The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry

“The Peasant’s Song”: Both the Confucian Mencius (372–288 B.C.E.) and his contemporary the Taoist Chuang Tzu (c. 360 B.C.E.) attest that this is “the first Chinese poem.” From this evidence we can only know that the work preceded at least one of the two who cite it, the other of whom might or might not even have been its author. It is very unlikely that it is actually older than all of the poems in the Shih Ching, but its theme of independence and individuality is as old as the hills (and valleys, and swamps) in which the peasants lived.

“My Lord Is Full of Yang”: The pun on organ (a reed pipe, a mouth organ) is there in the original. The Yang of the Tai-chi, the well recognized picture of Yin and Yang in their eternal embrace, does refer in traditional Chinese culture to the male member, as well as to the principle of maleness, and to the sun, among other related ideas.

“Before the East Was Bright”: This poem is alluded to in T’ao Ch’ien’s “Drinking Wine” set, and it is clear there as here that both the court officer’s anxious desire to please and the duke’s disorderly demands are being satirized. T’ao Ch’ien’s poem is stronger because he uses the time-honored poem from the sacred classic to satirize himself.

“The Fisherman’s Song”: The “hat strings” have traditionally been taken to refer to the strings that hold the hat of office on the head. Thus the meaning is something like, “When the times are right, I can serve the state as all good men should. When the times would require I be morally compromised by service, I may retire into hermitage.” Ch’u Yuan is a hero for the Confucian and a fool for the Taoist. Most traditional Chinese literati were both Confucian and Taoist. The difficulty posed by this paradoxical advice is apparent in the allusion made to this poem in major works by such poets as T’ao Ch’ien, Wang Wei, and Li Po.

“Song at Kai-hsia”: Hsiang Yu, at least pretender to the position of prince of Ch’u, was most likely literate and may indeed have written this poem. It seems more likely that it was written anonymously and posthumously by a Ch’u loyalist to create a romantic aura around the figure of the vanquished contender for the throne of a new dynasty.

“Song of the Great Wind”: This poem was performed to celebrate the destruction of the Ch’in Dynasty and the proclaiming of the first truly successfully unified Chinese dynasty, the Han. Liu Pang was a peasant and no doubt at best barely literate. Nonetheless, he chose brilliant associates and was a better military leader than all his rivals at least partly because he understood that success depended on the people’s understanding that his victory would make their lives better. The concerns of a ruler, not just a war chief, are apparent in this poem. Its attribution to his name by traditional historians shows their desire to capture this vigorous and virile character (he once pissed in the hat of a prissy Confucian scholar who volunteered to design the proper ceremonial rites) within the confines of the concept of wen, making him properly suited to rule according to the dominant Confucian ideology of the period.

“Nineteen Old Poems of the Han,” poem 2: All previous translations have ignored the word lattice. I believe it is an allusion to a famous passage in the Analects of Confucius in which Confucius, barred from entering the sickroom, reaches through a window lattice to take the hand of an honored friend who is suffering from a terrible disease (commentators have assumed leprosy). Confucius says, “That such a man should suffer such an illness . . .” The wonderfully sophisticated presentation of the plight of a woman (who in conventional terms might be seen as “merely” a prostitute, perhaps frustrated in her schemes to raise herself out of “such an illness”) is signaled by the allusion. The first six lines of the poem include doubled adjectives that engage the reader’s imagination in a way that expands and diffuses the meaning of the doubled word. When the phrases appear in later poetry, they are most often allusions to this poem. Dictionaries often define the terms by reference to their context in this poem. The last line of the poem is worldly, knowing, and, I believe, sympathetic.

“Nineteen Old Poems of the Han,” poem 10: The poem presents the myth of the Herd Boy and the Weaving Girl, celestial lovers separated by the Emperor of Heaven and allowed only a single night a year, the seventh of the seventh (lunar) month. What separates them is the Milky Way, which in Chinese has several names; here simply the Han River (an actual river on earth, too), elsewhere the river of stars or the river of the sky. Many if not most English translators fudge this one, some giving up all the river imagery for the sake of the idiomatic English of the Milky Way.

