Silently she placed the pick between the strings,
straightened her garment and stood up with a serious face.
She told us, “I was a girl from the capital,
lived close to the Tombs of the Toad.
I finished studying lute at the age of thirteen,
and was first string in the Bureau of Women Musicians.
When my tunes stopped, the most talented players were humbled,
other girls were constantly jealous when they saw me made up,
the rich young city men competed to throw me brocade head scarves,
and I was given countless red silks after playing a tune.
My listeners broke hairpins and combs when they followed my rhythm.
I stained my blood-colored silk skirt with wine
and laughed all year and laughed the next,
and autumn moon and spring wind passed unnoticed.
My brother was drafted and my madame died.
An evening passed, and when morning came my beauty was gone.
My door became desolate and horses seldom came,
and as I was getting old I married a merchant.
My merchant cared more about profit than being with me.
A month ago he went to Fuliang to buy tea.
I am here to watch this empty boat at the mouth of the river.
The bright moon circles around the boat and the water is very cold.
Deep into the night I suddenly dreamed about my young days
and wept in dream as tears streaked through my rouge.”
I was already sighing, listening to her lute,
but her story made me even sadder.
I said, “We both are exiled to the edge of this world
and our hearts meet though we've never met before.
Since I left the capital last year,
I was exiled to Xunyang and became sick.
Xunyang is too small to have any music;
all year round I heard no strings or pipes.
My home is close to the Pen River, low and damp,
and yellow reeds and bitter bamboo surround the house.
What do you think I hear there day and night?
Cuckoos chirping blood and the sad howls of apes.
Spring river, blossoming morning and autumn moon night—
I often have my wine and drink by myself.
It is not that there are no folk songs or village flutes,
but their yawps and moans are just too noisy for my ear.
Tonight I heard your lute speak
and my ear pricked up, listening to fairy music.
Please don't decline, sit down to play another tune,
and I'll write a ‘Song of the Lute' for you.”
Touched by my words she stood there for a long time,
then sat down and tuned up her strings and speeded up the rhythm.
Sad and touching it was different from her last song
and everyone started to weep.
If you ask, “Who shed most tears in this group?”
The marshal of Jiangzhou's black gown was all wet.
Seeing Yuan Zhen's Poem on the Wall at Blue Bridge Inn
In spring snow at Blue Bridge you were called back to Changan.
In autumn wind I was exiled to the Qin Mountains.
Whenever I got to a horse station I would dismount
and meander around walls and pillars, hoping to find your poems.
On Laziness
When offices are open I'm too lazy to apply for office.
And though I have lands I'm too lazy to farm them.
My roof leaks but I'm too lazy to fix it
and I'm too lazy to patch my gown when it splits.
I'm too lazy to pour my wine into my cup;
it's like my cup is always empty.
I'm too lazy to play my lute;
it's as if it has no strings.
My family says the steamed rice is all eaten;
I want some but am too lazy to hull it.
I receive letters from relatives and friends
I want to read, but am too lazy to slit them open.
I heard about Qi Shuye
who spent all his life in laziness,
but he played the lute and smelted iron.
Compared with me, he isn't lazy at all!
On Laozi
“The ignorant speak, but the sage stay silent.”
I heard this saying from Laozi.
But if Laozi knew the Way,
why did he write a book of five thousand characters?
Madly Singing in the Mountains
There is no one among men that has not a special failing;
And my failing consists in writing verses.
I have broken away from the thousand ties of life;
But this infirmity still remains behind.
Each time that I look at a fine landscape,
Each time that I meet a loved friend,
I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry
And marvel as though a god had crossed my path.
Ever since the day I was banished to Hsün-yang
Half my time I have lived among the hills.
And often, when I have finished a new poem,
Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of white Stone;
I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills;
The apes and birds all come to peep,
Fearing to become a laughingstock to the world,
I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.
Translated by Arthur Waley
After Getting Drunk, Becoming Sober in the Night
Our party scattered at yellow dusk and I came home to bed;
I woke at midnight and went for a walk, leaning heavily on a friend.
