Lowell, Amy
(Brookline, Mass. 1874-1925 Brookline, Mass.) : Dichterin, Frauenrechtlerin
[No Chinese translations until 2014].
[No Chinese translations until 2014].
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (25)
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| 1 | 1913-1925 |
Amy Lowell and China : general [Amy Lowell hat unzählige Bücher betreffend China gelesen, aber eine Liste ist nicht auffindbar]. Bushell, Stephen. Description of Chinese pottery and porcelain [ID D21527]. Fletcher, John Gould. Goblins and pagodas [ID D32321]. Julien, Stanislas. Histoire et fabrication de la porcelain chinoise [ID D5236]. Pound, Ezra. Cathay [ID D29059]. One hundred and seventy Chinese poems. Translated by Arthur Waley [ID D8884]. |
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| 2 | 1913 | Amy Lowell went to London, where she fell in with a group of writers who were then cultivating an acquaintance with Chinese and Japanese poetry and art, under the influence of British scholars. |
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| 3 | 1914-1925 |
Lowell, Amy. Works. 1912 Lowell, Amy. A little song. In : Lyrical poems. In : Lowell, Amy. A dome of many-coloured glass. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1912). … In a single flash, while your streaming hair Catches the stars and pulls them down To shine on some slumbering Chinese town... 1914 Lowell, Amy. Sword blades and poppy seed. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1914). A little shop with its various ware Spread on shelves with nicest care. Pitchers, and jars, and jugs, and pots, Pipkins, and mugs, and many lots Of lacquered canisters, black and gold, Like those in which Chinese tea is sold… These vases, poisoned venoms spout, Impregnate with old Chinese charms; Sealed urns containing mortal harms, They fill the mind with thoughts impure, Pestilent drippings from the ure Of vicious thinkings… At last, he poured it back into The china jar of Holland blue, Which he carefully carried to its place… Of sandalwood, and pungent China teas, Tobacco, coffee!"… At highest tide she lets her anchor go, And starts for China… Loose in a china teapot, may confess His need, but may not borrow till his friend Comes back to give… I brought from China, herbs the natives smoke, Was with me, and I thought merely to play a game… 1916 Lowell, Amy. Men, women and ghosts. (New York, N.Y. : Macmillan, 1916). The china shone upon the dresser, topped By polished copper vessels which her skill Kept brightly burnished. It was very still… He drew her into the shade of the sails, And whispered tales Of voyages in the China seas, And his arm around her Held and bound her… Tramp of men. Steady tramp of men. Slit-eyed Chinese with long pigtails Bearing oblong things upon their shoulders March slowly along the road to Longwood… And one of them Captain Bennett's dining-table! And sixteen splendid Chinamen, all strong and able And of assured neutrality… The fire snaps pleasantly, and the old Chinaman nods—nods… The china mandarin on the bookcase nods slowly, forward and back--forward and back--and the red rose writhes and wriggles, thrusting its flaming petals under and over one another like tortured snakes… A music-stand of crimson lacquer, long since brought In some fast clipper-ship from China, quaintly wrought With bossed and carven flowers and fruits in blackening gold… He took his Chinese pastilles and put them in a mass Upon the mantelpiece till he could seek a plate Worthy to hold them burning… I saw them as a circle of ghosts Sipping blackness out of beautiful china, And mildly protesting against my coarseness In being alive… A man carries a china mug of coffee to a distant chair… 1917 Lowell, Amy. Ombre chinoise. In : The Yale review ; Jan. (1917). Red foxgloves against a yellow wall Streaked with plum-coloured shadows ; A lady with a red and blue sunshade ; The slow dash of waves upon a parapet That is all. Non-existent – immortal – A solid as the centre of a ring of fine gold. 1917 Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in modern American poetry. (New York, N.Y. : Macmilan, 1917). What are these names ? Some are Anglo-Saxon, aome are clearly German ; one, 'Russian Sonia', tells of an origin, if not distinctly national, at least distinctly cosmopolitan ; an other, 'Yee Bow', is as obviously Chinese. We do not find German, French, Chinese names in Mr. Frost's books… Sometimes the poet's conception of more Chinese than Japanese : An Oiran and her Kamuso. Gilded hummingbirds are whizzing Through the palace garden, Deceived by the jade petals Of the Emperor's jewel-trees. That is almost distinctly Chinese… In 'Spoon River', there are no primary characters, no secondary characters. We have only a town and the people who inhabit it. The Chinese laundry-man is as important to himself as the State's Attorney is to himself… 1918 Lowell, Amy. Can Grande's castle. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1918). The coaling ships have arrived, and the shore is a hive of Negroes, and Malys, and Lascars, and Chinese… The beautiful dresses, Blue, Green, Mauve, Yellos ; And the beautiful green pointed hats Like Chinese porcelains !... Vessels glaore choke the wharves. From China, Siam, Malaya ; Sumatra, Europe, America… Winter, with green, high, angular seas. Bot over the water, far toward China, are burning the furnaces of three great steamers, and four sailing vessels heel over, with decks slanted and sails full and pulling… Ten ships sailing for China on a fair May wind. Ten ships sailing from one world into another, but never again into the one they left… 1919 Lowell, Amy. Pictures of the floating world. (London : Macmillan, 1919). Foreword : The first part of this book represents some of the charm I have found in delving into Chinese and Japanese poetry… From China I thought : The moon, Shining upon the many steps of the palace before me… It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens, And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples Amid the broken flutings of white pillars… Above, the models of four brown Chinese junks Sailing round the brown walls, Silent and motionless…The brown Chinese junks sail silently round the brown walls… Thrust back against the swaying lilac leaves, Will bloom and fade before the China asters Smear their crude colours over Autumn hazes… Toss on some Chinese white to flash the clouds, And trust the sunlight you've got in your paint. Warm it on tea-pots She sat in a Chinese wicker chair Wide at the top like a spread peacock's tail, And toyed with a young man's heart which she held lightly in her fingers… A Dresden china shepherdess, Flaunted before a tall mirror On a high mantelpiece… 1925 Lowell, Amy. What's o'clock. (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1925). The strange pink colour of Chinese porcelains ; Wonderful – the glow of them… I might be sighting a tea-clipper, Tacking into the blue bay, Just back from Canton With her hold full of green and blue porcelain, And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail Gazing at the white spire With dull, sea-spent eyes… Pipkins, pans, and pannikins, China teapots, tin and pewter, Baskets woven of green rushes… Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks When a ship was in from China. You called to them : "Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, May is a month for flitting," Until they writhed on their high stools And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers… I might be sighting a tea-clipper, Tacking into the blue bay, Just back from Canton With her hold full of green and blue porcelain, And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail Gazing at the white spire With dull, sea-spent eyes… |
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| 4 | 1914 | Amy Lowell discussed oriental poetry with Ezra Pound and Frank Stuart Flint on her second visit to London, this time as a full member of the Imagist group. It was on this visit that her acquaintance with John Gould Fletcher blossomed into a friendship that was to last throughout her lifetime. Fletcher was absorbed in Chinese and Japanese poetry, especially after having been shown the Fenollosa manuscripts by Ezra Pound. |
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| 5 | 1916 | Amy Lowell was becoming more absorbed in Oriental literature and has read Ezra Pound's Cathay. |
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| 6 | 1917 |
Lowell, Amy. An observer in China : Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens : review [ID D32294]. I read that book through three times before I put it down, and the next ay I read it again. Then I waited some weeks and read it once more ; the charm remained. That charm of something new, sincere, an original thought expressed personally and vividly. Profiles from China is strong and free, and is evidence of a rare psychological insight. As interpretations of Chinese character, these poems are of only the slightes interest ; it is as pictures of the fundamental antagonism of the East and the West that they are important. The poet makes no pretence at an esoteric sympathy which she does not possess. Her complete sincerity is not the least of the volume's excellencies. Only in the section 'Echoes', is there the slightest preoccupation with the native point of view, and although there is here much Chinese decoration, such as 'the fifth day of the fifth month ', 'the tiny footfalls of the fox-maidens ', and 'the hour of the horse ', still these poems remain rather as exercise in the Chinese manner, than as an intimate fusing of the author's ego with that of China. There is not a word too much in these poems. They are sharp and beautiful, and extraordinarily satisfying. One of the best is 'On a Canton River Boat'. Mrs. Tietjens is more than modern or 'new' ; she is herself. Her kind of poetry is distinctly hers, a perfectly natural utterance. This book deserves high praise and is an earnest of future accomplishment. |
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| 7 | 1917 | Amy Lowell was invited by Florence Ayscough during one of her customary visits to America, to shape into poetry, her transliterations of Chinese poems, whch would accompany the exhibition of Ayscough's own collection of Chinese paintings (now at the Art Museum Chicaco). Lowell grew enthusiastic about the reading of Chinese poetry and about a translation project with her old friend. | |
| 8 | 1918 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to Harriet Monroe, 19 June, 1918. "I have made a discovery which I have never before seen mentioned in any Occidental book on Chinese poetry, but which, I think must be well known in Chinese literature ; namely, that the roots of the characters are the things which give the poetry its overtones, taking the place of adjectives and imaginary writing with us. One cannot translate a poem into anything like the proper spirit, taking the character meaning alone. It is necessary in every case to go to the root of a character, and that will give the key to why that particular word is used and not some other which means the same thing when exactly translated. Mrs. Ayscough quite agrees with me in this. This is the key to the situation, and it is the hunting of these roots that she is now doing." Letter from Florence Ayscough to Amy Lowell, 24 July, 1918. "My reason for suggesting that you put in the little hint of our discovery about the roots is simply and solely to knock a hole in Ezra Pound's translations ; he having got his things entirely from Professor Fenelosa [sic], they were not Chinese in the first place, and Heaven knows how many hands they went through between the original Chinese and Professor Fenelosa's [sic] Japanese original. In the second place, Ezra has elaborated on these until, although they are excellent poems, they are not translations of the Chinese poets." |
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| 9 | 1918 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to Florence Ayscough ; 24 July (1918). My reason for suggesting that you put in the little hint of discovery about the roots is simply and solely to knock a hole in Ezra Pound's translations ; he having got his things entirely from Professor Fenollosa. They were not Chinese in the first place, and Heaven knows how many hands they went through between the original Chinese and Professor Fenollosa's Japanese original. In the second place, Ezra has elaborated on these until, although they are excellent poems, they are not translations of the Chinese poets. |
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| 10 | 1919 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to John Gould Fletcher ; 16 Aug. (1919). [About her work with Florence Ayscough]. We have found out something which has never yet been taken into consideration by the translators of Chinese poetry, namely, that the nuances, the shadings of expression are found in the roots of the characters. Our method is that she makes a translation direct fom the Chinese, an absolutely literal one, and she not only gives the equivalents of the signs, but all their roots. Then I take it and work out something as nearly like the original as possible. She again compares with the original, and between us we arrive at something she says, from her knowledge of the language, is practically exact. This discovery should knock out Ezra [Pound]'s translations completely, as far as their resemblance to the originals is concerned, for his were made from Fenollosa transcripts of Japanese translations. I do not claim that these translations are any better as poems, nor perhaps as good as Ezra's, but they are much more faithful. |
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| 11 | 1919 |
Letter from Florence Ayscough to Amy Lowell ; 17 Sept. (1919). When I had asked Dr. Darrock (a well known scholar) about a teacher, he had said, 'There is one man only (Dr. Nung Chu) whom I know, who would do what you want, and he, I think, would be just the person. He lives in Nanking, not Shanghai, and may not be available now, I will try to find him'. In the cours of time he found him and he is the man who is here now with me, and, as I have told you, work with him is an entirely different proposition to what it has ever been beford. |
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| 12 | 1919 |
Advertisement of One hundred and seventy Chinese poems. Transl. by Arthur Waley [ID D8884] in The New Republic ; 31 May (1919). Alfred Knopf got a letter from Amy Lowell (22 May 1919) : "No better translations have so far appeared of Chinese poetry. He [Waley] has given the real feeling of Chinese poetry, its clarity, its suggestion, its perfec humanity. There is no other translation of Chinese poetry now available with anything like the merit of this." The sentence which Alfred Knopf from the letter excised was : "I have been working lately on Chinese poetry with a friend of mine who lives in China, so I know whereof I speak, and while I do not always agree with Mr. Waley's renderings of those poems with which I am familiar, he has done what nobody else has." |
