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对划线部分提问Mingming usually waters the flowers everyday.对every day 划线
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How often does Mingming water the flowers?
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扫描下载二维码　　1）用动词的适当情势填空的
　　1.I& like ____________ (swim).&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 内容来自
　　2.He _________(read) English& every& day. 内容来自
　　3.We _________(go)to school at seven in the morning.&&
　　4.Mike________(go)to school at seven in the morning.
　　5.My& mother________(like) ______(go) shopping.&&&&&&&
　　6.I can ________(draw)& many& beautiful& pictures. CopyRight
　　7.She_________(make) a& model& plane.&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& CopyRight
　　8.Do& you ________(like)_________(run)? CopyRight
　　9.Does& he_________(like)_________(jump) ?&&&&&&&&&&
　　10.Does Nancy_________(grow)flowers on Saturday ?
　　11.The& teachers________(like)___________(dance).&&&&& CopyRight
　　12.The teacher________(like)____________(dance).
　　13.The students___________(speak) English in class.&&&&& CopyRight
　　14.The student_________(speak) Chinese after class.&
　　15. Let's____________and play football . ( go )&&&&&&&&&&
　　16. He_____________ like swimming . ( not )& 内容来自
　　17. I'm sorry ____________that . ( hear )&&&&&&&
　　18. Wang Bing is____________ ( write ) an E-mail to his friend . 内容来自
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　　20. _________you study English at school ? Yes , I___________. ( do ) CopyRight
　　21. __________your sister study English at school ? No , she__________ . ( do )
　　22. I'm _________ better . ( feel )&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
　　23. Why__________Tom absent today ? ( be ) CopyRight
　　2）初中英语时态练习用所给的人称改写句子
　　1.I take photos on Sunday. ( Mike)
　　2.We grow beautiful flowers. (she)
　　3.They like collecting stamps. (Ben)
　　4.I listen to music carefully. (my aunt)
　　5.You like making a model ship. (Helen) 内容来自
　　6.We clean the classroom every day. (he)
　　7.They look after the pandas. (Mr Wang) CopyRight
　　8.I draw a tree and some flowers. (Nancy)
　　9.We go to bed at eight. ( my sister)
　　10.I read newspapers in the evening. (Mr Green)& 内容来自
　　3）写出下列动词的相应形式 的初中英语时态练习
　　1. 第三人称单数： wash_________ match _______guess______ study______ finish_________ go________ snow______ carry_________& 内容来自
　　2.写出下列动词的从前式：stop______ see________ drive ________let_______ carry______ keep_____ join______ find_______ think________ teach______ catch______& CopyRight
　　3. 写出下列动词确当初分词形式： stay_______ begin______ forget_______ forget______ lie________& die _______ run_______ prefer______ give________& ring_______ dance______ hope_______&
　　II. 用所给动词的恰当形式填空：& 内容来自
　　1．I ________(write) to you as soon as I _______(get) to London.&
　　2. He doean't feel well and ____________(not eat) any food this morning.&
　　3. He ______ not _______(see) me come in, for he ___________(read) something with great interest.&
　　4. I _________(l;et) you have the book as soon as I _________(finish) it.&
　　5. While we ________(wait) for our teacher, a little boy ________(run) up to us.&
　　6. Don't make a niose. Grandpa __________(sleep).& 7.It's seven now, Tom's family__________(watch) TV.&
　　8. It ________(take) me two hours to finish my homework last night.&
　　9. What ______ your mother _______(do) at eight yesterday evening? She _______(wash) clothes.&
　　10. _______ it ______ (rain) when school was over yesterday?&
　　11. What _______(do) _______ tomorrow? We ________ (play) football.& 内容来自
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　　13. They said they ________ (visit) the Great Wall the next summer holiday.&
　　14. Who _______ (dance) the best in your class?&&&&&&& 15. Will you come if he _____________ (not come)?&
　　16. The teacher told us the earth __________ (move) round the sun.& 17She ________ (buy) a sweater yesterday.
　　18. They _______ (have) a party in the garden if it ________ (not rain) tomorrow.& 内容来自
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　　5. They _____ the office at nine yesterday morning.&&&&&&& A. reached to B. arrived C. went D. get to& 内容来自
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　　8. I saw her ____ the room this morning.& A.to enter B. entered C. enter D. enters&
　　9.the teacher asked us ______ to school on time. A. to es& CopyRight
　　10. John is always ______ others.&&&&&&&&&&& A. help B. helping C. helps D. to help& CopyRight
　　11. He told us ______ at eight.&&&&&&&&&&& A,. working B. to work C. work D. worked& CopyRight
　　12. You'd better ______ at home and ______ your homework.&
　　A. to stay, do B. stay, do C. to stay, to do D. stay, to do&
　　13. He sat down ______ a rest.&&&&&&&&&&&& A. having B. have C. to have D. had& CopyRight
　　14. Uncle Wang knows _______ a washing machine.&
　　A. how to make B. to make C. how making D. what to make& 内容来自
　　15. Jim decided _______ Polly to Ling Feng when he was back to England.&
　　A. to leave B. left C. leaving D. leave CopyRight
　　4）改句子&
　　1.Do you often play football after school? (确定回答)&&
　　2.I have many books.& （改为否定句）& 内容来自
　　3.Gao Shan's sister likes playing table tennis （改为否定句） 内容来自
　　4.She lives in a small town near New York.&&& （改为一般疑问句）&&& CopyRight
　　5.I watch TV every day. （改为普通疑问句）&& CopyRight
　　6.David has got a goal. （改为正常疑问句）
　　7.We have four lessons.（否认句）
　　8.Nancy doesn't run fast （断定句）
　　9.My dog runs fast. 否定句： 一般疑问句的初中英语时代练习
　　10.Mike has two letters for him. 个别疑难句： 否定句：
　　11.I usually play football on Friday afternoon. 否定句: 一般疑问句: 划线提问
　　12.Su Yang usually washes some clothes on Saturday. 否定句: 一般疑问句: 划线提问:
　　13.Mingming usually waters the flowers every day 否定句: 个别疑难句: 划线发问
　　14.Tom does his homework at home. 否定句: 一般疑问句: 划线提问
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扫描二维码关注线话POEMS FROM THE TANG
translated by Frederick Turner and Y. D.
Introduction
Two Buddhist poems: Shen Xiu, Hui-Neng
Luobin Wang
Chen Zi-ang
Zhang Jiu Ling
Wang Zhihuan
Meng Haoran
Wang Changling 32-33
Liu Changqing
Chang Jian
Liu Changqin
Jin Changxu
Wei Yingwu
Li Kangcheng
Master Han Shan
Liu Zongyuan
Li He 106-111
Zhu Qing Yu 112
Wen Ting Yun 116
Li Shangyin
Wei Zhuang
Nie Yizhong
Dun Xun He
Qin Tao Yu
Huang Chao
Tan Yong Zhi
Fan Zhongyan
For all my friends in China
INTRODUCTION
The Tang Poets: A Personal View
Frederick Turner
From about the middle of the seventh century to the end of the tenth, one of the most remarkable bodies of poetry in the world was composed in China.
