The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

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The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 2

by Tony Barnstone


  To the Tune of “Longing for Qin e”

  LIU YONG (987–1053)

  To the Tune of “Phoenix Perched on the Parasol Tree”

  To the Tune of “Rain Hits a Bell”

  To the Tune of “New Chrysanthemum Flowers”

  To the Tune of “Poluomen Song”

  FAN ZHONGYAN (989–1052)

  To the Tune of “Sumu Veil”

  To the Tune of “Imperial Avenue Procession”

  MEI YAOCHEN (1002–1060)

  Plum Rain

  On the Death of a Newborn Child

  Sorrow 239 A Small Village

  Reply to Caishu's “Ancient Temple by a River”

  The Potter

  OUYANG XIU (1007–1072)

  About Myself

  To the Tune of “Spring in the Tower of Jade”

  The Lamp-wick's Ashes, Blossoms Droop,

  the Moon Like Frost

  To the Tune of “Spring in the Tower of Jade”

  Painting Eyebrows, to the Tune of “Pouring Out Deep

  Emotions”

  Walking Back in Moonlight from Bohdi Trees to the

  Guanghua Temple

  Encouraging Myself

  To the Tune of “Butterflies Adore Flowers”

  To the Tune of “Mulberry-Picking Song”

  Poem in the Jueju Form

  WANG ANSHI (1021–1086)

  Plums Blossoms

  Late Spring, a Poem Improvised at Banshan

  SU SHI (SU DONGPO) (1036–1101)

  Written on the North Tower Wall After Snow

  Written While Living at Dinghui Temple in Huangzhou,

  to the Tune of “Divination Song”

  Written in Response to Ziyou's Poem About Days in Mianchi

  Boating at Night on West Lake

  Brushed on the Wall of Xilin Temple

  from Rain on the Festival of Cold Food

  Because of a Typhoon I Stayed at Gold Mountain for Two Days

  To the Tune of “Song of the River Town,” a Record of a Dream on the Night of the First Month, Twentieth Day, in the Eighth Year of the Xining Period (1705)

  To the Tune of “Prelude to the Water Song” 251 To the Tune of “Butterflies Adore Flowers”

  Recalling the Past at the Red Cliffs, to the Tune of “Charms of Niannu”

  Returning to Lingao at Night, to the Tune of “Immortal by the River”

  QIN GUAN (1049–1100)

  To the Tune of “Magpie Bridge Immortal”

  MADAM WEI (FL. C. 1050)

  To the Tune of “Bodhisattva Barbarian”

  To the Tune of “Bodhisattva Barbarian”

  To the Tune of “Attached to Her Skirt”

  NIE SHENQIONG (UNCERTAIN DATES)

  To the Tune of “Partridge Sky”

  ANONYMOUS (“the girl who took the gold cup”)

  (early twelfth century)

  To the Tune of “Partridge Sky”

  ZHOU BANGYAN (1056–1121)

  To the Tune of “Rambling Young Man”

  To the Tune of “Butterflies Adore Flowers”

  Willows, to the Tune of “King of Lanling”

  ZHU SHUZHEN (1063–1106)

  To the Tune of “Mountain Hawthorn”

  To the Tune of “Mountain Hawthorn”

  To the Tune of “Washing Creek Sands”

  Spring Complaint, to the Tune of “Magnolia Blossoms”

  The Song of A-na

  ZHU XIZHEN (UNCERTAIN DATES)

  from Fisherman, to the Tune of “A Happy Event Draws Near”

  LI QINGZHAO (1084-C. 1151)

  To the Tune of “Intoxicated in the Shade of Flowers”

  To the Tune of “One Blossoming Sprig of Plum”

  To the Tune of “Spring at Wu Ling”

  To the Tune of “Silk-Washing Brook”

  To the Tune of “Dream Song”

  To the Tune of “Immortal by the River”

  To the Tune of “Lone Wild Goose”

  To the Tune of “The Fisherman's Song”

  To the Tune of “Butterflies Adore Blossoms”

  LU YOU (1125–1210)

  On the Fourth Day of the Eleventh Month During a Windy Rainstorm

  Record of Dream, Sent to Shi Bohun, to the Tune of “Night Roaming in the Palace”

  Thinking of Going Outside on a Rainy Day

  To the Tune of “Phoenix Hairpin”

  The Sheng Garden

  To My Sons

  TANG WAN (UNCERTAIN DATES)

