The Collected Poems of Li He

by Li He

  The originality of his metaphors is often a source of perplexity, for his imagery is often difficult to follow until one has grasped its innate logic.

  Xi and He whip up the sun

  With the sound of glass.

  This borders on the synaesthesia of the Symbolists, whom He so much resembles. The sun is like glass, because both are white and shining (glass was an exotic substance for Tang Chinese). The sun is being shattered by time so it sounds like breaking glass as Xi and He, who drive the chariot of the sun, apply the whip. He’s verse abounds in images of this nature which are reminiscent of the conceit of the Metaphysicals and quite as difficult to grasp at first reading. The difficulty and density of most of He’s verse vanishes when we turn to his love poetry, largely because he is here writing in imitation of an older tradition which antedated Tang, namely the Palace Poetry of the Southern Qi and Ziang dynasties (479–556 A.D.). He has over forty poems dealing with women, a surprisingly high proportion for a poet of the Yuan-zhao period. In a very real sense this verse not only looks backward to an earlier era but also looks forward, anticipating the languid, incense-laden atmosphere of the ci, a kind of song lyric composed to fixed melodic patterns which was to come into being some fifty years or so after his death.

  Clouds tumbling over her jewelled pillow,

  She seeks a spring dream,

  In caskets cold with inlaid sapphires

  The dragon-brain grows chill.

  She lies resentful in her net of pearls

  Unable to sleep,

  Beneath a robe ornate with golden phoenix

  Her body is chill,…

  Drowsy with wine, idle all the white day

  In a moored boat,

  In a plum-breeze by the ferry she waves

  Her singing-fan.

  Butterflies lighting on China pinks—

  Hinges of silver,

  Frozen water, duck-head green—

  Coins of glass.

  Its six-fold curves enclose a lamp

  Burning orchid-oil.

  She lets down her tresses before the mirror,

  Sheds her gold cicadas,

  Perfume of aloes from a warm fire,

  Smoke of dogwood.

  A single skein of perfumed silk,

  Clouds cast on the floor,

  Noiseless, the jade comb lights upon

  Her lustrous hair.

  Delicate fingers push up the coils—

  Colour of an old rook’s plumes

  Blue-black so sleek—the jewelled pins

  Cannot hold it up.

  Flowers bow down beneath light dew,

  Melilote’s breath,

  Windlass of jade and rope of silk

  Draw the dawn water,

  Her powdered face, like rose carnelian,

  Hot and fragrant.

  Part of this verse—like the last example—is undoubtedly satiric. But in any case, even when He’s intentions were to mock, he lingered to admire. This world of black-haired, jade-skinned beauties, blushing cheeks, perfumed silks, gauze bed-curtains, flickering tapers, carved screens, golden censers fuming with rare incense, and the mournful drip of rain on the kolaunut trees, was to become the sole poetic province of ci writers like Wen Ting-yun (812?–70?), Wei Zhuang (836–910), Li Yu (937–78), and others. He’s natural sensuality could not resist the appeal of this glittering kingdom of pearl and aloes-wood, jasper and cassia, though he invested it with a significance lacking in later writers. Not only does He anticipate the great poets of the ci: he also looks forward to the two outstanding romantics of the ninth century, Du Mu and Li Shang-yin. Like them he delights in wine and spring flowers, beautiful women and the moon on the water. He takes love as seriously as the Confucian poet took friendship. Li Shang-yin, one of the greatest poets of love writing in Chinese, was a devoted admirer of He’s and must have found support for his passionate affairs of the heart in He’s verse:

  What sort of love am I seeking?

  That of Xun Feng-qian.

  O sun above the city wall,

  Forever stay above the city wall!

  Let a single day be as a thousand years,

  And never sink to rest.