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| 13 | 1919 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to Florence Ayscough ; Aug. 16 (1919). The great poets of the T'ang Dynasty, particularily Li T'ai Po, are without doubt among the finest poets that the world has ever had. He seems to me to rank second to none in any country in lyric poetry, and it seems to me as though Tu Fu were equally fine. |
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| 14 | 1920 |
Lowell, Amy. A legend of porcelain : China [ID D32296]. Preface : As for the original impulse, in some cases I have forgotten it, in others I do not know what it was. For instance, I remember that 'A Legend of Porcelain' was composed of three distinct legends, but I do not know where I found them, probably in Dr. Stephen W. Bushell's 'Description of Chinese Pottery and Porcelain' or in the 'Histoire et Fabrication de la Porcelain Chinoise' by M. Stanislas Julien, the volume which gave Lafcadio Hearn the material of his 'Tal of the Porcelain God'. Both these books consist principally of translations of Chinese treatises, Julien's of the 'King-te-tchin T'ao Lu', or 'History of the King-te-tchin Porcelains', the original work was published in 1815 ; Bushell's of the 'T'ao Shuo' or 'Description of Pottery', by Chu Yen, an eighteenth century official, who held an appointment under the jurisdiction of the Governor of the Province of Kiangsi. King-te-tchin, the city in which the Imperial porcelain factories were situated, was in this province, and Chu Yen made a personal investigation of the processes of the manufacture of porcelain during his residence there. His book was published in 1774. It is a most fascinating volume, and as English lends itself more easily to the translation of Chinese than does French, the account of the various kinds of porcelain and its trade names as rendered by Dr. Bushell keeps the poetic flavor of the originals better than the same descriptions of M. Julien'w ork. Chu Yen invokes the aid of both poets and philosophers to make his book vivid and readable. One proverb which he mentions is so pertinent to this preface that I cannot resist quoting ist, as a warning and as a delight : "Those who plant the polygonium in rows, put ornamental borders on earthenware bowls and dishes, weigh the firewood before burning it, and count the grains of rice before cooking it, are fit only to attend to petty things, not to have the management of large affairs". Mindful then of this most wise saying, I will not enumerate other books on China which I have read. Indeed, I could not, they are so many. Old China sits and broods behind her ten-thousand- miles-great wall, And the rivers of old China crawl — crawl — forever Toward the distant, ceaselessly waiting seas. At King-te-chin in China, At King-te-chin in the far East of the Eighteen Provinces of China, Where all day long the porcelain factories belch corded smoke, And all night long the watch-men, striking the hours on their lizard-skin drums, Follow the shadows thrown before them From a sky glazed scarlet as it floats over the fires of burning kilns — At King-te-chin, in the heart of brooding China, Lives Chou-Kiou, White as milk in a tazza cup, Red as a pear-tree just dropping its petals, Happy as the Spring-faced wind. Chou-Kiou, For whom the wild geese break their flight, And the fishes seek the darkness of the lower waters. Chou-Kiou, Apt as a son, Loved as a son, More precious to her father than blue earth with stars of silver. It is Chou-Kiou who paints the fighting crickets On the egg-shell cups; Who covers the Wa-wa cups With little bully boys; Who sketches Manchu ladies, Tartar ladies, Chasing crimson butterflies with faint silk fans, On the slim teapots of young bamboo. Chou-Kiou, Bustling all day between the kilns and the warehouses. A breath of peach-bloom silk Turning a pathway — Puff! She is gone, As a peach-blossom painted on paper Caught in a corner of the wind. King-te-chin in the Province of Kiangsi, Noblest of the manufactories of porcelain, Where, from sunrise to sundown, In the narrow streets, The porters cry "Way! Way!" for the beautiful dishes They carry to the barges, The flat barges which nuzzle and nudge the banks of the river Jao T'cheou; And the strong stevedore coolies grunt As they lift the clay bricks quarried in the P’ing-li mountains Out of the sharp-prowed boats moored along the river Ki-muen. Meng Tsung, master of a thousand workmen, Walks under the red eaves of his buildings In the tea-green shadow of the willow-trees, Contemplating his bakers, his mixers, his painters, The men who carry tcha wood, And those, nicer-fingered, who turn the shaping wheels. He walks among the beehive furnaces, And his nostrils smart with the sharp scent of ashes, And his ears rattle with the crackle of a hundred flames. Meng Tsung, finest of the porcelain-makers of King- te-chin. In China, Old China, What other artists do is his work also; Does Lu Tzu Kang work in jade; the porcelains of Meng Tsung are ice and rainbows. What Chu Pi-shan can dp in silver, What Hsiao-hsi in carnelian, Pao T'ien-ch'eng in rhinoceros horn, P'u Chung-ch'ien in carved bamboo, Chang Ch'ien-li in mother-of-pearl, All this is nothing. The bowls of Meng Tsung are like Spring sun on a rippled river, Like willow-leaves seen over late ice, Like bronze bells one hour before sunset. They are light as the eggs of the yellow-eyebrowed thrush, And wonderful in colour as the green grapes of Turkestan. Meng Tsung walks under the red eaves of his buildings, Musing on the beauty of old, old China, Listening to the dull beating of the fish-drums in the monastery on the hill calling the attention of God to the prayers of his monks. Beautiful the sun of China, Beautiful the squares of flooded rice-fields, The long slopes of tea plants on the hills of Ning-po, The grey mulberry-trees of Chuki. Beautiful the cities between the rivers, But three, and three, and three times more beautiful The porcelains fashioned by Chou-Kiou. See them in the sun, Swept over by the blowing shade of willows, Moulded like lotus-leaves, Yellow as the skins of eels, Black glaze overlaid with gold. Tell the story of this porcelain With veins like arbor-vitae leaves and bullock's hair, Mottled as hare’s fur, Bright and various as the wooded walls of mountains. Here are the dawn-red wine-cups, And the cups of snow-blue with no glisten; Little vases, barely taller than a toad, And great, three-part vases shining slowly like tarnished silver. They stand in rows along the flat board And she checks them, one by one, on a tablet of fir-flower paper, And her eyes are little copper bells fallen in the midst of tall grass. Tell the tale of these great jars, Cloudy coloured as the crystal grape With white bloom of rice-dust upon them, Fallen over at the top by pointed bunches Of the myriad-year wistaria. Those smaller jars of moonlight enamel, dark and pale, With undulating lines which seem to change. Pots green as growing plants are green, Marked with the hundred-fold crackle of broken ice. Pallets painted blue with dragons, And ample dishes, redder than fresh blood, Spotted with crabs' claws, Splashed with bluish flames of fire. Here are bowls faintly tinted as tea-dust Or the fading leaf of the camphor-tree in Autumn; Others as bamboo paper for thickness, Lightly spattered with vermilion fishes; And white bowls Surpassing hoar-frost and the pointed tips of icicles. There are birds painted thinly in dull reds, Fighting-cocks with rose-pink legs and crests of silver, Teapots rough as the skin of the Kio orange, or blistered with the little flower-buds of the Tsong-tree. How tell the carminates, The greens of pale copper, The leopard-spotted yellows, The blues, powdered and indefinite as a Mei plum! Globular bodies with bulbous mouths; Slim, long porcelains confused like a weedy sea; Porcelains, pale as the morning sky Fluttered with purple wings of finches; High-footed cups for green wine, And incense-burners yellow as old Llama books With cranes upon them. Blue porcelain for the Altar of Heaven, Yellow for the Altar of Earth, Red for the Altar of the Sun, White for the Altar of the Year-star. All these Chou-Kiou sets down on her fir-flower tablet, Then carefully, carefully, selects a cup Of so keen a transparence that the sun, passing it, can scarcely mark a shadow, And fills it with water. Oh! The purple fishes! The dark-coloured fishes with scales of silver! The blue-black fishes swerving in a trail of gold! They move and flicker, They swing in procession, They dart, and hesitate, and float With flower-waving tails — The vase is empty again, Smooth and open and colourless. The tally is finished, The sun is sinking in a rose-green sky, And in the guard-house down the road The red tallow candles are lighted. It is the fifth day of the fifth month, And all the demons of old China Are chattering down from the mountains of the North. Little Chou-Kiou, Where are the spears of the sweet-flag You should have gathered yesterday And nailed to the door-lintel at the first flow of morning? Little Chou-Kiou, It is too late, The guards have clanged the Dragon Gate. Flags do not grow in this trodden city, Demons laugh at the studded walls of men. You dream of your betrothed As you roll your tablet, Your lover sailing the sharp seas, Your lover of the tall junks Trading up and down the coast Glad when the two eyes of his ship Are turned again to China. Silly Chou-Kiou, Absorbed by love and dishes, Forgetting the evil spirits Descending from the curled blue mountains. Open the Gate, Open the Gate, His Lordship T'ang Ling, High official to the Emperor, Waits without the walls. Hurry, Guards, The sun is red, The gate already casts a shadow. T’ang Ling is come To visit the porcelain factories Of King-te-chin. Click! Click! — loud and imperious! It is the mandarin's outrunners, And the rods they are carrying and striking on the ground. Clash, Clash, Gongs. Feet of men in the clouded dust, Whipping banners scarlet and gold, Tablet-bearers carrying his scrolls: All of his titles, All of his greatness, All of his honours, Who were his fathers, Grim, dim, warriors, Poems and speeches. Pass, Pass, Golden the heels of the men of T'ang Lmg. Here is one staggering, Mightily flaunting, The heavy, flat, superb umbrella! Spreading crimson as a lotus, Frozen sun-disk, Carried high before him. Clatter! Trip! Clatter! Clatter! See the caparisoned horses Glittering and kicking — How lightly ride the men of T'ang Ling! They bear the moon fans before his face, Honourable gentleman. They raise the golden melon mace. They have bamboos for the contumacious, And chains for persons who resist the God-like will. A space, Rifting the procession — Then a bright and massive thing: His Chair! Gold thunder carvings, Mighty lines and fallen spirais, Dazzling as the sun on cannon, And he, the Proud One, T'ang Ling, With his sapphire button, And the plaques of his coat embroidered with oneeyed peacocks' feathers. Play Ch'ang flutes before him, Make a loud music of cymbals, Pluck sharply on the three-stringed guitars, Prostrate yourselves, And beat the snake-skin drums. K'otow, Meng Tsung, Walk backwards past the beehive furnaces, T'ang Ling, servant of the Yellow Emperor, Has come to inspect the porcelain. You must stay in the Eastern Pavilion, Chou-Kiou, Hiding and peeking behind the amethyst flowers of the peonies. But do not forget the sweet-flag Which you did not hang upon the door. Tea appears red in white Hsing-chou porcelain, How strange then to offer such to an official. When T'ang Ling came to visit Meng Tsung They sat under a cinnamon-tree Examining the "Pieces of a Thousand Flowers." Coiling-dragon tea is best in black cups, And silver vessels hold the gosling-down wine. Lychees and finger citrons Delight the palate of the great man, And flat-land ginger, soft and tender to the taste; But candied melon-rind calls for more wine. One hundred cups is nothing to so high an officer. Already his fingers stray in vague tappings Among the samples of porcelain. A dragon bowl, seven days fired, for the Palace. What is T'ang Ling doing with the sword — Does he dream of the campaigns of his youth, Whirling it voraciously before him? His sword is tempered to an edge of flame, It cleaves the dragon bowl without a splinter. Chou-Kiou, Chou-Kiou, Was the river so far that you could not reach it yesterday before the twilight fell? The flags which you did not pick must spear your heart. A diamond-marked python scuttles away under the potting-shed, But every one knows that evil spirits take many forms. Drive, Frosty sea, Against the high beak of this junk, Cover the painted eyes with foam. Kuan-Yin, Goddess of sailors, Care for this man; Even in remembering, his betrothed has forgotten him. It will be long — long — Before they sit together gazing at the flowery candles. Pirate junks make bitter waiting. The moon above the potting-sheds is cold. Disaster, A great plague of disaster, Fallen upon the factory of Meng Tsung. Evil spirits in clay, in water, in fire. The clay weakens in the potter's grasp And falls to powder on the wheel. When the furnaces are opened, The lovely-shaped vessels Are run into flakes of cream At the bottom of the seggars. The tcha wood, The strong, horned tcha wood, Crisp, brittle, dried to the very bite of fire, Hewn perfectly, Split to an even thickness, Piled with meticulous care by the circular pilers — The tcha wood dies under the touch of the lighters, It crackles as though each pore seeped water; And the men who carry it to the ovens Swear at the splinters buried in their flesh. Cinnabar vases bake an acrid chrome, Blue glaze gutters into thorns of yellow, Fox fingers smear the delicately etched designs. Have the P'ei-se-kong, the colour-mixers, gone mad? The pound — pound — of their pestles seems louder than usual. No — pestles do not strike with such a clang: Devil gongs beat on the roof-tiles, Devil bells tinkle at the windows, A bloody moon casts an ape's shadow On the open space before the warehouse door. There is a wailing of gibbons in the willow-trees, But gibbons do not live in the populous city of King- te-chin. In twos, in threes, in companies, The servants of the factory slink away. Chou-Kiou weeps at her painting, For the junk with the watching eyes is desperately overdue. Foxes dance by night in dim, old China, And the agent of the Emperor demands the delivery of the Palace bowls. Meng Tsung is a crazy man, He nods his head and claps his hands, He sits and plays a game of chess In a staring, stuttering idleness. Swallows build