  Tang Wan's Reply, to the Tune of “Phoenix Hairpin”

  YANG WANLI (1127–1206)

  Cold Sparrows

  XIN QIJI (1140–1207)

  Written on a Wall in the Boshan Temple, to the Tune of “Ugly Servant”

  The Night of the Lantern Festival, to the Tune of “Green Jade Table”

  Village Life, to the Tune of “Clear Peaceful Happiness”

  JIANG KUI (1155–1221)

  Preface to “Hidden Fragrance” and “Sparse Shadows”

  Hidden Fragrance

  Sparse Shadows

  YAN RUI (FL. C. 1160)

  To the Tune of “Song of Divination”

  YUAN HAOWEN (1190–1257)

  Living in the Mountains

  Dreaming of Home

  from In May of 1233, I Ferried Across to the North

  WU WENYING (C. 1200-C. 1260)

  Departure, to the Tune of “The Song of Tangduo”

  To the Tune of “Washing Creek Sands”

  To the Tune of “Prelude to Oriole Song”

  LIU YIN (1249–1293)

  Reading History

  Mountain Cottage

  YUAN DYNASTY (1280–1367)

  ZHENG YUNNIANG (UNCERTAIN DATES)

  The Song of Shoes

  To the Tune of “West River Moon”

  ZHAO MENGFU (1254–1322)

  Guilt at Leaving the Hermit's Life

  Poem in the Jeju Form

  MA ZHIYUAN (C. 1260–1334)

  To the Tune of “Thinking About Nature”

  Autumn Thoughts, to the Tune of “Sky-Clear Sand”

  Autumn Thoughts, to the Tune of “Sailing at Night”

  GUAN DAOSHENG (1262–1319)

  Love Poem

  Fisherman's Song

  JIE XISI (1274–1344)

  Written on a Cold Night

  Fishing Folk

  A Portrait of Ducks

  SA DUCI (C. 1300-C. 1355)

  from Shangjing Instant Poems

  Autumn Day by a Pond

  To a Zheng Player

  MING DYNASTY (1368–1644)

  ZHANG YU (1333–1385)

  Song of the Relay Boats

  GAO QI (1336–1374)

  Where Is My Sorrow From?

  Passing by a Mountain Cottage

  Lying Idle While It Rains

  SHEN ZHOU (1427–1509)

  Inscription for a Painting

  Thoughts Sent to a Monk

  ZHU YUNMING (1461–1527)

  Taking a Nap by a Mountain Window

  TANG YIN (1470–1524)

  In Reply to Shen Zhou's Poems on Falling Petals

  Boating on Tai Lake

  Thoughts

  XU ZHENQING (1479–1511)

  Written at Wuchang

  YANG SHEN (1488–1599)

  On Spring

  WANG SHIZHEN (1526–1590)

  Saying Good-bye to My Young Brother

  Climbing Up the Taibai Tower

  GAO PANLONG (1562–1626)

  Idle in Summer

  XIE ZHAOZHE (1567–1624)

  Spring Complaints

  YUAN HONGDAO (1568–1610)

  At Hengtang Ferry

  ANONYMOUS EROTIC POETRY, COLLECTED BY FENG MENGLONG (1574–1646)

  Untitled

  A Dragging Cotton Skirt

  Clever

  Lantern

  The Bento Box

  Shooting Star

  The Boat

  A Boat Trip

  A Nun in
Her Orchid Chamber Solitude Feels Lust Like a Monster

  We're Only Happy About Tonight

  ZHANG DAI (1597–1684)

  from Ten Scenes of the West Lake: Broken Bridge in Melting Snow

  QING DYNASTY (1644–1911)

  JI YINHUAI (SEVENTEENTH CENTURY)

  Improvised Scene Poem

  WANG WEI (C. 1600-C. 1647)

  To the Tune of “Drunk in the Spring Wind”

  FENG BAN (1602–1671)

  A Poem in Jest

  WU WEIYE (1609–1672)

  On Meeting an Old Flame, to the Tune of “Immortal by the River”

  HUANG ZONGXI (1610–1695)

  A Stray Poem Written While Living in the Mountains

  QIAN CHENGZHI (1612–1693)

  A Stray Poem Written in the Fields

  NALANXINDE (1654–1685)

  To the Tune of “Endless Longing”

  To the Tune of “Washing Creek Sands”

  To the Tune of “Bodhisattva Barbarian”

  To the Tune of “Mulberry-Picking Song”

