by Gopal Sukhu
After the fall of Ying, the Chu capital, in 278, the capitals of Chu were all north of the Yangtze River. The tree that is being praised for its steadfastness is a mandarin orange tree that has “crossed the river”—that is, most probably one that has been transplanted from south of the Yangtze to one of the northern capitals. But, contrary to traditional lore, it has not changed into a hardy orange tree, thus becoming a metaphor for steadfast moral integrity. (I say “northern capital” because I take the first line as indicating that the tree was transplanted by royal command.) The hymn may have been written to celebrate its first fruiting.
At first glance the poem is unlike the other poems in the Nine Cantos and elsewhere in the Chuci. It is short and joyous, whereas most other poems ascribed to Qu Yuan are long and sad. On closer inspection, however, we observe a use of floral metaphor very similar to that of “Li sao” and other poems in the Chuci.
Hymn to a Mandarin Orange Tree
The Lord August delights in planting,64
So, orange tree, you came to serve.
You accepted his order but never changed,
You who were born in the southern kingdom.65
Deep and firm, hard to move,
The better to focus your will.
Your green leaves and white blossoms,
Abound to our joy,
Up tiers of sharp-thorned branches
Your round fruit spiral.
Shades of green and gold combine,
Patterns appear and glisten.
Rich color lined with plain white pith,
like one to entrust with a mission.
Adorned in so many happy ways,
You are splendor without peer.66
We sigh before your youthful will.
Something in you, different from the rest,
Stands alone and abides.
How could we not delight in it?
So deep and solid, so hard to uproot,
A spacious heart that seeks no gain.
You stand upright and apart from the world,
Having crossed the river without yielding to the flow.
Lock your heart, guard yourself,
Allow no trespass,
Maintain your virtue selfless
As the sky and the earth.
With you we would pass the withering years,
Friends always,
With your pure unflaunting beauty,
straight and strong in your orderly grain,
And fit, though young,
to teach the old,
You act as Bo Yi67 would—
Let us raise you as our model.
9
“I GRIEVE WHEN THE WHIRLWIND”
悲回風
“BEI HUIFENG”
This poem was originally counted, as were all the other poems in this series, as one of the works of Qu Yuan. By the Song dynasty opinion had begun to change. Some scholars recognized stylistic divergence between the poem and many of the other poems attributed to Qu Yuan. Many noticed similarities between it and “Xi Wang ri,” “Yuan you,” “Ai Ying,” and poems elsewhere in the anthology. Nevertheless there are still many scholars who think that it was written by Qu Yuan.
“I Grieve When the Whirlwind” is a difficult poem. It is not clear whether it was written that way or whether later editors added parts to it that left it garbled. Its last two lines, for example, appear to have been lifted from “Mourning Ying.” Another possibility is that the original order of some of the bamboo slips onto which it was transcribed was lost.
Especially difficult is the long dream sequence that seems to begin with the phrase “in a waking dream.” That is one of the possible meanings of a word that is usually translated as “to wake up.” My reason for using the alternative and rare meaning is that the word comes after a passage describing a sleepless night. At the end of the dream sequence the “beautiful woman,” who appears to stand for an out-of-favor courtier, suddenly wakes up. But that awakening occurs after she has stopped to “rest” near the mythical place from which winds originate. Thus it is unclear whether she is awakening from her “rest” (which may or may not involve sleep) or from her waking dream. Or is it meant to be a clever device where falling asleep in a dream signals awakening from a dream, corresponding with the waking up in a dream that marks the end of sleeplessness earlier in the poem.