“Nineteen Old Poems of the Han,” poem 17: The position of the constellations in the sky at a certain time on any given night tells the sky watcher the time of year, just as their movement over the course of a minute or an hour tells a more ephemeral time. Living a more outdoor and less well-lighted life than we do, the traditional poets knew and used the skies to allude to many aspects of the passage of time.

PART TWO: A Time of Trials

“Fought South of the City Wall”: China’s philosophies do, indeed, honor a pacifistic stance. However, neither Confucius nor Taoists advise accepting defeat. China is not, moreover, without her martial heroes and heroines.

Poems of Juan Chi: These poems are drawn from Juan’s eighty-two poems in pentameter, called the Yung Huai Shih (Songs of My Heart’s Ideals). The poet and his work are idols for T’ao Ch’ien, considered one of China’s greatest poets, who also lived under a decadent government. Many phrases from Juan Chi’s poems appear in T’ao’s work.

“Poem 73”: This poem is loaded with references to the Taoist classic Chuang Tzu. For Tung-ye Chi and his horses, see The Essential Chuang Tzu, p. 109 (translated by J. P. Seaton and Sam Hamill, Shambhala Publications, 1998).

Poetry of Hsieh Ling-yun: I find that in spite of my personal prejudice against aristocracy (any “aristocracy”: didn’t our revolution send those twits who think they were born better than us plain folks back where they came from), something that I’m proud of and used to think of as the heritage of every American, in spite, I say, of that prejudice, when I came to translating a short selection from Hsieh Ling-yun I discovered a grudging admiration for the poet. My first introduction to Hsieh Ling-yun, as my heart and mind recall it, was in a lecture by a well-known native Chinese professor from a well-known Chinese literary family, which included several stories apparently from the scholarly “oral tradition” since I’ve never seen anything quite like them in print in Chinese or English since. These stories characterized Hsieh as an abusive “Lord” and a self-abusive drug user who, according to the storyteller, was often portrayed as looking something like the cartoon caveman Allie Oop, with lower legs that got broader and broader from the knee down, the result of edema caused by the recreational use or abuse of psychotropic mushrooms and ergot (grain rust fungus) derivatives. With this picture in mind, you may find the arrogant aristocrat of my prejudice in both the poems here selected.

PART THREE: The Golden Age

Buddhism in the golden age: Contrary to popular misconception, Buddhism was never monolithic in China (or elsewhere, except perhaps at the very beginning). Three major Buddhist “churches,” T’ien T’ai, Hua Yen, and Ch’ing T’u, along with several strong tantric sects, existed in T’ang China. Ch’an, or Zen, was actually born and nurtured toward maturity by T’ien T’ai in the eighth century.

“Palace Lament”: The willow is doubly powerful in reminding her of her mistake: breaking a twig is a ritual of parting, since the name of the tree is in Chinese a pun on a word that means “to stay” (to remain) and (in her afterthought) “to be detained.” She should have had him stay. Now he “stays” somewhere else.

“Bamboo Pavilion”: The character for “again” in line 2 is the same character as that used in Wang Wei’s next poem, “Deer Park.” In both cases it alludes to the I Ching, one of the more subtle of the Confucian classics, where it means not just “again” but rather “to begin again at the beginning.” Also note the similarity of the last line of this poem to the last line of Li Po’s “Sitting at Reverence Mountain.” A golden age may be necessarily full of poetic inspirations and friendly competition.

“Deer Park”: Both Chinese and English language poems are in fact multimedia artifacts, but the Chinese poet sometimes makes use of extra visual layers not directly available to his English language counterpart. For a rather wild ride through the poetic possibilities embodied in the original, see my essay “Once More, on the Empty Mountain,” in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, edited by Frank Stewart, Copper Canyon Press, 2004.

“To Magistrate Chang”: In English, this is probably Wang Wei’s second most famous poem. What has often been read as a sort of Zen koan offered as advice from the wise old gentleman to the aspiring young official is by its reference to “The Fisherman’s Song” transformed into a clear statement of Wang Wei’s actual position. The poem then may appear somewhat sarcastic, since young Mr. Chang, a military official, was probably not sufficiently well educated to be able to appreciate the advice. Like some Taoists and many Zen teachers, Wang Wei does not seem to favor gentle guidance.