  WANG JIULING (D. 1710)

  Inscription for an Inn

  ZHENG XIE (1693–1765)

  On Painting Bamboo for Governor Bao in My Office in Wei County

  Homecoming Song

  YUAN MEI (1716–1798)

  from Improvisations

  A Scene

  On the Twelfth Day of the Second Month

  An Improvisation

  Meeting a Visitor

  Sitting Still

  Inscription for a Painting

  A Poem Sent to Fish Gate

  from Twenty-two Miscellaneous Poems on the Lake

  Temple in the Wild

  Mocking Myself for Planting Trees

  JIANG SHIQUAN (1725–1785)

  A Comment on Wang Shigu's Painting Portfolio

  ZHAO YI (1727–1814)

  from Reading at Leisure

  In a Boat 340 On Poetry

  from Poem Composed While Living at Houyuan Garden

  WU ZAO (1799–1863)

  To the Tune of “Song of Flirtation”

  To the Tune of “Beautiful Lady Yu”

  Feelings Recollected on Returning from Fahua Mountain

  on a Wintry Day, to the Tune of “Waves Scour

  the Sands”

  To the Tune of “A Song of the Cave Immortals”

  To the Tune of “Clear and Even Music”

  To the Tune of “Washing Creek Sands”

  QIU JIN (1879–1907)

  A Poem Written at Mr. Ishii's Request and Using the Same

  Rhymes as His Poem

  Letter to Xu Jichen

  SU MANSHU (THE HALF MONK) (1884–1918)

  from Ten Narrative Poems

  To the Zither Player

  FROM MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY

  (1911-Present)

  MAO ZEDONG (1893–1976)

  Changsha

  Tower of the Yellow Crane

  Warlords

  Kunlun Mountain

  Loushan Pass

  Snow

  from Saying Good-bye to the God of Disease

  To Guo Moruo

  XU ZHIMO (1895–1931)

  You Deserve It

  Farewell Again to Cambridge

  WEN YIDUO (1899–1946)

  Miracle

  Perhaps

  The Confession

  The Heart Beats

  Dead Water

  The End

  LI JINFA (1900–1976)

  Abandoned Woman

  LIN HUIYIN (1904–1955)

  Sitting in Quietude

  DAI WANGSHU (1905–1950)

  A Chopped-off Finger

  A Rainy Lane

  Written on a Prison Wall

  FENG ZHI (1905–1993)

  Sonnet 1. “Our hearts are ready to experience”

  Sonnet 2. “Whatever can be shed we jettison”

  Sonnet 6. “I often see in the wild meadows”

  Sonnet 16. “We stand together on a mountain's crest”

  Sonnet 21. “Listening to the rainstorm and the wind”

  Sonnet 23. (ON A PUPPY)

  Sonnet 24. “A thousand years ago this earth”

  Sonnet 27. “From freely flowing water, undefined”

  Al QING (1910–1996)

  Gambling Men

  BIAN ZHILIN (1910-)

  Entering the Dream

  Fragment

  Loneliness

  Migratory Birds

  Train Station

  HE QIFANG (1912–1977)

  Autumn

  Shrine to the Earth God

  LUO FU (1928-)

  Song of Everlasting Regret

  BEI DAO (1949-)

  Night: Theme and Variations

  Ordinary Days

  Country Night

  A Decade

  Response

  A Step

  Elegy

  Nightmare

  Many Years

  Sweet Tangerines

  A Formal Declaration

  Ancient Monastery

  Requiem

  The Morning's Story

  Coming Home at Night

  Rebel

  Asking the Sky

  Untitled

  Delivering Newspapers

  DUO DUO (1951-)

  Bell Sound

  Five Years

  SHU TING (1952-)

  Two or Three Incidents Recollected

  Perhaps

  Missing You

  Dream of an Island

  Mirror

  A Night at the Hotel

  YANG LIAN (1955-)

  An Ancient Children's Tale

  An Elegy for Poetry

  To a Nine-Year-Old Girl Killed in the Massacre

  HA JIN (1956-)

  Our Words

  They Come

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Selections and Some Words of Thanks

  Unless otherwise noted, the selections in this anthology have been cotranslated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping.