The dream itself outdoes the “Li sao” in obscurity and should be ranked as one of the ancient predecessors of surrealism. Its imagery shows the influence of the Han cult of the immortals (xian), whose adherents believed the absorption of certain forms of qi, through breathing, eating, osmosis, and even certain sexual practices, conferred superhuman powers and even immortality. This is especially obvious in the latter part of the dream sequence. The stanzas describing turbulent river waters, right after the dream sequence, give the impression of lines to be sung in a dramatic performance where someone playing Qu Yuan contemplates suicide. Interestingly, the end of the poem seems at least rhetorically to deny the value of suicide. Is this evidence that there was a nonsuicidal version of Qu Yuan? Or, perhaps, that the persona of the poem is not meant to be taken as Qu Yuan?
I Grieve When the Whirlwind
I grieve when the whirlwind harasses the basil.68
Sorrow tangles my heart, I bleed inside,
For a tiny thing is losing its life,
While an invisible singer leads the song.
How is it that I look back, longing, to Peng and Xian,
Hoping that their aspirations and high moral principle never be forgotten?
What wavering heart can ever be disguised?
How long can the empty and false endure?
Birdsong or beast cry is signal to the flock,
but even the sweetest herb will stink when worn in a shoe.69
Scales form on each fish to mark its kind,
but the flood dragon’s markings are hidden.
Thus sow thistle and shepherd’s purse70 never live in the same field,
but thoroughwort and angelica are fragrant
even when they grow where no one goes—
For the beautiful, no matter how the times change,
are always their own measure.
Wherever they find themselves, those who see far
will always love the freedom of floating clouds.
But what is it like, you might ask, when the lofty and far-sighted
find themselves at a loss?
That I will humbly explain in this poem:
Consider a beautiful woman lonely and longing for her lover,
picking fragrant pepper to eke out a living,
sighing, constantly sighing,
living hidden and careworn,
feeling chill after chill of crisscrossing tears,
she lies awake until dawn, yearning
through a long night of slow hours,
with no way out of flooding sorrow.
Then, in a waking dream,71 she wanders everywhere,
A moment of freedom that brings her hope.
But when she feels the pain of deep sighing regret,
she cannot stop the choking sobs.
Braiding her yearning, she makes bellybands for her horses,
and breast bands72 woven of bitter sorrow,
and breaks a hibiscus branch for sunshade,
and would go wherever the whirlwind goes.
But no whirlwind appears, being only a phantom,
and her heart leaps like boiling water.
So she calms herself, arranging her robes and belt charms,
And in deep despair continues her journey.
The year speeds away as though dropped from a cliff,
and sun-slow time will soon bring the season
when club rush and asarum wither and fall,
and flowers are too weak to even lean on each other.
Pity her longing heart that cannot be cowed,
proof that her words mean just what they say:
She
would sooner escape by sudden death
than bear her heart’s constant sorrow.
The orphan moaning as she wipes away tears,
the banished going out to never come back—
Who can think on such things without pain?
Peng and Xian suffered such, they say!
She climbs the rocky heights to scan the far distance.
Now begins the journey through vast silence,
where she casts no shadow and makes no sound,
where she cannot hear or see or think,
where she bears the weight of sadness with no relief,
and sorrow binds and never slackens,
and a bridled heart cannot break free,
And anger within her tangles and knots.
In the borderless silence,
in the vast featureless void,
the voice of the formless wind moves her nevertheless,
but the pure ones, though here, are helpless.
Through immeasurable space,
shadowy, indistinct, ungraspable,
she suffers constant sorrow,
joyless even as she flies through dark skies.
Riding the great waves and flowing with the wind,
she finds refuge where Peng and Xian dwell,
here she climbs to the edge of a steep cliff,
and perching herself high on the pale arc of a female rainbow,73
She unfolds the male rainbow’s colors against blue space.
Then, suddenly she is stroking the sky,
and drinking thick dew from a floating spring,
and rinsing her mouth in a freezing flurry of frost.
Seeking shelter she stops at the ice-cold Wind Cave,74
when she suddenly falls on her side and wakes up bewildered.
She leans on a Kunlun boulder overlooking the mist,
that covers Min Mountain75 and the clear Long River.
She is startled by the sound of rapid waters crashing on stones,
and the violent surge of waves in her ear.