It is at once achingly fresh and evocative, and class perhaps the only Western analogy might be the work of the early Greek lyric poets–now mostly lost–and their great Roman followers, Horace and Virgil. The poems from the period in this anthology are for the most part tiny in physical length and astonishingly uniform in structure and meter–but each one is a unique gem of profound water and unplumbed depth.
These poems were selected from the huge body of classical Tang poetry by my collaborator, a Chinese scholar of distinction who chooses, against my wishes but with characteristic Chinese modesty, to remain anonymous.
I do not read or speak more than a few C during our work on these poems I avoided using other translations, such as those of Witter Bynner, Ezra Pound, and Kenneth Rexroth, though I was familiar with them before.
Thus I must acknowledge my great debt to my nameless colleague, for he was, with the exception of some useful comments and advice from the Chinese philologist Baomei Lin, my only language informant.
These poems roughly overlap the period of the Tang Dynasty, which until its later decline provided an era of peace and prosperity in the heartland of China..
For the Han, China’s largest ethnic group, the Tang period was the pinnacle of Chinese culture and power, the time when China’s “Yang”, or brilliant and positive creative energy, was at its strongest, followed by decline. The poems in this anthology do not represent the entire range of genre, form and subject in Tang poetry, but they are a fair sample.
This introduction will address only the poems here, and should not be taken as applying to all of Tang poetry, still less to Chinese poetry as a whole.
Applying, for the sake of crude historical classification, the traditional Western system of cultural periodization—a practice shared with the Chinese themselves, who write of “late Tang,” “High Tang”, etc– we might describe the poets translated here in this way:
*First, the early Tang poets, such as Meng Haoran, Wang Bo, Wang Zhihuang, and especially Wang Changling.
We can compare their purity and sweetness of sensibility to such Western figures as Giotto, Ronsard, Saint-Colombe, and Dowland in their respective cultures and artforms.
*Second, the high classicism of Wang Wei, perhaps comparable to Bach or Novalis or Raphael, or–in his perfection of the genre of nature poetry–the great Dutch and English landscape painters.
*Third, the mature classicism of Du Fu, perhaps the greatest of all the Tang poets, his exquisite style enriched with psychological depth and controlled passion.
Here the objective and subjective are perfectly balanced, as in the work of such Western figures as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Mozart.
*Fourth, the great mannerist, Li Bai, a giant in the world of subjective artists.
Passionate, turbulent, romantic, mystical, fantastical, but with a strange self-deprecating sense of humor, he explores the strange world of Chinese folklore and the darker and wilder passages of the soul–but always with poetic mastery and dignified grace.
Perhaps we can compare him with Caravaggio, Beethoven, Milton.
*Fifth, the great poet of social protest, Bai Juyi, who sees already the signs of Tang cultural and political decadence, and couches his prophetic and moral message in realistic scenes of ordinary life.
Here we must turn to the great Romantic novelists, like Balzac, Tolstoy, and Dickens, or to painters like Millet and Van Gogh, or dramatists like Berthold Brecht, for comparisons.
*Sixth, the later Tang poets: Li he, who like Li Bai explores the Chinese fantasyland, the passions, and the surreal mode, but with a quirki Du Mu, with his
lovely i and the last great flowering in Li Shangyin, lover and philosopher, one of the most exquisite poets of retrospection and delicate feeling.
Perhaps we might think of such Western “latecomers” as Brahms, Keats, or Caspar David Friedrich.
The Poet-Scholar’s Life
Almost all the recorded Tang poems were composed by poet-scholars who were imperial administrators, or in search of an imperial post, retired or dismissed from such a post, or in voluntary religious retreat from imperial service. The imperial administrator could be as humble as a clerk or as grand as a provincial governor or imperial envoy to if he remained in the Capital in a position of national responsibility he would have little time or incentive to write, but if his position was that of a minor official he would often be inspired to poetry.
More usually he would be sent to the provinces.
Wise imperial policy tended to appoint local administrators whose family and childhood home were far away, so as to avoid nepotism and an inter-generational accumulation of local power and wealth that could challenge the distant central government.
(To recruit local authorities from distant prefectures was, I believe, the Chinese way of solving the same problem that faced the medieval Christian Church–how to prevent the formation of local dynasties.
The Church solved it by enforcing priestly celibacy, so that a priest’s or bishop’s offspring could have no legal title to the church property.
Celibacy was the price a pries exile was the price paid by a mandarin.
Louis XIV of France solved it by bringing his nobles to Versailles where he could keep an eye on them).
One of the great themes of T family, friends, and the sounds, smells and sights of home became achingly dear, and letters very important.
The occasional visit by an old fellow-student would be the occasion of bitter-sweet reminiscence, feastings, late night drinking parties, and sad farewells.
Many poems are parting gifts to a friend.
The poetry examination, with its intense period of prior study under professional tutors, was the rite of passage by which a scholar entered imperial service.
It is a remarkable reflection that perhaps the longest-lasting regime in the world (setting aside the dynastic struggles of the emperors, and the invasion and swift assimilation of foreign rulers) was the Chinese civil service–and its major qualification was the passing of an examination in poetry!
Perhaps this is one reason why China is the only surviving ancient civilization that still uses the same writing system, and the written language of Confucius still remains vivid for modern Chinese.
Ernest Fenollosa, like some Chinese scholars, traces the decline after the Tang period to a change of emphasis in the examination system from the composition of original poetry to memorization of Confucian texts—in Chinese terms, a loss of the Yang element in the certification process.
For the Tang writer the examinations served as a common ordeal, cementing together in a bond of mutual understanding poets from a hundred corners of China and centuries of Chinese history.
A pure and refined poetic vocabulary was hammered out, which was capable of an extraordinary range of delicate nuance, detailed observation, and emotional power.
The ethics and religion of the scholar-poet-administrator were fundamentally Confucian.
The prime directive was the perfection of one’s own character in virtue and self-restraint through the discipline of letters and the correct perfo and the purpose of this purifying discipline was to prepare the scholar to serve the Emperor in the just and wise administration of the State.
Piety included love for one’ respect for one’ ritual observance to one’s ancestors, to the traditional Chinese deities, the just and honest conduct of g and military service as required.
But such a life was recognized by most poets to be incomplete without a more meditative and even mystical dimension.
Daoist communion with nature and Buddhist retreat for the refreshment of the soul were necessary counterbalances for the worldly cares, vanities, and corruptions of court or command. It was always risky to tell truth to power in China as anywhere else, and such truth-telling was a Confucian duty.
In retirement or in dismissal a scholar-poet’s religious and ethical life would turn toward Taoist and Buddhist worldviews and practices.
He would relinquish ego in search of the secrets of nature and of the soul.
The life of the scholar/administrator supplied many of the major themes of Tang poetry.
There is the
the poet in the wintry western mountains, for instance, hears a familiar melody played on an alien type of flute and misses the southern willows in the spring wind (Wang Zhihuan’s ” A Song of Liang Zhou”).
Or looking at the moon over the sea he thinks of distant friends doing the same thing.
