4: Alluding to Qu Yuan

This poem is a great example of the intertextuality Matt mentioned last month, and a good introduction to Qu Yuan 屈原, a master of Chinese verse -- arguably the first master of verse, as he is apparently the first Chinese poet to have his name directly associated with his works. Qu Yuan lived some three centuries before the Common Era, during the period of history called the Warring States, when the territory that is now the Chinese heartland was ruled by, well, warring states. The fiefdoms that took power as the Zhou declined were eventually devoured into seven large nations, and Qu Yuan worked as a high minister for the king of Chu, one of the seven.

At the time of Qu Yuan's life, another of the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of Qin, was growing ever more aggressive, the ruling family's ambitions given strength by the rise of a philosophy of meritocratic totalitarianism (more or less) called Legalism, which a philosopher friend of mine describes pithily as "Evil Daoism." Qin scored a sequence of decisive military victories, and seemed a threat to all seven kingdoms, including Chu. Qu Yuan advocated an alliance between the six kingdoms against Qin, but he was betrayed for his trouble and sentenced to exile in Hubei province. Exiled and beset by deep depression, he composed poetry. If you think this sounds familiar, you're absolutely right. Many Chinese poets have walked the path of exile and literature; Qu Yuan is noteworthy, though, because even if he did not walk it first, he is the first one we remember. He is, quite literally, the one they made the holiday after.

Oh yes: in his depression, Qu Yuan wrote a sequence of poems about government, loyalty, duty, and sorrow, that have been the touchstones of Chinese romantic verse for two millennia. Then he walked into a lake carrying a heavy rock, and drowned. Villagers raced out in their fishing boats to save them, but they were too late. Unwilling to let such a great man be devoured by the beasts of the water, they threw rice and dumplings into the lake: eat this, but leave his body unharmed. When that failed, they beat the water with their paddles to frighten hungry fish away. Every year to this day, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, people around the world race their dragon boats into the lake to save Qu Yuan, and always fail; they throw rice into the water so the fish will not devour him.

It looks sort of like this.

In the end, Qu Yuan proved right. The combination of the political control granted by Legalism, and the military leadership and ambition of a ruling family rightly measured against the early Caesars and Phillip and Alexander of Macedon, proved too much for the other six kingdoms. In 221 BCE, the Qin unified all China under a single banner, and commenced a rule infamous for bloodthirsty suppression of dissenting opinion, bookburning, and the murder of scholars. The Qin lasted for only fifteen years before they were toppled by a peasant rebellion led by the charismatic Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty, but they left deep marks on China.

One of Qu Yuan's poems was an extensive poem praising the red tangerine, called 橘颂 júsòng, "Tangerine Ode." Here, Qu Yuan praises the tangerine for the same reasons as Zhang Jiuling (perhaps I should write that the other way 'round, of course), citing the value of its remarkable constancy. Reading this poem biographically, you hear Qu Yuan's lament for the world of human affairs, where constancy is not so highly regarded, or rewarded.

Zhang takes this poem as his base, establishing the scene and alluding in the same breath to Qu Yuan, with whom all his readers would be familiar. Then he asks why the tree is so secluded, thereby raising the question: why has he been banished? Why was Qu Yuan banished, for that matter? Why are men of good faith banished from the halls of power?

I'll get to those questions, and the poem's overall meaning as near as I can fathom it, tomorrow.

9: Stars

Max has asked about two issues that I really ought to get into: the stars Shen and Shang, and my use of the pronoun "they" in the beginning of the translation, only to switch to "I" later on. First, stars:

人生不相见,动如参与商。

These human lives do not see each other, moving

like the stars Shen and Shang.

Shen and Shang are individual stars, the first lying within the constellation of Orion (specifically corresponding to one of the stars of his belt) and the second corresponding to Antares. As such, each rises only when the other sets, and they do not seem to move relative to each other -- natural symbols for two people who share an intimate connection and yet must be apart, as in Du Fu's poem. As far as I know, however, these two stars have no metaphorical connection of this kind at all in the Greco-Roman-based Western astronomy Americans learn in school. By contrast, as early as the Zuo Comentary (compiled c. 400 BCE but contained information from much earlier sources) there have been Chinese written references to the association between the stars Shen and Shang and stories of separation. The Zuo Commentary itself cites the story of two brothers, sons of the Legendary Emperor Ku (the great-grandson of the Yellow Emperor), who were so at odds that their father enfoeffed each with different lands. E'bo (阏伯), the eldest, was given land that became known as Shangqiu (商丘), and was called "the Shang star" after he died. His younger brother Shishen (实沈) was then naturally called "the Shen star" after his death -- and the legend, so they say, was born.

