Chinese Poetic Writing

by Francois Cheng

  And hold the Yang to their breast:

  Harmony is born on the Breath of the Median Void.

  Simplifying greatly: the Tao of Origin is conceived as the Supreme Void from which the One emanates, which is none other than the Primordial Breath. This in turn engenders the Two, embodied by the two vital breaths that are the Yin and the Yang, which in turn through their interaction rule and animate the Ten Thousand Things. Nonetheless, between the Two and the Ten Thousand Things occurs the Three, which has known two interpretations, which are not divergent but complementary.

  From the Taoist point of view, the Three represents the combination of the Vital Breaths of Yin and Yang and of the median Void (or median Breath). This Median Void that comes out of the Supreme Void, from which it draws all its power, is necessary for the harmonious functioning of the Yin-Yang couple; it is that which draws and directs the two vital Breaths in the process of becoming reciprocal; without it, the Yin and Yang would remain static substances, and quasi-amorphous. It is that ternary relationship (Chinese thought is not dual but ternary; in the heart of each couple, the median Void constitutes the third term) that gives birth and serves as model for the Ten Thousand Things. For the median Void that resides in the heart of the Yin-Yang couple also resides at the heart of all things; breathing in breaths and life, it maintains all things in relation to the supreme Void, allowing them access to transformation and unity.17 Chinese thought thus finds itself dominated by a crossed double movement which one can represent as two axes: a vertical axis that represents the free exchange between the Empty and the Full (the Full emerges from the Empty; the Empty continues to act in the Full), and a horizontal axis that represents the interaction, in the heart of the Full, of the two complementary poles that the Yin and Yang are and from which all things are produced, including, of course, Man, a microcosm par excellence.

  It is precisely the place of Man that characterizes the second interpretation of number Three. According to this other point of view, coming more from the Confucian conception, but taken up again by the Taoists, the Three, derived from the Two, would designate Heaven (Yang), Earth (Yin), and Man (who possesses in spirit the virtues of Heaven and Earth, and in his heart the Void). This time, it is thus the privileged relation among the three entities Heaven-Earth-Man that serves as a model for the Ten Thousand Things.18 Man is raised to a position of exceptional dignity, since he participates as one of the three forces of Creation. His role is in no way passive. If Heaven and Earth are endowed with will and acting power, Man, through his feelings and desires, and his rapport with the two other entities as well as with the Ten Thousand Things, will contribute to the process of universal becoming that never stops reaching for the shen (divine essence) of which the supreme Void is like the guarantor, or the depositor.

  Void-Full, Yin-Yang, and Heaven-Earth-Man thus constitute the three relational and hierarchical axes about which a cosmological system has been organized, and this system, founded on the notion of the breath, holds that nonbeing is a vital dimension of being, that what goes on among living entities is just as important as the entities themselves, that it is the breath of the median Void that permits the adequate functioning of the two fundamental entities the Yin and Yang, and consequently the human spirit’s accomplishment in its ternary relationship with Earth and Heaven. The poetic language, exploring the mystery of the written signs, has not failed to structure itself, on its different levels, according to these three axes. So it is that on the lexical and syntactic level, which we analyzed in chapter 1, the subtle game between empty words and full words plays out; on the prosodic level, which we analyzed in chapter 2, notably with tonal counterpoint and parallel lines, which are the essential components of the lü-shi (“regular poetry”), the dialectic of Yin and Yang is installed; and at last on the symbolic level, which was the subject of chapter 3, the metaphoric images replenished by nature, through the transfer of meaning and the back-and-forth movement between subject and object that they imply, fully exploit the ternary relation of Man-Earth-Heaven. One finds here another proof that the poetic language, having taken charge of the basic mechanism of Chinese thought, represented the semiotic order par excellence.

  The corpus that we have used is the poetry of the Tang (7th–9th c.), which constitutes, both by its fecundity and variety and by its formal experimentation, the summit of classical poetry. This poetry is at the same time the end point of an already long exploration. Here we try to trace the broad outlines of this journey in a more than summary fashion. The initial epoch is marked by two collections of lyrics representing two different styles: the Shi Jing (“Book of Poetry”) and the Chu Ci (“Songs of the Land of Chu”). The Shi Jing, which dates from the beginning to the middle of the Zhou dynasty, during the first half of the first millennium before our era, is composed of ritual songs and popular lyrics coming from a number of areas located for the most part in the Northern plain of China crossed by the Yellow River. These songs, born from the womb of agricultural society and of which the constant themes are field work, the pains and joys of love, the seasonal festivals and sacrificial rites, are striking because of their sober and regular rhythms, the verses being dominated by the quaternary meter. As to the Chu Ci, it appears later, in the epoch of the Warring Kingdoms, around the 4th c. B.C., in the Yang-tze River basin, in South Central China. This poetry contrasts with that of the Shi Jing as much by the content as by the form. Of shamanic inspiration and with an incantatory style, with an overflow of vegetal and floral symbolism with magical and erotic implications, the lines are of unequal lengths: generally two lines of six feet tied together with a syllable of xi meter. It is above all from this genre that subsequent poets will draw their inspiration to express the phantasms aroused by their imagination.