in the eye-holes of his kilns. See her pick her way up the stony path, Her little feet, small as the quarters of a sweet orange, Hoar her sadly over the roughness. The stars hang out of the sky like lotus-seeds. It is the third watch, and the city gates are shut. Taoist priests know many things, And folk bewitched say nothing of difficulties. The whine of an owl trembles along the darkness. She runs, Flinging her heart forward, Reaching to it, Floundering. "We need light," says the Taoist priest. And he cuts a bit of paper round like the moon And hangs it on the wall. And it is the moon, Silver and lesser silver, Hanging from a pin. He steps into the moon to think, And she sees him drinking rice-wine And slowly writing on a tablet. The room is filled with the larkspur scent of ink. The priest steps down from the paper moon. He reads from a scroll, Droning the words, Teetering back and roth on wide, horny feet : "The protection of the sweet-flag has been dishonourably neglected. Chou-Kiou, accursed woman, following the toys of this present life, has hardened her mind to the teaching of the ages. She, daughter of Meng Tsung greatest of those who work in porcelain, Has strayed from the path of her most respected ancestors. Thinking of love, she forgot filial piety; Snared by beauty, she permitted her august father's house to go unguarded. Now a fox has entered the body of her most directly-to-be-commiserated father, While he by whom she was truly begot lies bound in the cave of the Tiger-peaked mountain. Weary, weary, the way of an arrogant heart, Sad, and beyond sadness, the lot of Chou-Kiou. With her white hands she must labour, With her 'golden lily' feet she must stumble under terrific burdens. The breath of her mouth must coax the flame to enter wet wood, She must sear and burn before the hot furnaces, And, waking many nights and days, produce in agony a bowl 'Bright as a mirror, blue as the sky, thin as paper, sweet-sounding to the touch as camphor-jade.' " China! China! The voice of Chou-Kiou is very small, Her eyes are pale, Her limbs stiff as frozen thorns: "And if I do this thing, What of him, Wu, my betrothed?" "The scroll is written," said the Taoist priest. The Gods are many and confused in old, dim China. Morning leaping from the rims of the mountains; Darkness leaning farther and farther over a descending sun. Clouds bring rain, And winds dry the pools of it. The North-west wind whirls dust over the willow-trees; Wild duck and teal cross and re-cross King-te-chin In search of water, And the hurry of their wings Is the rush of the Northern monsoon Sweeping the gulf of Tonkin. Chou-Kiou pounds the blue clay, Kneading it with effort to its finest granules. Days and Days — The smartweed reddens on the river shoals; Eye-fruit and pears are dropping in the gardens; Floating elm-leaves gild running water; The pinnacles of the Dragon Mountains are clear above red mist. Chou-Kiou paints a crane and two mandarin ducks Under a persimmon-tree. She dips the jar, and poises it, But her ears are numb with the heavy sound of the sea. Cold winds. Long Autumn. '"Leaves touched by frost are redder than flowers of the second moon." How drag the great wood, How build it into a circle of fire, Waveringly uncertain on the "golden lily" feet? 3heng! Sheng! The water-clock marks an hour which has gone. The wind is sad, blowing ceaselessly from the clear stars, rhe lamp-flower flickers and dies down. Is her shadow some one? ts she, perhaps, not alone? She raises the bamboo blind, Snow is falling, The branches of the Winter plum-tree Glitter like jade hairpins against a white sky. Brooms brush little snow, Her fox father laughs and rattles his chess-men. Chou-Kiou, Bones under frosty water Bleach as white as the jade-coloured branches of the plum-tree: You remember now, Sweeping from dawn till evening A pathway to the kilns. She has blown upon the fire and kindled it, She has set her fragile bowl in the midst of the flame. She lifts her eyes from the red fire For green Spring is like smoke in the willow-trees. The rivers run flooding over the wharves of King-te- chin. She hears the porters shouting: "Way! Way!" In the streets, going up and down from the boats. But about her is only the harsh sound of fire, And a crow calling: "Ka! Ka! Ka!" In a mulberry-tree. Ashes of fire, Ashes of the days of the World! If failure, then another long beginning. Why hope, Why think that Spring must bring relenting. O man of this woman, Where on all the Spring-flown oceans Is your junk? Where your heart that you cannot hear the cuckoos calling from the fir woods of the Golden Yoke Cliff? China blossoms above her sea-beaches, Her trees break budding to an early sun, Foot-boats fly along the blue rivers, But Chou-Kiou sobs as brick by brick she opens the cooled kiln. Oh, marvel of lightness! Oh, colour hidden and all at once emphatically clear! Like a bright moon carved in ice, Green as the thousand peaks, Blue as the sky after rain, Violet as the skin of an egg-plant fruit, Then once again white, White as the "secretly-smiling" magnolia, And singing a note when struck Sharp and full as all the hundred and fifty bells On the Porcelain Tower of Nankin. This bowl is worth one hundred taels of silver. Pour in the black dragon tea, Plucked in April before the Spring rains, This shall be a libation to Kuan-Yin, Goddess of Mercy. Chou-Kiou has no wine. Fragrant Goddess, despise not the yellow tea. But the tea bubbles, It moves like waves in a short bay, It tumbles with a glitter of rainbows. Wing-flare widening out of the cup — The great crane sweeps into the air. He circles round Chou-Kiou, Circles, circles — With him are the mandarin ducks. The air is dark with wings, It is bright with the clipping and cutting Of quickly-flickered wings. In a whirl of wind, Something comes twirling and dazzling out of the house, Flapping in plum-coloured silks, Confusing with motion, Blurred, Without contour. It is a man — It is a bit of paper — It is a bamboo-silk cocoon — It blows, turning — turning — toward the bowl, It is blown into the bowl — The tea is red, It leaps, water-spouting, into the air. It soars over the red roof-tiles, It glitters like a pagoda hot with lamps, And then descends, Sucking, into the bowl, Sucking, out of the bowl, Disappearing where there is no hole. It is a beautiful piece, With white and grey peonies and yellow persimmons. There are no birds, only flowers, Starting in a chord of colours out of violet haze. Chou-Kiou has fainted, She does not hear Meng Tsung Calling to her from the Terrace of the Peach-Trees. I read this tale in the "Azure Sky Bookshop," in the ninth month of the sixth year of To Kwong. When I had reached this point, the shadow of a thirty-two-paper kite fell upon my page, and raising my eyes to the sky, the whiteness of the sun dazzled me, and I inadvertently turned over the leaves of the book. How many I turned, I do not know, but when I could see again after the blindness of the sky I read at once, not daring to go back for the leap of the story upon which I had fallen — "Pity, pity me, For my flesh cries night and morning; The darkness hears me, And the tongues of the darkness babble back his name. I am eager and thwarted. Daughter I am, And as a daughter I have given my brain and my body To restore my father's house. Alone, with bleeding feet and frozen hands, I have lifted the curse fallen upon my people; I have toiled without sleep Until the sight of my eyes was broken. Hungering for days, chattering with cold and sorrow, I have not suffered my heart to weaken. My prayers have risen incessantly to the thirty-three Heavens. All powerful Goddess, you have regarded me, And taken me under your protection. I am a worm, Spurning the mulberry-leaf to cry upon the moon. Holy Kuan-Yin, of the thousand eyes, and the thou¬sand arms, and the merciful heart, I beseech a farther clemency. You, who answer the longings of the sterile, Do not mock me with a half-completed pardon. Daughter I am, Kuan-Yin, But I am also a woman. I love as women here in China must not, But as you know very well they must and do. Glory has once more entered into my father's heart, All day he watches his men. He weighs the precious blue earth and numbers it. He oversees the lame men who knead the clay, He praises and chides the painters, And rises in the night to superintend the firers. King-te-chin hums like a hive at swarming time Between its rivers, And this is the loudest of all the factories of King- te-chin. Only I am desolate. I am as the shadow of a bamboo upon bleached sand, My eyes are black and colourless seeking the boats on the long canals, My ears rattle waiting for the sharp sound of a voice at the gate. Once more I will work, Kuan-Yin, I will use all my skill to honour you. I will fashion you in such a manner that your eyes will laugh to see it. I will make a figure of you in fine silk porcelain And set it in the temple where all can see, And, looking, their hearts will be to you as coral beads on a string of white gold For your hand's stretching, And for an ornament upon your breast forever." Then Chou-Kiou tightened her willow-coloured girdle And sat down to the modelling board. And on the fifteenth day the figure was completed, Not entirely to Chou-Kiou’s dissatisfaction. Underneath it she wrote: "Made at the Brilliant Colours Hall." And again: "Reverentially made by Chou-Kiou, daughter of Meng Tsung Captain of the Ban¬ner promoted four honorary grades, also Director of a Porcelain Manufactory at King-te-chin in the Province of Kiangsi: and presented by her to the Temple of the Holy God of Heaven to remain through everlasting time as an offering of a grateful heart and as a glory in the eyes of men: on a fortunate day in the Spring of the 6th year of the reign of the Emperor Ch'ien- lung." For days she paints it, Rubbing the gold with garlic-bulbs To fix its lustre. Laying copper-foil about it to heighten the colour, Setting it with careful blue: The blue of little stones, The blue of the precious stone Mel-Kouei-tse-yeou, The blue of the head of Buddha. She dreams of beauty, And the face of the figure is lovely as her dreams; But has it not been written: "It is useless to cast a net to catch the image of the moon." Night over China, Night over old, distant China, Dark night over the city of King-te-chin. Chou-Kiou, Chou-Kiou, Your eyes are red watching the flames of a furnace, And the great shield of wood you hold Scarcely protects you from the bursting heat of the kiln. For three days and three nights You have tended a flowing fire; For two days and two nights You have watched before a fierce fire; Now the seggar is red and passing into a white heat, It is bright in front and behind. At cock-crow you will stop the fire, But to-night you watch, And your eyes are salt As though you stood before the sea. A wind teases the willow-trees, They rustle, And fling the moonlight from them like spray. And then snow fell from the midst of the moon. The flakes were like willow-flowers, They drifted down slowly, And the brilliance of the moon struck upon them as they fell So that all the air was flowing with silver, And walking in the arc of it was a woman Who cast a whip-like shadow before her From the brightness of the snow and the white, round moon. All the flowers bend toward her, The grass by the ring-fence lies horizontally to reach her, She moves with the movement of wind over water, And it is no longer the moon which casts her shadow But she who sets shadows curving outward From the pebbles at her feet. Her dress is Ch'ing-green playing into scarlet, Embroidered with the hundred shous; The hem is a slow delight of gold, the faded, beautiful gold of temple carvings; In her hair is a lotus, Red as the sun after rain. She comes softly — softly — And the tinkle of her ornaments Jars the smooth falling of the snow So that it breaks into jagged lightnings Which form about her the characters of her holy name: Kuan-Yin, Goddess of Mercy, of Sailors, of all who know sorrow and grieve in bitterness. Ochre-red sails are dark in moonlight, But the red heart of man is like a water-clock dripping the hours; Lost days weigh many ounces of silver, But green Spring is worth blood and gold. Snow ceases falling, Moonlight is no longer broken, but a single piece. Her eyebrows are fine as the edge of distant moun-tains, Her eyes are clear as the T'ung-T'ing lake in Autumn, Her face is sweet as almond-flowers in a wind. The breath of her passing is cool; Her gesture is a plum-blossom waving. She mounts the step And looks into the eye-hole of the kiln. One — two — three, the pulse of Chou-Kiou, Beating to a given time, like music. The coals of the fire are not fierce now But gentle, They lie in the form of roses And the scent of them is the urgent scent of musk. A watchman calls the hour And strikes on his bamboo drum. The moon fades down a long green sky. There is no one on the step, No flight of silks down the pathway, Chou-Kiou sickens to a weariness which eats her bones. She rakes the scattered embers. The firing is done. Spring day. How sharp the pheasants cry, Like metal! This year the bamboo flowers, This year the many-petalled peonies Are large as rising moons. The men of the "Brilliant Coloured Factory" stand In their blue jackets, In their dark-purple silk jackets, In a curve like the bow moon, Watching Chou-Kiou advancing to the furnace. And Meng Tsung stands, Fearfully watching. No one must touch, No one must caution, No one must pray. It is between Chou-Kiou and the Gods. How do her ancestors in the thirty-three Heavens? Do they watch? Do they listen? Do they desire and remain silent? Ten times round her hands The cloth is wrapped. Yet will they be blistered — But it is cool! Cold! And the seggar falls apart without a touch. Fragrant Goddess, Whose heart is of snow and rubies, Is this the figure made by Chou-Kiou? Not so, certainly. Slimmer, Lovelier, More quaintly golden. This face is clouds and flowers, These eyes are wind and flame, This body is jade and silver. Her dress is the smoky green of Autumn lakes Flashed and tinted to immediate scarlet, It is embroidered with the hundred shous. Poised is this figure, Balanced like a music Of flageolets and harps under the Dawn. Men cover their faces, Here is a beauty to turn the dart of arrows. But Chou-Kiou's figure was single, This is triplicate. Attendants guard the dazzling Goddess. One (who dares to see it!) Chou-Kiou, In her peach-bloom dress with the willow-coloured girdle, And clasped and cherished in her hands The sacred peach. The other is a man, Blue-dressed as in running waves, Bronze and crimson with the rake of the sea. The gate-keepers shout his name, Swift are his steps, Like songs for gladness His footsteps, He is a straight shaft of sapphire, He is a peacock feather borne upon a spear. He and she before the Goddess, Heads in the dust. Not alone do the bamboos flower; Here are blossoms and fruit. Kuan-Yin, Goddess of Mercy, of Sailors, of Sterile Women, For what they pray let them have full answer: Guide them as with a torch, Scatter snow and heat like the cool of the moon, Defend them against enemies as a moat or a city, Save them in danger as a father or mother, Quicken them as rain and sun, Bless the seed of this man as corn under a rich sun, Bless the womb of this woman as fishes are blessed by the sea. Then the multitude rose up And proclaimed them mighty. They placed her in the scarlet palanquin And brought her before him. They lit the flower candles; With painted lanterns in broad daylight they lined the roads. Drums and musicians played forever, And fireworks blazed in the heart of the sky. So the day fell And the night came, And the lizard-skin drums struck midnight, And the marriage was accomplished. Sweetly the moon slept in the willow-trees, And the man and the woman slept under the green eyelids of the Dawn. When I finished the book, night had come. I could not part with it, so I bought it for two ounces of silver. Did I overprize it, do you think? It is only a tale of old, dead China. |
