Pauline Yu, "Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry"

Du Fu 杜甫. It turns out that hundreds of years passed before he began to be seen as China's greatest poet. This shot is from his "thatch hut" in Sichuan, where you can take a tour for only 20 yuan.

Yu, Pauline. “Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 20 (1998): 71–87. This essay contains a lovely introductory portion that asks us to picture Chinese anthologies as gardens -- a sophisticated design principle. Then, a bravura exposition illustrates the most basic principle in choosing the peaks of Chinese poetry: peaks happen when poetry has real political potential.

I read this essay mainly to help with a professional translation gig, one that concerns poetry developments during the Northern Song dynasty. Since Pauline Yu does not concern herself with this period, I was at first not certain the piece would be useful to me.

However, it was useful. This piece has an even more important insight than any particular historical narration: it helps us begin to understand Chinese poetry historians. To Yu writing in 1998, many current historians refused to see the poetry landscape of their imagination, with its massive, highest peak in the High Tang and in the person of Du Fu, was in fact a historical development itself. I can sympathize with them: they might not wish to do understand this, because it would reveal a political agenda in poetry criticism that might seem to cheapen the art. I call that the Harold Bloom complex (glib, I know, but I can be glib when I'm talking to myself. And I'll correct myself later if this is wrong.).

A very, very brief outline of the historicization work Yu performs:

Lynn, Richard John. “The Aesthetics of Orthodoxy: Gao Bing’s 高棅 (1350-1423) Tangshi pinhui 唐詩品彚 (A Critical Anthology of Tang Poetry)” appears in Richard John Lynn, ed., Essays in Memory of James J. Y. Liu 劉若愚 (forthcoming), a manuscript of 28 pages. Prof. Lynn seems to have done much of the groundwork for Yu's statements on the roles of Yan Yu, Gao Bing and others on the formation of a Tang canon with Du Fu on top. See especially note 17, p. 77:

As noted by Richard John Lynn in his "Alternate Routes to Self-Realization in Ming Theories of Poetry," in Susan Bush and Christian Murck, eds., Theories of the Arts in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 319. Lynn also discusses Yan Yu's poetics and its implications in several other articles, among them: "Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Wang Shih-chen's Theory of Poetry and Its Antecedents," in Wm. Theodore deBary, ed., The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 217-269; "Tradition and the Individual: Ming and Ch'ing Views of Yuan Poetry," Journal of Oriental Studies, 15.1 (1977), pp. 1-19; and "The Talent-Learning Polarity in Chinese Poetics: Yan Yu and the Later Tradition," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 5 (1983), pp. 157-84.

Perhaps Yu's best achievement is her extremely stylish and well-spoken elucidation of this point. Yu, p. 80:

Gao Bing's pedagogical aspirations are also evident in the third set of boundaries he delineates, that of elaborately articulated rankings of the poems in the collection. He systematically groups all of the works included first by prosodic type, then by rank, and then, within each rank, by author. The tradition of grading individuals-especially government officials-or works had deep roots going back to the Han dynasty, and the nomenclature of Gao Bing's categories underscores both the political implications of such evaluations and his particular esteem for the High Tang....[p. 83]
Tang literary culture appeared to have institutionalized more dramatically than any other era the mutual implication of self and society, the links between the individual and the body politic that informed the discursive identity of the elite as upholders of culture and the imperial order. This had been evident above all in the inclusion of a section on poetic composition on the most literary and most prestigious civil service examination in the Tang, one that led to the degree ofjinshi art or "scholar presented" to the emperor for office.

A Canon of Canon Formation:

note 1, p. 71:

See, for example, "Poems in Their Place: Collections and Canons in Early Chinese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 50.1 (June 1990), pp. 163-196; "Song Lyrics and the Canon: A Look at Anthologies of Tz'u," in Pauline Yu, ed., Voices of the Song Lyric in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 70-103; "The Chinese Poetic Canon and Its Boundaries," in John Hay, ed., Boundaries in China (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 105-123; and "Canon Formations in Late Imperial China," in Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 83-104

Knechtges, David R. “Culling the Weeds and Selecting Prime Blossoms: The Anthology in Early Medieval China.” In Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, eds. Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200-600. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003, 200-41.

note 7, p. 73

See, for example, Alan Golding, "A History of American Poetry Anthologies," in Robert von Hallberg, ed., Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 279-307, and Jane Tompkins, "'But Is It Any Good?': The Institutionalization of Literary Value," in Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

Lindenberger, Herbert. The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

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Classical Chinese: Rouzer, Lesson 1

Liu Xiang 劉向, Archivist and Collector.

