Green rays penetrate, seek invisible4
Here, in the course of a solitary walk, the poet turns back to contemplate the moving clouds, until they dissolve—and the poet with them—into an indivisible whole (the idea of total communion); he advances toward the green rays of light that luxuriant nature releases—it becomes invisible as he penetrates into its luminous space (the idea of illumination in nonbeing). Each line ends with three successive verbs: the first two verbs have the poet as their subject, and the last one, Nature. Thus composed, the lines strongly suggest the process of the fusion of man with Nature.
Springtime sleeping, not knowing dawn
All around hear singing of birds…
Last night: murmur of wind, of rain;
Fallen petals, who knows how many…5
This quatrain describes the impression of the sleeper awakening on a spring morning (when dawn has already come): the reader is invited to enter directly into the consciousness of the sleeper (or rather, into his state of semiconsciousness, since, barely awake, he is still confused in mind and spirit). The first line does not situate the reader before the sleeping poet, but rather lets him enter into that sleep, a sleep that may well be confused with springtime’s own. The remaining lines, in order, “represent” the three layers of the sleeper’s consciousness: present (the chirping of birds), past (the murmur of wind and rain), and future (presentiment of an all too fleeting happiness and a vague desire to descend to the garden to contemplate the petals strewn on the ground). Should a clumsy translator use denotative language, for the sake of “clarity,” and make these lines too precise”—“when I sleep in spring time,” “all around me I hear,” “I remember when,” “and I ask myself”—we would see only a completely awakened author, one who has left the happy state of drowsiness behind, “commenting” from outside his sensations.
The examples cited to this point all have a singular subject (an “I” or a “he”). In poems that involve several persons, the ambiguity due to the absence of personal pronouns does not always inhibit comprehension, but often, instead, adds subtle nuances.
The following example shows the poet visiting a hermit (a Taoist monk). The poem implies an “I” and a “you” without the two pronouns ever being used.
The road crossing many places
Tender mosses perceiving tracks of sandals
White clouds surrounding calm isle
Wild plants enclosing idle door
Rain ended contemplate pine’s color
Hill traversed reach river’s source
Creek flowers reveal spirit of Chan
Face to face already beyond words6
To get to the place where the hermit lives (lines 3 and 4: the isle surrounded by clouds, the door enclosed by wild plants), the visitor crosses a sinuous countryside entirely inhabited by the presence of the hermit himself. In that he is not named “you,” the hermit is not isolated from that which surrounds him, and thus is not presented as the “object” of the visit. Moreover, by not naming himself with an “I,” the poet mixes himself in among the elements of the landscape, becoming in turn the mosses, the rain, the pines, the hill, and the spring. And this landscape is indeed nothing other than the interior landscape of the hermit. The material path becomes, here, a spiritual path. When at last the goal is achieved (but what goal?), visitor and host find themselves sharing a common state. The expression “face to face” in the last line is, in addition, an ambiguous one, one that may give rise to multiple interpretations: is this the union of the “I” and the “thou”; or is it the union of the two together in the face of the spirit of Chan (Zen); or is it even only the “I” in front of the flowers, the host being absent? In any case, for the visitor it is unimportant whether or not he has found the host and spoken with him, since indeed his path has taken him beyond words. In this language, where the indicators “I” and “you” are absent, objective discourse coincides with personal discourse. This poem reveals again the poet’s effort to interiorize external elements, and through this method to suppress the opposition between the subject and the objective world.
Finally let us cite a poem by Du Fu that involves several people. This poem is “Second Message to My Nephew Wu-lang.” The poem is addressed to the poet’s nephew, to whom Du Fu left his property near Kui-zhou. The poet requests that the nephew not plant a hedge on the west of the garden, as he fears that the new hedge would intimidate the neighbor in the west, a poor woman who ordinarily comes there to pick figs to feed herself. The poem goes as follows:
Before thatched hut shake fig tree neighbor on the west
Without food without child a solitary woman
If no misery why have recourse to this
Because of shame that much more reason to be well disposed
To have no faith in the foreign host even though unnecessary
To plant sparse hedge nonetheless too real
To complain drudgery taxes picked to the bone
To think flames of war tears to soak clothes7
The poem puts into play three separate protagonists: the poet (I), the nephew (you), and the woman (she). Yet perhaps the term “protagonist” is inappropriate here, for, by omitting the personal pronoun, the poet seeks to create precisely an “intersubjective” consciousness where the “other” is never placed in an opposed position. From line to line the poet identifies himself with each of the characters, as though he held many points of view at once. (Lines 3, 5, and 7 relate to “her,” lines 4 and 6 to “you,” and the last line to “I” or to “we.”) The poem presents the interior debate of one character, a debate in which the story and the discourses are constantly confused.
The poems that we have analyzed to this point are all part of what is called “regulated verse.” It may be interesting here to observe an example of ancient poetry, where the first person pronoun is sometimes present.