  IN THIS ANTHOLOGY WE HAVE ATTEMPTED TO BRING TOGETHER into one volume the essence of Chinese poetry. The selection begins with the Book of Songs (the ancient anthology of folk songs supposedly collected by Confucius himself) and culminates in the political and experimental poetry of contemporary Chinese poets, many of whom are in political exile in the diaspora that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. We have sought to represent in fine translation the well-established canon of great Chinese poems, and to deviate from that canon in ways we found interesting. Here you will find many of the familiar classical gems, popular favorites, and anthology pieces, and yet we have chosen to cut out old touchstones that don't fare well in translation in favor of including poems that read in English as poems in and of themselves. We have also attempted to adjust the canon, here and there, to shine a spotlight on fine poets whose work is often overlooked, and especially to make room for the poems of Chinese women. In the classical Chinese anthologies, the voices of women were largely ignored. Relegated to a few pages at the end of the volumes, they have survived the ravages of the centuries at significantly lower rates than those of men. The work of many of the finest Chinese women poets has been lost entirely. Those we know are represented by only a few poems or a few dozen poems, if we are lucky (while for many male poets, hundreds or even thousands of poems survive). Perhaps one could argue that we are skewing the canon by including a fifth of the fifty extant poems of the great woman poet

  Li Qingzhao, while including only one thousandth of the poems of Lu You, who wrote more than ten thousand poems. However, our goal is not to be merely representative in this anthology. We have chosen to swell the selections of poets whose work we particularly admire (Tao Qian, Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Han Shan, Su Shi, Mao Zedong, Bei Dao, and others) so that the reader can truly come to know their work. We consider such larger selections to be “pillars” that support the book, little books or chapbooks within the larger book that show the range and
development and depth of the finest poets of this extraordinary tradition.

  To aid the general reader (as well as students and scholars of Chinese) in navigating such a large selection of work by so many poets, we have provided an author index with both Pinyin and Wade-Giles transliterations of the authors' Chinese names. To help give readers the context necessary to ground their reading of this selection from three millennia of Chinese poetry, we have outfitted the book with an essay on the key issues that confront the English-language translator of classical and contemporary Chinese poetry, a short history of the development of Chinese literary forms, and introductions to each major historical period.

  I would like to thank the poet and novelist Ha Jin for generously putting us in touch with Anchor Books and helping this project find a home. I would also like to thank our editor, LuAnn Walther, and John Siciliano at Anchor Books, for their patience with the book's slow development and for making the project possible. Although the majority of the selections in the volume have been team-translated by Chou Ping and myself, I supplemented our translations with exceptional examples by my father, Willis Barnstone, and by other poet-scholar-translators of Chinese, among them Arthur Waley, Sam Hamill, Kenneth Rexroth, David Hinton, Xu Haixin, Eliot Weinberger, Newton Liu, Ko Ching-p'o, Burton Watson, Michelle Yeh, Arthur Sze, Gregory B. Lee, John Cayley, A. C. Graham, J. P. Seaton, John Rosenwald, Mabel Lee, Sun Chu-chin, Bonnie S. McDougall, Chen Maiping, James A. Wilson, and Ho Yung. They have played an extraordinary role in carrying Chinese poetic genius across oceans and centuries and transplanting it in American soil, and I would like to thank them for allowing me to reprint their translations here. Finally, I would like to thank my coeditor and primary cotranslator for his good humor and insight, which have made it a pleasure to work with him on this and other projects since we first met in my small apartment in Beijing in the winter of 1984.

  —TONY BARNSTONE

  Preface

  The Poem Behind the Poem: Literary Translation as English-Language Poetry

  I ORIGINALLY CAME TO CHINESE POETRY AS AN AMERICAN poet learning how to make the image. Like many other American poets, I was led to China by my interest in Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other modernist poets who developed and modified their craft in conversation with the Chinese tradition. I came to China, in other words, to learn how to write poetry in English. This is also how I came to translation: as a way of extending the possibilities of poetry written in English. I wanted to learn from the Chinese how to write better poems in English, and to learn from the English-language tradition how to translate better from the Chinese. A translation, after all, is the child of parent authors from different cultures, and however assiduously the translator attempts to remove his or her name from the family tree, the genetic traces will be found in the offspring. What the translator brings to the equation can never be reduced to zero. Translators bring their linguistic patterns, cultural predispositions, and aesthetic biases to the creative act. They don't merely hold up a mirror to something old but give the original text new life in a strange environment. Even a perfectly translated poem—one in which every word is turned magically into its doppelgänger and in which form, sound, and rhetoric are retained—is still a product of misprision, and the translator does not so much create a text in the new language equal to the old one as a text that strives to be equivalent to the original.

 

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