Line 5: In the Southern Sea, mermaids appear on nights of the full moon; their tears become pearls.
Line 6: In the Blue Field (in the contemporary province of Shen-xi, famous for its jade), the sun provokes mists that give, when seen from afar (but only from afar) marvelous visions. Another myth recounts that an old man has sown seeds given to him by a passing stranger, in return for his generosity. These seeds, germinating, become beautiful pieces of jade, thanks to which he can marry the woman he loves.
Even a reader who does not know these legends can grasp the pertinent metonymic links that hold these images together: for example, in line 5, between the sea and the moon (interaction), the moon and the pearls (brilliance and roundness), the pearls and tears, and at last, the image of the tears being that of a liquid element (because there also exists the expression “sea of tears” in the language), it rejoins that of the sea. The two lines thus each form a ring:
Let us recall that alongside the expression “sea of tears” there is also the expression “sea of mists,” such that the end of the second line rejoins the beginning of the first. The two rings combined can be represented by the following figure, which we use to illustrate the form of parallelism:
These combined rings, as coherent as they may be, nonetheless surround a void, an absence. Between the animal realm of couplet II and the mineral realm of couplet III, there is always the image of the flower named in couplet I and suggested by “butterfly-mist” and “turtledove-tears.” This absent flower (the desired woman) is justly the object of the poet’s quest. Thus, having considered the two legends in this couplet III (both connected to a woman’s arrival), having considered as well the particular sense attached to images of the moon, of waves, of pearls and of pieces of jade (in Chinese, a multitude of expressions founded on these images describe feminine beauty: woman’s body, woman’s gaze, woman’s hair, woman’s face), one truly senses, through its absence, the carnal presence of the loved woman that the magic of song calls up. The circular linkage, represented by this double ring, in addition suggests the poet’s belief in the possibility of reuniting in an afterlife.
If this quest of the poet across time and the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms is strongly cast in relief by literary linkages, we nonetheless do not forget that, exactly as in the preceding couplet, the two lines (5 and 6) are parallel. The terms placed face-to-face, between these two lines, by their combination provoke other senses:
Sea—field: universal transformation, vicissitudes of human life;
Sun—moon: cosmic movement, flow of time (day and night, days and months), eternity;
Pearls—jades: traditionally associated with very many expressions—human treasure, conjugal harmony, melodious sounds of music; and the expression “buried pearls and jade” signifies a beautiful woman who has died;
Tears—mists: tragic passion, vain passion.
Still other significant combinations are possible: “sea-sun” = to be reborn, “dried sea-shattered stone” = indestructible passion. Beyond the binomials that link the two lines, it is important to examine the two lines as a unit, the one marked by yin (moon, sea) and the other by yang (sun, fire). Seen as parallel, the two lines together bring up the image of coupling (yang-yin: man-woman). Through these carnal ties, the man and the woman lose and find each other again endlessly.
Thus in couplet III, while on the syntagmatic axis the theme of the dream begun in the previous couplet is pursued, on the paradigmatic axis, between the two lines, the theme of desire is developed. A reader who knows the symbolic sense of all these images, while he scans the two lines rhythmically, truly senses, through direct language (“through everything, day and night, I look for you and want you. Come to me, together each in the other, we will be reborn…”), will see the figures and gestures of an unrealized passion gush out from the depths of the act.17
Yes, the three couplets just analyzed are caught up in a process of continual engendering, without overly rigid elements of a denotative language fixing them in a single meaning. Behind those images, both structured and disrupted, one senses, underlying them, an “I” and a “you” which assure the unity of the poem. Neither are mentioned, for they both rediscover their being through this very quest, a quest that, starting with the cithara as it would a body, and by the device of the incantatory music that emanates from it, finishes by permitting, step by step, this “I” to rejoin—indeed, to become—“you”:
The last couplet, departing from language of parallel structure, reintroduces the linear song of the first couplet. Line 7 can be interpreted as a prayer as well as a question (same sentence structure in Chinese): can this passion have survived, like the cithara that remains? And, because of having taken it up to play again, will (we) recapture the original song? The couplet has three characters that contain the key of the heart (the first starts the couplet and the third ends it), which respond to the only appearance of the word “heart” in line 4. Their presence seems to signify that the adventure is interior. It refers to “passion,” to “memory,” and to the last character wang that encloses the poem and which is pronounced like the name of the emperor Wang; it makes this figure emerge again and contributes to the poem’s coherence. This word, very imagistic, means both “to be possessed” (the heart caught in a net) and “to be dispossessed” (the ungraspable void, absence). Through this word, filled with ambiguity and apparent contradiction, the end of the poem is situated in that place where all presence is due only to absence and where the time of a lived passion is confused with that of the quest.
