The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (44 page)
Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
(1612.-1693)
Qian Chengzhi, also known as Tianjian, was a writer and scholar born in Anhui. In 1649 he passed a special examination and became a member of the Royal Academy (the
hanlinyuan).
He was assigned the job of composing imperial edicts, which made him such a target of jealousy that he soon asked for leave and returned home. He was a prominent scholar on the
Book of Changes
, the
Book of Songs
, Qu Yuan, and Zhuangzi. Like others in the Old Phraseology School, he was influenced by Han and Wei poetry as well as by the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu. He had little respect for poetry after the Tang. His works include
Collection of Tianjian's Poetry and Prose
and
Works in Zang-shan Pavilion.
So long without a sunny spring day,
and today is a washing day.
What am I to wear?
A gown that reaches my calves.
My family worries I'll catch a chill
and pours me a full cup of wine.
I can't often have a full cup
because I can't delay my farming.
I thrash hard in the fields
till strings and buttons suddenly give.
If only I move my limbs enough
I can keep myself warm naked.
Look at those fur coats:
they make people lazy in their waist and limbs.
(1654–1685)
Nalanxinde (original name Chengde) was also known as Rong-ruo and The Man from Lengjia Mountain. He was born to a Manchu aristocratic family in Beijing, where he lived in wealth in a great manor and was given an education by distinguished tutors. He excelled at cavalry, calligraphy, and lyric poetry. After passing the national imperial exam, he worked as Emperor Kangxi's bodyguard. He was a talented writer of lyric (
ci)
poetry, which his work helped to revive. At the age of thirty-one, he caught a cold and died.
A journey through the mountains,
a journey on the waters,
my body moves toward Elm Pass
and sees a thousand lamps moving in tents at midnight.
Drums beating through wind,
drums beating through snow,
shatter my homesick heart and dream.
Back home I never heard such a sound.
This May, wheat is already sparse south of the
Yangtze and it drizzles like dream in plum-ripening season.
Idly I watch swallows teach their babies to fly.
The river in deep shade is like a colored ink painting.
Many peaks emerge after rain, shiny with reflected sun.
I wonder who that woman is, going alone to wash at the fishing rock.
Staggering whirlwinds sweep the earth in midwinter
as I remove the saddle below a chaos of noisy evening crows.
Ice flows with the river.
My sorrow is as broad
as this scorched wasteland, exhausting my vision.
Drums and horns resound from high city walls.
Tomorrow I will near Changan,
but my homesickness travels forever.
Who first wrote the ancient “Song of Melancholy”?
Wind mourns and mourns,
rain grieves and grieves,
and the thin wick wears away another night.
I don't know what is lingering in my heart.
I feel bored when I'm sober,
I feel bored when I'm drunk.
Even my dreams can't reach my love at the Bridge of Xie.
(d. 1710)
Wang Jiuling came from a family of high officials and scholars. He passed the imperial exam in 1683 and was an official in the Qing dynasty, a member of the Hanlin Academy, vice president of the Board of Civil Office, and president of the Censorate. He wrote a book of poetry titled
Zunxiang Manuscripts.
I wake at dawn. A piece of low moon in the thatched eaves.
My home country is vaguely lost in dream.
In this world what makes a man age?
Partly the crowing rooster, partly the horse's hooves.
(1693–1765)
Zheng Xie came from Xinghua. Commonly known as Pan Qiao (“plank bridge”), he was one of the “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou” who painted in eccentric and individualistic styles. A brilliant youth, he displayed his talent early on as a painter, poet, and calligrapher. His mother died when he was a child, and his father died when he was a young man, so forced to seek a living despite his privileged upbringing, he supported himself by selling paintings. He took the provincial and imperial exams in 1732 and 1736, respectively, and in this time traveled to Beijing, where he cultivated friendships with Buddhist priests and the nobility. He became the magistrate of Fanxian around 1742, and apparently was an extremely good official, working to ease the plight of the people. In 1746 he was transferred to Weixian, and in 1753 he retired. Not long after, he found himself again in poverty and was forced to sell his paintings and writing for income. His own experience with poverty, as well as his wide travels across China and his interest in Chan (Zen) Buddhism, help to explain the sympathy for the poor evident in his work. Bamboo also often figures in both his paintings and his poetry, as in his poem included here, “On Painting Bamboo for Governor Bao in My Office in Wei County.”
in My Office in Wei County
In my office I lie listening to rustling bamboo,
wondering if I'm hearing the people moaning.
I may be humble as a small county clerk,
but I worry over every leaf and stem.
After the dead were buried in the desert,
we survivors traveled homeward.
We heard from far away that in the outskirts
of Qi and Lu the crops were as tall as men.
My eyes fixed on the clouds over Mount Tai,
my feet bid farewell to the northern coastal frost.
I kowtowed to the tombs of the dead and cried—
“Farewell, we will never see each other again!”
Swallows and wild geese migrate in spring and autumn
carrying letters with tears enclosed.
But now what do I see when I finally come back?
Nothing but four empty walls.
Frogs jump upon my stove,
foxes curl up in my bed.
I drive out the foxes, block up rat holes,
sweep clean the paths and throw open my glorious home,
fresh-painting the walls with wet mud
as tender grass grows new and yellow.
Peach flowers must know I've returned;
they unfold red blooms near the corner of the house.
Old swallows are happy about my homecoming.
They murmur above the open roof beams.