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| 15 | 1920 |
Letter from Amy Lowell to John Gould Fletcher ; July (1920). Basil Hall Chamberlain's translations of Japanese poetry are quite as bad as [Herbert A.] Giles's of Chinese, and there is no sense in my using translations which have absolutely no flavor of the originals. Also do you know anywhere that I could find biographical material on Chinese and Japanese poets ? I should be terribly grateful if you could help me in this matter. You know so much more about it than I do, and you are the only person who has ever, to my mind, really explanation where-ever I have had occasion to refer to that form, and here let me tender my thanks. |
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| 16 | 1921.1 |
Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140]. (1) Preface by Amy Lowell Let me state at the outset that I know no Chinese. My duty in Mrs. Ayscough's and my joint collaboration has been to turn her literal translations into poems as near to the spirit of the originals as it was in my power to do. It has been a long and arduous task, but one which has amply repaid every hour spent upon it. To be suddenly introduced to a new and magnificent literature, not through the medium of the usual more or less accurate translation, but directly, as one might burrow it out for one's self with the aid of a dictionary, is an exciting and inspiriting thing. The method we adopted made this possible, as I shall attempt to show. The study of Chinese is so difficult that it is a life-work in itself, so is the study of poetry. A sinologue has not time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese. Since neither of us pretended to any knowledge of the other's craft, our association has been a continually augmenting pleasure. I was lucky indeed to approach Chinese poetry through such a medium. The translations I had previously read had given me nothing. Mrs. Ayscough has been to me the pathway to a new world. No one could be a more sympa- [Page vi] thetic go-between for a poet and his translator, and Mrs. Ayscough was well-fitted for her task. She was born in Shanghai. Her father, who was engaged in business there, was a Canadian and her mother an American. She lived in China until she was eleven, when her parents returned to America in order that their children might finish their education in this country. It was then that I met her, so that our friendship is no new thing, but has persisted, in spite of distance, for more than thirty years, to ripen in the end into a partnership which is its culmination. Returning to China in her early twenties, she became engaged to an Englishman connected with a large British importing house in Shanghai, and on her marriage, which took place almost immediately, went back to China, where she has lived ever since. A diligent student of Chinese life and manners, she soon took up the difficult study of literary Chinese, and also accepted the position of honorary librarian of the library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Of late years, she has delivered a number of lectures on Chinese subjects in China, Japan, America, and Canada, and has also found time to write various pamphlets on Chinese literature and customs. In the Autumn of 1917, Mrs. Ayscough arrived in America on one of her periodic visits to this country. She brought with her a large collection of Chinese paintings for exhibition, and among these paintings were a number of [Page vii] examples of the "Written Pictures." Of these, she had made some rough translations which she intended to use to illustrate her lectures. She brought them to me with a request that I put them into poetic shape. I was fascinated by the poems, and, as we talked them over, we realized that here was a field in which we should like to work. When she returned to China, it was agreed that we should make a volume of translations from the classic Chinese writers. Such translations were in the line of her usual work, and I was anxious to read the Chinese poets as nearly in the original as it was possible for me to do. At first, we hardly considered publication. Mrs. Ayscough lives in Shanghai and I in Boston, and the war-time mails were anything but expeditious, but an enthusiastic publisher kept constantly before us our ultimate, if remote, goal. Four years have passed, and after many unavoidable delays the book is finished. We have not done it all by correspondence. Mrs. Ayscough has come back to America several times during its preparation; but, whether together or apart, the plan on which we have worked has always been the same. Very early in our studies, we realized that the component parts of the Chinese written character counted for more in the composition of poetry than has generally been recognized; that the poet chose one character rather than another which meant practically the same thing, because [Page viii] of the descriptive allusion in the make-up of that particular character; that the poem was enriched precisely through this undercurrent of meaning in the structure of its characters. But not always – and here was the difficulty. Usually the character must be taken merely as the word it had been created to mean. It was a nice distinction, when to allow one's self the use of these character undercurrents, and when to leave them out of count entirely. But I would not have my readers suppose that I have changed or exaggerated the Chinese text. Such has not been the case. The analysis of characters has been employed very rarely, and only when the text seemed to lean on the allusion for an added vividness or zest. In only one case in the book have I permitted myself to use an adjective not inherent in the character with which I was dealing – and, in that case, the connotation was in the word itself, being descriptive of an architectural structure for which we have no equivalent – except in the "Written Pictures," where, as Mrs. Ayscough has stated in her Introduction, we allowed ourselves a somewhat freer treatment. It has been necessary, of course, to acquire some knowledge of the laws of Chinese versification. But, equally of course, these rules could only serve to bring me into closer relations with the poems and the technical limits of the various forms. It was totally impossible to follow either the rhythms or the rhyme-schemes of the originals. All [Page ix] that could be done was to let the English words fall into their natural rhythm and not attempt to handicap the exact word by introducing rhyme at all. This is the method I followed in my translations of French poems in my book, "Six French Poets." I hold that it is more important to reproduce the perfume of a poem than its metrical form, and no translation can possibly reproduce both. Our plan of procedure was as follows: Mrs. Ayscough would first write out the poem in Chinese. Not in the Chinese characters, of course, but in transliteration. Opposite every word she put the various meanings of it which accorded with its place in the text, since I could not use a Chinese dictionary. She also gave the analyses of whatever characters seemed to her to require it. The lines were carefully indicated, and to these lines I have, as a rule, strictly adhered; the lines of the translations usually corresponding, therefore, with the lines of the originals. In the few poems in which the ordering of the lines has been changed, this has been done solely in the interest of cadence. I had, in fact, four different means of approach to a poem. The Chinese text, for rhyme-scheme and rhythm; the dictionary meanings of the words; the analyses of the characters; and, for the fourth, a careful paraphrase by Mrs. Ayscough, to which she added copious notes to acquaint me with all the allusions, historical, mythological, geographical, and technical, that she deemed it necessary for me to know. [Page x] Having done what I could with these materials, I sent the result to her, when she and her Chinese teacher carefully compared it with the original, and it was returned to me, either passed or commented upon, as the case might be. Some poems crossed continent and ocean many times in their course toward completion; others, more fortunate, satisfied at once. On Mrs. Ayscough's return to America this year, all the poems were submitted to a farther meticulous scrutiny, and I can only say that they are as near the originals as we could make them, and I hope they may give one quarter of the pleasure to our readers that they have to us in preparing them. |
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| 17 | 1921.2 |
Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140]. (2) Introduction by Florence Ayscough There has probably never been a people in whose life poetry has played such a large part as it has done, and does, among the Chinese. The unbroken continuity of their history, throughout the whole of which records have been carefully kept, has resulted in the accumulation of a vast amount of material; and this material, literary as well as historical, remains available to-day for any one who wishes to study that branch of art which is the most faithful index to the thoughts and feelings of the "black-haired race," and which, besides, constitutes one of the finest literatures produced by any race the world has known. To the confusion of the foreigner, however, Chinese poetry is so made up of suggestion and allusion that, without a knowledge of the backgrounds (I use the plural advisedly) from which it sprang, much of its meaning and not a little of its beauty is necessarily lost. Mr. Arthur Waley, in the preface to his "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems," says: "Classical allusion, always the vice of Chinese poetry, finally destroyed it altogether." Granting the unhappy truth of this statement, the poetry of China is nevertheless so human and appealing as to speak with great force even [Page xx] to us who live under such totally different conditions; it seems worth while, therefore, to acquire a minimum of knowledge in regard to it and so increase the enjoyment to be derived from it. In the present collection, I have purposely included only those poems in which this national vice is less in evidence; and this was not a difficult task. There is such an enormous body of Chinese poetry that the difficulty has been, not what to take, but what to leave out. I have been guided somewhat by existing translations, not wishing to duplicate what has already been adequately done, when so much still remains untouched. Not that all these poems appear in English for the first time, but many of them do; and, except for Mr. Waley's admirable work, English renderings have usually failed to convey the flavour of the originals. Chinese scholars rank their principal poets in the following order: Tu Fu, Li T'ai-po, and Po Chü-i. Realizing that, naturally, in any literature, it is the great poets which another nation wishes to read, I have purposely kept chiefly to them, and among them to Li T'ai-po, since his poems are of a universal lyricism. Also, Mr. Waley has devoted his energies largely to Po Chü-i. Tu Fu is very difficult to translate, and probably for that reason his work is seldom given in English collections of Chinese poems. Some of his simpler poems are included here, however. A small section of the book is devoted to what the Chinese [Page xxi] call "written-on-the-wall-pictures." I shall come back to these later. The great stumbling-block which confronts the translator at the outset is that the words he would naturally use often bring before the mind of the Occidental reader an entirely different scene to that actually described by the Oriental poet. The topography, the architecture, the fauna and flora, to say nothing of the social customs, are all alien to such a reader's own surroundings and cannot easily be visualized by him. Let me illustrate with a modern poem, for it is a curious fact that there has lately sprung up in America and England a type of poetry which is so closely allied to the Chinese in method and intention as to be very striking. This is the more remarkable since, at the time of its first appearance, there were practically no translations of Chinese poems which gave, except in a remote degree, the feeling of the originals. So exact, in fact, is this attitude toward the art of poetry among the particular group of poets to whom I have reference and the Chinese masters, that I have an almost perfect illustration of the complications of rendering which a translator runs up against by imagining this little poem of Miss Lowell's being suddenly presented to a Chinese scholar in his grass hut among the Seven Peaks: [Page xxii] NOSTALGIA BY AMY LOWELL "Through pleasure and palaces" – Through hotels, and Pullman cars, and steamships . . . Pink and white camellias floating in a crystal bowl, The sharp smell of firewood, The scrape and rustle of a dog stretching himself on a hardwood floor, And your voice, reading – reading – to the slow ticking of an old brass clock . . . "Tickets, please!" And I watch the man in front of me Fumbling in fourteen pockets, While the conductor balances his ticket-punch Between his fingers. As we read this poem, instantly pictures of American travel start before our eyes: rushing trains with plush-covered seats, negro porters in dust-grey suits, weary ticket-collectors; or marble-floored hotel entrances, clanging elevator doors, and hurrying bell-boys, also the vivid suggestion of a beautiful American house. But our scholar would see none of this. To him, a journey is undertaken, according to the part of the country in which he must travel, either in a boat, the types of