“Drinking with a Hermit Friend”: When you first read this poem in the Chinese, the thing that jumps out at you is the second line. In the characters, it’s one cup, one cup, again, one cup. What dullness, or what daring? “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” Only a Li Po, or a Shakespeare, could get away with that kind of repetition. In Li Po’s line we also find the playful use of the hyperclassical word for “beginning again,” from the I Ching, that Wang Wei used in his “Deer Park.” Li Po raises the stakes with the next line, however. It’s a direct quote, with only one of the seven characters slightly changed, from the official biography of T’ao Ch’ien, in the Sung Shu (the history of Liu Sung dynasty, 420–477). This supposedly drunken song contains not only drunken babbling—“a cup a cup anutha cup”—but a wonderfully playful “scholarly” allusion as well.

“Sitting at Reverence Mountain”: Reverence Mountain is a “literal” translation of the name of the mountain, sometimes left untranslated as Ching-t’ing Shan. It is clear that Li Po is playing with the name.

“Thoughts of a Quiet Night”: The twenty characters of the original quatrain include two that are stylized pictures of the moon and four more that contain that picture as an element of their construction. Good calligraphers often add several more when creating a hanging scroll of the poem, by “deforming” characters and elements that are similar in form to the moon character. The creative imagination finds, in the moon, a celestial connection between separated friends, lovers, or family members. In China, this is probably the single best-known and best-loved of all classical poems. It is said that in the old days even illiterate peasants could chant the poem by heart.

“Jade Stairs Lament”: The moon, so important to Li Po, appears again here, captured in and multiplied by the facets of the hanging crystal curtain (its facets speaking in a chorus of potential togetherness) as it mocks the spurned lover.

“At Ch’iu-pu Lake”: This quatrain is from a group of seventeen. Whereas Tu Fu experimented with chueh chu, for the most part Li Po just wrote them (and then wrote some more). There is a famous story about this particular one: a young Japanese pupil, having read the poem in an elementary school class, insisted that Li Po was a liar, since no one could have hair three thousand yards long. I wonder how the perhaps apocryphal little boy felt about the line when he saw his first white hair?

“Bathing”: In the first four lines Li Po is in apparent agreement with the arrogance of Ch’u Yuan, but in the last two lines he switches to the mocking voice of “The Fisherman’s Song.”

“Ancient Air”: The opening lines of this poem, full of the names of the stars of the sky and of literary history, are only background for one of the few occasions when Li Po allows the cruel realities of his times into the privileged world of his imagination.

“To the Tune of P’u-sa-man”: One of Li Po’s many most famous poems, this is an early example of the tz’u, a new form of verse discussed in the introduction. Here we find Li Po alluding to poem 13 of the “Nineteen Old Poems of the Han.”

“Ruins: The Ku-su Palace”: This great little poem and the one that follows represent a type of Chinese poem called the tiao ku, poems written on historical sites, in most cases ruins, that speak of the ephemeral nature of the worldly glories: sic transit gloria mundi, as Thomas à Kempis reminds the popes, in the words of their splendid and glorious inaugural rituals. To my mind, these two little poems by Li Po put Shelley’s pillar of Ozymandias in the shade.

“Searching for the Taoist Monk Ch’ang at South Creek”: The phrase “all words gone” is most obviously an echo of T’ao Ch’ien. It originally appears, as François Cheng has pointed out, in Chuang Tzu. Both of these sources were doubtless familiar to the poet.

“Moonlight Night”: Longpeace is the translation of Ch’angan, the T’ang capital. I have translated this place name here, because Tu Fu clearly intended its ironic effect.

“Captive Spring”: As always, Tu Fu’s life is a tangle of the personal and the political. He shows perhaps better than any other Chinese poet how completely the two are one for a responsible man of talent. In this poem, isolated, trapped in the rebel-occupied capital, he thinks first of his wife and then of his responsibility as an official. The latter he shows subtly, referring only to the fact that as he wastes his time in the capital his hair is growing too thin to hold the pin that was used to hold his official’s cap in place.