Rouzer, Paul. A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007. It's clear enough now that for my teaching and even my PhD work, I need better classical chops. I'm beginning at the beginning -- back to my teacher's basic textbook.

I have a recurring dream that I have to go back to elementary school, because it turns out I didn't actually finish some crucial credits. It's not entirely a nightmare, because I always imagine that I would do quite well in grade school, seeing as how I spell and write sentences at or above my grade level. Reading this book from the beginning, I get that feeling again. The first few lessons at least are quite easy, but of course they are also rabbit holes as well -- practically any line of classical Chinese, no matter how short or seemingly insignificant, seems capable of supplying adventures of the literary and linguistic kind.

Lesson 1: A Few Proverbs

知命者不怨天，知己者不怨人

He who knows Fate does not complain to Heaven; he who knows himself does not complain to men.

禍生於欲得，福生於自禁；聖人以心導耳目，小人以耳目導心。

Bad fortune is born of the desire for gain; good fortune is born of self restriction. The sage uses the mind to guide ear and eye; the inferior person uses ear and eye to guide the mind.

為善者天報以德，為不善者天報以禍。

Those who are good, Heaven repays with inner virtue; those who are not good, Heaven repays with bad fortune.

A Few Notes:

Proverb 1

知命者不怨天，知己者不怨人

He who knows Fate does not complain to Heaven; he who knows himself does not complain to men.

The term yuan 怨, which I translate here as the simple verb "complain," is also sometimes translated as "rancor," and refers to the deep indignation of a person who has not got what they want -- the classic example is the Confucian whose king will not listen to his advice. Yuan-rancor is a fraught concept because it demands expression but can only remain honorable if it is not whining. Hence the virtuous trait yuan'er bu nu 怨而不怒, to have rancor without complaint. This proverb perhaps gives us more clarification of yuan-rancor: its expression as a frustrating song to Heaven must mean that the singer does not "know" Fate; that is to say, he is not resigned to the workings of Fate, but has a strong desire to establish his own will.

In the second statement, whining is suspicious activity because there is the distinct possibility that the truly knowledgeable person would know to blame only himself. I could imagine arguing that a person of true understanding could at all times see that the decisions they have made have got them to this imperiled state, and so that person would not blame anyone else for his problems.

One sort of wants to link these statements together: on the one hand, you should not blame Heaven since Fate is fickle and everything crashes down at some point anyway. And on the other hand, you are most likely a big factor in any bad situation that arises in your life, so you should not whine about yourself too much. There is a strong sense of "shut up or put up," of learning to simply bear adversity in good form, without whining.

Proverb 3:

為善者天報以德，為不善者天報以禍。

Those who are good, Heaven repays with inner virtue; those who are not good, Heaven repays with bad fortune.

As we saw in the second proverb, "bad fortune" 禍 is more likely to be opposed with good fortune, but here it is paired with de, one of those rich philosophical terms whose meaning has been the subject of conversation for thousands of years. I haven't read Benjamin Hoff's book The Te of Piglet yet, but this proverb gives me a sudden desire to do so, because I think Hoff may have been on the right track by associating De (="Te") with the smallness, modesty, and general self-abnegation of Piglet. Hoff's message, I presume, is that we should all be a little like Piglet. Reading liberally, we might have it that in this proverb, the term shan 善, "good," describes the basic motivation to improve the self in an honest way, and the Chinese opinion is that the virtues of smallness, modesty and more generally the ability to adjust to the situation at hand will be the result of this basic good motive.

A little context:

The Shuo yuan 說苑, or "Garden of sayings," is a first-century BCE compilation by the great archivista Liu Xiang. To Liu Xiang, working hard every day in the Han Imperial Library, the work must have been like so many files that I have created to store little stories, images, sayings -- snippets, really -- that don't seem to go anywhere else but somehow seem to the reader who encounters them that they should not be lost, that they have some utility, either as wisdom or as records, but always because they bring the past back to life.

If you go over to The Chinese Text Project, a tremendous undertaking by Donald Sturgeon (thanks, Mr. Sturgeon!) you can see the entire text of the "Garden." You will see first of all that it is divided into twenty sections; all of these proverbs come from the 16th section, titled Tan cong 談叢, or "Grove of conversation." This metaphor of a garden, which contains little "groves," seemed whimsical to me at one point, and then quaint later, but Pauline Yu points out that it is actually a sophisticated design principle:

...[I]n fact, in the Chinese tradition if a large collection of works by more than one author is not called a "grove of letters" (wen lin 文林), then it will more than likely be named some variety of "literary garden" (wen yuan 文苑). Anthologies, indeed, are in many respects very much like gardens, for they are usually carefully designed, with individual works or plants selected and ordered according to a particular scheme or sequence. (from "Charting the Landscape of Chinese Poetry")

I unfortunately do not know much about the "Garden of sayings," and so won't go into the possible schemes and sequences in it here -- though I really feel like doing that right now rather than working on my dissertation.