—
We will study, in finishing, a quatrain of Li Bai that represents an extreme case, even if rather frequent in Chinese poetry. It concerns observing how, in a poem where the descriptive elements are reduced to a minimum, the symbolic images form a homogeneous paradigm and create a spatial order in which, all the while in opposition to each other, they transform themselves into interchangeable unities. This structure, both shattered and unifying (like a constellation) is strikingly economical. It lays bare a metaphorical language—where subject and object, without and within, far and near, are facets of the same prism ceaselessly radiating:
Li Bai: “Jade Staircase”
Jade staircase | white dew born
Late night | penetrate silk stocking
Nonetheless lower | crystal screen
Through transparency | see autumn moon.
The poem18 is about a woman waiting at night before the staircase in front of her abode; a long and finally disappointed wait: her lover will not come. Discouraged, suffering the night’s chill, she retires to her bedroom. There, through her lowered crystal curtain, she waits again, confiding her regret and desire to the moon, so close (through its light) and so distant.
We have just proposed an interpretation of this poem. Nonetheless, in the poem the narrative elements consist of several neutral action verbs, while the words describing feelings such as solitude, deception, disappointment, regret, desire for reunion, etc., are totally absent. The personal subject, as poetic tradition would have it, is omitted. Who speaks? A “she” or an “I”? The reader is invited to experience the person’s feelings “from the inside,” but these feelings are only suggested by gestures and a few objects.
The poem is presented in the form of a series of images: jade staircase, white dew, silk stocking, crystal curtain, ling-long “through transparency,” autumn moon. A reader who knows Chinese poetic symbolism will grasp the connotative meaning without trouble:
Jade staircase: a woman’s home. In addition, jade evokes the fine, smooth skin of a woman.
White dew: cool night, solitary hour, tears. Erotic nuance as well.
Silk stocking: woman’s body.
Crystal screen: interior of the women’s quarters.
Ling-long: this word, which we have translated “through transparency” in line 4, is very rich in meaning; first it would evoke the tinkling of the jade pendants making the screen; then too, it is used for preciou
s and glittering things, as well as women’s and babies’ faces. Here it allows a double interpretation: the woman who gazes at the moon and the moon that lights up the woman’s face. From a phonic point of view, this alliterative binomial echoes the series of words contained in the preceding lines, lines having “l” as the initial sound and which designate brilliant or transparent objects: lu (dew), luo (silk), and lian (crystal curtain).
Autumn Moon: distant presence and desire for reunion (separated lovers can look at the same moon; in addition, the full moon symbolizes the reunion of those in love).
Through this series of images, the poet creates a coherent world. The linear progression is maintained on the metaphoric level. These objects have in common that they are all brilliant or transparent. They give the impression of being derived from each other, in a regular order. This impression of regularity is confirmed, on the syntactic level, by the regularity of sentences of the identical type. The four sentences that make up the poem may be analyzed thus:
complement + verb + object
Such regularity stamps on the poem nuances of an inexorable order: in each of the four sentences, the verb, placed in the center, is determined by a complement and leads to an object. Given the omission of personal subject, the poem appears as if caught in a process where separate things are linked together in a chain and one object gives birth to another, from the first to the last:
This scheme suggests a linear progression going in one direction. But if one can distance oneself to an imaginary point of view, one can reconnect the last image (moonlight) to the first (jade staircase) by passing through all the others:
The transparent or crystalline objects shine thanks to the moonlight that, appearing at the last moment, “retraces the path” of the poem as if to give each image its full light or, more exactly, its full meaning. This moon that shines once again on the empty jade staircase accentuates the regret; the circular movement underlines an obsessive thought that comes back ceaselessly to itself.
This paradigmatic organization in the midst of linear development allows us to verify, on the level of images, the dominant trait of poetic language defined by Jakobson: projection of the axis of selection upon the axis of combination. Subtly, the poet makes language burst open, in introducing the spatial dimension into the temporal order. The images, in opposition with each other, provoke, as if “naturally,” some meaning:
This manner of letting the images fully “play” is a participant in an economy of structure, a structure that unites in itself the outer and the inner, the distant and the near, and even more the subject and the object. The interior world is projected on the exterior, while the exterior world becomes the sign of an interior world. The jade is both the stair and the woman’s flesh; the dew is both the cool of the night and the woman’s desire; the ling-long is both the face of the woman gazing and the moon seen through the crystal curtain. And this moon, at once distant presence and intimate feeling, provokes a new meaning at each of these encounters with the objects.