As I lay on my pillow my vinous complexion, soothed by sleep,
grew sober: In front of the tower the ocean moon, accompanying the tide, had
risen. The swallows, about to return to the beams, went back to roost
again; The candle at my window, just going out, suddenly revived its
light. All the time till dawn came, still my thoughts were muddled;
And in my ears something sounded like the music of flutes and
strings.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Resignation
(Part of a Poem)
Keep off your thoughts from things that are past and done;
For thinking of the past wakes regret and pain.
Keep off your thoughts from thinking what will happen;
To think of the future fills one with dismay.
Better by day to sit like a sack in your chair;
Better by night to lie like a stone in your bed.
When food comes, then open your mouth;
When sleep comes, then close your eyes.
Translated by Arthur Waley
On His Baldness
At dawn I sighed to see my hairs fall;
At dusk I sighed to see my hairs fall.
For I dreaded the time when the last lock should go….
They are all gone and I do not mind at all!
I have done with that cumbrous washing and getting dry;
My tiresome comb for ever is laid aside.
Best of all, when the weather is hot and wet,
To have no topknot weighing down on one's head!
I put aside my messy cloth wrap;
I have got rid of my dusty tasseled fringe.
In a silver jar I have stored a cold stream,
On my bald pate I trickle a ladleful.
Like one baptized with the Water of Buddha's Law,
I sit and receive this cool, cleansing joy.
Now I know why the priest who seeks repose
Frees his heart by first shaving his head.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Old Age
(Addressed to Liu Yü-hsi, who was born in the same year, 835 ce)
We are growing old together, you and I;
Let's ask ourselves, what is age like?
The dull eye is closed ere night comes;
The idle head, still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors,
One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper, one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer, one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk,
Is great as ever, when you and I meet.
Translated by Arthur Waley
Since I Lay Ill
Since I lay ill, how long has passed?
Almost a hundred heavy-hanging days.
The maids have learned to gather my medicine herbs;
The dog no longer barks when the doctor comes.
The jars in my cellar are plastered deep with mold; My singers' mats are half crumbled to dust. How can I bear, when the Earth renews her light, To watch from a pillow the beauty of spring unfold?
Translated by Arthur Waley
A Dream of Mountaineering
(Written when he was seventy)
At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain
Going out alone with my staff of hollywood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys—
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body—both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking—both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts—
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.
Translated by Arthur Waley
**Written when the poet was only sixteen years old, this was an assignment poem (with a predetermined title) to practice for the imperial exams.
* This poem recounts the story of Yang Guifei, the famous beauty and the concubine of the Tang emperor Xuanzong (685–762, ruled 713–756). Xuan-zong was among China's greatest emperors, but he neglected his rule once he met Yang Guifei and made her his concubine. Yang was close to An Lushan, the Turkic general, and adopted him as her son. When An rebelled in 755 (in the famed An Lushan Rebellion that devastated the empire), Yang and her brother, the prime minister, were blamed. As the emperor and his court fled the capital in the face of a rebel advance, the furious royal guards killed Yang's brother and forced the emperor to have Yang strangled at Ma Wei.
2 Sharing-wing birds are legendary birds with one eye and one wing; only by sharing wings can they fly.
LIU ZONGYUAN
(773–819)
Liu Zongyuan was one of the finest prose writers of the Tang dynasty and one of only two Tang dynasty writers included among the “Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song.” A friend of Han Yu, he was one of the followers of the Ancient Style Prose Movement, which emphasized clarity and utility over ornament in prose writing. As a poet he was relatively minor. He was born and raised in Changan, the capital during the Tang dynasty. After a highly successful early career in civil government, he was reassigned to a post in the provinces (in Yongzhou, Hunan province) after the abdication of Emperor Shunzong in 805. A decade later he was banished even farther away, to modern Guangxi. His works in exile are considered his finest. While he was in the capital, his writing was bureaucratic in nature, and he considered it primarily a means to advance his career; in exile, however, he wrote a number of delightful didactic pieces, showing a neo-Confucian synthesis of both Daoism and Buddhism (unlike Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan was not averse to the wave of Buddhism that was then sweeping across China). He is particularly known for his allegorical writings and for his fables, which, like Aesop's, often feature animals. His poem “River Snow” is considered a prime example of “minimum words, maximum message” and has been the subject of numerous landscape paintings.
