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Ch’ien Ch’i (722–780) was from Huchou in Chekiang province but he spent most of his adult life in the Ch’ang-an area, where he served as a bureau director in the Ministry of Personnel and as an academician in the Hanlin Academy. Included among the Ten Talents of the Tali Period (766–779), he was considered a poetic successor to Wang Wei and Meng Hao-jan. Here, he asks wild geese why they turn around when they reach the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers in southern Hunan province, where the environment seems so welcoming. The answer is the spiritual malaise of the region. When Emperor Fu Hsi (c. 2850 B.C.) heard the fifty-string zither, the sound so saddened him that he ordered the instrument limited to twenty-five strings, which are being played here by the two sisters both of whom married Emperor Shun (c. 2250 B.C.). When their husband died in battle south of Hunan, they drowned themselves where the Hsiang flows through Tungting Lake and became the river’s and the lake’s resident spirits. Two thousand years later they were joined in the same river by Ch’u Yuan (340–278 B.C.), whose suicide in the Milo River, which also empties into Tungting Lake, is still commemorated by the Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth month. The Hsiao flows into the Hsiang, and the phrase Hsiao-Hsiang simply indicates their combined watershed. I’ve read yeh-yueh (night moon) as descriptive. But it could also be taken as the name of a song for the zither. Or it could even refer to the pavilion of that name outside Yiyang, where the Hsiang joins Tungting Lake. In any case, while such melancholy drives off the geese, exiled officials must wait to be recalled.

On Geese Turning Back

CH’IEN CH’I

Why do they turn back when they reach the Hsiao and Hsiang

the water is green the sand is bright and both shores are mossy

twenty-five strings echo beneath the moon at night

unable to bear such melancholy they all fly away