Then there is the Horatian poem about the rustic wine-party with an old friend and colleague.
Or the farewell drunken feast, as the poet in disfavor prepares to depart for a remote post far from the capital (Li Bai’s wild and desperate “Bring in the Wine: a Drinking Song”).
There is the farewell or parting poem, usually to a friend but sometimes and the poem of political exile written to distant friends, yearning for a role in the just reform of government.
And there is the war poem, celebrating and mourning the great exploits and suffer here China’s vast Wild West stretches before us, its deserts barred with snow, its distant mountains brooded over by blue clouds.
In retirement there is the peace or the grief of an old age that is either serene and wealthy, or lonely and penurious.
The people that wrote these poems more than a thousand years ago were as sophisticated, critical-minded, and well educated as the greatest literary genius of today. Their sense of humor is fresh and charming, and their social conscience is as sensitive as any today.
They possessed a canvas, the vast already-ancient land of China, as varied and rich both historically and geographically, as full of ironic and magnificent perspectives, as our own.
And they speak to us with both ancient wisdom and delightful directness.
The Content of Tang Poetry
Perhaps the most salient feature of Tang poetry represented here is its attention to nature.
If one excepts the romantic poetry of the European nineteenth century, nature poetry is very rare in all human poetic traditions, except as a background for epic or amorous events and as a source of metaphor.
But the Chinese were masters of the art of natural description, raising words to the status of paint in the evocation of landscape and weather.
Not that Tang poetry is unmetaphorical–the moods and forms of nature always have deeper moral, psychological, religious, and sociopolitical meanings.
A nature poem is often a point-to-point allegory, such as Huang Chao’s “Ode to the Chrysanthemums” which contrasts the aristocratic peach blossom with the humbler chrysanthemum, in the context of a peasant revolution at the time:
The west wind rustles in the yard
that’s thick with your full flower,
But chill your stamens,
no butterflies fly here.
But nature is a powerful value in itself, with a moral presence quite as numinous as in W and the allegory never interferes with the fresh shock of real natural experience.
Wang Wei and Du Fu are perhaps the supreme masters of the nature poem, though almost every Tang poet has his own special way of evoking mood and feeling from natural details.
Distinct genres and stock subjects, always renewed by some lovely subtle twist, can be discerned through the centuries of nature verse.
The great Chinese waterways inspire the river poems—scholar-administrators traveled mainly by boat, and were well acquainted with riverine scenery and river-port life.
There is a whole genre of mountain poetry, with variations: Wang Wei’s vast still silences, Li Bai’s terrifying precipices, Gao Shi’s epic frontier, and the Buddhist mysticism of the Cold Mountain school.
There is the seasonal poem, with its precise capture of some moment–the spring flower festivals, the first chill of fall, awakening to snow, the summer storm.
There are rain poems and snow poems and mist poems and moon poems and sunset poems and night and morning poems.
Each poet would vie respectfully with his predecessors in the topic, and add a unique brush-stroke.
Indeed, the metaphor of ink-brush drawing and painting is almost unavoidable.
Chinese script, especially when handled by the great scholar poets, who, I am convinced, saw every written character as a rich evocative picture in their heads, is almost inseparable from the visual arts.
Often a poem is the text of a painting, the calligraphy subtly matched to the brushwork and stylistic genre of the landscape or the still-life spray of flowers.
Music is scarcely less important to Tang poetry than painting.
Very many of the poems are titled “songs”, and many were sung as often as recited.
One genre of the time was the poem in praise of music, such as Li He’s “Upon the Sounds of Li Ping’s Overture for the Kong Hou”, a genre that gives full scope to the Chinese sense of fantasy and an opportunity for the poet to break the strict bonds of brevity and meter that normally discipline his verse.
Very often a Tang poetic landscape is haunted by the sound of a flute or the sad notes of the zither-like Cheng.
The Tang landscape is always inhabited.
Even the loneliest and most desolate place has a stretch of guarded frontier wall or a tiny pavilion or the sound of an axe or a bell or a sad flute, or the ghostly presence of past emperors or generals.
Just as in the West we find the shepherds and bucolic pastoralists and fishing-folk of Theocritus, Virgil, Sannazaro and Spenser, so in Tang verse there is a cast of arcadian or realistic character types that recurs again and again.
The archetypes include the fisherman, the herd-boy with his buffalo, the wise old woodman, the toiling peasant or jade-miner.
Again, these thematic figures, though stereotypes, are always given fresh immediacy by some poignant detail.
The nature poetry in this anthology always contains a sense of awe at the sheer vastness of the land of China.
The Tang poets loved to climb towers or mountain peaks and survey with a shiver the huge and melancholy scene.
Or they would sit in a boat at night while the stars wheeled above them in the black sky, and meditate upon their own insignificance.
Then would come a moment of intense lonely experience, which would find its way into a poem.
Likewise, they would survey the ruins of some old imperial palace, recall the extinct passions of that time, and reflect on the transience of all things.
Tang poetry is deeply human and humane. The love poetry in this collection, whose rarity is, I believe, typical of Tang poetry, is always tender and lovely.
Du Fu’s yearning for his wife in “Moon and Night” is especially moving:
Dampened with fog, my wife’s black fragrant hair
Falls over jade-cold
When will we lean upon the airy curtain
Together in this light, our tears dried?
Women do not appear much in the masculine world of the scholar-poets in this collection, but when they do they are richly and subtly delineated.
Tang poetry has a delightful genre of dramatic monologue in the voice of a lady, full of humor, pathos, psychological insight, and accurate observation–exemplified most famously in Li Bai’s “Song of Chang Gan”, translated by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa as “The River-Merchant’s Daughter”.
The lady’s feelings for her lover or husband in such poems again show a huge range, from shy devotion through coquetry and grief-stricken longing to sarcastic insight.
Another perennial topic in Tang poetry is social justice.
There seems to be a sense of compassion for the poor in the whole tradition, a compassion that is both sentimental and genuine–Buddhist in its moral spirituality and Confucian in its practical motivation to political and social reform.
Bai Juyi is perhaps the master of such themes, though Du Fu and several others have poems on war widows and overtaxed peasants and wretched miners that are as moving.
The poems of social protest almost never attack negligent authorities directly.
Sometimes the criticism will be cloaked in allegory, as in Zhang Ji’s “Song of the Fearsome Tigers.”
Sometimes an incident that constitutes in itself a mute indictment of official arrogance, corruption, cowardice, or neglect is simply presented without editorializing.
Sometimes an episode of past history that is pointedly relevant to the present is left to stand alone.
These stories–of young wives or old mothers deprived of their sons by the draft, of abandoned peasant farms, of lavish court processions and feastings as people die of starvation in distant provinces–are among the most moving of the period.
One of the most effective examples of this genre is Bai Juyi’s old charcoal-burner spurned aside by the court envoys:
Though only thin rags hang upon
His wretched arms and thighs,
He hopes the winter will be cold
So charcoal’s price will rise.
An inch of snow fell overnight,
Down from the hills through rutted ice
He drives the charcoal-cart.