  Under the Han (206 B.C.–219 A.D.), the continuation of the Shi Jing no longer being assured, most of the literate poets dedicated themselves to writing fu (“rhythmic prose”), while the popular songs were returned to honor by the yue-fu (“Office of Music”)—instituted by Emperor Wu around 120—charged with collecting them. These songs, with a more spontaneous lyricism and freer forms, in their turn influenced the poets. Also, from the late Han up to the Tang, there was a parallel development of a popular and a learned poetry, which were both dominated by a pentasyllabic meter. During the Three Kingdoms, the Jin (265–419) and the Dynasties of the North and the South (420–589) that followed the Han, besides an always flourishing popular poetry, several generations of poets—among which a Tao Yuan-ming, a Xie Ling-yun, a Bao Zhao, and a Jiang Yan stood out—produced works of great value, preparing the way for the arrival of Tang poetry. Over the course of this long period, new forms first flourished: quatrains, heptasyllabic poems, long narrative poems, etc.

  From the beginning of the Tang, all of the genres and the poetic forms were collected and codified; they were to be kept unchanged up to the dawning of our era. It is in the poetry of the Tang that one observes the most conscious and fruitful experiments to explore the limits of the language. For three centuries, thanks to a convergence of favorable circumstances,19 poets devoted themselves to an intense creative activity. The Quan Tang-shi (“The Complete Poetry of the Tang”), a work compiled in the 18th century under the Qing dynasty, contains no less than 50,000 poems, written by some 2,000 poets.20 As to what concerns us, we are restricting ourselves to the “best part,” which is to say, those recognized by tradition as the most representative, and also to those that present a clear formal interest.

  Our work, which studies classical Chinese poetry as a specific language, thus permitting the reader to appreciate this poetry in depth, is divided into two parts: a theoretical part and an anthology. The first is composed, as we have specified, of three chapters that study, respectively, the three constituent levels of the poetic language. First, we will observe the relationship between ordinary language and poetic language, particularly the “distance” the latter achieves from the lexical and syntactic rules of the former, and the consequenc
es that are entailed for poetic language (chapter 1, “The Passive Procedures”). Second, we will observe the specifically poetic forms, their structure and their signification (chapter 2, “The Active Procedures”). Finally, we will attempt to show how, by depending upon this specific language, and profiting from the structural economy it implies, the poet explores the range of his imagination (chapter 3, “The Images”). Pursuing a practical goal, that of initiating the reader to the reading of Chinese poetry, and taking into account the obstacles that the Chinese language itself presents, we will attempt to make this analysis the least “abstract” possible; it will be based at each step on concrete examples. Most of the examples are drawn from the second part of the study, an anthology of Tang poems classed according to genre. The purpose of the translations is, above all, to help the reader seize and sense certain hidden nuances of the poems.21 The word-for-word translations which appear in chapters 1, 2, and 3, though they may be useful for the reader, and though they are certainly indispensable to the requirements of our analysis, can give only the barest caricature of the original poems. Nothing is truly translated here, neither the cadence of the line, nor the syntactic implications of the words, nor, most importantly, the ambivalent nature of the ideograms and the emotional charge they contain. In a poem, the ideograms, freed from accessory elements, attain a more intense presence: the apparent or implicit relations that hold among them orient the meaning of the poem in multiple directions. What remains untranslatable is not only that which the writing system, like any writing system, is unable to transcribe, but also that which by its very special nature that writing system adds to the capabilities of the poetic language.

  While affirming the value of research on the poets of the Tang, we are not unaware that the corpus treated here represents only one state of the language. A contradiction seems to arise: we seek to outline an apparently well-delimited reality. It is clear, however, that this reality itself is the result of a dynamic practice, one that contains the germ of all the potentialities of alteration and transformation. This contradiction was sensed, after a fashion, by the Tang poets themselves. We see proof of this awareness in the profound significance of the lü-shi, the most important form of Chinese classical poetry, a form that will be studied in chapter 2. The lü-shi is essentially concerned with a dialectical system of thought, founded in the alternation, or opposition, between parallel and nonparallel lines. We can, for the moment, simply affirm that the parallelism which does exist, by its internal spatial organization, introduces another order into the linear progression of the language: an autonomous order, turning upon itself, in which the signs respond to and justify each other, and are liberated from exterior constraints, to dwell beyond time. The codification of this parallelism in poetry at the beginning of the Tang reflects, beyond a dualist conception of life, the immense confidence that the Tang poets had in the signs. The poets believed themselves to be mediums in the creation of a universe in accord with their desires. Yet, this pretension was negated by the fact that in the lü-shi parallel lines must obligatorily be followed by nonparallel lines. These latter end the poem, seeming to introduce it again into the process of time, an open time, one that promises the metamorphosis of all. And changed it was to be indeed,22 as we may discern from the death of wen-yan (the classical language) around 1920, and its replacement in poetry by bai-hua (modem colloquial language).

  But it is not the smallest paradox of Chinese poetic writing that despite its affirmation of a semiotic order which is in effect its own negation, the signs abide, permanent, invariable, and independent of phonetic change, as signs by which a poetry is brought down to us across the centuries, eternally “speaking,” charged with the evocative power and the vital force of its youth.