The lawless churning flow,
the vast borderless chaos,
wave upon wave pressing in from no beginning,
an undulating rush to what end?
Turning over and over, up and down,
flying far to the left and right,
tossing and rising in front and behind,
arc and trough faithfully coupling.
She observes the continuous production of fiery vapor,
watches mist condensing into rain,
laments the fall of snow and frost,
and hears the sound of the ramming tide.
She uses her time to come and go,
Wielding a curved whip of yellow jujube,
seeking the remains of Jie Zhitui,
Looking for Bo Yi’s exiled footprints—
the ones who adjusted, but did not abandon, their precepts,
the ones who engraved an unfading thought on their hearts.
I say:
I resent the thwarted hopes of the past,
And fear the horrors to come.
I will float on the Yangtze and Huai and sail out to sea
Following Zixu76 for the pleasure of it.
I will look toward distant islets on the great Yellow River,
And sadly recall the noble path of Shentu Di77
Who having tried many times
To set his heedless ruler straight,
Jumped into a river with a stone on his back,
Accomplishing what?
My heart tied in knots too tight to unravel,
I am helplessly trammeled and tangled in longing.
NOTES
1. Susan Roosevelt Weld, “Chu Law in Action: Legal Documents from Tomb 2 at Baoshan,” in Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, ed. Constance A. Cook and John S. Major (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1999), 96.
2. Here, with Tang Bingzheng, I read song 訟, “bring a case to court,” for song 誦, which can mean a number of things, including “chant,” “remonstrate,” and “complain.” The two characters are interchangeable. See Tang Bingzheng 湯炳正, Li Daming 李大明, Li Cheng 李誠, and Xiong Liangzhi 熊良知, Chuci jinzhu 楚辭今注 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997), 124.
3. The sky was often conceived of as plural in China. The Five Lords were the gods of the five directions, Taihao (East), Yandi (South), Shao Hao (West), Zhuan Xu (North), and Huang Di (Center). The Six Spirits are variously explained. Zhu Xi tells us that they are the spirits of (1) sun, (2) moon, (3) stars, (4) water and drought, (5) the four seasons, and (6) cold and heat. Gao Yao was a minister of the sage-king Shun. He was his chief justice and known for his wisdom and fairness. He is sometimes thought of as the inventor of law.
4. The God of Whetstones (厲神 Lishen) rules untimely death but is also the spirit who possesses and empowers shamans specializing in dream interpretation. The shaman thus possessed will be addressed by the spirit’s name.
5. “Hot air from so many mouths” seems to be a metaphor derived from blast furnaces used for smelting, such as the ancient one discovered at Daye 大冶 in Hubei, where a continuous stream of air was produced by the coordinated application of many bellows.
6. Shensheng 申生 was the heir apparent of Duke Xian of the state of Jin (晉獻公 Jin Xiangong) during the Spring and Autumn period known for his filial piety. He was the son of the duke’s principal wife, Qi Jiang 齊姜. The duke, however, fell under the spell of Li Ji 驪姬, one of his concubines. She induced him to demote Qi Jiang and make her his principal wife instead. Li Ji of course wanted to have her own son Xiqi 奚齊 designated heir apparent. Toward this end she arranged to have Shensheng and two of his three half brothers sent away to defend the borders of Jin from barbarian raiders. In the meantime, Shensheng’s mother died. Li Ji convinced him that he could appropriately offer sacrifices to his mother while still on the frontier, and that the customary offering of sacrificial food to his father could be accomplished when he returned to the capital. Before Duke Xian received the food, Li Ji had it intercepted and poisoned. Duke Xian as usual had it tested before he touched it. The poisoning was of course blamed on Shensheng, who in turn hanged himself, unable to bear revealing the truth about his stepmother to his father; see Zuozhuan, Xigong, 4th year, in James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893–1894; repr., Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 141–42.