  Certain critics give the impression that He’s love of beauty was somehow incompatible with the Confucian gravity and sense of purpose associated with the New Ballad Movement: that aestheticism and naturalism could not go together. This is a misleading dichotomy. Tang poetry, even the best of it, is inclined to be florid: but one should never mistake this for a lack of high seriousness. One has only to look at Han Yu’s own verse to see that it abounds in quaint conceits and odd expressions, breaks many of the time-hallowed rules of composition, and deals with subjects which no earlier poet would have thought fit to mention in verse. I hazard the opinion that both the intricate nature of He’s own poetry and his choice of subjects were in fact partly the result of a deliberate attempt to please his patrons. There is certainly nothing in He’s verse which Yu or his fellows would have thought frivolous. Some critics have failed to see that there is a difference between He’s verse and the effete, palace poetry against which Yu fulminated. Palace poetry was largely mere empty rhetoric; once penetrate its glossy surface and there was little or nothing underneath. But He’s verse, even when concerned with the very subjects that formed the sole staple of the palace poets, never wavered from the Li Sao tradition. Beneath the intricately patterned surface lay solid layers of meaning. Ultimately, Yu waged war on the poetry of Qi and Liang not because of its decadent subject-matter but because it was void of social content. He praised He’s verse because it came to grips with reality, whether it dealt with soldiers starving in a frontier-post or a princess getting drunk at a banquet. Yu was astute enough to realize, as so many later critics have not, that if verse was to mirror the complex, sophisticated, and disintegrating fabric of Tang society it could not confine itself to simple ballads. It is only because He possessed this poetic range that he could so successfully hold up the mirror to his age: and it was precisely for this quality that Yu admired him. His verse in its own way reflects the realities of Tang life just as faithfully as the poems of Du Fu and Bo Ju-yi. The parallel with our own times, when naturalism and symbolism, aesthete and realist flourish together, is quite striking. One is reminded of Mallarmé congratulating Zola on the publication of L’Assommoir, both having, as Durkheim pointed out, a common need to destroy the real or escape from it.

  The contention that the main difference between He’s poetry and the verse of Qi and Liang, which it sometimes superficially resembles, lies in their content, brings us directly to the problems of meaning in Chinese verse. He was brought up in a poetic tradition which laid great stress on metaphor (bi) and allegory (xing): “The parables employed in the xing appear subtle, but they are so apparent!” wrote the critic Liu Xie (c. 465–522) in the chapter on metaphor and allegory of his Wenxin diaolong (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons). Subtle they certainly are; but they are not always as apparent as they might be. Thus the first song of The Classic Songs begins with the line:

  Guan-guan cry the fish-hawks.

  The commentators point out here that fish-hawks are a symbol of virtue, because male and female do not mix promiscuously; hence the poem is a eulogy of the virtue of Queen Wen, wife of Wen of the Zhou. So Liu Xie adds sagely: “Do not let these birds of prey distract your mind, because the important thing is the virtue of sexual separation. Such parables are like the first rays of light before the break of dawn, still enveloped in ambiguity. This is the reason why commentators are required to make the meaning clear.” Liu then goes on to deal with the difference of metaphor, whose most important function, he implies, is to act as a further means of remonstration. “Thus gold and pewter are used to stand for illustrious virtue, a jade tally signifies an outstanding man, a caterpillar means education, cicadas and grasshoppers denote howling and shouting, washing clothes symbolises sadness of the heart and the rolling up of a mat denotes firmness of will.”

>   Now He’s style is admittedly based not on the Songs, from which all the above examples are drawn, but on the Chu Ci. Yet ultimately this makes no difference to our argument, for as Liu points out, the Sao was created in the spirit of the Songs and has “adopted its formal remonstrations.” We may protest, of course, that the Chu Ci is not really like that; for its dragons do not always betoken men of virtue any more than its clouds and rainbows invariably stand for flatterers and sycophants. But this is after all rather to miss the point. What matters in this context is that He’s views on the nature of the Chu Ci must have been essentially those of Liu Xie.

