from times past this has been so.
How can square and round be made to fit together,
how can those who travel different roads plan for one another?
But to humble the heart and curb the will,
suffer censure, put up with shame,
hold fast to purity and whiteness, die for the right—
this the ancient sages heartily extolled.
Fording the Yüan and Hsiang, I journeyed south,
visited Ch'ung-hua and stated my case.5
“Ch'i's Nine Arguments and Nine Songs—
these the Hsia rulers loved, indulging their desires.
They failed to heed danger, to consider the ages to come,
and so Wu-kuan brought contention to the ruling house.6
Yi wandered recklessly, too eager for the chase;
he loved to shoot the big foxes.
But wild and disorderly ways seldom end right,
and Han Cho was there to covet his wife.7
Chiao dressed himself in stout armor,
gave way to desires without restraint,
daily losing himself in sport and pleasure,
until his head came tumbling down.8
Chieh of the Hsia violated the norms
and thus in the end encountered disaster.
Lord Hsin pickled the flesh of others
and hence the rule of Yin lasted no longer.9
T'ang and Yü were solemn, pious, respectful;
Chou10 expounded the Way and committed no error;
they promoted men of worth, employed the able,
followed the chalk and line without partiality.
August Heaven shows no favoritism;
it sees men's virtue and apportions its aid accordingly.
Only the sages and wise men flourish in action;
they indeed are worthy to rule these lands below.
I have viewed what went before, scrutinized what came after,
observing the standards that guide men's conduct.
Who, if not righteous, can ever rule,
who, if not good, can oversee affairs?
I have placed myself in peril, drawn close to death,
but as I look back at my former ways I have no regret.
Trying to shape a peg without thought for the hole it must fit—
even the ancient worthies met misfortune that way.
I sigh in my gloom and melancholy,
sad that the times I live in are so uncongenial.
Picking tender heliotrope, I wipe away the tears,
tears that wet my collar in wave on wave.”
I gathered bindweed, bamboo slips for divination,
commissioned Ling Fen to tell my fortune.11
“Two beautiful ones are certain to come together,” he said.
“Who is truly fair and yet lacks admirers?
Consider the breadth and vastness of these Nine Provinces—12
why should you think of those women only?
Dare to range farther afield, put off doubt—
who in search of beauty would pass you by?
What region is without its fragrant grasses?
Why must you pine for your old land?”
But the age is benighted, blinded, and confused;
who claims it can discern the good and bad in me?
People may differ in likes and dislikes,
but these cliquish ones—they're a breed apart!
Each one sports mugwort stuffed in his waist
and avers that rare orchids are not fit to wear.
If they're so blind in their discernment of plants,
how could they gauge the worth of precious gems?
They scoop up rotten earth to fill their scent bags
and claim that the pepper of Shen lacks aroma.
How rich the rare jewels I wear at my sash,
but the crowd conspires to darken and conceal them.
Among such partisans, none can be trusted;
I fear in their envy they'll smash my treasures.
The times are discordant, too easily they shift—
how can I linger any longer?
Orchid and angelica have changed and lost their fragrance,
sweet flag and heliotrope have turned to mere grass.
Why have the fragrant plants of bygone days
now all gone to common mugwort and wormwood?
How could it be for any other reason?
The fault's that no one cares for beauty!
I thought that orchid could be trusted,
but he proved to have no substance, nothing but boasts.
He spurns beauty to run with the crowd,
yet expects to be ranked with the fragrant ones.
Pepper is all flattery and insolence,
and even prickly ash thinks he can fill a scent bag!
They strive to advance, work to gain admittance,
but what fragrance are they fit to offer?
Yet such, to be sure, is the current of the times—
who can fail to be affected?
If I see pepper and orchid13 behaving thus,
what can I expect from cart-halt and river sage?
Only this girdle of mine is worthy of respect;
others scorn its beauty, but I go on as before.
Its teeming fragrance never falters,
its aroma to this day has yet to fade.
I will compose myself, think of my own pleasure,
go rambling once more in search of a mate.
Now while my adornments are at their finest
I'll seek her through every land high and low.
Ling Fen had already told me his auspicious augury;
I would choose a lucky day and commence my journey.
I broke a branch of carnelian to serve as food,
pounded carnelian fragments to make rations for the road.
I had flying dragons to draw my vehicle,
a carriage inlaid with jasper and ivory.
How could I band with those of different mind?
I would go far away, remove myself from them.
I turned my course toward the K'un-lan Mountains,
over distant roads rambling on and on,
hoisting clouds and rainbows to shield me from the sun,
sounding the tinkle of jeweled carriage bells.
In the morning I set off from the Ford of sHeaven,14
by evening I had reached the westernmost limit.
Phoenixes reverently bore my banners,
soaring and dipping in solemn flight.
Suddenly my route took me to the Flowing Sands;
I traced the Red Waters,15 ambling at my ease.