The ox gets tired, the man is starved,
The sun has risen higher,
He rests outside the Southern Gate
Upon the market mire.
Two horsem
Who are they?
By their dress,
One in yellow, one in plain white,
They’re couriers, more or less.
With dispatches in hand, they shout
“Imperial command!”
The old man turns his cart, the ox
Drags the whole burden round.
One cart of charcoal’
North to the palace gate
The envoys chivvy him, and now
He must unload the weight.
In grief, he’s paid but half a bolt
Of muslin, dyed cheap red,
And but nine feet of low-grade silk
Flung round the ox’s head.
Behind these observations is always a kind of sad and realistic memory of the universal repeated cycle of imperial history: the vital new dynasty that reforms and protects the land, followed by a golden age of wealth and conquest, which yields to luxury and neglect of duty.
In its new confidence the dynasty embarks on vainglorious conquests, resulting in stretched supply lines and thus incompetent defence against the perennial invaders, and ends in invasion, rebellion and collapse–with the peasants as always the chief victims.
Like other dynasties, the Tang in its later days sent off more and more conscripts to expand the frontier buffer zone or build walls and fortified towns–towns that then had to feed themselves off poor land.
The imperial administration taxed the farmers cruelly for these adventures, while depriving them of their young male labor and building sumptuous palaces in the capital, and exiling critical mandarin advisers to remote posts to keep them quiet.
The mood with which the Tang poets responded to official neglect, both of their individual services as pious advisers, and of the nation’s welfare as a whole, was the resigned serenity of China’s three great religions–Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.
The Tang poet might meditate on the proverbial Confucian wisdom, like Du Fu in “Beyond the Frontier Pass”:
Who bends a bow should ben
Who draws an arrow, choose one that is long.
If you would shoot a man, f
To take the enemy, first take their king.
But there must be some
All nations have their own distinct frontiers:
If we can check aggressive bullying,
What need for so much killing, harm, and wrong?
Or he might call to mind great historical examples of thankless devotion to Confucian duty, as Du Fu does in “The Shu Prime Minister”:
Where is that noble minister’s
commemorative shrine?
Outside the Brocade City, in
dark cypress-groves, alone.
Stone stairways mirror blue-green grass,
A yellow oriole, hid in fronds,
sings sweetly, but in vain.
Three times the nation called on him
Two empires the old minister
He led the troops to victory,
but died before they won–
Which wets with tears the garments of
heroic gentlemen.
Anther recourse was to turn one’s back on the flattery and corruption of society and enter the strange magical world of Taoist nature mysticism.
Nature for the Chinese poet is always liable to surprise him with an epiphanic revelation and a dream vision.
Li He is a master of this genre.
The most ancient of China’s traditions, preserved in old “pagan” myths and fairytales and in memories of early childhood, here rise to the poetic surface as a solace and escape.
Perhaps the strangest example is Li Bai’s magnificent “Dream Journey on Mount Tian Mu”:
Fired by this vision, one night I
dreamed of the land of Y
I’m flying over Mirror Lake,
where the br
That bright moon casts my shadow on the lake
And ushers me toward the clear Shan rill
Where dwelt the poet-master Xie,
and his old home is still,
And over the pure ripples wail
the apes’ cries, sad and shrill.
I don the simple clogs of Master Xie,
My body climbs the b
Half up the cliff, look, sunrise on the sea,
And listen, for the cock crows in the day.
Ten thousand rocks, ten thousand turns,
Tranced by a flower, till sudden dark
I lean against a stone.
With roars of bears and dragon-screams
and rumbling waterfalls
I tremble at the forests deep,
the layered mountain-walls:
Ai! these blue blue clouds
full of the coming rain!
Ai! these pale pale waters,
from which the white mist crawls!
Now there’s a sudden thunderbolt,
A landslip slumps down from a fault!
There the stone gates of fairyland
Crash open now on either hand,
Reveal a vast and teal-green space,
a fathomless sky-vault
Where in the sun and moonlight, gold
and silver towers stand.
Their clothes are glowing rainbows, Ai!
their horses,
The gods of cloud, Ai! see their glittering files
in endless multitudes descend!
The tiger strikes the zither, Ai!
those phoenix charioteers!
Ai! see how the Immortal Ones
their serried ranks extend!
My heart is quaking, Ai!
Ah, in this sudden terror
I wake with a long sigh.
What’s left, alas, is only
a pillow and a mat:
Oh, where is that bright mist now?
where is that rosy cloud?
Thus all the pleasures of the world
are transient as a dream,
Passing forever from the earth
as rivers eastward stream.
Farewell, I do not know
For now I’ll let my white stag graze
in these cliffs green with fern–
If called, I’ll reascend that peak
But how shall I with lowered brow
and bent neck to the mighty turn,
Where there’s no opening of face or heart,
in service to their scorn?
Most serene of all religious responses is the Buddhist abandonment of attachment and devotion to the moment of the eternal present.
Jiao Ran catches the ethos of the Zen-based Cold Mountain School in his “Hearing a Bell” (the “ong”-“ang” rhymes are in the original):
From the old shrine on Han Shan comes a clang,
A far bell like the sweet wind’s spreading song.
The Moon-Tree rings with its long lingering,
The frosty sky is emptied by its gong.
Long through the night the seeker after Zen
Lets the mind chill, and still, and hang.
Tang poets would go on retreats at Buddhist monasteries and seek counsel from the reverend masters, as Chang Jian does here in “On the Cloisters Behind the Temple of Mount Po”:
At dawn I slip int
The early sun has lit the sacred grove.
B a path to a secluded glen
Where amid woods and flowers the Zen monks live.
The birds by nature lov
The pool’s reflections purge the hearts of men.
Ten thousand noises here are silenced quite,
But for the sound of bell and clear chimestone.
The Poetic Form of Tang Poetry
All human poetry (with the exception of some free verse experiments in the Westernized countries in the twentieth century) uses a line about three seconds in length when recited, regulated by such devices as syllable-count, stress-count, number and uniformity of metrical feet (established by syllable-length or syllable-stress), tone pattern, grammatical or logical parallelism, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme.
These devices, depending upon the tradition or the poet’s choice, can be either voluntary or obligatatory–either recognizable ornaments or constitutive features of a given form.
For instance, in English a formal sonnet must have fourteen iambic pentameter lines, with one of a small num it may use alliteration, logical and grammatical parallelism, masculine or feminine rhymes, etc.
Chinese Tang period poetry uses a rich palette of rules.
It must (with some exceptions, especially in the longer forms) have lines of five or seven syllables.
Chinese is of course a tonal language, with four pitched tones (high, rising, falling-and-rising, and falling).
Certain specific combinations of changing and unchanging tones are required in Tang poetry.
There is also to my ear a regular stress pattern of alternating strong and weaker stresses.
Lines (again with the exception of the longer forms) are arranged in pairs and quatrains–pairs of pairs.
Rhyming is obligatory, though the rhyme pattern can vary and not every line must rhyme.
The seven-syllable line will have a caesura after the fourth syllable, like the English “fourteener” (more commonly known as ballad meter) which is divided into eight- and six-syllable parts, with a caesura after the eighth syllable.
