The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry
Page 6
Ambiguity also arises when natural syntax comes up against the expectation of symmetrical structure in paired lines. For example, the couplet “ ” (“A time so bad, even the flowers rain tears./I hate this separation, yet birds startle my heart.”), from Du Fu's “Gazing in Springtime,” contains an ambiguity that is often lost in translation. According to the natural syntax, an initial reading of the first half of the couplet would be “A time so bad, even the flowers rain tears,” taking the flowers as the subject of the whole line. But the second half immediately suggests a different reading. It is very clear that the poet himself was startled by birds, and the symmetrical structure strongly suggests that the subject in the first half is the same person. Thus, when we read the poem again, the first half may be read as “sad about the times, flowers make me shed tears.” This ambiguity results from two legitimate readings according to syntax or symmetry. Since it is impossible to keep two interpretations in the translation, we chose personification of the flowers to avoid making the second half of the couplet too expected. This sort of conflict between natural reading and reading for symmetry can be found in many seemingly unambiguous lines in Chinese poetry.
Ambiguities can also be quite local and involve indeterminacy in grammar or definition of words. Two of the lines we discussed earlier from the first poem from the Book of Songs contain such ambiguity:
The last two characters can be read as “hao (i) qiu (2)” (first tone plus second, meaning “good spouse”). But they can also be pronounced as “hao (4) qiu (2)” (fourth and second tones). In that case the character hao is no longer an adjective modifying the noun qiu (spouse) but rather a word meaning “love to” (hao [4] ) modifying a verb qiu (to marry). In that case the line indicates a man's strong desire for the hand of a lady, and perhaps should be translated: “Full of grace is the lady./The gentleman is obsessed with marrying her,” or “… seeks her hand.” Although a translation can keep just one of the interpretations, the effect of reading the Chinese is that the text is wavering between readings, a door swinging open and shut.
In contemporary Chinese poetry, much of the elegant ambiguity of the classical Chinese poem is lost. This can explain why a Chinese reader's first reaction to classical Chinese poetry in English or in modern Chinese can be summed up in one word: “diluted.” But to leave out in translation most of the functional or connective elements of language in an attempt to re-create the intensity of the original Chinese too often yields a poem that reads like pidgin English.
From Modern to Contemporary
After the last emperor was removed from the throne in 1911 and China entered an era of warlords and revolution, the classical Chinese language and all its forms of poetry quickly became outmoded. The vernacular movement promoted by Dr. Hu Shi and other advocates of modernization introduced a fault line in the poetry tradition as well as a schizoid understanding of poetry: while new poetry was expected to be in sync with the changing times and to emerge from the shadow of classical poetry, many readers continued to evaluate new poetry against the merits of classical poetry—namely musicality, memorability, and intensity of information and imagery. The best of the modern poets, the one who solved the riddle of how to blend classical qualities with modern sensibility, was Mao Zedong; he did so by using classical forms, such as regulated verse and lyric song, in modern ways.
Even though classical Chinese and modern Chinese share the same characters, there are significant differences that influence how they are used in the composition of poetry. Modern Chinese is mainly disyllabic, while classical Chinese is mainly monosyllabic. Many common words are even more than two syllables now, and functional words are often necessary to clarify the relationship between words. As a further complication, many modern poets, rejecting what they saw as an outmoded and failed Chinese cultural tradition, began to draw on the Western tradition. Translated poems became a model of style and resulted in new forms and uses of language. Feng Zhi even tried to introduce the sonnet into Chinese poetry. After about a hundred years of experimentation, the forms of the new poetry are still as open as folk songs in the Han dynasty. Contemporary Chinese poetry, particularly that of the Misty school, whose poets often imbue their work with political messages that can be glimpsed through the mists, is typically a hybrid of classical Chinese parallelism, Western free verse, surrealism, and symbolism, as in these lines by Shu Ting: “A colorful hanging chart with no lines./A pure algebra problem with no solution” (from “Missing You”).
Like other Asian nations, China in the era of modernity suffers from a split consciousness, seeking at once to modernize and to retain a sense of what was traditionally Chinese. Its poets have helped to imagine a China for the twentieth century and for today— one that creates uneasy hybrids between tradition and experimentation, that promotes political movements and is persecuted by them, and that seeks new poetic forms that can express what it means to be Chinese in the new millennium.
—CHOU PING
2 We tried to create a poem with an equivalent form in English, using homonyms, repeated words, slant rhymes, caesura, and a loose strong stress meter (based on the meter of Old English poems). For the majority of poems in this anthology, we have chosen to be accurate to other levels of the poem— the diction, imagery, implicit thought problems, tone, and/or parallel structure—while abandoning meter and rhyme. For a few select poems, however, we thought it worthwhile to experiment and see what would be gained or lost by approximating Chinese form in English.