I beckoned dragons and horned dragons to bridge the ford for me,
commanding the Western Sovereign to let me pass over.16
But the trail was long and rank with dangers
so I summoned a host of carriages to come and attend me.
Passing Pu-chou Mountain, I veered to the left,17
pointing to the western sea as our destination.
I marshalled my chariots, a thousand in number,
their jeweled hubs aligned as they raced side by side,
my eight dragons drawing me, writhing and turning,
my cloud pennants fluttering and streaming on high.
I tried to curb my will, to slacken my pace,
but my spirit soared upward into distant regions.
I played the Nine Songs, danced the Shao music,18
stealing a brief day for enjoyment.
But as I ascended the bright reaches of heaven,
suddenly I looked down and saw my old home.
My groom was filled with sadness, and the horses in their longing pulled about in the reins and refused to go on.
Luan19
It's over! In this land there's no one, no one who knows me! Why must I long for my old city?
Since there's no one I can join with in administering just rule, I will se
ek out P'eng Hsien in the place where he dwells.20
Translated by Burton Watson
* Although most of the translations in this book are in the Pinyin transliteration system, in this poem and a few others we have respected the practice of those translators who prefer to use the Wade-Giles system.
1 Yü, T'ang, and Wu, founders of the Hsai, Shang, and Chou dynasties respec tively. For easier reading, I have divided the translation into sections on the basis of content, though there are no such divisions in the original poem.
2 Here and elsewhere the plant names, usually of aromatic or efficacious plants, are probably intended to represent actual adornments to the hero's dress and at the same time to symbolize his talents and superior moral qualities.
3 Yao and Shun are wise rulers of the time before Yü. Chieh and Chou are the evil rulers of the Hsia and Shang dynasties respectively.
4 Moth eyebrows are eyebrows shaped like moth antennae, a mark of femi nine beauty. In this passage the hero imagines himself as a beautiful woman.
5 The Yüan and Hsiang Rivers in Ch'u, south of the Yangtze. Ch'ung-hua is another name for the sage ruler Shun, said to be buried near the Hsiang.
6 Ch'i was a son of Yü, founder of the Hsia dynasty. He visited heaven and brought back the pieces of music mentioned here. Wu-kuan was a son of Ch'i.
7 Yi, noted as a skilled archer, usurped power from the Hsia rulers but spent all his time hunting and neglected government affairs. In time the high minis ter Han Cho had him murdered and married Yi's wife.
8 Chiao was the son of Han Cho and Yi's wife. Though he wielded power for a time, he was overthrown by a prince of the Hsia dynastic line.
9 Lord Hsin is another name for Chou, the evil last ruler of the Shang or Yin dynasty. Pickling the flesh of his associates was only one of the many heinous deeds he is charged with.
10 Chou here is the dynasty founded by the sage kings Wen and Wu to succeed the Shang dynasty, not the last ruler of the Shang, whose name is written with a different character.
11 Ling Fen is identified as an ancient expert in divination. Stalks were bound together and then broken to perform the divination.
12 The nine provinces of ancient China and, by extension, the world at large.
13 Commentators have attempted to identify “orchid,” “pepper,” and the other plants censured in this passage with persons at the Ch'u court, though with little evidence to go on.
14 A constellation in the eastern portion of the sky.
15 The name Flowing Sands probably refers to the desert areas north and west of China; the Red Waters refers to one of the four rivers that flow out of the K'un-lun Mountains, each of a different color.
16 The Western Sovereign is the mythical ruler Shao Hao, who in Chinese cosmology presides over the western direction.
17 Pu-chou Mountain serves as a pillar holding up heaven in the northwest sector. When Kung Kung, contending for power with the mythical ruler Chuan Hsü, butted his head against the mountain in rage, he caused heaven to tilt toward the northwest and the earth to sag in the opposite direction.
18 The Nine Songs of Ch'i: see footnote 6.
19 Luan appears to have been a musical term designating the concluding section of a musical selection. Here and in other works that imitate the Li Sao it denotes a reprise or summation of the poem.
20 Since P'eng Hsien is supposed to have committed suicide by drowning, commentators have traditionally taken the last line to refer to the hero's determination to do likewise. Ch'u culture abounds in legends of persons who drowned themselves in a river and thereafter became the tutelary deity of the river, and the hero of the Li Sao perhaps hopes for a similar apotheosis.
HAN DYNASTY
(206 BCE-220 CE)
THE QIN DYNASTY THAT FOLLOWED THE ZHOU DYNASTY DID NOT last long. The expansionist First Emperor was known for his ruthless repression of dissent in his attempt to unite China, and, seeing the Confucianist nobles as his enemy, famously ordered a burning of the books, and of the Confucian classics in particular. Much ancient literature and wisdom was lost. The Qin was overthrown by a peasant revolt, and the succeeding dynasty, the Han, reformed the tax structure and the treatment of the peasants, leading to an expansion of agriculture.
