The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (11 page)

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.

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.

THOUGH CHINESE CIVILIZATION STRETCHES BACK TO NEOL
ithic 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.

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
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.