“River Snow”
Liu Zongyuan
(Late 8th/early 9th century CE)
The birds have all flown
From these hills.
No footprints
Along the paths.
Alone on a tiny boat
Beneath cape and hat
An old man fishes
In the cold river snow.
The relationship of humanity with Nature is a central theme of much Medieval Chinese poetry. The Taoist withdrawal from the social world can involve a feeling of “oneness” with Nature. But there is another aspect that draws attention to the unfeeling indifference of Nature towards the individual person. In Liu Zongyuan’s poem, that bleaker view of solitude amidst Nature (here seen at its most elemental – even the birds have fled it) is embodied in the image of the old fisherman. Yet there is something stirring in his fortitude. His cape (suō) would have been made of rushes, and his hat (lì) of bamboo.
Liu Zongyuan (773-819) had become a powerful politician by the age of thirty-two, but then fell foul of court politics and was exiled to the South for most of the rest of his life. In addition to poetry, he wrote fiction and essays, including defences of Buddhism against its detractors. The original of “River Snow” is written in four lines, five characters per line. I’ve broken it up for my translation – partly because the subject-matter seemed to call for more white space!
“Zhuliguan”
Wang Wei
(Early 8th century CE)
Sitting alone in this remote bamboo grove
I strum the strings of my qin, I whistle a slow tune.
No one knows I’m here, deep in the woods:
Only the bright moon comes to illuminate me.
At first glance, Wang Wei’s poem may seem to provide a complete antithesis to Liu Zongyuan’s bleak vision of solitude-in-nature. The music is a comforting touch, but it is worth remembering that moonlight is a cold light. According to traditional Chinese folklore and mythology, the moon is occupied by the unhappy goddess Chang’e, who according to some accounts stole the elixir of immortality and had to flee there, where she lives an eternal life of lonely isolation.
Wang Wei (701-761) was one of the major figures of the “High Tang” (roughly the first half of the 8th century CE). The High Tang holds something of the same status for Chinese civilization as Athens of the 5th century BCE or Renaissance Italy holds for European civilization, with a reputation as a Golden Age of arts and letters. Wei was a truly a “Renaissance man”: in addition to his poetry, he was a celebrated painter, calligrapher and musician.
Zhuliguan is a place-name – part of the estate that Wei purchased with proceeds of his artistic successes, located some fifty miles from the Tang capital, Chang’an (in modern Shaanxi province). Qin is often translated as “lute” or “zither”. “Zither” gives a better picture, because the qin was laid flat rather than held like a lute or guitar. Perhaps because I’m a keen amateur musician myself (and hence have a deep respect for the technical and cultural particularity of instruments) I’ve opted to leave it untranslated: a qin is a qin, and nothing else.
Whistling, incidentally, seems to have held an artistic status in Medieval China that it has not been able to capture in modern times. The third-century poet Ruan Ji (one of the legendary “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove”) was a celebrated siffleur.
I worked from the Chinese text in Archie Barnes, Chinese Through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse (2007). In this wonderful book (far more than just a language text-book), Barnes urges students following his course to attempt their own literary translations of the poems, as a way of thinking their way into the meaning of these often-elliptical texts. It’s in that spirit that I’ve attempted the translation above, and will attempt more in future.
Photography: Judith Robinson
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