“Song of the Bound Chickens”: One of the reasons Tu Fu is great is that he truly does make ideas (and metaphors and philosophical arguments) out of things. Juan Chi and T’ao Ch’ien were intellectuals as well as poets, but they weave their intellectual webs from conventional poetic language. Tu Fu needs just a chicken and an ant to discuss slavery (and slave owning). Thomas Jefferson would certainly have shivered at this poem, or, had he written it, we might find it easier to forgive our greatest leader his trespasses.

“Thinking of My Little Boy”: This and the next three poems all deal with Tu Fu’s sons. There has been a scholarly discussion of whether the first two poems refer to the same son as the second two poems. I think that’s irrelevant, and that what is relevant is that Tu Fu loved his sons, and they him. He loved his daughters, too, as other poems of his clearly show.

“Gone by Myself to the Riverbank, in Search of a Flower”: Here Tu Fu visits a brothel. Showing that to write about such ordinary behavior is not in itself quite so ordinary, he justifies his visit with the none too subtle juxtaposition of the grave of the Buddhist abbot and the house of the madam, the two of whom share the surname Huang, which is, certainly not coincidentally, the color of the earth (huang denotes a color that ranges from dark brown to a yellowish tan) in which the abbot lies.

“Thoughts While Traveling by Night”: The wen that is referred to here is the wen with so many different related meanings that may be the most important concept separating the modern West from traditional China. It has often been rendered as “letters” or “the written word” in translations of this poem, but I have left it as wen to emphasize its greater meaning. Though Tu Fu certainly harbored a desired to be remembered, to attain immortality for his literary works, I am convinced that the “fame” he desired was something (may I say it?) more noble than fame for a talent, even one developed into a surpassing skill, a sublime art. A thoroughgoing Confucian (though clearly the sort of epicurean we call a Taoist and certainly the most humane sort of T’ien-T’ai Buddhist as well) such as Tu Fu wanted fame for having achieved wen, for deserving to be called a chun tzu, a just and humane governor of his community.

“Gazing from High”: With a series of fairly erudite allusions, Ch’ien Ch’i appears to be telling the monks (true men) that though his heart is with them he cannot perform miracles (like Bodhidharma crossing the river on a reed) to aid them. Most Zen poets avoid literary allusions. Maybe the monks’ need overrode Ch’ien Ch’i’s observance of Zen poetic convention.

“The Master of Hsiang Plays His Lute”: Wu-t’ung is the catalpa tree, whose large leaves murmur dolefully in a breeze. The scene is the site of Ch’u Yuan’s supposed suicide.

“Song of the South of the River”: As often happens with a translation, the most interesting action happens offstage in the realm of the untranslatable: the wave riders are young men (with all the panache and romantic cachet of our own surfers) who ride the tidal bore, the annual tidal wave that runs up the Yangtze for phenomenal distances inland. These tough guys surpass the trader/traitor husband ironically in regularity of visit (at least once a year) and also perhaps in sexual attractiveness: so the translator has the traveling salesman’s wife cry something along the lines of “I shoulda married a surfer.”

“Moored at Maple Bridge”: This great quatrain hangs, in calligraphic form, on the walls of tens of millions of homes and offices today. The poet sees the sadness in the chaos inevitably attendant upon the fall of a dynasty. The temple bell offers solace, even a reminder of the possibility of salvation, to every traveler. To show this in English required more than four lines.

“Grass on the Ancient Plain”: It is likely that Po Chu-i intended to give this little farewell a political twist. The grass, “tender” as a friendship, and tough as a true one as well, may also be meant to stand for “the people,” whose welfare was the shared moral and ethical goal of Po Chu-i and his here unnamed friend.

“The Charcoal Man”: This poem is a perfect example of the sort of political poetry that won Po Chu-i fame as an upstanding supporter of social justice in the best Confucian tradition. Along with his close friend, the poet Yuan Chen, he is credited with creating a new genre of socially critical poetry, called the Hsin Yueh Fu, or New Music Bureau Poems. However, the reader is sure to notice the similarity between “The Charcoal Man,” and Tu Fu’s “The Press-Gang at Shih-hao Village,” a poem written more than a century earlier.