The Greco-Roman and Chinese astronomical traditions independently developed many of the same predictive techniques and even fit some of their stellar groupings into vaguely similar conceptual frameworks, but of course despite their similarities remain extremely different. In the classical Chinese astronomy of the Tang Dynasty, for example, the sky was divided into a total of "Twenty-eight Mansions" (二十八宿), plus "Three Enclosures" (三垣). So one would say that the star Shen from the poem is located in the Shen Mansion of the White Tiger of the West (东方白虎参宿), and the Shang star is located in the Xin Mansion of the Azure Dragon of the East (西方青龙心宿, which in earlier times -- as early as the Shang Dynasty, supposedly -- was 苍龙; just as in earlier times 方 was 宫).

All of this background probably only scratches the surface of what Du Fu, a well educated man of the Tang, would have known. He would have been aware of other famous references to the stars, such as to the story of the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl, and perhaps had in mind some resonance with another text I've never even heard of. Indeed, his use of the Shen-Shang reference is illustrative of the sophistication of his interaction with the Chinese canon. Just as when he plays with the well-known "To-night, oh, what a night", this choice of metaphor provides an unexpected new lens through which to view the rest of the action of the poem. The stars are cosmically determined to never meet -- their separation is a definite, natural feature of the world. Human lives, says Du Fu, do not see one another in precisely this fashion. That is, they simply couldn't.

9: Tuesday Literary Allusion Blogging

This week, I translated another extremely well-known poem by Du Fu, one of China's preeminent poets. Highlighting his exceptional range, this poem is of a different genre, and in some ways a very different style: where "The Beautiful Woman" was an imaginative, allusive, richly described allegorical tale, "For the Recluse Wei Ba" is a more straightforward gift of sincere friendship, filled with subtle moments of quiet emotion. Different sorts of textual ephemera lifted from a long life of same.

Especially since I ended up skipping over Du Fu's many references in my last translation (though I made a couple of comments about them last week), I'm determined to get right to the allusions in this week's poem, even if it means putting off some talk about the more obvious ways my translation deviated from the original. And so I'll start with this line:

今夕复何夕

At first I was frankly stumped as to its precise meaning, so I looked up the line. The lovely Baike described it as an exclamation of happy wonderment, which I can understand though I remained somewhat confused. Then by chance I heard a re-written version of the original sung while I was watching the movie The Banquet《夜宴》by Feng Xiaogang -- it turns out that it comes from

今夕何夕

which appears in the Book of Songs (《诗经 唐风 绸缪》to be precise). The original means something like "To-night, oh, what a night"; which then given the context of the song, is clearly a happy exclamation, looking forward to a marriage ceremony the next day. So Baidu Baike is correct, if incomplete. It is certainly meant to be a happy, wistful sort of exclamation at the night, but it is a twist on an old, sighing lyric of that feeling, not a direct copy. In Du Fu's version, for one, the poet's days of marriage have long since passed.

Du Fu's line, then, is a play on a lyric from one of the oldest extant folk songs in the world, a song that even now sees some of its lyrics sung in big-budget period movies and faux-Qing teahouses throughout China. The original lyrics are old enough that their grammar is noticeably different from the Classical Chinese of the Tang (Du Fu's time), which explains why it stuck out to me. Given its provenance it seems nothing but beautiful, but as for how to translate such beauty I am still stumped. My choice was a banal one, to try to simply convey in a modern free verse English what the direct connotation should be. I am unsatisfied with that, but I'm unconvinced there is much to be done. Anyone have any ideas?

10: In Which I am Destroyed

I had a fantastic discussion with Kang Zhengguo today that eventually developed into his offering a full-blown evisceration of my translation below. If I were always lucky enough to be so eviscerated, I would be a much wiser person:

[If you want to study literature, you must understand] intertextuality. [Do you know that word?]

[Yes Teacher Kang, yes. I was think--]

[This word is a set phrase. It doesn't mean that. It comes from a poem by Li Yuannian from the Han Dynasty. "In the north there was a beautiful woman." Do you know Qu Yuan?]

[Oh. Yes, but I've only--]

[This one is a reference to Qu Yuan's Nine Songs. "Mountain Ghosts." "Oh if through mountain depths / once wandered a traveler." And this one's not really right at all.]

Kang Laoshi (for those who might not know, laoshi is a common Chinese honorific applied to teachers) is a tall, broad-shouldered, shuffling Chinese intellectual from Xi'an. He has a a crackly Shaanxi accent, and he speaks directly, through your words if they're in his way, but not interrupting, like sand being poured steadily down over trails of smoke in the air. I won't try to encapsulate his fascinating life into a few lame bon mots, but I recommend his memoir, which has been well translated into English, entitled Confessions.

Stay tuned for explorations of the above allusions, my thoughts on enjambment, and more! Same web-site, same web-time. So, tomorrow maybe.