Chinese poetry also uses a much-prized formal ornament, the couplet, in which a pair of lines echo each other exactly in syntax, while either paralleling or exactly contrasting with each other in logic, and reversing each other in tonal pattern. Even poems that do not contain exact couplets often refer by implication to the couplet in partial parallelisms and significant variations. Assonance, alliteration, etc, are voluntary ornaments, reinforcing the logic or suggesting onomatopoeia.
The normal Tang poem has eight or four lines.
To my ear–this feature is not often discussed by scholars–the lines are stressed TUM-ta TUM-ta TUM for the five-syllable line, TUM-ta TUM-ta, TUM-ta TUM) for the seven-syllable line.
Since Chinese writing is pictographic and ideographic, spoken words being represented not alphabetically but by characters, an additional dimension is added to classical Tang poetry: the semantic interplay among the radicals (the semantic and phonemic visual glyphs out of which a character is composed).
Each radical possesses for a Chinese scholar a set of meaningful connotations, which can set up a visual dance through the poem–a dance often heightened by the calligraphy and sometimes echoing the themes of an associated ink-brush painting.
In poetic form as in so many things, such as music, medicine, and painting, the traditional Chinese arts are, it seems to me, an elaboration and brilliant refinement of popular crafts rather than a separate avant-garde intellectual and esthetic realm.
The most recent equivalent in Europe, perhaps, was the music of Bach, where a popular musical tradition was raised to the level of high art without any loss to its capacities for creating direct pleasure and a true sense of community.
Though the scholars who created poetry were a distinct class, they often had humble roots, because they were qualified not by birth but by pa they thus were exposed to the vitality of folk art–the folksong, ballad, fairytale, etc.
Bai Juyi, it is said, would not stop tinkering with his poems until they could be understood by an old cleaning lady.
Tang poems were often known by heart among the people and cited proverbially even without awareness of their source, as the Bible still is in the West.
Tang poetry, however, does not seem to have developed the longer forms, the epic, epillion, or extended dramatic narrative.
China had already developed a sophisticated prose, and so the novel or tale forms took over the tasks of more extended storytelling.
However, there are some very fine mid-length poems, of upwards of thirty lines, which break out into more extended narrative or spontaneous effusion or meditative discourse.
The dithyramb–the longer, irregular, passionate, and sometimes mystical poetry of the inspired Greek bard–may be a useful Western analogy.
Li Bai and Du Fu especially show fine examples: Li Bai’s “The Perilous Shu Road,”
“Song of Chang Gan”, and “Dream Journey on Mount Tian Mu”, and Du Fu’s “Song of the War Chariots” and “Thatched Cottage Wrecked by Autumn Gales” are examples.
These longer poems abandon many of the practices of the more formal short poem, mixing five-syllable, seven-syllable, and even longer lines, interspersing exclamations in four or even three syllables, and changing the rhythmic flow.
It is as if when a Chinese poet escaped the limits of the quatrain or double quatrain form, a new aesthetic comes into play, one in which precision, delicacy, and perfection is replaced by impressionism, passion, and that roughness that the Italian Renaissance poets called “sprezzatura.”
But this is not to imply, either on my part or on that of the Tang poets, that the escape from or breaking of form is necessarily a superior or an inevitable thing.
It is only the surrounding presence of a thousand tiny gemlike poems in the tradition that gives meaning and pathos and the force of surprise to the occasional rant or dithyrambic effusion or wandering meditation.
And those perfect gems that make up the bulk of the tradition contain in their faceted interiors such blazes of sudden light, color, and emotion as to focus into an ineffable moment the same intensity of feeling that we find, drawn out and elaborated, in the longer poems.
Tang Aesthetic Philosophy
Every great national literature is both unique and at the same time representative of humanity’s universal essence.
Indeed, what we mean by “great” is perhaps precisely the union of these two characteristics.
A literature that was not unique, if one could imagine such a thing, might hardly be worth translating, since its qualities would be a literature that did not contain the spirit of humanity as a whole would be of local interest only, village gossip or arbitrary cult obsessions.
As one might say that all English poetry is in some sense dramatic, and in this uniqueness reveals more clearly than elsewhere the essential dramatic trading that must go o or that all German poetry is based on a sort of fairy tale in which the novice learns wisdom, and thus tells us something about the guiding function
or that all Hungarian poetry addresses the world of nature and human culture as “thou”, and so epitomizes the implicit “ode” element in human poetry–so Tang poetry, when it
raises its eyes from the immediate view of the midnight river or mossy tree to the vast and melancholy vision of “ten thousand miles,” reflects a hidden theme in all other poetry.
The I Ching system of divination and classification provides a continuous logical progression from the primal unity of Chi energy that is also called the Tao (or “way”), through its first division into Yin and Yang, and successive iterative dividings into binary opposites, into the rich variety of the world.
This process resembles the cosmological speculations of modern science.
During the Big Bang, physicists tell us, the forces and objects of physics first appeared as a succession of dividings—gravity and the superforce from supergravity, electromagnetism and the electroweak force from the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force from electromagnetism, matter and energy from electromagnetism, and so on. The complex dynamical systems of nature attain their full orderly-chaotic structures through an iterative process of folding or bifurcation, a process that is capitalized on by life in its spontaneous protein-folding technique.
Likewise, our own fertilized egg becomes a human being through successive cell-divisions, each division creating a more complex three-dimensional geometry, a geometry locally sensed by each cell and guiding its specialization into the organs of the future adult body.
The brains of young children grow into neural networks by dendritic branching, and learn natural language by a similar bifurcating and branching system of classification.
The Chinese intuited the basic principles of chaos and complexity theory, which underlie all these processes, long before the West did.
Of course the West always had branched systems of classification and taxonomy, as do all human cultures.
We do see a similar sequence of creation by iteration and bifurcation in the Hebrew book of Genesis—light divided from darkness, solid from liquid, upper from lower, life form the inanimate, human from non-human, and so on.
But these dividings are the work of an intervening divine power that is ext the Chinese saw the divine principle as internal, immanent in the flow of change itself.
The creative bifurcations of Hesiod’s cosmogony are genealogical, not physical, and so the Greeks did not generalize the principles of growth and reproduction to the inanimate world, and abhorred surds and infinitesimals for the same reason.
The Chinese, however, were perfectly at home with inconclusive and undecidable mathematical entities, polycentric dynamical systems and nonlinear causal networks.
In Chinese painting one is always being shown the swirls of clouds and water currents, the torsions of mountain-slopes and tree branches, and turbulences of all kinds, as if they were the folds of dancing dragon-bodies pushing through from the visionary world into that of the fleshly eye.
In Western painting the basic composition is based on straight lines and E in Chinese painting, it is as if fractal attractors played the corresponding organizing role.
We know now that linear order and straight lines are rare in the universe, and nonlinear dynamical pr the Chinese knew this all along, and the strict order of their metrical forms and architecture is a conscious reply and complement to the protean Chi of nature.