Section 16, "Grove of conversation," has 74 short texts, all of which seem to be proverbs or long paragraphs of proverbs. Paul takes his first proverb from entry 22, which is the longest of them all:

無不為者，無不能成也；無不欲者，無不能得也。眾正之積，福無不及也；眾邪之積，禍無不逮也。力勝貧，謹勝禍，慎勝害，戒勝災。為善者天報以德，為不善者 天報以禍。君子得時如水，小人得時如火。謗道己者，心之罪也；尊賢己者，心之力也。心之得，萬物不足為也；心之失，獨心不能守也。子不孝，非吾子也；交不 信，非吾友也。食其口而百節肥，灌其本而枝葉茂；本傷者枝槁，根深者末厚。為善者得道，為惡者失道。惡語不出口，苟言不留耳；務偽不長，喜虛不久。義士不 欺心，廉士不妄取；以財為草，以身為寶。慈仁少小，恭敬耆老。犬吠不驚，命曰金城；常避危殆，命曰不悔。富必念貧，壯必念老，年雖幼少，慮之必早。夫有禮 者相為死，無禮者亦相為死；貴不與驕期，驕自來；驕不與亡期，亡自至。踒人日夜願一起，盲人不忘視。知者始於悟，終於諧；愚者始於樂，終於哀。高山仰止， 景行行止，力雖不能，心必務為。慎終如始，常以為戒；戰戰慄慄，日慎其事。聖人之正，莫如安靜；賢者之治，故與眾異。

All of the statements here seem to be proverbs, though there a fun and interesting variation in their quality. I'm out of time right now, but I will make an exercise out of translating each of these little proverbs in turn. To begin:

無不為者，無不能成也；無不欲者，無不能得也。

He who has nothing that he does not do has nothing he cannot complete; he who has nothing he does not want has nothing he cannot obtain.

He who tries it all can finish it all; he who desires it all can get it all.

The first translation is an effort to represent the literal meaning of the Chinese, which applies double negatives and nominalization to achieve a Yoda-like effect of wisdom. In the second, I try to rewrite it as a proverb more congenial to Western standards (suggestions eagerly accepted).

This first proverb seems a little unwise, doesn't it? Unless I've made some major mistake (quite possible), it seems to recommend that we should be infinitely ambitious and greedy. I suppose it was intended to be spoken to lazy boys who are too self-satisfied, but still, I can't imagine ever using this proverb.

More to come!
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Back to Classical: "Letter in Reply to Ren An"

Update, 11/8: My productivity has been shot lately, but I'm determined to win it back.

Update, 11/5: this is much harder than I imagined. Or else I did imagine it to be quite difficult, which is why I have been avoid it. But this sort of thing is like working out -- it is good exercise of the mind, and good defense against laziness. I'm making this my main priority for the next few days.

I've decided to make a concerted effort to return to the study of classical Chinese. I'll do this by going through a number of works related to my dissertation work in close detail.

To begin, I'm going to return to a text that has come up many times in my course "Writing Lives in China:" Sima Qian's "Letter in Reply to Ren An"

太史公牛馬走，司馬遷再拜言，少卿足下：曩者辱賜書，教以慎於接物，推賢進士為務。意氣懃懃懇懇，若望僕不相師，而用流俗人之言。僕非敢如此也。僕雖罷駑，亦嘗側聞長者之遺風矣。顧自以為身殘處穢，動而見尤，欲益反損，是以獨抑鬱而誰與語！諺曰：「誰為為之？孰令聽之？」蓋鍾子期死，伯牙終身不復鼓琴。何則？士為知己者用，女為說己者容。若僕大質已虧缺矣，雖才懷隨、和，行若由、夷，終不可以為榮，適足以見笑而自點耳。書辭宜答，會東從上來，又迫賤事，相見日淺，卒卒無須臾之閒，得竭志意。今少卿抱不測之罪，涉旬月，迫季冬，僕又薄從上雍，恐卒然不可為諱。是僕終已不得舒憤懣以曉左右，則長逝者魂魄私恨無窮。請略陳固陋。闕然久不報，幸勿為過。

