The Songs of Chu

by Gopal Sukhu

  18. Wu Guang 務光, like Bian Sui 卞隧, was so insulted when Tang, the founder of the Shang dynasty, offered him the throne that he threw himself into a river and drowned.

  19. Red Pine (赤松 Chi Song) and Wang Qiao 王僑 are two of the most famous Daoist immortals (xian).

  20. Xiao Yang 梟楊 is a mountain spirit that has an oversized human form, a black face, fur, and backward feet. When it sees a human, it laughs.

  21. A white deer is the preferred mount of immortals.

  22. Zixu is Wu Zixu 伍子胥 (d. 485 B.C.E.), a defector from Chu who served as military adviser to King Fuchai of Wu. King Fuchai ordered him to commit suicide when he opposed the king’s plan to form an alliance with the state of Yue. His body was stuffed in a leather sack and floated on the Yangtze River. Legend has it that he became the god of Yangtze tidal floods.

  23. When the Zhou dynasty overthrew the cruel last king of the Shang, Bo Yi, out of loyalty, retreated to Shouyang Mountain and there ate ferns rather than eat crops grown under Zhou rule and starved to death.

  24. Taigong 太公 is Taigong Wang 太公望, also known as Jiang Ziya 姜子牙 (fl. ca. 1100 B.C.E.), a legendary sage who served King Wen of the Zhou dynasty as a military strategist.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Calling the Hermit Back”

  招隱士

  “Zhao yinshi”

  Attributed to Huainan Xiaoshan

  Although this poem is attributed to Huainan Xiaoshan (second century B.C.E.), the name, which translates as “low mountains south of the River Huai,” is probably not that of a person. Most scholars follow the Later Han commentator Wang Yi in taking it as the collective name of a group of literary men in the service of the Prince of Huainan (179–122 B.C.E.). It will be remembered that he was ordered by his nephew Emperor Wu to compose a commentary on the “Li sao,” of which fragments are preserved in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Records of the grand historian) and Hong Xingzu’s edition of the Chuci. The court of the Prince of Huainan rivaled that of Emperor Wu in brilliance, especially in the literary arts, for the prince had gathered together the best minds from all over the empire. The most famous of these were known as the Eight Dukes. There were also two groups of scholars known as the High Mountains and the Low Mountains, who, under the prince’s direction, cooperated with the Eight Dukes in compiling the philosophical miscellany known as the Huainanzi. Someone from the Low Mountain group probably composed “Calling the Hermit Back.”

  While there is little doubt about what the poem says, there is much disagreement as to what it means. Wang Yi, as usual, claimed that the hermit in the poem stands for Qu Yuan. Others say that the prince had it composed to attract the talented but disgruntled unemployed to his court. Still others say that the dangerous mountain wilderness described in the poem is a metaphor for the imperial court, and that the poem is warning the prince, who was visiting the capital, that the emperor was plotting against him. Liu An, in fact, was eventually accused of plotting a coup. He committed suicide to avoid arrest.

  Calling the Hermit Back

  In the depths of the mountains,

  the cinnamon tree grows densely.

  Its writhing branches

  wander and interlace

  in high mountain mists

  that crowd the boulders looming

  over the steep drop to wave upon wave

  of the river in the valley.

  When gibbons in packs yell,

  and tigers and leopards roar,

  climb the branches of the cinnamon tree

  and stay there awhile,

  as you roam, my prince, not coming home,

  and the spring grass grows lushly.

  But towards year’s end you’ll find no consolation

  in the summer cicada buzzing

  on the endless paths winding

  the waists of the mountains,

  as your heart aches flustered

  for having stayed too long,

  and you climb in panic and terror

  through dense bush and deep woods,

  trembling where tigers and leopards

  make their dens.

  Gaunt peaks rise steeply,

  with strange rocks at all angles.

  And in the forest thick with leaves and branches

  sagging over tangled shrubs

  and green sedge growing in between

  and bog bulrush waving in the breeze,

  the white deer and elk bucks

  leap or stand

  with towering horns

  and glossy fur.

  But when macaques and bears,

  longing for their species, keen,

  climb the branches of the cinnamon tree

  and stay there awhile,

  for tiger fights leopard

  and black bear roars at brown.

  Even wild beasts quail

  when parted from their kind.