Just so we find in a scroll painting of a cliffside a tiny pavilion whose straight lines contrast with and complement the surrounding wilderness.
Every Tang poem in this collection celebrates the inner Chi of the world.
One might say that for the Tang poet Time is not a dimension or a space but a dragonlike energy, an enlivening and animating breath that makes every twig and snowflake shine and transform itself.
Chi is not just a dynamic that takes place in time, but the core property of time itself. Chi is both the increase of entropy that constitutes time for thermodynamics, and the self-organizing growth of information that takes place in evolutionary processes.
The beauty experience, the shiver of epiphanic delight in every good Tang poem, is a recognition of the promise and power of that energy, the perpetual dawning of the world.
Or again, in the terms in which the West rediscovered the old wisdom of the Chinese, our sense of beauty is an intuitive capacity to recognize the strange attractors of nonlinear dynamical processes, especially when those processes are on the brink of self-organizing into a higher integrative level of structure.
This moment of emergence is also the point of branching or bifurcation, in which a new kind of entity is precipitated out of some far-from-equilibrium crisis, a turbulence that the old system has encountered in its temporal exploration of the information space.
Out of turbul and branching creates new entities.
For the Tang poets in this collection, those entities are the germs of poems, which elaborate themselves through pairing and iteration until they are complete.
In Du Fu’s “Spring Night with Happy Rain” the wild turbulence of wind and rain and flood and cloud resolves in the last two lines into a spring dawn, suddenly full of soaked flowers, and a human city.
It is a tiny epitome of the evolution of the universe through the branching of Chi into Yin and Yang, and the continuation of the branching process, drawn by the whispered attractors inherent in the turbulence into the complex forms of flowers and cities:
A good rain knows the season when it’s right,
In spring, on time, it makes things sprout and grow.
Follow the wind, sneak out into the night:
All moist things whisper silently and slow.
Above the wild path, black clouds fill the air,
The boat-lamp on the
At dawn you see wet mounds of crimson where
The heavy flowers of Chengdu hang down low.
The very form of the classic Tang five-syllable double quatrain exemplifies the mysterious Chi-process of nature.
The first line is the Tao of the poem, emerging out of the namelessness of the preceding silence.
The second, often forming a couplet with the first, constitutes both its elaboration and its binary contrast, the yang to its yin or the yin to its yang.
The third and fourth echo the relationship between the first and second, but with a further twist.
Then the second quatrain takes the theme of the first but in a different key and at a different scale.
The universal becomes the particular, the particular is suddenly generalized into a v in either case the correspondence between the form of the macrocosm and the form of the microcosm, their “scaling” or “self-similar” property as fractal geometricians call it, is suddenly brought to mind.
But the last line, though it rhymes with some crucial ending earlier in the poem, usually pushes out into an adumbration of some further encounter or development, leaving the reader on the edge of an ineffable discovery of his own.
The whole poem is a cube of two lines, suggesting the further implications of its exponential power law.
The following, by Wang Wei, is a good example (though Wang Wei likes to vary the classic double quatrain by dividing its sense at the end of the sixth rather than the fourth line, variation upon the theme being the soul of Tang poetry):
The Han River Seen From A High Vantage Point
The three Xiang forks join at the Chu frontier,
Through the Jin Gate nine str
The river flows far beyond earth and heaven,
The mountains seem
Cities and realms float by the riverside,
Great billows roil the void immensity.
Ah yes, Xiang Yang has pretty scenery:
I’ll leave to drunk Old Shan the ecstasy!
Our Translation Methods
My co-translator prefers to be called an informant or assistant, but every word of these translations is inspired by meanings that he communicated to me.
We worked together for over two years, including a two-week trip to China together in which we visited many of the classic landscapes and cityscapes that the poems describe, and viewed artifacts, calligraphy, and painting of the Tang period.
Our translation work was mostly face-to-face.
We met each week for two to three hours, beginning with a recitation by my collaborator in Chinese, in which I noted the cadence, diction, and feeling of the piece.
I have picked up some conversational Chinese and recognize many of the words in the Tang
I know some characters and can discern a number of the radicals.
But essentially I am linguistically blind when I come to the language, and my ears and hands must be guided over these poems so that I can visualize their meanings.
My collaborator prepared and brought a trot, which included the Chinese script of the poems, a Pinyin phonetic transcription (including the tonal marks), and a “literal” translation of each word underneath the Pinyin versions.
Tang poetry has hardly any syntagmata in the Western sense (words like a, of, the, who, etc) and the logic and argument must be largely inferred from context.
One of my biggest challenges was to render into English the rich ambiguitioes and suggestive alternate readings that result from the syntactical indeterminacy of the original.
We would go through a poem word by word, with explanations by my collaborator of the historical, geographic, biographical, and cultural context and the usages and connotations of the words.
Any issues of rhyme and meter would be thoroughly aired.
For instance, in the longer, more irregular poems, I needed to know which variations on the five or seven syllable line were familiar to a Tang audience, and which would come as a deliberate surprise.
I would then prepare an English version, which my collaborator would critique by email or, if the case became complex, at our next meeting.
Sometimes I would see a further meaning in the poet’s words, using my own poetic intuition of the movement of the poet’ sometimes I would have grasped the wrong sense and have to be corrected.
My version would attempt to preserve the poem’s rhyme scheme, lineation, and cadence, and at least suggest the perfect couplets when they arose.
In English, an exact parallel in sound or grammar between two adjacent lines sounds heavy and contrived, because not varied by the Chinese system of tonal contrasts.
I usually changed the grammatical sequence while keeping the semantic pairings between the words in each line.
The largest issue that confronted us when we began our work was how to translate the Chinese metrical system into an English equivalent.
To translate the seven and five syllable Chinese lines into seven and five syllable English lines was wrong, for several reasons.
One reason is that the Chinese lines take about 3.5 and 2.8 seconds respectively to recite, since the Chinese syllable must be drawn out to about twice the length of an English syllable, so as to indicate the important semantic distinctions of tone.
An English line of seven syllables would take only about two seconds and sou an English line of five syllables, only about one and a half seconds, would sound like only a fragment of a line.
Chinese people can chatter very quickly, but the very character for “poetry” in Chinese contains radicals implying slow and elevated speech.
Another reason is that much of Tang poetic grammar is conveyed, as mentioned earlier, by means of context and word order, whereas English, even though a relatively economical language itself, still requires a host of little prepositions, articles, conjunctions, modal auxiliaries, prefixes, and suffixes to make sense.
A pair of Chinese lines, translated word for word, might look like this:
Mood come oft lone go
Good thing void self know
–but would need twice the number of syllables to express in English:
The mood comes o
There’s good only the empty self can know.
(Wang Wei: “The Villa of Zhongnan”)
A third reason is that the Tang poetic vocabulary had over centuries of use gathered a huge mass of literary and pictorial connotation and allusion, and conventional metaphoric significance.
To suggest these depths requires the full scope of English diction and word-choice.
So I decided to translate one Chinese syllable (or, to say the same thing, one Chinese written character) by two E thus restoring the actual musical length of the line, giving the opportunity to reveal the logic of the Chinese sentence, and allowing allusion and metaphor the play they have in the Chinese.