Spring water is warming in the rush pond
where I see a pair of mandarin ducks fly up
and recall my wife,
pawned to a man in a village in the southeast.
With sage-like kindness he lets me buy her back.
I carry my stringed coins in a bag.
When I hear my husband is coming
I am happy but perplexed.
It is right to go back to the old husband,
but my new husband is not bad.
Trying to remove the baby I am wet-nursing
I feel a knife stabbing my guts.
Our son knows I am not going to return,
he grabs my neck and demands,
Mama!
My son is rolling on the ground,
dirt all over his face messed up with tears.
I go to the hall to say good-bye to his aunts and uncles,
all of them weeping.
They give me a bronze mirror as a gift
and a gilded box.
They let me take with me my jewelry
and wrap up my silk clothes.
“Just go home nice and neat,
but never forget us please!”
Her new husband is young
and he cannot bear the departure.
He silently goes away to the neighbor's
and leans back against a tree and the setting sun.
His wife is gone,
traveling around the fields, through ponds and woods.
The new husband brings home his son,
and stays alone in an empty bedroom.
The son cries and the father cannot sleep.
The lamp-wick is short, but the night is forever.
(1716–1798)
Qing dynasty writer Yuan Mei was born to a wealthy family near Hangzhou. He took the civil service examinations at an early age and was appointed to office at twenty-four. While in office at Jiangnan he developed a plot of land into an estate that became famous for its architecture and landscaping. He directed a school of women poets and was condemned by some of his contemporaries for encouraging young women writers. He retired at forty and spent his remaining years in literary and artistic pursuits. In addition to poems he wrote a collection of ghost stories titled
What the Sage Didn't Discuss
(a reference to Confucius's avoidance of the supernatural in his discourses) and a number of essays. His
Comments on Poetry from the Sui Garden
is a major compilation of poetry criticism. Though he often strikes a philosophical note in his work, he is certainly one of the most personable of Chinese poets—not averse to humor, sympathetic with the poor, and bearing a strong resemblance to the Tang poet Bai Juyi. His poems are direct, simple, often strikingly autobiographical.
Improvisations
1
I chance on a half-blossoming plum,
lean lazily against bamboo.
Children don't understand spring.
They ask, “Why is grass now green?”
A cowherd riding on an ox,
his songs vibrating through woods.
He has an idea:
I'll catch a cicada.
Suddenly he shuts his mouth and stands very still.
Red peach flowers have just unfurled and willow leaves are tender.
This March
1
it's a cold spring and snow still swirls down.
Who else except my daughter remembers,
“Today is the birthday of all flowers.”
Three blooming plums in pots fill the whole room.
The master sits in front of them in oblivion.
My daughter was surprised when I entered the inner chambers:
“Daddy, why do your clothes smell so sweet?”
Watching the mountain all day, I stand on clouds.
Suddenly I hear outside my bamboo grove an urgent knock.
Arranging my clothes and hat to meet my guest,
I see my shoes pasted with yellow leaves.
By West Brook I sit still
as the white sun slants and spring wind
blows me mingled fragrances
from who knows what flowers?
Late on a sunny day by a village.
Fresh peach blossoms by the water.
Where is the cowherd going?
On the ox's back a gull is sleeping.
So far between the river south and river north yet it is the same river in front of the doors there. The water can pass two doors in the same day. Why can't people be like spring tide?
1
The moon like bright water soaks the sands.
I carry my walking stick, sauntering along the bank.
There is no way my servant can find me—
I sit alone west of a broken bridge deep in night.
The Lotus Flowers Study in Mr. Fan's Temple
—I was a pupil here forty years ago.
No one knows me when I come today.
I walk alone, lingering on each step.
In these few rooms next to a brook
the monks are long gone, Buddha's fallen from his pedestal.
Incense ash all over the ground swirls into wind.
Squirrels gnaw prayer flags and shake their tails wildly.
I stumble over flowers on the wild vines
and in surprise clusters of butterflies swarm up.
At seventy I still plant trees,
but don't take me for an idiot.
Though death has always been inevitable,
I don't know the date!
1
The Chinese calendar does not map exactly onto the Western one, but this date is probably in either February or March.
(1725–1785)
Jiang Shiquan was the finest playwright of his day and one of the finest poets from Southern China in this period, along with Zhao Yi and Jiang Shiquan's good friend Yuan Mei. They were referred to as the “Three Masters of Jiangzuo.” Jiang was known as a realist, working from history and current events in his plays and poems, and yet he was also a very internal poet, celebrating intuition and inspiration. He came from Nanzhang and was tutored in the classics by his talented and educated mother. His father worked as a minor government official. As a young man Jiang was referred to as one of the “Two Luminaries of Jiangxi.” From 1750–1751 he helped the magistrate of Nanzhang edit a local history, and in 1757 he took the imperial exams in Beijing, after which he worked in Shuntien in the Imperial Printing Establishment and Bookbindery and as an associate examiner of a provincial examination. He and Yuan Mei were regular correspondents—
literary pen pals. They met in person in 1764, when Jiang moved near Yuan Mei in Nanjing, and the two of them met often thereafter. Beginning in 1766 Jiang became an educator in charge of several academies and then worked in the National Historiographic Bureau. He retired in 1781, suffering from partial paralysis.
He doesn't paint sunny mountains, but rainy mountains,
like breathing on a bright mirror to show misty hair.
Better to obscure the ten thousand images of the human world
so wind horses and cloud wagons can come and go at will.