  Return, my prince,

  for in the mountains

  you cannot stay long.

  Appendix: Dating the Works in the Chuci

  Aside from authorship, dating the works in the Chuci has long been a subject of controversy, especially in recent times. Most of the conclusions of traditional scholars were based on speculation about what part of the Chuci fit into what phase of Qu Yuan’s life, and the main guide to that life was the Shiji biography. While traditional scholars see the Chuci as an outgrowth of the Shijing, Galal Walker sees in the Chuci a tradition quite distinct from the Shijing. Walker’s concept of tradition overlaps with the concept of style. To write in a style is to consciously or unconsciously imitate work or works that already exist, and imitation involves repetition or sharing of distinct elements. There is very little that the Chuci shares with the Shijing. The works within the Chuci share with each other such elements as theme, imagery, prosody, and, most importantly, phraseology. Not just words and phrases, but whole sentences and rhyming lines recur, in some cases often, throughout the anthology. Walker’s rigorous statistical analyses of both phraseology and phonology reveal that the early part of the Chuci tradition generated sentences and phrases that were borrowed into later works of the tradition, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—that is, through other works.1 The earliest parts of the tradition also tend to rhyme according to the phonological standard observed in the text of the Shijing. Classifying these poems as early must come with the caveat that the received text of the Shijing, having been transcribed into characters (and possibly, therefore, a language) standardized during the Qin dynasty, probably reflects a stage of phonological evolution later than the probable date of the earliest Shijing poems.

  The middle part of the Chuci tradition is marked by works that display characteristics, both stylistic and phonological, of Han provenance but are (mis)attributed to Qu Yuan or other Chu poets. It also includes works by known Han poets still strongly under the influence of the early tradition.

  The later part of the Chuci tradition was produced by recognized Han-dynasty authors who consciously wrote in the Chu style drawing upon stylistic and thematic elements of both early and middle periods, but whose rhyming habits are characteristically Han.

  Walker’s work is pioneering, and, as he himself admits, may not be the final word on this topic (new reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology are being formulated even as I write), but I find it convincing enough to use as a starting point for determining the date and authorship of the anthology’s contents.

  With the exception of “Those Who Died for the Kingdom” (國殤 “Guoshang”), which was composed later, the Nine Songs (九歌 Jiuge) for Walker are the earliest works of the Chuci tradition. These beautiful and mysterious poems appear to have been originally hymns to accompany the performance of shamanic ritual. There is no trace of political complaint, allegorical or otherwise, in them. Walker places them at the head of the Chuci tradition, because their rhyming standard is the same as that of the Shijing, or at least of the final redactors of the Shijing, and their influen
ce is visible, in terms of phraseology at least, throughout most of the anthology, especially “Leaving My Troubles” (離騷 “Li sao”). For this reason I have gone against traditional practice by placing them before the “Li sao,” rather than the other way around; however, I will preserve intact Zhu Xi’s order of the other works.

  The “Li sao,” the longest of the ancient Chinese poems and the centerpiece of the anthology, borrows sentences from the Nine Songs, as well as the world they describe, with its shamans, airborne spirits, and fragrant, wearable herbs. Its meter is also derived from the Nine Songs—it is simply the predominant Nine Songs verse line doubled. The basic “plot” of a number of the songs, where a spirit descends attracted by fragrances and then ascends suddenly to depart, is adapted to create the “Li sao” political allegory of which the surface narrative is about a spirit who, drawn by the fragrances of various medicinal herbs, descends upon what appears to be a shaman kingdom, and after much hesitation leaves in disappointment when the royal taste for fragrances changes in favor of malodorous weeds. What the poem is really about is a good king gone bad, his rejection of a virtuous minister and the consequent, imminent fall of his kingdom.

  The next poem is “Mourning Ying” (哀郢 “Ai Ying”), the third piece in the Nine Cantos (九章 Jiuzhang). The title and the first part of the poem suggest that it was written to lament the fall of Ying, the Chu capital city, to the Qin army in the year 278. Wang Yi (d. 158 C.E.) thought it was written by Qu Yuan, but later scholars doubted that attribution because, according to Sima Qian’s biography, Qu Yuan committed suicide before the fall of Ying. Walker finds evidence that argues that this piece was written shortly after the “Li sao.” The meter and most of the rhyme pattern are the same. The narration and imagery, however, are very different. It is a realistic description of a journey into exile, first of refugees from a city that has been destroyed, and then, apparently, of an individual. The second part of the poem, oddly, concentrates not on why or how the city was destroyed but on the individual, who describes his plight as that of the loyal but rejected minister who has been sent into exile. It reminds one of the “Li sao,” but the shamanistic and supernatural images are gone. I agree with Hawkes that the poem as we have it may be the result of the joining of two or more originally separate texts.

