Sharing Lodging with Hsieh Shih-hou1 in the Library of the Hsü Family and Being Much Bothered by the Noise of Rats
Mei Yao-ch’en (1002–1060)
The lamp burns blue, everyone asleep;
from their holes the hungry rats steal out:
flip-flop—a rattle of plates and saucers;
clatter-crash!—the end of my dream.
I fret—will they knock off the inkslab on the desk?
worry—are they gnawing those shelves of books?
My little son mimics a cat’s miaowing,
and that’s a silly solution for sure!
Translated by Burton Watson
Mei Yao-ch’en
A poor man’s clothes—ragged and easy to get dirty,
easy to get dirty and hard to keep free of lice.
Between the belt and the lower robe is where they swarm,
ascending in files to the fur collar’s margin.
They hide so cleverly—How can I ferret them out?—
dining on blood, making themselves at home.
My world, too, has its sallies and withdrawals;
why should I bother to pry into yours?
Translated by Burton Watson
The author, one of the best-known early Sung poets, held a series of minor government posts. He wrote in a simple, unpretentious style about the details of daily life and about various social ills. An admirer of Han Yü (see selection 42), he participated with Ou-yang Hsiu (see selection 174) and others in the revival of Confucianism. The poet and critic Liu K’e-chuang (1187–1269) characterized him with a technical term for the founder of a Buddhist sect as “the Mountain-opening Patriarch of the poetry of this dynasty.” The tragic deaths of his first wife and two young children led Mei to write poems of great pathos. He stressed the “flat and bland” (p’ing-tan) and wrote about reality as opposed to Buddhist and Taoist mysticism and enlightenment.
1. Hsieh was a nephew of the poet’s wife, who had died earlier in the year this poem was written (1044) in K’aifeng. He was married to a daughter of the Hsü family. The poet and his two little children were spending the night at the Hsü home.