“The Old Fisherman”: Liu Tsung-yuan, renowned through Chinese history as both a poet and a prose master, was also a Buddhist politician who was involved in a constantly fluctuating battle for control of the late T’ang court. The references in this famous poem to the state of Ch’u and the River Hsiang (where Ch’u Yuan was said to have drowned himself) and to the Ch’u period poem “The Fisherman’s Song” clearly show that Liu intended us to travel back with him a thousand years from his time to forge our understanding of his ethical, spiritual, and political position here. Can we suppose that he would allow us to rest a little first, after our 1,200-year trip to his late T’ang?

“River Snow”: This is one of the most famous of all the great T’ang dynasty quatrains. Your acquaintance with Ch’u Yuan and his fisherman friend is not the key to a cipher: a poem is not (usually) written in code. But your knowledge may deepen the mysterious beauty that has allowed this poem to live nearly a dozen centuries so far.

“Searching, and Not Finding, the Hermit”: Simples refers to medicinal herbs.

“Passing the Night in a Village Inn”: In addition to the two poems included here for this poet under his secular name, Chia Tao, several more are included in the T’ang Zen section under his “name in religion,” Wu Pen, by which he was known during the early part of his life when a shaven-headed Zen Buddhist monk.

“Don’t Go Out, Sir!”: Perhaps his own poor health caused Li Ho to identify with Confucius’s favorite disciple, Yen Hui, who also died young. Readers who imagine that Taoism and Buddhism are the sources of all wildly imaginative literature and literary figures in China should take note that mad as he is, Li Ho still knows that Confucian belief is at the core of the Chinese cultural experience. Besides Yen Hui, several other Confucian exemplars are mentioned in the poem, and the reference to the wearing of orchids is an allusion to Ch’u Yuan himself.

“The Tomb of Su Hsiao-hsiao”: Su Hsiao-hsiao is the name of a famous courtesan. Here, at its most restrained, Li Ho’s style certainly still has a ghostly power.

“Confession”: Here, “won a name” is a ferociously ironic pun: to win a name means to gain fame in Chinese, just as in English, though certainly the distinction between (honorable) fame and infamy or notoriety was clearer in Tu Mu’s time than in our own even in China. Chiang-nan is China’s scenic sunny south. Yang-chou dreams refers to illusory dreams of luxury.

“Untitled” by Li Shang-yin: It’s generally agreed that the explanation for the abstruse quality of Li Shang-yin’s poems lies primarily in the fact that they are artifacts of the processes of courtly sexual intrigues: that is, he’s both angling for lovers, attempting to communicate with them, and bragging of his conquests. The quality of the language and the gossip surrounding the subject matter have kept him ranked high in popularity among lovers of T’ang poetry. Some readers would say these two poems are not a fair sample. I think they are.

PART FOUR: A Few Strong Voices Still Singing

The Poetry of Ou-yang Hsiu: This selection includes six tz’u poems and six classical quatrains. Ou-yang Hsiu legitimized the tz’u as a form by simply signing his culturally very potent name to his poems. Many Sung dynasty poets were writing tz’u by his time, but in the conservative culture of the time they were waiting for someone like Ou-yang to make the first step. And he did, in spite of the fact that he was associated with the most conservative of the Confucian political “party.” The first group that he published under his own name, two of which are included here, are actually written to a tune title with regular seven-syllable lines, so the innovator cheated just a little, not going all the way here, as he did later, to the irregular line length that was the real mark of the tz’u.

“A painted skiff”: This and the next poem are taken from Ou-yang’s groundbreaking first set of nonanonymous tz’u. They are all excellent poems in their own right. The repeated “West Lake’s good” uses the simplest word for “good” in the Chinese language, obviously intentionally. Thus Ou-yang beat Ernest Hemingway to the punch by about nine centuries. In the poem above he puns on the word for “to hold office,” which also means to “endure.” As the two poems suggest, Ou-yang Hsiu was in (somewhat less than rigorous) political exile when he wrote this set of “radical” poems.