  Western sinologists have very much inclined to ignore the part played by bi and xing in Chinese verse, largely because the tradition of a work possessing several levels of meaning died out in Europe during the seventeenth century and has only recently been revived. I. A. Richards’s “multiple definition,” Kenneth Burke’s “multiple causation,” William Tray’s attempt to revive the medieval “four levels of meaning” are all of them relevant to any attempt to read Chinese literature in depth. Unfortunately, very little, if anything, has as yet been done towards applying modern critical methods to the study of Chinese poetry. A. C. Graham’s recent excursions into this field in his Poems of the Late Tang have the distinction of being the first serious attempt of its kind. In general, due credit has not been given to traditional Chinese explanations of the meanings hidden in verse. Hence in my own annotations to He’s poems, I have attempted to bring out this aspect of the verse wherever possible, while attempting to avoid falling into the pitfall that Yao Wen-xie tumbled into in his anxiety to suppose every bush a bear.

  A point closely connected with this is the question of plurisignation (a better term than “ambiguity”) in He’s verse. Lack of literary professionalism among sinologists has all too often led to a concern with outmoded, pre-Empsonian ideas about the meaning of a poem. The notion has persisted that the denotative aspect of language is more important than the connotative: that a line—or a whole poem—must mean one thing and one thing only. In fact, Chinese poetry has consciously employed plurisignation since the Six Dynasties period; by late Tang times, when Tang was writing, multiple meanings had become quite as involved as those of Shakespearian verse. This poses special difficulties for the translator, who is in any case forced by the very nature of the English language to be precise where Chinese is vague and suggestive. At times, he may be lucky enough to hit upon a rendering which will convey something of the ambiguity of the original; but most of the time he can only labouriously spell out the other possible meanings of the line in a footnote.

  A reluctance to annotate poems copiously has been one of the main reasons, I think, why He has not received the attention that is his due from Western translators. From the end of the eighth century onwards, Chinese poetry becomes steadily more complex and allusive. The Chinese poet has always relied heavily for his effect on allusions. Pound’s characterization of a poem as a form that should be able to do as much in a line as a whole page of prose, is strikingly true of Chinese verse, which can sum up a situation, draw an analogy, or reveal a contrast in the minimum of words through the use of the shorthand of allusion. As the corpus of literature increased there was a tendency on the part of poets to refer not only to the Confucian and Taoist classics but to the whole ever-growing body of earlier writings. This means that the later Tang poets tend to be rather more difficult to read than their predecessors, if only because they have incorporated so much into their verse. This is not to say that there is a great deal of purely literary allusion in He’s verse; on the contrary, there is far less of this than in, say, the fifth-century poet Xie Ling-yun. But there is enough general use of allusion to ensure that there are very few poems in He’s collected works that can be understood without at least some notes and a good many poems that require a great deal of annotation indeed.

  Here the Western reader is at a considerable disadvantage compared with even the Chinese reader who has received no formal classical education; for the latter has acquired, by cultural osmosis as it were, a great deal of information which the unfortunate Westerner has painstakingly to imbibe. All this goes to swell the already excessive volume of footnotes, until the translator half begins to wonder, with Pound, whether he is not “obscuring the text with philology.” Nevertheless, I myself am convinced for one that this is the only way in which Chinese verse can be made intelligible to the European reader, without fobbing him off with mere chinoiserie. A belief in the essential untranslatability of a text, particularly a poetic work, has ancient roots in Western society, going back at least as far as St. Jerome. It was reiterated by Dante, Du Bellay, Dr. Johnson, Diderot, and Heine. In our own time Rilke and Nabokov have both insisted that poetry is untranslatable, the latter voicing his objections, with characteristic vividness, in verse:

  What is translation? On a platter

  A poet’s pale and glaring head,

  A parrot’s speech, a monkey’s chatter

  And profanation of the dead.