  1. The Passive Procedures

  Since the object of this study is to come to an understanding of the language of Chinese poetry as a specific language, we will first examine the relationship between that poetic language and the ordinary language. Even at first glance, the gap between the ordinary language and the recherché forms invented by the Tang poets is a striking one. It is not, however, based on a fundamental opposition. The poets sought, above all, to take advantage of the potentials of their language, its ideographic script, and its isolating structure. Their task was facilitated by the existence of wen-yan, the language of classical prose, a language essentially written rather than spoken, and one with an extremely concise style. Thus the poetic language must be viewed in relation to both wen-yan and the spoken language of the Tang (or at least to such as we know of it through the popular literature of the period).

  On the lexical and syntactic level, the most important preoccupation of the poet is, as indicated in the Introduction, the opposition between full words (the substantives and the two types of verbs: verbs of action and verbs of quality) and empty words (the collection of tool words: personal pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, words of comparison, particles, etc.). This opposition is made on two levels. On a superficial level, it is a question of the judicious alternation of full and empty words, for the simple purpose of rendering the lines more lively. But the poets were very early aware of the importance of rhythm (linked as it is to the notion of the vital breath). Rhythm may, in poetry, assume the function performed by the empty words in ordinary language, the function of the demarcation and connection of words. Moreover, on a deeper level, the poets proceed to a series of reductions of empty words, most notably personal pronouns, prepositions, comparisons, and particles, conserving only a limited number of adverbs and conjunctions. These reductions serve to introduce a dimension of depth to the language, the dimension of the truly empty, precisely of the Void.

  In some cases, the poets go so far as to replace a full word (most often a verb) with an empty word. The purpose is, as always, the insertion of the empty into the full, but here the method is substitution rather than simple deletion. It must be pointed out here that within the full words as a group there exist further distinctions. These, marked by the terms si ci / huo ci (“dead words” / “living words”), and jing ci / dong ci (“static words” / “dynamic words”), indicate the difference either between substantive and verb or, more importantly, between the two types of verbs: verbs of quality (adjectives) and verbs of action. Thus, in the eyes of the poets, as they attempt to seize upon the hidden dynamism of things, a verb can know three separate states, dynamic (when it is used as a verb of action), static (when it is used as a verb of quality), and finally empty (when it is replaced by an empty word).

  In the remainder of this chapter, we shall observe the procedures by which the poets delete certain existing elements from the ordinary language—hence the term “passive procedures.” We shall see that this series of ellipses is not solely a matter of stylistics. The “void” that is engendered between the signs and “behind” the signs modifies their relationship and their implications, and thus also modifies the relationship between man and the world. (This relationship is expressed, in Chinese poetics, by the two terms qing, “interior sentiment,” and jing, “exterior landscape.”)

  Ellipsis of Personal Pronouns

  Since the absence of personal pronouns is already a frequent phenomenon in wen-yan, it is necessary to emphasize that it is much more pronounced in poetry and practically total in lü-shi (regulated verse).1 This effort to avoid, as much as possible, the three grammatical persons is a matter of conscious choice. It gives birth to a language that places the personal subject in a particular relationship with beings and things. In erasing itself, or rather in choosing only to imply its presence, the subject interiorizes the exterior elements. This phenomenon is most evident in sentences that would normally be composed of a personal subject and a transitive verb, and where, in the absence of determining marks, a circumstantial complement of place, time, or even manner seems to constitute the real subject.

  Summit of Mount Incense-cup

  There high hermit dwells

  Sun dusky, descends the Mount<
br />
  Moon bright, remounts the Summit2

  In the last two lines of the quatrain the reader can easily reestablish the “normal” sentence: “At sunset, he (the hermit) descends from the mountain; he climbs back up to the summit when the moon rises.” However, there can be no difficulty in seizing upon the poet’s intention: it is clearly to identify the hermit with the cosmic elements; the sun and the moon are no longer simply “complements of time.” The daily ramble of the hermit is presented, thus, as the very movement of the cosmos.

  Empty mountain, perceive no one

  Only hear human voice resound

  Sun setting penetrate deep forest

  One instant again illuminate green moss3

  This quatrain was composed by Wang Wei, the painter-poet, an adept of Chan. He describes here a walk on the mountain, which is at the same time a spiritual experience, an experience of the Void and of communion with Nature. The first couplet should be interpreted “On the empty mountain I met no one; only some echoes of voices of people walking come to me.” But through the suppression of the personal pronoun and of locative elements the poet identifies himself immediately with the “empty mountain,” which is therefore no longer merely a “complement of place”; similarly, in the third line he is the ray of the setting sun that penetrates the forest. From the point of view of content, the first two lines present the poet as still “not seeing”; in his ears the echoes of human voices still resound. The last two lines are centered in the theme of “vision”: to see the golden effect of the setting sun on the green moss. Seeing here signifies illumination and deep communion with the essence of things. Elsewhere the poet often omits the personal pronoun to effect the description of actions in sequence where human acts are related to movements in nature. We cite the following lines:

  White clouds return, contemplate dissolve