Among the flowers a pot of wine
Drinking alone without close friends
Lifting the cup invite the moon
Facing shadow become three people
The moon not know how to drink
The shadow vainly follow my body
An instant accompany shadow and moon
Rejoice in life at the same time the Spring
I sing and the moon strolls about
I dance and the shadow jumps
Awakened commune in joy
And drunk each is separated
Forever the non-attached bonds
Find oneself far Milky Way8
This poem by Li Bai, of Taoist inspiration, is entitled “Drinking Alone under the Moon.” Despite the apparent simplicity of the tone, the poet touches on many themes here: on the theme of illusion and reality, on that of the self and the other, on attachment and non-attachment, among others. Without becoming the victim of illusion, he invents his own drinking companions, his shadow and the moon that projects that shadow. Through these beings, divided and interdependent at the same time, he becomes aware of his own being (line 6: “my body”) as an acting subject (lines 9 and 10: “I sing” and “I dance”). His song and his dance, echoed by his companions, allow him a taste of shared joy. It is a transient joy, of course. And the poet dreams of the true union (together but free—“non-attachment”) in the Milky Way, where light and shadow will be indistinct. In the course of the poem there is first an “emergence” of the “I” and then a complete “refounding” of the “I” within the Whole; this progression is appropriately reinforced by the use of the pronoun “I” in the middle of the poem, while the personal subject is absent in the lines of the beginning and of the end.
In this group of poems, for the most part very short poems, we have seen how, through the ellipsis of pronouns, man speaks through things themselves. The poet very often uses ellipsis, with ingenuity or malice. We will cite now a few extracts at random from longer poems. Du Fu, during the An Lu-shan Rebellion (in 757), presented himself in rags before the emperor in exile. To accentuate the contrast between th
e lamentable state to which he had been reduced and the solemnity of the occasion, instead of saying “wearing poor sandals I present myself before the emperor,” he says simply, and not without irony:
Sandals of straw visit Son of Heaven9
In another example, he ends along poem describing the suffering of wartime, the hollow, dry-eyed stares of those who have already wept too much:
Eyes dried up until see bone
Heaven and Earth be without pity10
These lines, without a personal subject, draw their strength from an ambiguity: who is seeing? Is it the poet, who, through the dried-out eyes of the poor, sees their faces reduced to a skeletal state? Or are these the eyes of the poor themselves, as at last they see the “base of things”: a heaven and earth without pity for man, destined for death. The reader has thus become spectator to a scene viewed at once from without and from within.
In still other examples, it is direct communion with nature that the poet seeks to express, as in the following lines, where Li Bai, addressing himself to a hermit friend, instead of simply saying “when tardily I come to keep you company, we will ride a white dragon in the blue sky,” writes:
Late in the year, perhaps in company
Blue sky riding white dragon11
The poet is no longer in the blue sky, but rather has become of one body with it: the Taoist dream par excellence. In the same way, Wei Zhuang signifies that he is not only in his boat, but that he has become that boat between sky and water when he sings:
Springtime water more emerald than the sky
Painted boat hearing rain to sleep12
Ellipsis of The Preposition
In the discussion of the ellipsis of personal pronouns, we have already been able to show to a certain extent the effect of the omission of the preposition in the locative complements (phrases of place and time). These phrases very often, in the absence of words such as at, on, in, and the like, reestablish themselves as substantives in a very real sense: “empty mountain” replacing “on the empty mountain,” “tender mosses” replacing “on the soft mosses,” “springtime sleeps” replacing “when one sleeps in springtime.” This reestablishment of the substantive potentials of the phrases allows them to serve as the subjects of sentences. In this section we will observe the same effect in the predicate. This is accomplished when the omission of the preposition of the type yu, “at” combines with the omission of the personal subject to remove all indication of direction from the verb, creating a reversible language, where subject and object, within and without, find themselves in a perfectly reciprocal relationship.
It is a reciprocity founded on “intersubjectivity,” as in these lines of the poem “Night of the Springtime River and the Flowered Moon” by Zhang Ruo-xu:
Who sails tonight in his light boat
And where then to ponder pavilion beneath the moon13
The lines relate the drama of two separated lovers; the second line may be interpreted in two ways:
(1) Where then is he who thinks about the pavilion under the moon?
(2) Where then is she who ponders in her pavilion beneath the moon?
The ambiguity in this sentence is purposeful, since the separated lovers are thinking about each other at the same time in the night.
Or it may be a reciprocity between subject and object, as in the following couplet:
Light of mountain rejoice humor of the birds
Shadow of the swamp empty heart of the man
These two lines are taken from the poem “Visit to the Po-shan Monastery” of Chang Jian.14 This poem has been translated many times and into several different Western languages; the two lines, by virtue of their ambiguity, give rise, like the preceding examples, to a variety of quite different interpretations.15
Let us examine the second line. The verb of this line, “to empty” (which signifies “to attain an emptiness that is regarded as a spiritual state”), is unmarked by any preposition. The line itself, as a result, when regarded only on the basis of its immediate constituents, has at least three possible meanings.
(1) In the shadow of the marsh the heart of the man is emptied.
(2) The shadow of the marsh is emptied in the heart of the man.
(3) The shadow of the marsh makes the heart of the man empty.
The “trees” on this page may show more clearly the mobile and reversible aspects of these three differing syntactic structures.