When I did this, lo and behold, I ended up with the English ballad meter or fourteener, corresponding to the Chinese seven, and the English pentameter corresponding to the Chinese five.
What is lost in this method is the almost picturelike juxtaposition of sememes in the C but what is gained is the riches of English syntax and affective emphasis, that can bring out the complexity of the Tang poet’s mood as polishing brings out the color of a gem.
The long English ballad line is usually divided into two, of eig but then again, so is the Chinese seven, into four and three, proving that the Chinese need a caesura after the fourth as we do after the eighth.
I have indicated this by indentation, as here, in Gao Shi’s melancholy “Ballad of the Yan Country”:
Mountains and rivers desolate
Like windstorms on our flanks there fall
the horsemen of the H
Dead on the field of battle lie
Under the tents of generals
the dancing-girls sing on!
In autumn by the desert fort
At sunset in the lone stronghold
few troops still keep the wall.
Too often the high-favored ones
misjudge the enemy,
Their strength spent in the pass, can’t hope
to break the siege at all.
The homesick garrison in arms
Well might the ones they left behind
Young wives in southern cities are
The warriors sent up north of Ji
turn back their heads in vain.
How might one ever cross once more
those shimmering frontier plains?
In all this vast and boundless land
what can avail us here?
Three seasons now, in deathly chi,
the clouds are ranged for war,
All night the signal of the watch
strikes echoes cold and drear.
They’re face to face and sword to sword
as blood and snow flow free,
Did ever yet the noble dead
prize fame or eulogy?
Did you not see, sir?– how we fought,
how suffered on the battlefield,
How sorely to this day do we
miss the great General Li!
These are the last lines of the poem: note that in the original the penultimate long line breaks the pattern of sevens and expands to eight, preparing a cli I have reproduced this effect by making that line a sixteener, divided into eight and eight.
I hope that something of the rhythm of the great English border ballad of Chevy Chase comes through here, transmuted into a more courtly and self-conscious key.
TWO BUDDHIST POEMS
Shen Xiu (606-706)
The body is a holy bodhi tree,
The heart a mirro
So it reflect the truth, clean it each day,
Lest dust be drawn to grime its purity.
The bodhi is no body and no tree,
There’s no bright mirro
At first no thing at all had come to be,
So what is there to draw the grime and dust?
Luobin Wang (640-c.648; composed at seven years old)
Honk, honk, honk!
Crook-necked, the geese raise clamor to the sky,
White feathers floating in the water’s green,
Red paddles rowing in the clear bright wave.
Climbing the Tower of You Zhou
Chen Zi-ang (661-702)
I cannot see all those who went before,
All those who are to come I cannot see.
Then in my loneliness and grief the tears roll down,
For heaven and earth appear so vast, so vast to me.
In the Mountains
Wang Bo (650-676)
Why must the Yangtze flow so sluggishly?
Ten thousand li
I yearn for my return.
And it’s so late, the autumn wind blows high
And through the hills, the hills, the gold leaves fly.
Farewell to Junior Prefect Du, on his Departure to Take Office in Shu Zhou
Wang Bo (650-676)
The forts of Tang guard Chin’
I gaze toward Five F smoke and wind.
Sadly I say goodbye to you, my friend,
Both of us official travelling men.
Soul mates we are, between the four great seas,
Neighbors, though at the world’
Let us not linger at the road’s fork, then,
Like tender children, wetting handkerchieves.
On an Autumn Night in the Mountain Pavilion:
For Reverend Master Hui, in Return for his Poem
Chen Ziang (661-702)
White is the autumn forest,
Pale is the emerald mountain, pale and green.
Cloistered, I sense change in
Alone I sit, open the prayer-room’s screen.
The night breeze bears confused and distant sound.
The bright moon dews the midnight with cold light.
I bow before your calm, unscheming mind:
I cannot put away this worldly care.
A Full Moon: Missing Distant Friends
Zhang Jiu Ling (673-740)
Out of the ocean grows the brilliant moon,
From furthest shores friends s
Grieving, they wish this long night over soon,
Awake, remembering, the whole night through.
I douse the wick, in love with the moonlight,
Throw on some clothes, moist with the falling dew.
Would I could give you armfuls of bright night!–
But I go back to sleep and dreams of you.
A Song of Liang Zhou
Wang Zhihuan
The Yellow River climbs away
A lonely outpost fortress lies
in mountains ten miles high.
Qiang flute, why must you take to heart
the “Willow” song, alas?
You know the spring wind never blows
across the Yu Men pass.
Climbing the Tower of Guan Que
Wang Zhihuan
The white sun nears the mountain, shines no more,
The Yellow Rive
If you would stretch your eye one thousand li,
You must climb one more storey of the tower.
Spring Morning
Meng Haoran
My spring sleep did not feel the first dawn air,
But now I hear the birds sing everywhere.
Throughout the night the sound of wind and rain–
Who knows how many flowers fell, out there!
at an Old Friend’s Farmhouse
Meng Haoran
My old friend cooks a chicken millet stew,
He’s asked me to his farm to share a meal.
A clump of green trees lines the village side,
Blue mountains slant above the city wall.
Flowers and a threshing floor outside the window,
We drink, talk hemp an
Wait till the Chong Yang festival: I’ll come
In time for the chrysanthemums in Fall.
Gazing at Lake Dong Ting:
For Prime Minister Zhang
Meng Haoran (689-740)
In August the lake water’s flat and high,
Its depths merge softl
But mists steam from the bays of Yun and Meng,
And waves shake Yue Yang’s ramparts by and by.
I would aspire to cross,
In this wise realm, idle and shamed am I;
I sit ashore, watch anglers fish afloat,
Vainly admire the fish that catch my eye.
Farewell to My Guest Xin Jian at the Lotus Pagoda
Wang Changling (698-765)
Cold rain and river drift and drift
through Wu-land’
At dawn we’ in Chu’s lone hills
your journey must be made.
In Luo Lang tell my kith and kin
if they ask after me,
That I am but a crystal heart
within an urn of jade.
Sorrow in My Lady’s Chamber
Wang Changling (698-765)
In her bedchamber the young wife
But dressed and painted, this spring day,
climbing her emerald stair,
She sees along the country lane
the weeping willows’ green,
Grieves that she sent her lord away
to seek high honors there.
Beyond the Great Wall
Wang Changling (698-765)
As in Qin times the moon, the pass,
so in the time of H
Young soldiers march ten thousand li,
and do not yet return.
Were the famed “Flying General”
of Dragon City here,
We’d never let Hun cavalry
across Mount Yin’s frontier!
Joining the Army–Two Songs
(out of seven)
Wang Changling (698-765)
Long cloud-racks over Lake Qing Hai
shade mount
From Lonely Outpost you gaze out
where Yu Men Pass must go.
A hundred battles in the sands
If we do not defeat Lou Lan,
may none return again!
The desert sandstorm turns the sun
a dusky yellow-
The red war-banner’s furled as they
pass through the fort’s gateway.