“Face turned to falling flowers; a breeze, ripples on the water”: Among the many little superstitions common among the Chinese (like our knocking on wood after speaking wishfully, or saying “gesundheit” or “bless you” after a sneeze) is the prohibition regarding the sharing of a pear by lovers or a married couple. It is based on the fact that the pear is called li in Chinese and to divide (share) is pronounced “fen.” Fenli, pronounced the same but not written with the same characters, means “to separate,” and so the sharing of a pear between loved ones is forbidden. (If only it were so easy to do away with separation.) The translator’s play at the end of this poem is based on a similar play on the part of Ou-yang.

“Two Poems on Paintings by Mr. Yin”: Here the toad and the snail may refer to specific political and social climbers probably well known to the poet’s audience. No insult to real toads and snails, living or dead, is intended, I am sure.

“To the Abbot of the Tung-lin Monastery”: This quatrain is often identified as Su Shih’s “enlightenment poem,” it being traditional for clerical and lay practitioners of Zen alike to compose a poem (a gatha, or hymn of praise) when they first experienced spiritual awakening. That the last line should seem something of a challenge to the abbot does not necessarily disqualify this poem as an expression of enlightenment. The reference to the Buddha in the first two lines is oblique but unmistakable.

“Four Verses”: Chang Yang-hao is a fascinating character, maybe because in the final analysis his answer to his own apparently rhetorical question here was a surprisingly nonrhetorical “yes.” He served the government early in life in an official capacity, but was early forced to flee the capital in disguise as a result of a penchant for honest advice. When he was called back to service, asked to take over government of an area under siege by famine, he did not falter from the Confucian ideal of service, and he died in office, it is said, of overwork.

“Ching-wei”: The ching-wei is a mythical bird, one that, in mythical, prehistoric times, tried to fill up the sea with pebbles to express her loyalty. Ku Yen-wu sees himself as a “modern-day” ching-wei, a Sisyphus condemned by his own sense of honor to fight the Manchus one pebble at a time, while, as the end of the poem suggests, birds of another feather are building and feathering their own nests. This is one of the least opaque of Ku’s poems.

“Eight Feet”: There is an allusion in almost every line of this poem. The feeling of mystery that I hope this translation may hint at would have inspired the poem’s contemporary reader to attempt to decipher its literary code. That attempt, using reference works like the immense dictionary of poetic phrases called the P’ei-wen Yun-fu to supplement the monumental amount of material held in memory by the conventionally trained Confucian reader, still wouldn’t have been easy. The ordinary literate person, the audience for the poems of a Yuan Mei, a Ching An, or a Su Man-shu, and of China’s then rapidly growing body of really excellent colloquial fiction, probably wouldn’t have been either interested in or able to master the task.

“Talking Art”: In a fairly rare foray into “critical discourse,” Yuan Mei brings the most radical contemporary artistic critical theory straight into play (playfully, to be sure) in inimitable style, as he applies it to poetry.

“So Be It”: The moss in the path has been growing since the earliest Chinese poems. Yuan Mei is surely thinking back, here, to the moss growing in Li Po’s famous “Ballad of Ch’angkan.” The poetic tradition is reflected on Yuan Mei’s gown in the poem at hand.

“Ginseng”: A preference for invigorating ginseng over long-winded philosophizing provides a succinct critique of the mean-spirited, puritanical, nitpicking fundamentalism that Chu Hsi’s neo-Confucianism had become in the hands of the Chinese who were Manchu collaborationists.

“Speaking My Mind”: Ou-yang Hsiu’s “Lang-ye Creek” is more elegant, but Yuan Mei’s broad, almost Monty Python–style humor is more suited to a democratized “Wang Yang-ming-ist,” anti-Manchu middle-class audience. It represents a classical style that could conceivably become part of the repertoire of modern Chinese poets.

“Late Gazing”: Despite his (misplaced) reputation as anti-Buddhist, here, as in the next poem, “The Bell,” Yuan Mei points to Buddhism as the source of needed radical change in the Chinese polity as well as in poetry. Yuan Mei’s favorite Confucian, the radical democrat Wang Yang-ming, was condemned in his own time by Chu Hsi-ists as a crypto-Zenist.

