Wen T’ien-hsiang (1236–1282)
Grasses enclose the old palaces as waning sunlight shifts.1
A lone wind-tossed cloud stops briefly: on what can it depend?
The view here, mountains and rivers, has never changed,
Yet the people within the city walls already are half gone.2
The reed flowers that fill the land have grown old with me,
But into whose eaves have the swallows of my former home flown?3
Now I depart on the road out of Chiang-nan;4
Transformed into a weeping cuckoo, reeking of blood, I shall return.5
Translated by Michael A. Fuller
Wen T’ien-hsiang was a great statesman and general who fought a losing war to defend the Southern Sung emperor from the invading Mongol (Yüan) armies. This poem was probably written when the poet was captured and being taken north to the Yüan capital.
1. Chin-ling (modern Nanking) was a secondary capital during the Southern Sung.
2. This relates to a story about a Taoist adept, Ting Ling-wei, who turned himself into a crane and returned to his home town after being away for ten years. While he perched on a roost, a youth of the town shot an arrow at him. As he flew away, he sighed, “The town is as of old, but the people are not.”
3. This bird imagery—part of a series in the poem—alludes to a famous couplet by the T’ang poet Liu Yü-hsi (see selection 87): “The swallows that in former day flew before the courtyards of the great Wang and Hsieh clans/Have flown into the houses of common folk.”
4. That is, he is about to head north, across the Yangtze.
5. There is much lore on the cuckoo. In one story, Tu Yü, a king of Shu (part of the modern province of Szechwan), ceded his throne to his very able minister and then left the country. Later he regretted this noble deed, and after his death his soul transformed into a cuckoo that returned to Shu. Its plaintive cry was said to sound like spitting blood as well as the words “It’s best to return.”