which are infinitely varied, from the large, slow-going travelling barge capable of carrying many passengers, to the swifter, smaller craft [Page xxiii] which hold only two or three people; in one of the several kinds of carriages; in a wheelbarrow, a sedan chair, a mule litter, or on the back of an animal – horse, mule, or donkey, as the case may be. Again, there is no English-speaking person to whom "Home, Sweet Home" is not familiar; in a mental flash, we conclude the stanza suggested by the first line, and know, even without the title, that the subject of the poem is homesickness. Our scholar, naturally, knows nothing of the kind; the reference is no reference to him. He is completely at sea, with no clue as to the emotion the poem is intended to convey, and no understanding of the conditions it portrays. Poem after poem in Chinese is as full of the intimate detail of daily life, as dependent upon common literary experience, as this. There is an old Chinese song called "The Snapped Willow." It, too, refers to homesickness and allusions to it are very frequent, but how can an Occidental guess at their meaning unless he has been told? In this Introduction, therefore, I have endeavoured to give as much of the background of this Chinese poetry as seems to me important, and, since introductions are made to be skipped, it need detain no one to whom the facts are already known. The vast country of China, extending from the plains of Mongolia on the North to the Gulf of Tonquin on the South, a distance of somewhat over eighteen hundred miles, and from the mountains of Tibet on the West to the [Page xxiv] Yellow Sea on the East, another stretch of about thirteen hundred miles, comprises within its "Eighteen Provinces" practically every climate and condition under which human beings can exist with comfort. A glance at the map will show the approximate positions of the ancient States which form the poetic background of China, and it will be noticed that, with the exception of Yüeh, they all abut either on the Huang Ho, better known as the Yellow River, or on the Yangtze Kiang. These two great rivers form the main arteries of China, and to them is largely due the character of the people and the type of their mythology. The Yellow River, which in the old mythology was said to have its source in the Milky Way (in the native idiom, "Cloudy" or "Silver River"), really rises in the K'un Lun Mountains of Central Asia; from thence its course lies through the country supposed to have been the cradle of the Chinese race. It is constantly referred to in poetry, as is also its one considerable tributary, the Wei River, or "Wei Water," its literal name. The Yellow River is not navigable for important craft, and running as it does through sandy loess constantly changes its course with the most disastrous consequences. The Yangtze Kiang, "Son of the Sea," often referred to as the "Great River," is very different in character. Its source lies among the mountains of the Tibetan border, where it is known as the "River of Golden Sand." After [Page xxv] flowing due South for several hundred miles, it turns abruptly to the North and East, and, forcing its way through the immense wall of mountain which confronts it, "rushes with incredible speed" to the far-off Eastern Sea, forming in its course the Yangtze Gorges, of which the most famous are the San Hsia, or "Three Chasms." To these, the poets never tire of alluding, for, to quote Li T'ai-po, the cliffs rise to such a height that they seem to "press Green Heaven." The water is low during the Winter months, leaving many treacherous rocks and shoals uncovered, but rises to a seething flood during the Summer, when the Tibetan snows are melting. The river is then doubly dangerous, as even great pinnacles of rock are concealed by the whirling rapids. Near this point, the Serpent River, so-called from its tortuous configuration, winds its way through deep ravines and joins the main stream. As may be imagined, navigation on these stretches of the river is extremely perilous, and an ascent of the Upper Yangtze takes several months to perform since the boats must be hauled over the numerous rapids by men, called professionally "trackers," whose work is so strenuous that they are bent nearly double as they crawl along the tow-paths made against the cliffs. In spite of the precipitous nature of the banks, many towns and villages are built upon them and rise tier on tier up the mountain sides. Having run about two-thirds of its course and reached the [Page xxvi] modern city of Hankow, the Great River changes its mood and continues on its way, immense and placid, forming the chief means of communication between the sea and Central China. The remarkably fertile country on either side is intersected by water-ways, natural and artificial, used instead of roads, which latter do not exist in the Yangtze Valley, their place being taken by paths, some of which are paved with stone and wide enough to accommodate two or three people abreast. As travel has always been very popular, every conceivable form of water-borne craft has sprung up, and these the poets constantly used as they went from the capital to take up their official posts, or from the house of one patron to another, the ancient custom being for the rich to entertain and support men of letters with whom they "drank wine and recited verses," the pastime most dear to their hearts. The innumerable poems of farewell found among the works of all Chinese poets were usually written as parting gifts from the authors to their hosts. As it nears the sea, the river makes a great sweep round Nanking and flows through what was once the State of Wu, now Kiangsu. This and the neighbouring States of Yüeh and Ch'u (the modern Chêkang and parts of Hunan, Kweichow, and Kiangsi) is the country painted in such lovely, peaceful pictures by Li T'ai-po and his brother poets. The climate being mild, the willows which grow on the [Page xxvii] banks of the rivers and canals are seldom bare and begin to show the faint colour of Spring by the middle of January; and, before many days, the soft bud-sheaths, called by the Chinese "willow-snow," lie thick on the surface of the water. Plum-trees flower even while the rare snow-falls turn the ground white, and soon after the New Year, the moment when, according to the Chinese calendar, Spring "opens," the fields are pink with peach-blooms, and gold with rape-blossom, while the air is sweetly scented by the flowers of the beans sown the Autumn before. Walls and fences are unknown, only low ridges divide the various properties, and the little houses of the farmers are built closely together in groups, as a rule to the South of a bamboo copse which acts as a screen against the Northeast winds prevailing during the Winter; the aspect of the rich plain, which produces three crops a year, is therefore that of an immense garden, and the low, grey houses, with their heavy roofs, melt into the picture as do the blue-coated people who live in them. Life is very intimate and communistic, and the affairs of every one in the village are known to every one else. The silk industry being most important, mulberry-trees are grown in great numbers to provide the silk-worms with the leaves upon which they subsist, and are kept closely pollarded in order that they may produce as much foliage as possible. This smiling country on the river-banks, and to the [Page xxviii] South, provides a striking contrast to those provinces lying farther North and West. Shantung, the birthplace of Confucius, is arid and filled with rocky, barren hills, and the provinces of Chili, Shansi, Shensi, and Kansu, which extend Westward, skirting the Great Wall, are also sandy and often parched for lack of water, while Szechwan, lying on the Tibetan border, although rich and well irrigated, is barred from the rest of China by tremendous mountain ranges difficult to pass. One range, called the "Mountains of the Two-Edged Sword," was, and is, especially famous. It formed an almost impassable barrier, and the great Chu Ko-liang, therefore, ordered that a roadway, of the kind generally known in China as chan tao (a road made of logs laid on piers driven into the face of a cliff and kept secure by mortar) be built, so that travellers from Shensi might be able to cross into Szechwan. This road is described by Li T'ai-po in a very beautiful poem, "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword Mountains." These varied scenes among which the poets lived differed again from those which flashed before their mental eyes when their thoughts followed the soldiers to the far Northwest, to the country where the Hsiung Nu and other Mongol tribes lived, those Barbarians, as the Chinese called them, who perpetually menaced China with invasion, who, in the picturesque phraseology of the time, desired that their horses should "drink of the streams of the South." [Page xxix] These Mongol hordes harassed the Chinese State from its earliest days; it was as a defence against them that the "First Emperor" erected the Great Wall, with a length of "ten thousand li" as Chinese hyperbole unblushingly states – its real length is fifteen hundred miles. This defence could, however, merely mitigate, not avert, the evil; only constant effort, constant fighting, could prevent the Mongol hordes from overrunning the country. Beyond the Jade Pass in Kansu, through which the soldiers marched, lay the desert and the steppes stretching to the very "Edge of Heaven," and on this "edge" stood the "Heaven-high Hills"; while, on the way, surrounded by miles of sand, lay the Ch'ing Hai Lake (Green, or Inland, Sea), a dreary region at best, and peopled by the ghosts of countless soldiers who had fallen in battle on the "Yellow Sand Fields." In addition to these backgrounds of reality, that of the Fertile Empire and that of the Barren Waste, there was another – that of the "Western Paradise" inhabited by the Hsi Wang Mu (Western Empress Mother) and those countless beings who, after a life in this world, had attained Immortality and dwelt among the Hsien, supernatural creatures living in this region of perfect happiness supposed to lie among the K'un Lun Mountains in Central Asia. From the spontaneous manner in which they constantly refer to it, and from the vividness of the pictures [Page xxx] suggested by their references to it, one can almost question whether this Fairy World, the World of Imagination, with its inhabitants, were not as real to the writers of the early days as was the World of Actuality. Thus the topography of Chinese poetry may be said to fall into three main divisions, and allusions are made to 1. The beautiful scenes in the Eighteen Provinces. 2. The desolate region beyond the Jade Pass. 3. The glorious "Western Paradise." Ideals determine government, and government determines social life, and social life, with all that the term connotes, is the essence of every literature. The theory upon which the Chinese State was established is exceedingly interesting, and although the ideal was seldom reached, the system proved enduring and brought happiness to the people who lived under it. The Emperor was regarded as the Son of the Celestial Ruler, as Father of his people, and was supposed to direct his Empire as a father should direct his children, never by the strong arm of force, but by loving precept and example. In theory, he held office only so long as peace and prosperity lasted, this beneficent state of things being considered a proof that the ruler's actions were in accordance with the decree of Heaven. Rebellion and disorder were an equal proof that the Son of Heaven had failed in his great [Page xxxi] mission; and, if wide-spread discontent continued, it was his duty to abdicate. The "divine right of kings" has never existed in China; its place has been taken by the people's right to rebellion. This system created a very real democracy, which so struck the Dutchman, Van Braam, when he conducted a commercial embassy to the Court of Ch'ien Lung in 1794, that he dedicated his account of the embassy to "His Excellency George Washington, President of the United States," in the following remarkable manner: Sir, Travels among the most ancient people which now inhabits this globe, and which owes its long existence to the system which makes its chief the Father of the National Family, cannot appear under better auspices than those of the Great Man who was elected, by the universal suffrage of a new nation, to preside at the conquest of liberty, and in the establishment of a government in which everything bespeaks the love of the First Magistrate for the people. Permit me thus to address the homage of my veneration to the virtues, which in your Excellency, afford so striking a resemblance between Asia, and America. I cannot shew myself more worthy of the title of Citizen of the United States, which is become my adopted country, than by paying a just tribute to the Chief, whose principles and sentiments, are calculated to procure them a duration equal to that of the Chinese Empire. The semi-divine person of the Emperor was also regarded as the "Sun" of the Empire, whose light should shine on high and low alike. His intelligence was compared to the penetrating rays of the sun, while that of the Empress found its counterpart in the soft, suffusing brilliance [Page xxxii] of the moon. In reading Chinese poetry, it is important to keep these similies in mind, as the poets constantly employ them; evil counsellors, for instance, are often referred to as "clouds which obscure the sun." The Son of Heaven was assisted in the government of the country by a large body of officials, drawn from all classes of the people. How these officials were chosen, and what were their functions, will be stated presently. At the moment, we must take a cursory glance at Chinese history, since it is an ever-present subject of allusion in poetry. Two favourite, and probably mythical, heroes, the Emperors Yao and Shun, who are supposed to have lived in the semi-legendary period two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ, have been held up ever since as shining examples of perfection. Shun chose as his successor a man who had shown such great engineering talent in draining the country, always in danger of floods from the swollen rivers, that the Chinese still say: "Without Yü, we should all have been fishes." Yü founded the first hereditary dynasty, called the Hsia Dynasty, and, since then, every time the family of the Emperor has changed, a new dynasty has been inaugurated, the name being chosen by its first Emperor. With Yü's accession to the throne in 2205 B.C., authentic Chinese history begins. Several centuries later, when Yü's descendants had deteriorated and become effete, a virtuous noble named [Page xxxiii] T'ang organized the first of those rebellions against bad government