Alone the vanguard fights tonight
north of the river T
Reports come in that Tu Yu Hun,
the chief, is captured now.
Lodging Beneath Mount Bai-Gu
(received degree 712-713)
The traveler’s way leads past the verdant peaks,
The boat glides swifter than the teal-
The flood has widened level with the banks,
My one sail hangs, the breeze blows calm and slow.
The far sea’s sun grows fro
The river’s spring invades the old year.
If I wrote letters home, where would they go?
Back with the wild geese to Luo Yang far below.
Embassy to the Frontier Pass
Wang Wei (701-761)
To visit the frontier I
As special envoy I had passed Ju Yan.
Tumbleweed blown beyond the lands of Han,
The wild geese seeking foreign skies again.
In the great desert one tall line of smoke,
On the long river, round, the setting sun:
A mounted scout comes to me in Xiao Guan,
Says the commander is on Mount Yan Ran.
Wang Wei (701-761)
The mountain’s empty of all human sign
But for a voice that rings out far below.
The backlit forest casts deep shafts that shine
Upon the moss, give back a bright green glow.
Longing Memories
Wang Wei (701-761)
The red bean grows down in the southern lands,
In spring, it sprouts how many filigrees?
Please gather, sir, armfuls of these sweet shoots:
Such things arouse the richest memories.
On the Festival of the Ninth Day of the Ninth Month, I Remember my Brothers
–East of Mount Hua
Wang Wei (701-761)
A foreign guest, and all alone,
stranger in a strange land,
I yearn, each happy holiday,
twice for my own dear kind.
I know my distant brothers on
whatever height they’ve climbed
Have set one extra cornel for
the one they left behind.
The Guest House in the Bamboos
Wang Wei (701-761)
Deep in the bamboo grove I sit alone,
I pluck the qin,
In these unpeopled woods I sing unknown,
But the bright moon comes and shines on me.
Song of Wei Cheng City
Wang Wei (701-761)
The dawn rain lays the dust in Wei Cheng City,
Spring willow-light has greened the guest-
My dearest sir, drain
West of Yang Pass no old friends can be found.
Autumn Evening at Home in the Mountains
Wang Wei (701-761)
The mountain’s empty after recent rain,
It’s come at last, the
A bright moon’s shining through the needled pine,
Among the stones the spring
Girls come from washing rustle the bamboos,
Fishing-boats pass, lotuses sink and stir.
The sweet spring grass has withered–what of that?
This is a dwelling for a prince’s heir.
The Central Southern Mountains
Wang Wei (701-761)
Close to Heaven’s capital stands Mount Tai Yi,
Its ranges reach the margins of the sea,
Its white clouds part before me,
I enter a blue haze I
Across its peak the constellations change,
Its valleys lit or shadowed variously.
Across the river there’s a woodman: he
May tell me where to find a hostelry.
The Han River Seen From A High Vantage Point
Wang Wei (701-761)
The three Xiang forks join at the Chu frontier,
Through the Jin Gate nine str
The river flows far beyond earth and heaven,
The mountains seem
Cities and realms float by the riverside,
Great billows roil the void immensity.
Ah yes, Xiang Yang has pretty scenery:
I’ll leave to drunk Old Shan the ecstasy!
Peasants by the River Wei
Wang Wei (701-761)
Across the hamlet slants the evening light,
Cattle and sheep come ambling down the street,
An ancient peasant waits for the herd-boy,
Leans on his cane beside a wicker gate.
The pheasants whir in eared and ripening wheat,
In tattered mulberries
A farmer they meet
A the time allows.
I envy them their peaceful unconcern
And sadly chant “Some Day I Will Return”.
A Bird Sings In The Ravine
Wang Wei (701-761)
I am quite still.
A cassia flower falls.
The spring night’s quiet, the mountain is serene.
The moon comes out, alarms a mountain bird.
At times he sings down in the spring ravine.
In the Mountains
Wang Wei (701-761)
The Jin Brook’s pebbles stand out white and pale,
The red leaves dwindle in the sky’
Although there’s no rain on the mountain trail,
People seem clothed with liquid emerald.
The Villa of Zhongnan
Wang Wei (701-761)
In middle age I came to love the Dao,
In old age dwell now under Mount Zhongnan.
The mood comes o
There’s good only the empty self can know.
I walk beside the water to its bourne,
And there I sit and watch the rising clouds.
Sometimes I meet an old man in the woods:
We talk and laugh with no thought of return.
In Return for a Poem from Deputy Prefect Zhang
Wang Wei (701-761)
Now late in years, stillness is all I crave.
Free of “ten thousand things” my heart’s at ease.
I see myself as one with no designs,
Know only the way back among the trees.
The pine-borne breeze has
The mountain moon lights my chin’s melodies.
You ask the truth of failure and success:
From river-deeps a fisher’s song replies.
For Wang Lun
Li Bai (701-762)
Li Bai has got aboard his boat,
Upon the bank he hears the sound
of footsteps and of song.
The Peach-Tree lake is deep, so deep,
a thousand feet wellnigh,
But not as deep as Wang Lun’s heart
As he bids me goodbye.
Thoughts in a Silent Night
Li Bai (701-762)
The moonlight falling by my bed tonight
I took for early frost upon the ground.
I lift my head, gaze at the moon, so bright,
I lower my head, think of my native land.
Farewell, Upon Passing Mount Jin Men
Li Bai (701-762)
And now at length I’ve passed beyond Jin Men
On my adventure to the land of Chu.
The mountains end, the flatlands open out,
The Yangtze meets the vast plains and pours through.
The moon is flung upon its heavenly mirror,
The clouds grow mirag
But still I love the waters of my homeland
That travel with my boat a thousand li.
Ascending the Phoenix Tower of Ji Ling
Li Bai (701-762)
Once on the Phoenix Tower played
the fabled phoenix shrill,
That bird is gone, the tower stands void,
the river flows on still.
In the Wu Palace grass and flowers
Fine nobles of the house of Jin
leave nothing but a hill.
The Three-Peak Mountain falls beyond
the blue rim of the sky,
The double river parts around
the far White Egret I
Always gross veils of cloud may hide
the glorious sun of heaven–
Royal Chang-An is hid from sight,
and my heart feels the chill.
The Perilous Shu Road
Li Bai (701-762)
Ah, terrible, that road!
How dangerous, how high!
The road to Shu is the most dreadful way,
Harder to climb than is the deep blue sky.
The realms of Can Cong and Yu Fu go back
To foundings
Forty-eight thousand years since then
they let go drifting by
But never with the forts of Qin
shared message or reply.
The western face of Mount Tai Bai
is where the wild birds fly,
Migrants that find their way across
the summit of E Mei.
It’s said the mountain broke and fell
in a great landslide
and many brave men died
And afterward the stair of heaven was joined
to the cliff causeway.
Above, a peak so high
the six swift dragons of the
Below, a rushing flood whose churning waves
turn back in whirlpools on themselves.
Even the yellow crane can not pass here,
whose element’
The very apes wish they could cross,
but fear to climb so high.
So spiraled round is Qi Ni Pinnacle,
To cli}