  In his memorable treatise on translation (After Babel, 1975), George Steven has convincingly refuted such arguments, pointing out that they are “only a weak form of an attack on language itself,” and insisting that “to dismiss the validity of translation because it is not always possible and never perfect is absurd.”

  Nevertheless the translator must concede that a great deal of the essential poetry of the original may be spilt in translation. As Mallarmé put it, since “poetry is made with words not ideas” it must evaporate like spilt perfume when poured into the alien flask of another language. On the other hand, it can be argued that this contention has come up against some very sharp and perceptive criticism in recent years, the most telling onslaught on this cherished doctrine coming from the Chicago critics. They reject the doctrine that literature is only a question of particular arrangements of words on a page, as Leavis puts it, in favor of the view that we are moved not only by the words but by the things the words stand for. One can test this for oneself. Flecker’s lines:

  A ship, an isle, a sickle moon—

  With few, but with how splendid stars

  lose little when rendered into any language. The quality of the imagery here is such that it passes unscathed through the refining fires of translation. It is precisely this characteristic of He’s verse, the giving of sharp perceptions in images of extraordinary colour and clarity, that makes him a peculiarly translatable poet. Whatever else may be lost, this at least is not.

  But He has other advantages for the translator besides the vividness of his imagery. Chinese poets, on the whole, are impersonal, self-effacing, and inclined to generalize in a way which sometimes muffles the impact of their verse on the Western reader, who is accustomed to as forceful a display of individualism in his poetry as in his culture. The Western poet, at least since the Romantics, has almost invariably been endowed with a personality which makes itself strongly felt through his verse. In this respect, He is an aberration from the Chinese standard; for though he very seldom consciously intrudes himself into his verse, rarely using the personal pronoun, the stress of his personality is there all the same. One is continually aware of a sort of controlled violence in his poems, informing even the most casual-sounding lines. He is a poet of exaggerated gestures and moods, swinging between despair and exultation in a way that leads one to guess that he must have been something of a manic-depressive. It is, I suspect, this violence of gesture that has made him so irritate many of his Chinese readers, who are vaguely conscious all the time that the proprieties are being offended. An image like the following illustrates what I mean:

  Blood that wells from a cuckoo’s maw

  The old man’s tears.

  Occurring as it does in a poem of social protest, which we are accustomed to think of in terms of the gentle, conversational ironies of Bo Ju-ji, this image brings one up with a start. It is altogether too vehement. What is more, it has a peculiar tellingness about it which is hard to
explain. The educated Chinese reader would at once link this with the story of the Emperor of Shu who abdicated his throne, fled into the wilds, and was changed into a cuckoo. But what has this allusion to the weeping emperor to do with an old peasant? The most likely explanation is that the blood the old man weeps (another exaggeration) makes him kin to the cuckoo and hence an animal; at the same time, the cuckoo is an emperor, so the old man’s grief is imperial. Linking cuckoo, peasant, and emperor in this way through the highly unpleasant image of blood flowing from the eyes and mouth, works on the reader powerfully and upsettingly. For a Chinese, the implied social confusion of man with animal, peasant with Son of Heaven, would have been not the least disturbing thing about this comparison.

  Another factor which is not lost in translation but can be brought over unscathed is He’s evocative use of colour to symbolize emotion. As the critic Fan Xi-wen remarked: “Li He’s words are like a coat of many colours, a hundred embroidered patches dazzling the eye.” White, gold, silver, black, red, green, yellow, blue-green, emerald, vermilion, scarlet, purple, turquoise, and cinnabar run riot through his work. Furthermore, his palette is a highly idiosyncratic one in which certain colours, notably white, red, and blue-green, are dominant, with white standing far above the rest. The table below shows the frequency with which the principal colours are distributed through He’s poems. They fall neatly into six groups:

  COLOUR NUMBER OF OCCURRENCES IN POEMS

  White (bai) + ecru (su) 93

  Jade or jade-white (yu) 79