3 E.g., from Zhang Heng's (78–139) “Four Sorrowful Poems” to Cao Pi's (187–226) “Songs of Yan.” These poets are important historically for their formal innovations, but their poems are not of the highest quality and have not been translated for this volume.
ZHOU DYNASTY
(1122–256 BCE)
THOUGH CHINESE CIVILIZATION STRETCHES BACK TO NEOLithic times, the earliest known dynasty, the Xia, is of limited importance to a discussion of Chinese literature, as there is no evidence that a written language was in use. The succeeding dynasty, the Shang, was a Bronze Age agricultural civilization. During the Shang, characters were written on oracle bones (usually made of turtle shell or cattle shoulder bones, and later on bamboo strips, silk, and bronze), but no literature from this time is extant.
The Shang were overthrown by the king of Zhou, a small dependent nation in the Wei River Valley in the western Shang territory, and thus began the Zhou dynasty, the first great period of Chinese literature. It was during the Zhou dynasty that the doctrine that the Chinese king was exercising a “Mandate of Heaven” developed. It later became an extremely important doctrine both to justify imperial rule and to explain the fall of an empire (should an emperor prove corrupt or weak, heaven would remove his mandate). The Zhou dynasty is the longest of China's many dynasties, and is divided into the Western Zhou (1122–771 bce) and the Eastern Zhou (770–256 bce), as the Zhou were forced out of their capital at Xian by barbarian invaders from the north, and moved east to found their new capital in Luoyang. The Eastern Zhou is itself subdivided into the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 bce) and the Warring States Period (475–221 bce). The troubled Warring States Period marked the waning years of the dynasty. Such great thinkers, moralists, and philosophers as Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi lived during the Eastern Zhou. It was the time of the Hundred Schools of Thought, the golden age of Chinese philosophy, when the great traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, Militarism, and Mohism developed. In this period, itinerant thinkers traveled with their followers, finding employment with rulers, who would seek their advice on warfare, morality, diplomacy, and government. The Zhou dynasty eventually weakened to the point where it ruled only in name, as seven powerful warring states vied for dominance. In 256 bce, the Zhou were conquered by the Qin state, but the warfare continued for another thirty-five years. In 221 bce, the ruler of Qin succeeded in conquering the remaining states and unified China, naming himself Shi Huangdi (the “first emperor”) and beginning the Qin dynasty
. After eight hundred years, heaven had removed its mandate from the Zhou at last.
The three Zhou dynasty texts presented here are the source of Chinese poetic literature, evolving out of the beginnings of Chinese writing and foreshadowing what was to come in this extraordinary three-thousand-year tradition. Chinese poetry begins with the Book of Songs, comprised of folk songs, hymns, and court songs collected largely from ordinary people living along the Yellow River, and putatively edited by Confucius himself (thus the collection is sometimes referred to as the Confucian Odes). The fact that the Chinese poetic tradition begins with folk poetry reworked and set to music has meant that the long tradition of Chinese poetry written by the nobility has often striven for a sense of folk authenticity to blend with the master poet's craft and skill, simplicity balancing elegance. The four-character verses in the Book of Songs are the model for shi poetry, whose variations came to dominate classical Chinese poetry for the next two thousand years.
The Book of Songs is one of the Confucian classics, studied throughout Chinese history by the nobility and by those who wished to rise in society as scholar-officials. Poetry is held to be one of the great arts that educated Chinese men (and sometimes women) should know and be able to practice. In fact, poetry has been the mainstream of literary expression in Chinese literature, and so it is often afforded great powers of influence in the Chinese critical tradition. The “Great Preface” to the Book of Songs states that poetry is a Confucian rectifier that establishes the proper relationships between spouses, encourages respect and loyalty for the old, strengthens human ties, improves civilizations, and excises bad customs. In the Analects, Confucius often mentions the Songs. In Analect 2.2, for example, he states, “There are 300 Songs, but they can be summed up with one phrase: let your thoughts be free of depravity.” Poetry serves a moral purpose, according to Confucius, “stimulating the reader, and making him observant, sociable, and capable of expressing his grievances,” while at the same time “helping him to serve his family and his King” (Analect 17.8). Though the poems in the Book of Songs were in fact simply songs of the peasants, they were read as moral allegories, or as analogues to political and historical events.
The second text presented here is the marvelous, riddling, profound, and elegantly difficult Dao De Jing of Laozi (better known in the West by an earlier transliteration as the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu). As the Book of Songs stands as one of the key texts that gave birth to the Confucian tradition, so the Dao De Jing (along with another great text, the Zhuangzi) stands as the source of the great religious and philosophical tradition of Daoism, and ultimately of Chinese Buddhism, which blended with Daoism in a particularly Chinese philosophical and spiritual mélange. Though it is not normally considered to be poetry, the Dao De Jing translates as marvelous poetry. A selection from it can help give Western readers an understanding of the concepts that underlie so many of the great Daoist and Buddhist poets in China who were to come later.
