellions, and warfare, the empire fell into economic trouble and had difficulty ruling and feeding its burgeoning population. Like their predecessors in the Ming dynasty, the Qing rulers maintained an isolationist foreign policy. But in a series of military actions, the imperialist powers of the West forced them to sign what came to be known as the “unequal treaties,” under which China became a semicolonized region, forced to cede territories, pay crippling tributes to the British, and open ports to Western traders. Notoriously, the British twice invaded China to force the Qing to allow them to continue their lucrative business importing Indian opium to China. Furthermore, Westerners were granted special status, immune from prosecution under Chinese law and with their own police and courts and system of taxation. These humiliating treaties diminished the moral authority of the government. The tributes drained Qing coffers, leading to an increase in taxes, which in turn led to dissent. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a series of rebellions by Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, martial artists (known in the West as the Boxers), and others were put down, but only after tens of millions of
people were slaughtered. Local taxes to finance armies to suppress the rebellions led to a decentralization of power that further weakened the empire. The Manchu rule came to an end in 1911, when the last emperor of China, Pu I, was overthrown by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and the Republic of China was founded. The poetry of the anti-Manchu revolutionary and feminist Qiu Jin—though not of the highest literary quality—is particularly interesting in this context.
During this period the novel made advances as a major Chinese genre, especially with the writing in the eighteenth century of
The Dream of the Red Chamber
(also called
The Story of the Stone)
, a great and immensely long work that incorporated poetry. On the whole the Qing dynasty is not generally regarded as a period of great achievement in poetry. Like the Ming, the Qing was a difficult time for intellectuals. As in the beginning of the Yuan dynasty, many intellectuals refused to work for the new and foreign imperial order, choosing instead to find other employment. Intellectuals were often persecuted by the autocratic Manchus, and their works were sometimes banned or destroyed. It should come as no surprise, then, that much of Qing poetry tends to be imitative, like that of the Ming, safely emulating the literary achievements of the great Tang poets. As Zhao Yi writes in his poem “On Poetry,” “Li Bai's and Du Fu's poems have passed through ten thousand mouths/and now they are no longer fresh.” However, there are some wonderfully fresh and talented voices that emerged from the Qing, notably the romantic poetry of Wu Weiye, the gorgeous
ci
lyrics of Nalanxinde, the spiritual, witty verses of Yuan Mei, and the sad, bitter, but beautiful boudoir lyrics of Wu Zao, one of China's finest female poets.
Ji Yinhuai, also known as Mao Lu, was born in Jiangnin, Jiangsu province. She was the sister of Ji Yingzhong (1609–1681), another Qing dynasty poet, and learned how to write poetry
from her brother. She wrote a collection entitled
Deeply Cold Hall Poetry
, but she stopped writing when her husband, Du Ji, was killed during the Manchu invasion of the city. She lived in poverty with her children for over thirty years. Her line “Nesting ravens and flowing waters highlight autumn” was highly praised by Wang Shizhen.
Plum blossoms, a lonely village,
water flowing past a few cottages.
Against the setting sun no one is seen,
just an ox lying in the wheat field.
Wang Wei, also known as Xiuwei, was an orphan from Yangzhou who made her living as a courtesan at the end of the Ming dynasty. Among China's most accomplished women poets, she was deeply involved in the literary life of her time. After years as a courtesan she married a man named Xu Yuqing. Later she converted to Daoism and became a nun, taking the name “the Straw Cape Daoist.” Well known as a traveler who wrote accounts and poems about her travels, she edited an anthology of travelogues titled
Records of Eminent Mountains.
Lover, who coaxed you to get drunk before me?
The window is cold beyond the lamp
and instead of holding me you lean the lute against the fragrant drapes
and sleep, sleep, sleep!
You forget how to be tender.
All you want
is the taste of being drunk.
I'm sorry I asked you that riddle about shoes.
It delayed our tryst in the mandarin duck quilt,
so when I asked if you'd taken off your clothes, you said
“No, no, no!”
Even a goddess
parting from her lover
wouldn't be able to let go of your sleeve.
Feng Ban was born in Jiangsu province. Out of loyalty to the Ming dynasty, he pretended to be insane when it fell to avoid having to work for the new administration. He set himself in opposition to his contemporaries, disdaining the Jiangxi School of Poetry and the poetics of Yan Yu (1180–1235), who had celebrated poetic revelation and sudden enlightenment and viewed the poetry of the Tang and earlier dynasties through the lens of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Feng Ban preferred a realistic, educational, didactic application of poetry.
In this world the rich and powerful are hooligans,
everywhere locking up good flowers behind red doors.
But women's dreams are difficult to control.
They can travel at will to the far edge of the sky.
Landscape painter, scholar, poet, and official, Wu Weiye, also known as Wu Meicun, was from Taicang and was a tutor in the Imperial Academy in Nanjing. He passed the imperial exam in 1631. Though he originally considered committing suicide upon the fall of the Ming dynasty (he decided not to after his family interceded), he eventually went to work for the Manchus of the Qing dynasty. He wrote a history of the rebellions that led to the fall of the Ming, a work that was banned, along with the rest of his writings. He lost his official rank in a tax scandal in 1661.
Among the principal poets of his time, Wu Weiye was best known for his long poem “The Song of Yuan Yuan.” The question of whether to consider him a poet of the Ming dynasty or of the Qing dynasty is complicated by the fact that, while he considered himself a Ming loyalist and wrote movingly of his regret at having lived to serve a new master after the last Ming emperor committed suicide, his best work was written during the Qing. His son, Wu Jing, was also a well-known poet.
Drifting debauched and drunk on rivers and lakes,
after ten years I see again a fairy beauty
still gorgeous and light enough to dance in my palm.
1
In front of the lamp with a smile
she secretly unfastens her silk skirt.
But I am a withered and loveless man and in this life cannot live up to her passion. Outside Gusu City the moon is yellow and hazy. Behind a green window she lives with her love gone, tears crisscrossing her powder rouge.
1
Literally the line says, “still beautiful, in palm light,” referring to the beauty Zhao Feiyen (d.
1
bce), courtesan to the Han emperor, who was said to be light enough to dance in the palm of a man's hand. Because she was so light, she was given the name Feiyen (“Flying Swallow”).
Huang Zongxi, also known as Tai Chong, Nan Lei, and Mr. Lizhou, was from Yuyao, Zhejiang province, and was a well-known philosopher and historian during the period of transition from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty. He had a wide-ranging career, both intellectual and worldly. He spent years fighting the Manchu invasion of China, and as a scholar he studied mathematics and wrote works of philosophy on Mencius and the
Classic of Changes
, as well as a history of the Ming dynasty and a biographical history of Ming philosophical systems and schools. About writing poetry he said: “Poetry, linked with all that we have between heaven and earth, is used to facilitate the free flow of our spirit and willpower. The vulgar simply copy and imitate, unrelated to ten thousand things between heaven and earth. How can one write poems like that?” He declined many invitations to serve the Qing emperor after the Ming dynasty collapsed.
Knives, arrows, and imprisonment, let them come,
nothing can stop my strings and songs.
I face death with a calm heart
so what can poverty do to me?
With twenty-two ounces of cotton stuffing my broken comforter,
and three pine logs to cook my empty wok,
this winter I still feel lavishly supplied.
I can't imagine anyone doing better than me.