  The next in line are what Walker calls the three early poems of the Nine Cantos, which is to say poems that were composed after “Mourning Ying.” These are “Crossing the Yangtze” (涉江 “She jiang”), “Expressing My Longing” (抽思 “Chou si”), and “A Bosom Full of Sand” (懷沙 “Huai sha”). All these poems, like most of the rest of the poems in the series, are concerned with political frustration and exile and are mostly in the same meter as “Li sao,” facts that were basis enough for Wang Yi to ascribe the whole set to the authorship of Qu Yuan. Evidence that they come after “Mourning Ying” is the fact that in addition to borrowing lines and phrases from the “Li sao” and the Nine Songs, they also borrow from “Mourning Ying.”

  “Summoning the Soul” (招魂 “Zhao hun”) was probably composed around the same time that these Nine Cantos pieces were composed. It was one of the small number of poems Sima Qian attributed to Qu Yuan. Yet Liu Xiang (77–6 B.C.E.) and Wang Yi, the two later scholars responsible for compiling and editing the Chuci, thought it was by Song Yu.

  “Summoning the Soul” represents a type of poem or song used to ritually call back the soul of someone who has just died in the hope of restoring life to the corpse. Its meter is that of the Nine Songs, with some admixture of “Li sao” meter. It also shares a few lines with the Nine Songs, but not with any other Chuci piece, even with the poem in the Chuci collection most similar to it, “The Great Summoning” (大招 “Da zhao”), another soul-recalling piece. On the basis of rhyme phonology, Walker placed “Summoning the Soul” in the early period, “The Great Call” in the late. In terms of sentence borrowing and sharing, they both stand outside the mainstream Chuci tradition.

  Next come four other poems in the Nine Cantos: “Longing for the Beautiful One” (思美人 “Si meiren”), “I Deplore Pleading” (惜訟 “Xi song”), “I Grieve When the Whirlwind” (悲回風 “Bei huifeng”), and “I Look Back in Sadness” (惜往日 “Xi wang ri”). Walker observes that these are the first poems in the anthology that “do not borrow directly from the ‘Nine Songs,’ ” the two main influences here being “Li sao” and “Mourning Ying,” especially thematically. Here the tradition seems to divide into those poets who preferred the more supernatural imagery of the former and those who preferred the more realistic imagery of the latter. Nevertheless, phraseology from both occurs in all the poems, with the exception of “I Deplore Pleading,” which has none from “Mourning Ying.” Rhyming in these poems begins to display the influence of one or another Han-period dialect.

  The only poem in the Nine Cantos that Walker does not classify is a poem that in being joyous rather than sad and short rather than long is very different from the rest— “Hymn to a Mandarin Orange Tree” (橘松 “Ju song”). The brevity of the poem does not offer enough formal and phonological features for analysis and comparison. It, like “Summoning the Soul,” stands outside the Chuci tradition.

  The middle period of the Chuci tradition begins, in Walker’s classification, with the Nine Variations (九辨 Jiu bian), a series that, unlike the previous poems, is generally attributed to Song Yu rather than Qu Yuan. These nine poems borrow more sentences from “Morning Ying” than any Chuci poem that follows. They also borrow from “Li sao,” “Longing for the Beautiful One,” and “I Grieve When the Whirlwind.” “Li sao” meter appears here but so does every other meter occurring in the poetry previous to it, as well as a prosodic unit (two syllables plus carrier sound) from the Shijing. The text of the Nine Variations seems in some places to be made up of fragments from other sources. The themes of political frustration and exile predominate, but the series also contains interesting evocations of the autumn landscape of the south.