The final text in this section is a selection from the great long poem Encountering Sorrow by Qu Yuan (c. 340-c. 278 bce). This poem comes from the Verses of Chu, the second great early anthology of Chinese poetry, which included Qu Yuan's poetry, as well as that of a later poet, Song Yu. Encountering Sorrow and other poems in the collection tell of how Qu Yuan's dedication to his king was rewarded with banishment, leading him to drown himself in despair. The poems are celebrated for their Confucian dedication to duty. The work of Qu Yuan represents the beginning of an ornate literary tradition in China, which is counterbalanced by the simpler, vernacular, folk tradition of the Book of Songs. His poems are also the source of Chinese fu poetry, an irregular blend of poetry and prose that was to become an important part of the Chinese tradition. Fu poems usually begin and conclude with prose passages, with rhymed poetry in the center.
Qu Yuan is supposedly the first Chinese poet whose name we know (though in fact there are a few cases in the Book of Songs in which a poet's name is embedded). That the Verses of Chu begins the tradition of named poetry in China is more important than one might think. When one knows a poet's name, and something of his or her life, one gets a powerful sense of human connection to the person behind the poem. As poets name the world, so their own names name something to us as readers—a life and, perhaps more important, a lifework. Though the songs from the Books of Songs can often feel personal, they are almost exclusively anonymous and written to set, generic topics. Thus, despite their allusive and elaborate nature, the poems of Qu Yuan are the fountainhead of personal poetry in China.
BOOK OF SONGS
(c. 600 bce)
The Book of Songs is the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry and the thematic and formal source of the Chinese poetic tradition. The Chinese name for the Book of Songs is the Shi Jing, and the term shi (the general term for poetry, like the Japanese term waka) derives from its name. Legend has it that its 305 poems were compiled by Confucius (551–479 bce) from an earlier manuscript of around three thousand songs. The assertion that Confucius was the compiler is questionable, but certainly the anthology was extant in Confucius's time, and it seems likely that the anthology was collected between 1100 and 600 bce. Confucius refers to the Book of Songs in the Analects, and it was part of the curriculum of his disciples; it is counted among the Confucian classics that form the basis of Confucian education. The collection was banned in the third century bce, along with the other Confucian classics, but was reconstructed during the Han dynasty, and the edition that is most complete derives from this time.
The Book of Songs contains three basic categories of song: folk songs and ballads, court songs, and sacrificial songs. Like the Sanskrit Vedas of India, these songs provide us with a window onto the simple and beautiful life of an ancient time. Heroes and ancestors are praised, love is made, war is waged, farmers sing to their crops, people complain about their taxes, and moral categories are set forth in stark and powerful form. Though these are songs, the music has been lost, and some of them have been revised from folk song roots by court musicians, rhymed and arranged into stanzas. Others were aristocratic songs, songs to be sung to accompany ritual dancing, or to accompany the rites of ancestor worship.
White Moonrise
The white rising moon
is your bright beauty
binding me in spells
till my heart's devoured.
The light moon soars
resplendent like my lady,
binding me in light chains
till my heart's devoured.
Moon in white glory,
you are the beautiful one
who delicately wounds me
till my heart's devoured.
Translated by Tony Barnstone
and Willis Barnstone
Fruit Plummets from the Plum Tree
Fruit plummets from the plum tree
but seven of ten plums remain.
You gentlemen who would court me,
come on a lucky day.
Fruit plummets from the plum tree
but three of ten plums still remain.
You men who want to court me,
come now, today is a lucky day!
Fruit plummets from the plum tree.
You can fill up your baskets.
Gentlemen if you…want to court me,
just say the word.
Serene Girl
The serene girl is pretty,
waiting for me at the corner.
She loves me but hides from me.
I scratch my head, walking back and forth.
That serene girl is tender,
she gave me a red straw.
The red straw shines;
I love this beauty.
It was picked in the fields.
It is beautiful and rare.
It isn't the straw that is so beautiful
but that it's a gift from a beauty.
In the Wilds Is a Dead River-Deer
In the wilds is a dead river-deer.
White rushes wrap h
er.
A lady yearns for someone dear.
A fine man seduces her.
In the woods are clustered bushes,
and in the wilds a river-deer is dead
and wrapped up in white rushes.
There is a lady as fine as jade.
Oh! Slow down, don't be so harsh,
let go of my girdle's sash.
Shhh! You'll make the dog bark.
All the Grasslands Are Yellow
All the grasslands are yellow
and all the days we march
and all the men are conscripts
sent off in four directions.
All the grasslands are black
and all the men like widowers.
So much grief! Are soldiers
not men like other men?
We aren't bison! We aren't tigers
crossing the wilderness,
but our sorrows
roam from dawn till dusk.
Hairy-tailed foxes slink
through the dark grass
as we ride tall chariots
along the wide rutted roads.
Ripe Millet**
Rows and rows of ripe millet,
the sorghum sprouts,