The Han dynasty is divided into the Western Han, with its capital in Changan, and the Eastern Han, with its capital in Luoyang; these bookended a brief, intermediate dynasty, the Xin, which lasted only from from 8–25 ce. During the prosperous Han dynasty, China expanded to a population of 50 million, and an aggressive foreign policy helped expand its borders east into Korea, south into northern Vietnam, and west into Chinese Turkistan. The expansion of trade led to the creation of the Silk Road, which stretched all the way from China to Europe, and the Great Wall was built as a security measure against the depredations of barbarians. The majority population in China, the Han Chinese, took their name from this dynasty. Though the Han dynasty began as a Legalist state with Daoist elements, under Emperor Wu (157–87 bce) it became an officially Confucianist state. Emperor Wu also instituted the examination system (125 bce), in which administrators would have to demonstrate proficiency in the Confucian classics in order to serve. The system lasted until the modern era and insured continuity and a commonality of reference in Chinese culture. It established the basis for a meritocracy and helped to assure that government officials would be literate and learned. During this time the Confucian classics became the base upon which Chinese education was built, and upon which prospective civil servants were tested in the civil service examinations.
The Han saw a flowering in works of history and literature and in the arts, surpassed in China's history only by the Tang and the Song dynasties. In poetry the Han was known for its rhyme prose (fu) poems, which developed from the Verses of Chu, and for its Music Bureau (yuefu) poetry. The elaborate, ornate, elegant, and erudite rhyme prose poems were the poetry of the court. “The Owl,” by Jia Yi (200–168 bce) is an example of the form at its height, as is a later poem, “The Art of Writing” by Lu Ji (261–303), from the Six Dynasties Period. In 193 bce a Directory of Music was founded, followed under Emperor Wu by a Music Bureau whose job was to collect and copy popular folk songs as well as the music written by scholars. Some of the songs were influenced by Central Asian melodies, and new songs were written under the direction of a musician. Later poems in the Music Bureau style, separated from their musical roots, were not sung and were not accompanied by instrumentation. During the Han, the dominance of the four-word line was shaken in Chinese poetry, and a new five-word line imitating the Music Bureau poems became popular, notably in the “Nineteen Ancient Poems” and in Southeast the Peacock Flies, a long anonymous poem written at the end of the Han or in the immediate post-Han period. Imitation of the Music Bureau poems by literati led to the creation of a new poetic form called Ancient Style Poetry (gushi).
The Han dynasty was weakened by a peasant revolt led by a secret society known as the Yellow Turbans. It started in 184 ce and continued to plague the empire for decades, until, like the Zhou dynasty, the Han degenerated and fragmented. It was succeeded by a tumultuous period of warring kingdoms, known as the Three Kingdoms Period, and by the long Six Dynasties Period, during which the empire remained in pieces. It was not to be reunited for four hundred years, until the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), which paved the way for the golden age of China, the Tang.
NINETEEN ANCIENT POEMS
The anonymous “Nineteen Ancient Poems” were written in the five-character meter, the longest-lasting and most influential form of versification in Chinese literature. They are the earliest poems that we have in this meter, and they helped shape the themes and forms of Chinese poetry for the next two thousand years. They probably represent a now-vanished tradition of first- or second-century poems, of which they are the sole remaining texts. They show aspects of folk song, but have been reworked into literary poems. Melancholy, lovelorn, accessible, and concerned with universal themes of the brevity of life
and separation from the loved one, these poems shine out of the deep past of China with an intense and intimate beauty.
Nineteen Ancient Poems
1
Traveling traveling and still traveling traveling,
you're separated from me for life,
ten thousand miles apart,
gone to the other end of the sky.
With your road so long and difficult,
how can we know if we'll meet again?
A northern horse leans against northern wind;
a southern bird nests on southern branches.
This separation lengthens day by day,
and day by day my gown and belt grow slack.
Floating clouds obscure a white sun
and wanderer, you do not return.
Missing you makes age come fast.
Years and months spin past.
No need to mention you abandoned me.
Just take care of yourself and eat enough.
2
Green so green is the river grass,
thick so thick are the garden willow's leaves.
Beautiful so beautiful is the lady upstairs,
shining as she stands by the window, shining.
Pretty in her powdered rouge, so pretty
with her slender, slender white hands.
Once she was a singing girl,
but now is the wife of a womanizer.
He travels and rarely comes home.
So hard to sleep in an empty bed.
3
Green so green are the cypress over the burial mounds.
Boulders upon boulders in the rushing ravine.
Born between heaven and earth,
a man is a long-distance traveler.
Let's take joy from this pitcher of wine
and drink with heart, not thin pleasure.
Whipping slow horses pulling our wagon,
we'll play at Wan and Luo.
It is so noisy and crowded in Luoyang,
officials with caps and belts visit each other,
there are main streets and tributary lanes,
and mansions owned by kings and princes.
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 8