River Snow
A thousand mountains. Flying birds vanish.
Ten thousand paths. Human traces erased.
One boat, bamboo hat, bark cape—an old man
alone, angling in the cold river. Snow.
Poem to Relatives and Friends in the Capital After Looking at Mountains with Monk Hao Chu
Sharp-pointed cliffs by the sea are swords
that slice my homesick guts in autumn.
If I could split into millions of selves,
I'd scatter them on all the peaks to gaze home.
Summer Day
Damp summer in Nanzhou intoxicates like wine;
with northern windows open I take a nap on the tea table.
I wake at noon alone and hear nothing but the sound of mountain
boys pounding tea leaves in stone mortars in the bamboo grove.
Fisherman
A fisherman spends the night under West Rock,
pails clear river water and burns bamboo.
Smoke vanishes, sun rises, and no one is seen.
The swishing oar turns mountains and water green.
Floating the central current, he turns to gaze at sky
above rock where mindless clouds chase each other.
The Caged Eagle
Chill wind noisily sifts a hard frost
as a black eagle soars up the dawning light.
Clouds shatter, mist cracks, a rainbow breaks in half!
The eagle skims a hillock like thunder and lightning.
The sound of fierce wings cuts thorns and brush;
he snatches foxes and hares and soars through sky again.
Hair on claws, blood on beak, one hundred birds gone.
He stands alone, gazing round, often excited.
But fiery wind and damp summer suddenly come,
now caged, his feathers droop and his wings ache.
In the wilderness raccoons and rats are just pests,
but now ten times a night they come to startle and to attack.
If only wind would swell my wings again
and I could fly in clouds, all constraints gone!
ZHANG JI
(c. 776-c.829)
Zhang Ji should not be confused with the other Tang dynasty poet named Zhang Ji whose work is also included in this volume (although their names are different in Chinese, they read the same transliterated into English). Zhang Ji was helped along in his career by a number of powerful friends and admirers. The poet Meng Jiao, for example, arranged for Zhang Ji to work with him and Han Yu on the staff of the military governor of Xunwu. With Han Yu's help Zhang Ji passed the provincial and imperial examinations and became a tutor in the Directorate of Education, where, after a number of further postings, he eventually became the Director of Studies.
In Zhang Ji's yuefu (Music Bureau style) poem “A Soldier's Wife Complains,” he evinces a sympathy for the poor and the ordinary and participates in a Confucian critique of social injustice. It is modeled on the work of Du Fu, whose genius Zhang Ji was among the first to recognize. Of Zhang Ji's four hundred poems, seventy are in the yuefu style, and many decry the effects of war and taxation on the poor. His work influenced such poets as Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen, who also used the Music Bureau style to critique social ills and try to convince the government to change.
A Soldier's Wife Complains**
In September the barbarians killed the border general
and all our Han soldiers died by the Liao River.
No one can travel three thousand miles to pick
up white bones,
so the families tried to summon the lost souls and bury them.
Women depend on their sons and husbands,
happy to live together, even in poverty,
but my husband is dead in a field and my son's in my belly
and though my body remains, my life is a candle in daylight.
Song of a Virtuous Woman
(To Governor Li Shidao at Dong Ping)
You know I'm married
yet you gave a gift of two bright pearls.
Grateful for your affection
I tied them on my red silk skirt.
My home's tall buildings and gardens extend afar
and my husband holds his halberd in the Bright Light Palace.
I understand your intentions are honest as sun and moon,
but I've sworn to share life and death with my man.
I return two pearls to you, and two tears drop.
Why didn't we meet before I married?1
Arriving at a Fisherman's House at Night
The fisherman's house is near the river mouth.
Tides flow into his brushwood gate.
A traveler, I wish to spend the night here
but the host is not back yet.
The bamboo grove is deep and the village road long,
fishing boats are few when the moon rises,
but look, on the distant sand bank,
a straw cloak flapping in spring wind.
* Since they didn't have the bodies, the families buried the dead soldiers' clothes and summoned their souls to lie at rest.
1 This is actually a poem written by a man to another man, declining an invitation to leave his current post and work as an adviser.
WU KE
(EIGHTH-NINTH CENTURIES)
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 22