7. Gun 鯀 in Chinese mythology is the father of Yu, the founder of the Xia dynasty. The sage-king Yao charged him with stopping the Great Flood, but he failed. Yao then had him executed on Feather Mountain, where his corpse lay for three years without decomposing. Finally someone cut him open and out came Yu. The corpse then turned into a turtle, dragon, or bear, depending on the source, and jumped into a deep lake.
8. Lovage (江離 jiangli) is Ligusticum chuanxiong, a plant that grows in both Europe and Asia. Its leaves and roots are edible and its seeds can be used as a spice. It tastes somewhat like celery.
9. The “strange clothes” described here are similar to those mentioned in “Li sao” and are presumably those of a shaman.
10. The moonlight gem emits a moonlike light even in the dark. It is not clear what lu 璐 jade is, save that it is fine jade.
11. Chonghua 重華 is one of the names of the sage-king Shun, whose spirit was consulted in the “Li sao” at his burial place on Jiuyi 九疑 (Nine Doubts) Mountain near Changsha.
12. Yao stone 瑤 is a white jadelike stone.
13. There are two Kunlun 崑崙 mountain ranges, one real, one legendary; this is the legendary one, where spirits and powerful shamans live.
14. Flower of jade 玉英 is jade of magical purity.
15. The Xiang 湘 River, in Hunan, is a tributary of the Yangtze.
16. The River Islet of E (鄂渚 Ezhu) was probably an islet in the Yangtze near Wuchang in Hubei. E was w
here King Xiong Qu of Chu enfeoffed his middle son, Hong.
17. No one knows for sure what the Square Forest is.
18. The Yuan 沅 is a river in Hunan and another tributary of the Yangtze.
19. Wangzhu 枉陼 was a place along the Yuan River, south of Changde county in modern Hunan. Chenyang 辰陽 was west of Chenxi county in Hunan.
20. The Xu River 漵浦 flows past the old site of Chenyang and into the Yuan River. It is difficult to tell whether the journey described here is real or imaginary. The journey bears some resemblance to the spirit journeys described in the Nine Songs.
21. Jieyu 接輿, also known as the Madman of Chu, was a famous hermit who feigned madness rather than serve a corrupt ruler. The Analects describes an incident in which he stood in the road and sang a song to Confucius as he passed by in a chariot urging him to give up trying to change the world. Some legends tell us that he wore his uncut hair loose and flowing; others say that he shaved his head.
22. Sanghu 桑扈 is possibly Zi Sanghu 子桑扈, mentioned in the Zhuangzi, or Zi Sang Bozi 子桑伯子 in the Analects. He, like Jieyu, showed his disapproval of power politics by becoming a hermit. The Zhuangzi tells us that he was so poor he had nothing to eat. The Confucius Family Sayings (孔子家語 Kongzi jiayu) tells us that he was so unconventional that he refused to wear clothes.
23. Master Wu (Wuzi) is Wu Zixu 伍子胥, who was originally from Chu but, when King Ping of Chu executed his father, defected to Wu, where he helped King Helü defeat Chu at the battle of Boju. When the Wu forces took the Chu capital, Wu Zixu desecrated the tomb of King Ping of Chu. Wu Zixu also served the next king of Wu, Fuchai, but less successfully. That king took offense at Wu Zixu’s opinion that Yue was a threat to Wu and ordered him to commit suicide. He had Wu Zixu’s body wrapped in a leather sack and thrown into the Yangtze River; see Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji 史記 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992), 66.2180. Bi Gan 比干 served Zhou Xin, the last king of the Shang dynasty.
24. When Bi Gan 比干 criticized the king for his cruelty, the king executed Bi Gan and had his heart torn out; see Shiji 3.108.
25. The Long River (長江Changjiang) is better known as the Yangtze River in the West. The Summer River (夏 Xia) branches off from it and runs parallel until it empties into the Han River. The river is full in summer and dries up in the winter, thus the name.