so characteristic of Chinese history. He was successful, and in his "Announcement to the Ten Thousand Districts," set forth what we should call his platform in these words: "The way of Heaven is to bless the good and punish the wicked. It sent down calamities upon the house of Hsia to make manifest its crimes. Therefore I, the little child, charged with the decree of Heaven and its bright terrors, did not dare forgive the criminal... It is given to me, the one man, to ensure harmony and tranquillity to your State and families; and now I know not whether I may not offend the Powers above and below. I am fearful and trembling lest I should fall into a deep abyss." The doctrine that Heaven sends calamity as a punishment for man's sin is referred to again and again in the ancient "Book of History" and "Book of Odes." It is a belief common to all primitive peoples, but in China it persisted until the present republic demolished the last of the long line of dynastic empires. T'ang made a great and wise ruler. The Dynasty of Shang, which he founded, lasted until 1122 B.C., and was succeeded by that of Chou, the longest in the annals of Chinese history – so long, indeed, that historians divide it into three distinct periods. The first of these, "The Rise," ran from 1122 B.C. to 770 B.C.; the second, "The Age of Feudalism," endured until 500 B.C.; the third, "The [Page xxxiv] Age of the Seven States," until 255 B.C. Starting under wise rulers, it gradually sank through others less competent until by 770 B.C. it was little more than a name. During the "Age of Feudalism," the numerous States were constantly at war, but eventually the strongest of them united in a group called the "Seven Masculine Powers" under the shadowy suzerainty of Chou. Although, from the political point of view, this period was full of unrest and gloom, from the intellectual it was exceedingly brilliant and is known as the "Age of Philosophers." The most famous names among the many teachers of the time are those of Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, and Confucius. To these men, China owes the two great schools of thought upon which her social system rests. The "Age of the Seven States" (Masculine Powers) ended when Ch'in, one of their number, overcame and absorbed the rest. Its prince adopted the title of Shih Huang Ti, or "First Supreme Ruler," thus placing himself on an equality with Heaven. Is it to be wondered at that the scholars demurred? The literary class were in perpetual opposition to the Emperor, who finally lost patience with them altogether and decreed that all books relating to the past should be burnt, and that history should begin with him. This edict was executed with great severity, and many hundreds of the literati were buried alive. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the name of Shih Huang [Page xxxv] Ti is execrated, even to-day, by a nation whose love for the written word amounts to veneration. Although he held learning of small account, this "First Emperor," to give him his bombastic title, was an enthusiastic promoter of public works, the most important of these being the Great Wall, which has served as an age-long bulwark against the nomadic tribes of Mongolia and Central Asia. These tribes were a terror to China for centuries. They were always raiding the border country, and threatening a descent on the fertile fields beyond the mountains. The history of China is one long struggle to keep from being overrun by these tribes. There is an exact analogy to this state of affairs in the case of Roman Britain, and the perpetual vigilance it was obliged to exercise to keep out the Picts. Shih Huang Ti based his power on fear, and it is a curious commentary upon the fact that the Ch'in Dynasty came to an end in 206 B.C., shortly after his death, and only a scant half-century after he had founded it. A few years of struggle, during which no Son of Heaven occupied the Dragon Throne, succeeded the fall of the Ch'in Dynasty; then a certain Liu Pang, an inconsiderable town officer, proved strong enough to seize what was no one's possession and made himself Emperor, thereby founding the Han Dynasty. The Han is one of the most famous dynasties in Chinese [Page xxxvi] history. An extraordinary revival of learning took place under the successive Emperors of Han. The greatest of them, Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.), is frequently mentioned by the poets. Learning always follows trade, as has often been demonstrated. During the Han Dynasty, which lasted until A.D. 221, intercourse with all the countries of the Near East became more general than ever before, and innumerable caravans wended their slow way across the trade routes of Central Asia. Expeditions against the harassing barbarians were undertaken, and for a time their power was scotched. It was under the Han that Buddhism was introduced from India, but deeply as this has influenced the life and thought of the Middle Kingdom, I am inclined to think that the importance of this influence has been exaggerated. This period, and those immediately preceding it, form the poetic background of China. The ancient States, constantly referred to in the poems, do not correspond to the modern provinces. In order, therefore, to make their geographical positions clear, a map has been appended to this volume in which the modern names of the provinces and cities are printed in black ink and the ancient names in red. As these States did not all exist at the same moment, it is impossible to define their exact boundaries, but how strongly they were impressed upon the popular mind can be seen by the fact that, although they were merged into [Page xxxvii] the Chinese Empire during the reign of Shih Huang Ti, literature continued to speak of them by their old names and, even to-day, writers often refer to them as though they were still separate entities. There were many States, but only those are given in the map which are alluded to in the poems published in this book. The names of a few of the old cities are also given, such as Chin Ling, the "Golden Mound" or "Sepulchre," and Ch'ang An, "Eternal Peace," for so many centuries the capital. Its present name is Hsi An-fu, and it was here that the Manchu Court took refuge during the Boxer madness of 1900. Little more of Chinese history need be told. Following the Han, several dynasties held sway; there were divisions between the North and South and much shifting of power. At length, in A.D. 618, Li Shih-min established the T'ang Dynasty by placing his father on the throne, and the T'ang brought law and order to the suffering country. This period is often called the Golden Age of Chinese Learning. The literary examinations introduced under the Han were perfected, poets and painters were encouraged, and strangers flocked to the Court at Ch'ang An. The reign of Ming Huang (A.D. 712-756), the "Brilliant Emperor," was the culmination of this remarkable era. China's three greatest poets, Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i, all lived during his long reign of forty-five years. Auspiciously as this reign had begun, however, it ended sadly. The Em- [Page xxxviii] peror, more amiable than perspicacious, fell into the toils of his favourite concubine, the lovely Yang Kuei-fei, to whom he was slavishly devoted. The account of their love story – a theme celebrated by poets, painters, and playwrights – will be found in the note to "Songs to the Peonies." A rebellion which broke out was crushed, but the soldiers refused to defend the cause of the Emperor until he had issued an order for the execution of Yang Kuei-fei, whom they believed to be responsible for the trouble. Broken-hearted, the Emperor complied, but from this date the glory of the dynasty was dimmed. Throughout its waning years, the shadow of the dreaded Tartars grew blacker and blacker, and finally, in A.D. 907, the T'ang Dynasty fell. Later history need not concern us here, since most of the poems in this book were written during the T'ang period. Though these poems deal largely with what I have called the historical background, they deal still more largely with the social background and it is, above all, this social background which must be understood. If the Emperor were the "Son of Heaven," he administered his Empire with the help of very human persons, the various officials, and these officials owed their positions, great and small, partly to the Emperor's attitude, it is true, but in far greater degree to their prowess in the literary examinations. An official of the first rank might owe his [Page xxxix] preferment to the Emperor's beneficence; but to reach an altitude where this beneficence could operate, he had to climb through all the lower grades, and this could only be done by successfully passing all the examinations, one after the other. The curious thing is that these examinations were purely literary. They consisted not only in knowing thoroughly the classics of the past, but in being able to recite long passages from them by heart, and with this was included the ability to write one's self, not merely in prose, but in poetry. Every one in office had to be, perforce, a poet. No one could hope to be the mayor of a town or the governor of a province unless he had attained a high proficiency in the art of poetry. This is brought strikingly home to us by the fact that one of the chief pastimes of educated men was to meet together for the purpose of playing various games all of which turned on the writing of verse. The examinations which brought about this strange state of things were four. The first, which conferred the degree of Hsiu Ts'ai, "Flowering Talent," could be competed for only by those who had already passed two minor examinations, one in their district, and one in the department in which this district was situated. The Hsiu Ts'ai examinations were held twice every three years in the provincial capitals. There were various grades of the "Flowering Talent" degree, which is often translated as Bachelor of [Page xl] Arts, some of which could be bestowed through favour or acquired by purchase. The holders of it were entitled to wear a dress of blue silk, and in Chinese novels the hero is often spoken of as wearing this colour, by which readers are to understand that he is a clever young man already on the way to preferment. The second degree, that of Ch'ü Jen, "Promoted Man," was obtained by passing the examinations which took place every third year in all the provincial capitals simultaneously. This degree enabled its recipients to hold office, but positions were not always to hand, and frequently "Promoted Men" had to wait long before being appointed to a post; also, the offices open to them were of the lesser grades, those who aspired to a higher rank had a farther road to travel. The dress which went with this degree was also of silk, but of a darker shade than that worn by "bachelors." The third examination for the Chin Shih, or "Entered Scholar," degree was also held triennially, but at the national capital, and only those among the Ch'ü Jên who had not already taken office were eligible. The men so fortunate as to pass were allowed to place a tablet over the doors of their houses, and their particular dress was of violet silk. The fourth, which really conferred an office rather than a degree, was bestowed on men who competed in a special examination held once in three years in the Emperor's Palace. Those who were successful in this last examination [Page xli] became automatically Han Lin, or members of the Imperial Academy, which, in the picturesque phraseology of China, was called the "Forest of Pencils." A member of the Academy held his position, a salaried one, for life, and the highest officials of the Empire were chosen from these Academicians. This elaboration of degrees was only arrived at gradually. During the T'ang Dynasty, all the examinations were held at Ch'ang An. These four degrees of learning have often been translated as Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, and Academician. The analogy is so far from close, however, that most modern sinologues prefer to render them indiscriminately, according to context, as student, scholar, and official. By means of this remarkable system, which threw open the road to advancement to every man in the country capable of availing himself of it, new blood was continually brought to the top, as all who passed the various degrees became officials, expectant or in being, and of higher or lower grade according to the Chinese measure of ability. Military degrees corresponding to the civil were given; but, as these called for merely physical display, they were not highly esteemed. Since only a few of the candidates for office passed the examinations successfully, a small army of highly educated men was dispersed throughout the country every three [Page xlii] years. In towns and villages they were regarded with the reverence universally paid to learning by the Chinese, and many became teachers to the rising generation in whom they cultivated a great respect for literature in general and poetry in particular. The holders of degrees, on the other hand, entered at once upon a career as administrators. Prevented by an inexorable law – a law designed to make nepotism impossible – from holding office in their own province, they were constantly shifted from one part of the country to another, and this is a chief reason for the many poems of farewell that were written. The great desire of all officials was to remain at, or near, the Court, where the most brilliant brains of the Empire were assembled. As may be easily imagined, the intrigues and machinations employed to attain this end were many, with the result that deserving men often found themselves banished to posts on the desolate outskirts of the country where, far from congenial intercourse, they suffered a mental exile of the most complete description. Innumerable poems dealing with this sad state are found in all Chinese anthologies. There were nine ranks of nobility. The higher officials took the rank of their various and succeeding offices, others were ennobled for signal services performed. These titles were not hereditary in the ordinary sense, but backwards, if I can so express it. The dead ancestors of a nobleman [Page xliii] were accorded his rank, whatever had been theirs in life, but his sons and their descendants had only such titles as they themselves might earn. The desire to bask in the rays of the Imperial Sun was shared by ambitious fathers who longed to have their daughters appear before the Emperor, and possibly make the fortune of the family by captivating the Imperial glance. This led to the most beautiful and talented young girls being sent to the Palace, where they often lived and died without ever being summoned before the Son of Heaven. Although