As a final example here are two lines in which Du Fu seeks to put in high relief the relationships and interactions between terrestrial elements and those of the cosmos, with which human destiny is at odds:
Stars hang, wild plain enlarging
Moon rises, great river flowing16
The two lines are parallel, each with a matched and regular succession of nouns and verbs. In the absence of formal marking, the verbs are at once both transitive and intransitive. In the second line, for example, the verb yong may be translated as “to rise” or “to raise,” and the second verb, liu, by “to flow” or “to float” (transitive, as in “to float a raft”). The line, so presented, permits the following translations:
(1) The moon rises and the river flows.
(2) The moon raises itself upon the river and the river flows.
(3) The moon lifts up the river and makes the waves flow faster.
(4) The moon raises itself upon the river and its light flows long with the waves.
(5) The moon gets on, and the river carries it.
Thus, the ellipsis of the postverbal element sets the verbs “free”; they may apply to two subjects at once (the moon rises, the moon makes the river rise; the river flows, the river carries the moon). The whole line is constructed by a sort of “nesting.” The line might be read just as well beginning after the caesura (with the third character in the line), and ending at the beginning. A dialectical relationship is established between the two images, the moon (which symbolizes life spirit, human destiny) and the river (infinite space and endless time). The “tree” at the bottom of this page is an attempt at representing that relationship graphically.
Complements of Time
Since Chinese is basically an uninflected language, verb tense is expressed by independent elements, adverbs, suffixes, or modal particles, which appear elsewhere in the line. Often, in an effort to create an ambiguous state, where present and past may mix, or dream become confused with reality, the poet may break the linear logic of a line either by omitting elements that indicate time, or by the juxtaposition of different times.
Numerous examples of this sort of effort are to be seen among the works of the Tang poets. Among them, Li Shang-yin would seem to have explored most consciously the realm of ambiguity of time: time lived and time evoked. This exploration is to be seen in the following lines, which close the poem “The Zither Ornamented with Brocade,” a poem whose theme is the experience of a love affair.17
This passion, can it last to be “pursued in memory”?
Only in the time when one is already “dispossessed”
Here the poet places himself in two times at once. He is simultaneously in the time where the passion is lived (line 1) and in that moment when he will seek to rediscover the passion in memory, all the while asking himself whether or not the experience had ever been really lived. A second example is the poem entitled “Ma-wei.”18 This poem evokes the unhappy love of the emperor Xuan-zong: passionately in love with his favorite, Yang Gui-fei, he neglected affairs of state. During the rebellion of An Lu-shan, in the course of his escape from the capital, Xuan-zong was forced to allow the execution of his favorite by the angry soldiery. After the tragedy, the emperor, inconsolable, sent Taoist monks in search of the soul of his lover, across the seas into the world of the immortals.
I (1) Beyond the seas in vain learn Nine Regions change
(2) The other life not predicted, this life stopped
II (3) Again hear tiger-guards beat wooden clocks
(4) No more come back cock-man announce
arrival of dawn
III (5) Today Six Armies together stop horses
(6) The other night Double Seven laugh at Cowherd/Weaver
IV (7) Why then be Son of Heaven four decades
(8) Not be worth son of Lu with No Care
The poem is composed of four couplets. Despite the absence of the personal pronoun, it can be supposed that the subject is the unfortunate emperor, even though several lines seem to suggest equally the point of view of the mistress. The first couplet contains no indication of time. The second, however, speaks of “this life” and “the other life”; but is the subject in “this life” or already in “the other,” or, perhaps, between the two? No precise indication is given the reader. There is an indication of place in the first line, “beyond the seas,” but there the reader meets the same sort of ambiguity: is the subject across the seas (in the land of the Taoist Immortals) or on this earth? According to an ancient Chinese tradition the earth is composed of Nine Regions (or Continents), but these regions also have their corresponding nine “across-the-seas” in another world. Thus the first line can be interpreted in two ways: “One learns in vain that beyond the seas the Nine Regions have changed” or “Beyond the seas where one finds oneself, one learns that on earth the Nine Regions have changed.” For the separated lovers, all transformations, here or in the beyond, are in vain.
Equally in vain is the succession of days and nights. The second couplet expresses the idea of the passage of time, but it is an undifferentiated time. The night (line 3) is only a monotonous echo, and there is no more sense to the day (line 4), whether it exists in “this life” or in “the other.”
At the heart of this discourse, in an imprecise (or undecided) time, the third couplet introduces, in an almost incongruous fashion, the complements of time “today” and “the other night.” These provide a “present” around which the obsessive thought may become fixed. Line 5 evokes the scene of the murder, while line 6 re-creates a night of love during which the lovers laugh at the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl, two stars that are located on opposite sides of the Milky Way, and that according to legend can only be reunited once each year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon. We have already remarked, concerning the personal pronouns, that the absence of a “shifter”19 creates an ambiguous language. Here, where the language is already quite ambiguous, the insertion of the shifter (“today”) introduces the personal level of discourse in a brutal manner and strongly indicates the irreducible character of the human drama, which will not allow itself to be “absorbed” and diminished by time.
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 5