“Gone Again to Gaze on the Cascade”: Wei-ma (in Sanskrit, Vimalakirti) was a lay disciple of the historical Buddha who confounded a conclave of monks by answering a fundamental metaphysical question with “a thunderous silence.” Wei-ma was a favorite of Chinese literary folk partly for his refusal to enter into arguments (à la Chuang Tzu) and partly because he remained a layman. Yuan Mei’s reference to T’ao Ch’ien (specifically to his “Drinking Wine,” number 5) is brilliantly silly, the epitome of Yuan Mei’s genius. Note that it is also another reprise of Ou-yang Hsiu’s “Lang-ye Creek.”

“Finished with a Long Parting Poem”: Clearly the Shih Ching (The Poetry Classic) is with Yuan Mei and with his audience.

“In Idleness”: Yuan Mei was finally set aside by the Manchu rulers who found him, in his clearly intentional failure of a mandatory Manchu language examination, simply too arrogant to rise any higher, whatever his other manifest talents. I’m inclined to accept his willingness to “lead” his family into the utopian kingdom of his retirement as only humorously self-mocking rather than deeply bitter. Fame, prestige, and power might be hard to turn down, but so was the free life of a popular poet. People were literally singing his praises in the streets of Nanjing and making his variety of works in both verse and prose best sellers in the book-sellers’ stalls.

“Ah Chen”: In traditional China, fathers seldom wrote poems for their daughters. Yuan Mei loved his children, and he is proud of the dangerously unconventional upbringing he and his wife have given their daughter. Their only care was where to find a man with the courage and understanding to marry an educated woman.

“Dusk of Autumn”: “What my heart embraces”: yes, indeed, directly connecting this twentieth-century poet to Juan Chi, whose “book” was, as you doubtless recall, “Sing of what my heart embraces.” The part of his monk’s oath that he’s referring to is the part that would stop him writing poems. Fat chance. Rules are made . . .

“Beating the Heat at Jade Lake”: In a widely praised poem, not included here, Ching An refers to himself as “worn-out sandals” facing the emperor. Chang An’s figure (representing himself as an empty robe, not as a man) is creative even though it was certainly consciously made in homage to Tu Fu. More than a thousand years and less than a synapse separate these two great poets of the great tradition.

“Moored at Maple Bridge”: This is, of course, the same Maple Bridge that Chang Chi made famous in the T’ang. How dare a Zen master suffer so? In the 1980s Gary Snyder published a poem in The New Yorker about a visit there, crossing space (and cultural boundaries) as well as time.

“Laughing at Myself, I”: Many a Zen-inspired writer, beginning in the T’ang with the monk Chiao Jan and the layman Po Chu-i, wrote of trying to give up poetry. Yuan Mei shares an animus for the inventor of writing, but as a bibliophile rather than as a writer.

“Laughing at Myself, II”: In a not totally unusual display of piety, as a young man Ching An burned off two of his fingers earning himself the lifelong nickname Pa-chih T’ou-t’uo, “the eight-fingered monk.” In an insightful moment later in life he wrote this very nice poem, which might serve as a useful reminder to all about the wisdom of age, or maybe the unwisdom of youth, precisely to those aforesaid youth who might admire and wish to emulate the Old Guy in too many ways.

“Passing the Birthplace of Cheng Ch’eng-kung’s Last Loyal Defender of the Ming”: Here again, Tu Fu’s straw sandals, Ching An’s empty robe. No reader would miss the mixture of pride and humility in the reuse of this honored figure.

“Random Verses, I”: The likening of the flood refugees to geese comes straight from the Shih Ching; stranded fish, more artfully, from Chuang Tzu. The poet is probably not trying to cast aspersions on specific political rivals here, but rather simply to show how important good government is to all the people, when it comes to practical affairs. (The maintenance of elaborate irrigation and flood control of both the Yellow River and Yangtze valleys was one of the most obvious of these sacred—and practical—duties of government.)

“Random Verses, II”: Newly married and traveling with his bride, Tseng lets “popular Taoism” with its varieties of magical tricks and “recreational” meditation into his poem . . . only deep mind meditation, and the silliness of Chuang Tzu, an approved classical philosopher for all his whimsy, pass muster in a classical poem for most poets in the musty Ch’ing.

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