numberless tragic poems have been written by these unfortunate ladies, many charming romances did actually take place, made possible by the custom of periodically dispersing the superfluous Palace women and marrying them to suitable husbands. In striking contrast to the unfortunates who dragged out a purposeless life of idleness, was the lot of the beauty who had the good fortune to capture the Imperial fancy, and who, through her influence over the Dragon Throne, virtually ruled the Middle Kingdom. No extravagancies were too great for these exquisite creatures, and many dynasties have fallen through popular revolt against the excesses of Imperial concubines. It would be quite erroneous to suppose, however, that the Emperor's life was entirely given up to pleasure and gaiety, or that it was chiefly passed in the beautiful seclusion [Page xliv] of the Imperial gardens. The poems, it is true, generally allude to these moments, but the cares of state were many, and every day, at sunrise, officials assembled in the Audience Hall to make their reports to the Emperor. Moreover, Court ceremonials were extremely solemn occasions, carried out with the utmost dignity. As life at Court centred about the persons of the Emperor and Empress, so life in the homes of the people centered about the elders of the family. The men of wealthy families were usually of official rank, and led a life in touch with the outer world, a life of social intercourse with other men in which friendship played an all-engrossing part. This characteristic of Chinese life is one of the most striking features of the poetic background. Love poems from men to women are so rare as to be almost non-existent (striking exceptions do occur, however, several of which are translated here), but poems of grief written at parting from "the man one loves" are innumerable, and to sit with one's friends, drinking wine and reciting verses, making music or playing chess, were favourite amusements throughout the T'ang period. Wine-drinking was general, no pleasure gathering being complete without it. The wine of China was usually made from fermented grains, but wines from grapes, plums, pears, and other fruits were also manufactured. It was carefully heated and served in tall flagons somewhat resembling our [Page xlv] coffee-pots, and was drunk out of tiny little cups no bigger than liqueur glasses. These cups, which were never of glass, were made of various metals, of lacquered or carved wood, of semi-precious stones such as jade, or agate, or carnelian; porcelain, the usual material for wine-cups to-day, not having yet been invented. Custom demanded that each thimbleful be tossed off at a gulp, and many were consumed before a feeling of exhilaration could be experienced. That there was a good deal of real drunkenness, we cannot doubt, but not to the extent that is generally supposed. From the character of the men and the lives they led, it is fairly clear that most of the drinking kept within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately, in translation, the quantity imbibed at these wine-parties becomes greatly exaggerated. That wine was drunk, not merely for its taste, but as a heightener of sensation, is evident; but the "three hundred cups" so often mentioned bear no such significance as might at first appear when the size of the cups is taken into account. Undoubtedly, also, we must regard this exact number as a genial hyperbole. If husbands and sons could enjoy the excitement of travel, the spur of famous scenery, the gaieties of Court, and the pleasures of social intercourse, wives and daughters were obliged to find their occupations within the Kuei or "Women's Apartments," which included the gardens set apart for their use. The ruling spirit of the Kuei was the [Page xlvi] mother-in-law; and the wife of the master of the house, although she was the mother of his sons and the director of the daughters-in-law, did not reach the fulness of her power until her husband's mother had died. The chief duty of a young wife was attendance upon her mother-in-law. With the first grey streak of daylight, she rose from her immense lacquer bed, so large as to be almost an anteroom, and, having dressed, took the old lady her tea. She then returned to her own apartment to breakfast with her husband and await the summons to attend her mother-in-law's toilet, a most solemn function, and the breakfast which followed. These duties accomplished, she was free to occupy herself as she pleased. Calligraphy, painting, writing poems and essays, were popular pursuits, and many hours were spent at the embroidery frame or in making music. Chinese poetry is full of references to the toilet, to the intricate hair-dressing, the "moth-antennæ eyebrows," the painting of faces, and all this was done in front of a mirror standing on a little rack placed on the toilet-table. A lady, writing to her absent husband, mourns that she has no heart to "make the cloud head-dress," or writes, "looking down upon my mirror in order to apply the powder and paint, I desire to keep back the tears. I fear that the people in the house will know my grief. I am ashamed." In spite of the fact that they had never laid eyes on [Page xlvii] the men they were to marry before the wedding-day, these young women seem to have depended upon the companionship of their husbands to a most touching extent. The occupations of the day were carried on in the Kuei; but, when evening came, the husband and wife often read and studied the classics together. A line from a well-known poem says, "The red sleeve replenishes the incense, at night, studying books," and the picture it calls up is that of a young man and woman in the typical surroundings of a Chinese home of the educated class. Red was the colour worn by very young women, whether married or not; as the years advanced, this was changed for soft blues and mauves, and later still for blacks, greys, or dull greens. A line such as "tears soak my dress of coarse, red silk" instantly suggests a young woman in deep grief. Shih Huang Ti based his power on fear, and it is a curious commentary upon the fact that the Ch'in Dynasty came to an end in 206 B.C., shortly after his death, and only a scant half-century after he had founded it. A few years of struggle, during which no Son of Heaven occupied the Dragon Throne, succeeded the fall of the Ch'in Dynasty; then a certain Liu Pang, an inconsiderable town officer, proved strong enough to seize what was no one's possession and made himself Emperor, thereby founding the Han Dynasty. The Han is one of the most famous dynasties in Chinese [Page xxxvi] history. An extraordinary revival of learning took place under the successive Emperors of Han. The greatest of them, Wu Ti (140-87 B.C.), is frequently mentioned by the poets. Learning always follows trade, as has often been demonstrated. During the Han Dynasty, which lasted until A.D. 221, intercourse with all the countries of the Near East became more general than ever before, and innumerable caravans wended their slow way across the trade routes of Central Asia. Expeditions against the harassing barbarians were undertaken, and for a time their power was scotched. It was under the Han that Buddhism was introduced from India, but deeply as this has influenced the life and thought of the Middle Kingdom, I am inclined to think that the importance of this influence has been exaggerated. This period, and those immediately preceding it, form the poetic background of China. The ancient States, constantly referred to in the poems, do not correspond to the modern provinces. In order, therefore, to make their geographical positions clear, a map has been appended to this volume in which the modern names of the provinces and cities are printed in black ink and the ancient names in red. As these States did not all exist at the same moment, it is impossible to define their exact boundaries, but how strongly they were impressed upon the popular mind can be seen by the fact that, although they were merged into [Page xxxvii] the Chinese Empire during the reign of Shih Huang Ti, literature continued to speak of them by their old names and, even to-day, writers often refer to them as though they were still separate entities. There were many States, but only those are given in the map which are alluded to in the poems published in this book. The names of a few of the old cities are also given, such as Chin Ling, the "Golden Mound" or "Sepulchre," and Ch'ang An, "Eternal Peace," for so many centuries the capital. Its present name is Hsi An-fu, and it was here that the Manchu Court took refuge during the Boxer madness of 1900. Little more of Chinese history need be told. Following the Han, several dynasties held sway; there were divisions between the North and South and much shifting of power. At length, in A.D. 618, Li Shih-min established the T'ang Dynasty by placing his father on the throne, and the T'ang brought law and order to the suffering country. This period is often called the Golden Age of Chinese Learning. The literary examinations introduced under the Han were perfected, poets and painters were encouraged, and strangers flocked to the Court at Ch'ang An. The reign of Ming Huang (A.D. 712-756), the "Brilliant Emperor," was the culmination of this remarkable era. China's three greatest poets, Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i, all lived during his long reign of forty-five years. Auspiciously as this reign had begun, however, it ended sadly. The Em- [Page xxxviii] peror, more amiable than perspicacious, fell into the toils of his favourite concubine, the lovely Yang Kuei-fei, to whom he was slavishly devoted. The account of their love story – a theme celebrated by poets, painters, and playwrights – will be found in the note to "Songs to the Peonies." A rebellion which broke out was crushed, but the soldiers refused to defend the cause of the Emperor until he had issued an order for the execution of Yang Kuei-fei, whom they believed to be responsible for the trouble. Broken-hearted, the Emperor complied, but from this date the glory of the dynasty was dimmed. Throughout its waning years, the shadow of the dreaded Tartars grew blacker and blacker, and finally, in A.D. 907, the T'ang Dynasty fell. Later history need not concern us here, since most of the poems in this book were written during the T'ang period. Though these poems deal largely with what I have called the historical background, they deal still more largely with the social background and it is, above all, this social background which must be understood. If the Emperor were the "Son of Heaven," he administered his Empire with the help of very human persons, the various officials, and these officials owed their positions, great and small, partly to the Emperor's attitude, it is true, but in far greater degree to their prowess in the literary examinations. An official of the first rank might owe his [Page xxxix] preferment to the Emperor's beneficence; but to reach an altitude where this beneficence could operate, he had to climb through all the lower grades, and this could only be done by successfully passing all the examinations, one after the other. The curious thing is that these examinations were purely literary. They consisted not only in knowing thoroughly the classics of the past, but in being able to recite long passages from them by heart, and with this was included the ability to write one's self, not merely in prose, but in poetry. Every one in office had to be, perforce, a poet. No one could hope to be the mayor of a town or the governor of a province unless he had attained a high proficiency in the art of poetry. This is brought strikingly home to us by the fact that one of the chief pastimes of educated men was to meet together for the purpose of playing various games all of which turned on the writing of verse. The examinations which brought about this strange state of things were four. The first, which conferred the degree of Hsiu Ts'ai, "Flowering Talent," could be competed for only by those who had already passed two minor examinations, one in their district, and one in the department in which this district was situated. The Hsiu Ts'ai examinations were held twice every three years in the provincial capitals. There were various grades of the "Flowering Talent" degree, which is often translated as Bachelor of [Page xl] Arts, some of which could be bestowed through favour or acquired by purchase. The holders of it were entitled to wear a dress of blue silk, and in Chinese novels the hero is often spoken of as wearing this colour, by which readers are to understand that he is a clever young man already on the way to preferment. The second degree, that of Ch'ü Jen, "Promoted Man," was obtained by passing the examinations which took place every third year in all the provincial capitals simultaneously. This degree enabled its recipients to hold office, but positions were not always to hand, and frequently "Promoted Men" had to wait long before being appointed to a post; also, the offices open to them were of the lesser grades, those who aspired to a higher rank had a farther road to travel. The dress which went with this degree was also of silk, but of a darker shade than that worn by "bachelors." The third examination for the Chin Shih, or "Entered Scholar," degree was also held triennially, but at the national capital, and only those among the Ch'ü Jen who had not already taken office were eligible. The men so fortunate as to pass were allowed to place a tablet over the doors of their houses, and their particular dress was of violet silk. The fourth, which really conferred an office rather than a degree, was bestowed on men who competed in a special examination held once in three years in the Emperor's Palace. Those who were successful in this last examination [Page xli] became automatically Han Lin, or members of the Imperial Academy, which, in the picturesque phraseology of China, was called the "Forest of Pencils." A member of the Academy held his position, a salaried one, for life, and the highest officials of the Empire were chosen from these Academicians. This elaboration of degrees was only arrived at gradually. During the T'ang Dynasty, all the examinations were held at Ch'ang An. These four degrees of learning have often been translated as Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, and Academician. The analogy is so far from close, however, that most modern sinologues prefer to render them indiscriminately, according to context, as student, scholar, and official. By means of this remarkable system, which threw open the road to advancement to every man in the country capable of availing himself of it, new blood was continually brought to the top, as all who passed the various degrees became officials, expectant or in being, and of higher or