  Next comes “I Lament It Was Not My Destiny” (哀時命 “Ai shiming”), which Walker’s analysis places around the time of the composition of the Nine Variations. The two works share sentences, but Walker could not determine which was the “loaner” and which the “borrower.” Here we see the influence of dialect on rhyme that began in the Nine Cantos becoming more obvious. “I Lament It Was Not My Destiny” is attributed to the Han poet Yan Ji 嚴忌, who was a native of Wu (modern Jiangsu province) and also served in the court of Pi, the Prince of Wu, during the middle of the second century B.C.E. He may well have written the poem there or at the court of Liu Wu, the Prince of Liang, where he served slightly later. That may account for the local-dialect-influenced rhyme phonology of the poem, which shares meter, imagery, and mood with the “Li sao,” but none of the poetic heights.

  Next comes “Regretting the Vows” (惜誓 “Xi shi”), which borrowed from the “Li sao” but mostly from “Seven Remonstrations” (七諫 “Qi jian,” not included in my translation), ascribed traditionally to the Han poet Dongfang Shuo, which itself borrows heavily from the later tradition. Because some sentences in Jia Yi’s “Mourning Qu Yuan” (弔屈原) are copied into “Regretting the Vows,” some scholars ascribed it to Jia Yi; Wang Yi rejected this attribution but implied that he thought that an unknown poet had written the poem during the time of King Huai. This seems unlikely, for “Regretting the Vows,” like “Wandering Far Away” (遠遊 “Yuan you”), features a spirit journey that has much more to do with Han Daoism than with the shaman fights of the early Chuci poems.

  Seven Remonstrations (七諫 Qi jian) comes next. This set of seven poems was at one time attributed to the Han poet Dongfang Shuo 東方朔 (ca. 160–ca. 93 B.C.E.), which is unlikely. At any rate, it is now almost universally recognized as an anonymous work. The poems, which are written in the persona of Qu Yuan, seem to be an example of the use of the Chu mode to register complaint about Han political circumstances. Exactly what those circumstances were is never mad
e clear. Since Zhu Xi cut them from his edition of the Chuci, I do not include them in my translation.

  “Wandering Far Away” seems to come after “Regretting the Vows,” as one of the sentences from the former appears in the latter. It also borrows from “Li sao,” the Nine Songs, “Crossing the Yangtze,” “Lamenting It Was Not My Destiny,” and the Seven Remonstrations. Wang Yi listed it as one of the works of Qu Yuan, and some scholars still do so today. Given its predecessors and the fact that twelve sentences from “Wandering Far Away” appear in “The Great Man Rhapsody” (大人賦 “Daren fu”) by Sima Xiangru (179–117 B.C.E.), which was presented to Emperor Wu between 120 and 130 B.C.E., Walker concludes that the approximate date for the composition of “Wandering Far Away” would be about 125 B.C.E. This would support the theory, put forth by Hawkes, that “Wandering Far Away” was by an unknown poet and was a model for “The Great Man Rhapsody.”2 Some scholars think that both poems are by Sima Xiangru and that “Wandering Far Away” is a first draft of “The Great Man Rhapsody.” Others think that “The Great Man Rhapsody.” came first and someone else, borrowing from it, wrote “Wandering Far Away.”

  In any event, the year 125 B.C.E., which marks the approximate end of the middle period of the development of the Chuci tradition, the period after which it is dominated by Han poets, in Walker’s reckoning, is the approximate date of the first performance of Chu poetry at the Han imperial court by someone deemed an expert in it, Zhu Maichen.

  As noted, Walker believes, the “Ask the Sky” (天問 “Tian wen”) and “The Great Summoning” were composed in the middle period. He thinks the same about “Calling the Hermit Back” (招隱士 “Zhao yinshi”), “The Fisherman” (漁夫 “Yufu”), and “The Diviner” (卜居 “Bu ju”). All these works stand outside the mainstream of the Chuci tradition, which is to say they seem uninfluenced by the foundational texts like the Nine Songs, “Li sao,” and “Mourning Ying” or their imitators. There is little controversial in Walker’s claim except for his dating of “Ask the Sky.” Even Wang Yi was doubtful about the authorship of “The Great Summoning,” though most scholars think it a Warring States–period work. “Calling the Hermit Back” was always recognized as a Han work produced at the court of the Prince of Huainan or by the prince himself. And most modern scholars no longer believe that the “The Diviner” and “The Fisherman” are the work of Qu Yuan. “Ask the Sky,” however, is almost universally considered Qu Yuan’s work.