Added to a Letter Sent to a Traveler
Pao Ling-hui (fl. c. 464)
Since you went away, oh,
I lean on the porch-rail, my face tense.
Nights, no block and pounder sound;
Noontimes, my high gate stays closed.
Within the curtains of my bed, a stream of fireflies;
Out front in the courtyard, a bloom of purple orchids.
Nature’s things dry up: they sense the season’s changed—
Wild geese arrive: they know a traveler’s chill.
Your journey may end at winter’s close—
Though spring wears on, I’ll wait for your return.
Translated by Jeanne Larsen and Anne Birrell
The female poet Pao Ling-hui was the younger sister of the poet Pao Chao and, like her brother, wrote in the style of refined imitation of Han dynasty folksongs and ballads (see selection 143).
As its opening line, this poem borrows from “Bedroom Longing” by Hsü Kan (171–218 C.E.), a poem of sixty lines by a member of the literary circle under the patronage of the Ts’ao royal family in the Wei dynasty (see selection 139). Pao Ling-hui’s poem develops in a very different way from her predecessor’s—where he is meditative, she is observant; where he is verbose, she is succinct. The images of the silent block and pounder in line 3 function as surprisingly coarse puns, given the generally decorous eroticism of New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yü-t’ai hsin-yung), the mid-sixth-century anthology in which this poem is preserved (see selection 25). The block (chen) was a heavy stone on which wet clothes were beaten by a wooden pounder (ch’u) to clean and thicken the cloth. Another name for the block was kao-chen, also called a fu, which is a pun for a man, lover, or husband (fu). The tactile, auditory, and visual imagery of the two objects combines to simulate lovemaking.