For us also to use a metaphorical language, we could perhaps say that above this “earth-to-earth” discourse rises a celestial vault in which float luminous figures forming a constellation. United by metonymic links, transforming chance into necessity, they are situated in relation to each other, are attracted to each other, and illuminate each other with their crossed rays. In the midst of them shines a body with a particular brilliance: the moon. Towards her the other stars converge; it is she who, given charge of human desire, finally illuminates them all. This moon, which is one of the fundamental symbols of the classical Chinese poets, whose sensibility is essentially “nocturnal,” reveals, through the intermediaries of signs with primordial rhythm, the secret of a night of myth and of communion.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF TANG POETRY
Translated from the Chinese by Jerome P. Seaton after the interpretations of François Cheng
Translator’s Note
The translations of the poems in this anthology were made from the original Chinese with reference to the word-for-word and interpretive translations by François Cheng which appeared in the French edition of the work. Conscious use was also made of the efforts of several English-language translations, most notably J. D. Frodsham’s translations of Li He. The major purpose of the effort was the accurate representation of the poems chosen by Professor Cheng as illustrations for the critical work which precedes the anthology; therefore, every effort has been made to remain true to the structure and word order of the originals.
Although I have nowhere consciously drawn on the precise wording of earlier English-language translations, I am sure that at least a few lines and phrases will be familiar to many readers. I can only offer these lines as homage to the translators who found them first. The footnotes are Professor Cheng’s, and are from the French edition of this work.
J. P. S.
This anthology presents the principal forms in use during the Tang period: on the one hand, the jin-ti-shi (modem-style verse), which is divided into jue-ju (quatrains) and lü-shi (eight-line regulated verse); and, on the other hand, the gu-ti-shi (ancient-style verse).
The collection ends with five ci (lyric poems). This new genre was born near the end of the Tang, its birth due, to a great extent, to developments in music: the poets composed their poems to pre-existing melodies. Unlike the shi the lines of the ci were of variable length and the verses show the influence of linear development. The chosen examples show the genre in its newborn state, when the poets were beginning to draw away from the concise and ordered style of the shi, making more use of descriptive and spoken language. This change in the use of the poetic language communicates a deeper crisis. The Tang dynasty, undermined by foreign wars and domestic conflicts, saw its dream of unity and order being shattered. The poets entrusted their nostalgia to a language and a rhythm already decomposed, already shattered.
The poetry of the Tang is usually seen as falling into four rather distinct periods: the Early (620–710), the High (710–780), the Mid (780–830), and the Late (830–906). Although the poems in the anthology are arranged, within their groupings by form, in chronological order, a further listing of the major figures by period may help the reader gain an overall grasp of poetic development and change during the course of the dynasty. Early Tang: Wang Bo, Chen Zi-ang, and Zhang Jiu-ling. High Tang: Meng Hao-ran, Wang Wei, Wang Chang-ling, Li Bai, Liu Chang-qing, Du Fu, and Qian Qi. Mid Tang: Liu Zong-yuan, Jia Dao, Bai Ju-yi, Li He, and Zhang Ji. Late Tang: Du Mu, Li Shang-yin, and Wen Ting-yun.
F. C.
Jue-ju
(Quatrains)
WANG ZHI-HUAN
Climbing the Pavilion of the Storks
White sun falls behind the mountains.
Yellow River runs into the sea.
Would eye embrace a thousand miles?
Go up, one flight.
* * *
This pavilion, in the bend of the Yellow River, in southeast Shan-xi, was celebrated for the beauty of its panoramic view. See this page–this page regarding the parallelism.
CHEN ZI-ANG
Climbing the Terrace of You-zhou
Before, I cannot see the men of old.
Beyond, can’t see the men to come.
Ponder the infinite, Heaven-and-Earth.
Alone, confused, I melt to tears.
MENG HAO-RAN
Passing the Night on the Jian-de River
Boat moored by misty isle,
Sun sets, the traveler’s grief arises.
Vast plain, sky lowers among the trees.
The limpid stream, the moon moves close.
MENG HAO-RAN
Spring Morning
Spring naps, unconscious of the dawn.
Everywhere, birdsong.
Night sounds, wind, and rain.
How many petals, fallen?
WANG WEI
Bamboo Pavilion
I sit alone among bamboo,
Pluck the lute, sigh long.
Deep grove,
unknown to men,
Bright moon draws near: its clarity.
* * *
This small pavilion was near Wang-chuan, the village to which Wang Wei retired in his later years.
WANG WEI
Deer Park
Empty mountain. None to be seen,
But hear, the echoing of voices.
Returning shadows enter deep, the grove.
Sun shines, again, on lichen’s green.
* * *
Line 3: Returning shadows = rays of sunset. See this page–this page on the omission of the personal pronoun.
WANG WEI
On the Mountain
Ching gorge: white rocks jut.
Cold sky: a few red leaves.
No rain upon this mountain path,
Chinese Poetic Writing Page 13