The Grand Historian, your humble servant Sima Qian, offering redoubled words of salutation to Shaoqing, at whose feet I sit:

Before, I was granted the favor of receiving your letter, which taught prudence in dealing with matters, as well as the duty to recommend worthy men and to good men. This concern was considerate and honest. It may be that you gaze darkly at your servant, not having tallied with his teacher, speaking of how he has made use of men swimming in vulgarity. Your servant would never dare to be this way. Your servant, though a used-up nag, still has heard and indeed, even listened closely to the inherited customs of the elders. I look to myself and I know my body is mutilated. I live in degradation. If I act, I'm reprimanded. If I want to help something, I actually hurt it. No one will speak with me, which is why I am so depressed by loneliness.

A proverb says, "For whom will you do it? What person will you manage to listen to it?" I think that once Zhong Ziqi is dead, Bo Ya to the end of his days will never again play on his qin. And why? The good man is for the employment of the one who truly knows him; a girl is made beautiful by the one who truly finds pleasure in her. It may be that the greater substance of your servant is already polluted now. Though my talents embraced Sui and He, and even if my conduct were like You or Yi, in the end, I can not be praised, for I am suited only to be laughed at, a disgrace to myself.

A letter's tidings deserves an answer, but together East following His Highness I came, and also I was pressed by private matters. Our days together were so few -- I was hurrying and hurrying, without a moment of leisure to tell you all of what is on my mind. Now you, Shaoqing, harbor this unfortunate accusation. Weeks and months have passed; the winter season presses upon us. Your servant again must follow urgently His Highness to Yong, and I fear very soon that which we cannot render unspeakable. If because of this your servant would never get to express his outrage and resentment, that it be known to you, honorable sir.

Otherwise, the traveling and lingering souls of the long departed will harbor private hatred that knows no bounds. Please allow me to briefly lay out my stubborn lowliness my stubborn lowliness. And for delaying so long without replying, please don't take offense.

僕聞之：修身者，智之符也；愛施者，仁之端也；取予者，義之表也；恥辱者，勇之決也；立名者，行之極也。士有此五者，然後可以託於世，而列於君子之林矣。故禍莫憯於欲利，悲莫痛於傷心，行莫醜於辱先，詬莫大於宮刑。刑餘之人，無所比數，非一世也，所從來遠矣。昔衞靈公與雍渠同載，孔子適陳；商鞅因景監見，趙良寒心；同子參乘，袁絲變色；自古而恥之。夫中材之人，事有關於宦豎，莫不傷氣；而況於慷慨之士乎？如今朝廷雖乏人，奈何令刀鋸之餘，薦天下豪俊哉？僕賴先人緒業，得待罪輦轂下，二十餘年矣。所以自惟，上之不能納忠效信，有奇策材力之譽，自結明主；次之又不能拾遺補闕，招賢進能，顯巖穴之士；外之不能備行伍，攻城野戰，有斬將搴旗之功；下之不能積日累勞，取尊官厚祿，以為宗族交遊光寵。四者無一，遂苟合取容，無所短長之效，可見於此矣。

Your servant has heard something: those who cultivate their person are the tallies of wisdom; those who treasure giving are the extremes of benevolence; taking and giving is the mark of righteousness; shame and disgrace are the determinants of courage; establishing one's name is the ultimate in conduct. When a man has these five, then can he be put out into the world and listed among the groves of superior men. Consequently, of misfortune, none is more latent than the desire for profit; of sorrows, none more painful than a broken heart; of conduct, none uglier than shaming the ancestors; of punishments, none greater than the palace punishment. For the person who remains after the punishment, there is no group to which he can associate; this is not one generation, but with a provenance that is long and far indeed. [feels like textual corruption here to me, or else extremely vague Chinese] In the past, when Duke Ling of Wei and Yong Ju shared a ride, Confucius went to Chen; when Shang Yang was because of Jing Jian seen [by the ruler], Zhao Liang became cold of heart; When Tong Zi participated in the ride; Yuan Si changed his color. From ancient times all were ashamed of them. Now, men of intermediate-level metel, affairs having relation to eunuchs, none do not have an injured air. So how much the more for the vehemently good man? As in this day, though the court lacks men, how can one command this remnant of the knife-saw to recommend stalwart men under Heaven?

A few sources:

http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/報任安書 [last accessed Nov. 2] I'm always pleased to find a whole version on Wikisource -- good formatting for cutting and pasting and for printing.


Apparently the text is also in the Wen Xuan.



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