lower grade according to the Chinese measure of ability. Military degrees corresponding to the civil were given; but, as these called for merely physical display, they were not highly esteemed. Since only a few of the candidates for office passed the examinations successfully, a small army of highly educated men was dispersed throughout the country every three [Page xlii] years. In towns and villages they were regarded with the reverence universally paid to learning by the Chinese, and many became teachers to the rising generation in whom they cultivated a great respect for literature in general and poetry in particular. The holders of degrees, on the other hand, entered at once upon a career as administrators. Prevented by an inexorable law – a law designed to make nepotism impossible – from holding office in their own province, they were constantly shifted from one part of the country to another, and this is a chief reason for the many poems of farewell that were written. The great desire of all officials was to remain at, or near, the Court, where the most brilliant brains of the Empire were assembled. As may be easily imagined, the intrigues and machinations employed to attain this end were many, with the result that deserving men often found themselves banished to posts on the desolate outskirts of the country where, far from congenial intercourse, they suffered a mental exile of the most complete description. Innumerable poems dealing with this sad state are found in all Chinese anthologies. There were nine ranks of nobility. The higher officials took the rank of their various and succeeding offices, others were ennobled for signal services performed. These titles were not hereditary in the ordinary sense, but backwards, if I can so express it. The dead ancestors of a nobleman [Page xliii] were accorded his rank, whatever had been theirs in life, but his sons and their descendants had only such titles as they themselves might earn. The desire to bask in the rays of the Imperial Sun was shared by ambitious fathers who longed to have their daughters appear before the Emperor, and possibly make the fortune of the family by captivating the Imperial glance. This led to the most beautiful and talented young girls being sent to the Palace, where they often lived and died without ever being summoned before the Son of Heaven. Although numberless tragic poems have been written by these unfortunate ladies, many charming romances did actually take place, made possible by the custom of periodically dispersing the superfluous Palace women and marrying them to suitable husbands. In striking contrast to the unfortunates who dragged out a purposeless life of idleness, was the lot of the beauty who had the good fortune to capture the Imperial fancy, and who, through her influence over the Dragon Throne, virtually ruled the Middle Kingdom. No extravagancies were too great for these exquisite creatures, and many dynasties have fallen through popular revolt against the excesses of Imperial concubines. It would be quite erroneous to suppose, however, that the Emperor's life was entirely given up to pleasure and gaiety, or that it was chiefly passed in the beautiful seclu- [Page xliv] sion of the Imperial gardens. The poems, it is true, generally allude to these moments, but the cares of state were many, and every day, at sunrise, officials assembled in the Audience Hall to make their reports to the Emperor. Moreover, Court ceremonials were extremely solemn occasions, carried out with the utmost dignity. As life at Court centred about the persons of the Emperor and Empress, so life in the homes of the people centered about the elders of the family. The men of wealthy families were usually of official rank, and led a life in touch with the outer world, a life of social intercourse with other men in which friendship played an all-engrossing part. This characteristic of Chinese life is one of the most striking features of the poetic background. Love poems from men to women are so rare as to be almost non-existent (striking exceptions do occur, however, several of which are translated here), but poems of grief written at parting from "the man one loves" are innumerable, and to sit with one's friends, drinking wine and reciting verses, making music or playing chess, were favourite amusements throughout the T'ang period. Wine-drinking was general, no pleasure gathering being complete without it. The wine of China was usually made from fermented grains, but wines from grapes, plums, pears, and other fruits were also manufactured. It was carefully heated and served in tall flagons somewhat resembling our [Page xlv] coffee-pots, and was drunk out of tiny little cups no bigger than liqueur glasses. These cups, which were never of glass, were made of various metals, of lacquered or carved wood, of semi-precious stones such as jade, or agate, or carnelian; porcelain, the usual material for wine-cups to-day, not having yet been invented. Custom demanded that each thimbleful be tossed off at a gulp, and many were consumed before a feeling of exhilaration could be experienced. That there was a good deal of real drunkenness, we cannot doubt, but not to the extent that is generally supposed. From the character of the men and the lives they led, it is fairly clear that most of the drinking kept within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately, in translation, the quantity imbibed at these wine-parties becomes greatly exaggerated. That wine was drunk, not merely for its taste, but as a heightener of sensation, is evident; but the "three hundred cups" so often mentioned bear no such significance as might at first appear when the size of the cups is taken into account. Undoubtedly, also, we must regard this exact number as a genial hyperbole. If husbands and sons could enjoy the excitement of travel, the spur of famous scenery, the gaieties of Court, and the pleasures of social intercourse, wives and daughters were obliged to find their occupations within the Kuei or "Women's Apartments," which included the gardens set apart for their use. The ruling spirit of the Kuei was the [Page xlvi] mother-in-law; and the wife of the master of the house, although she was the mother of his sons and the director of the daughters-in-law, did not reach the fulness of her power until her husband's mother had died. The chief duty of a young wife was attendance upon her mother-in-law. With the first grey streak of daylight, she rose from her immense lacquer bed, so large as to be almost an anteroom, and, having dressed, took the old lady her tea. She then returned to her own apartment to breakfast with her husband and await the summons to attend her mother-in-law's toilet, a most solemn function, and the breakfast which followed. These duties accomplished, she was free to occupy herself as she pleased. Calligraphy, painting, writing poems and essays, were popular pursuits, and many hours were spent at the embroidery frame or in making music. Chinese poetry is full of references to the toilet, to the intricate hair-dressing, the "moth-antennæ eyebrows," the painting of faces, and all this was done in front of a mirror standing on a little rack placed on the toilet-table. A lady, writing to her absent husband, mourns that she has no heart to "make the cloud head-dress," or writes, "looking down upon my mirror in order to apply the powder and paint, I desire to keep back the tears. I fear that the people in the house will know my grief. I am ashamed." In spite of the fact that they had never laid eyes on [Page xlvii] the men they were to marry before the wedding-day, these young women seem to have depended upon the companionship of their husbands to a most touching extent. The occupations of the day were carried on in the Kuei; but, when evening came, the husband and wife often read and studied the classics together. A line from a well-known poem says, "The red sleeve replenishes the incense, at night, studying books," and the picture it calls up is that of a young man and woman in the typical surroundings of a Chinese home of the educated class. Red was the colour worn by very young women, whether married or not; as the years advanced, this was changed for soft blues and mauves, and later still for blacks, greys, or dull greens. A line such as "tears soak my dress of coarse, red silk" instantly suggests a young woman in deep grief. |
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| 18 | 1921.3 |
Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140]. (3) Introduction by Florence Ayscough How a house was arranged can be seen in the plan at the end of this book. Doors lead to the garden from the study, the guest-room, and the Women's Apartments. These are made in an endless diversity of shapes and add greatly to the picturesqueness of house and grounds. Those through which a number of people are to pass to and fro are often large circles, while smaller and more intimate doors are cut to the outlines of fans, leaves, or flower vases. In addition to the doors, blank spaces of wall are often broken by openings at the height of a window, such openings being [Page l] most fantastic and filled with intricately designed lattice-work. I have already spoken of the Kuei, or Women's Apartments. In poetry, this part of the chia is alluded to in a highly figurative manner. The windows are "gold" or "jade" windows; the door by which it is approached is the Lan Kuei, or "Orchid Door." Indeed, the sweet-scented little epidendrum called by the Chinese, lan, is continually used to suggest the Kuei and its inmates. Besides the house proper, there are numerous structures erected in gardens, for the Chinese spend much of their time in their gardens. No nation is more passionately fond of nature, whether in its grander aspects, or in the charming arrangements of potted flowers which take the place of our borders in their pleasure grounds. Among these outdoor buildings none is more difficult to describe than the lou, since we have nothing which exactly corresponds to it. Lous appear again and again in Chinese poetry, but just what to call them in English is a puzzle. They are neither summer-houses, nor pavilions, nor cupolas, but a little of all three. Always of more than one story, they are employed for differing purposes; for instance, the fo lou on the plan is an upper chamber where Buddhist images are kept. The lou generally referred to in poetry, however, is really a "pleasure-house-in-the-air," used as the Italians use their belvederes. Here the inmates of the house sit and look down upon the garden or over the surrounding country, or watch "the sun disappear in the long grass at the edge of the horizon" or "the moon rise like a golden hook." Another erection foreign to Western architecture is the t'ai, or terrace. In early days, there were many kinds of t'ai, ranging from the small, square, uncovered stage still seen in private gardens and called yüeh t'ai, "moon terrace," to immense structures like high, long, open platforms, built by Emperors and officials for various reasons. Many of these last were famous; I have given the histories of several of them in the notes illustrating the poems, at the end of the book. It will be observed that I have said practically nothing about religion. The reason is partly that the three principal religions practised by the Chinese are either so well known, as Buddhism, for example, or so difficult to describe, as Taoism and the ancient religion of China now merged in the teachings of Confucius; partly that none of them could be profitably compressed into the scope of this introduction; but chiefly because the subject of religion, in the poems here translated, is generally referred to in its superstitious aspects alone. The superstitions which have grown up about Taoism particularly are innumerable. I have dealt with a number of these in the notes to the poems in which they appear. Certain supernatural personages, without a [Page lii] knowledge of whom much of the poetry would be unintelligible, I have set down in the following list: Hsien. Immortals who live in the Taoist Paradises. Human beings may attain "Hsien-ship," or Immortality, by living a life of contemplation in the hills. In translating the term, we have used the word "Immortals." Shên. Beneficent beings who inhabit the higher regions. They are kept extremely busy attending to their duties as tutelary deities of the roads, hills, rivers, etc., and it is also their function to intervene and rescue deserving people from the attacks of their enemies. Kuei. A proportion of the souls of the departed who inhabit the "World of Shades," a region resembling this world, which is the "World of Light," in every particular, with the important exception that it has no sunshine. Kindly kuei are known, but the influence generally suggested is an evil one. They may only return to the World of Light between sunset and sunrise, except upon the fifth day of the Fifth Month (June), when they are free to come during the time known as the "hour of the horse," from eleven A.M. to one P.M. Yao Kuai. A class of fierce demons who live in the wild regions of the Southwest and delight in eating the flesh of human beings. There are also supernatural creatures whose names carry a symbolical meaning. A few of them are: Ch'i Lin. A composite animal, somewhat resembling the fabulous unicorn, whose arrival is a good omen. He appears when sages are born. Dragon. A symbol of the forces of Heaven, also the emblem of Imperial power. Continually referred to in poetry as the steed which transports a philosopher who has attained Immortality to his home in the Western Paradise. Fêng Huang. A glorious bird, symbol of the Empress, therefore often associated with the dragon. The conception of this bird is probably based on the Argus pheasant. It is described as possessing every grace [Page liv] and beauty. A Chinese author, quoted by F. W. Williams in "The Middle Kingdom," writes: "It resembles a wild swan before and a unicorn behind; it has the throat of a swallow, the bill of a cock, the neck of a snake, the tail of a fish, the forehead of a crane, the crown of a mandarin drake, the stripes of a dragon, and the vaulted back of a tortoise. The feathers have five colours which are named after the five cardinal virtues, and it is five cubits in height; the tail is graduated like the pipes of a gourd-organ, and its song resembles the music of the instrument, having five modulations." Properly speaking, the female is Fêng, the male Huang, but the two words are usually given in combination to denote the species. Some one, probably in desperation, once translated the combined words as "phœnix," and this term has been employed ever since. It conveys, however, an entirely wrong impression of the creature. To Western readers, the word "phœnix" suggests a bird which, being consumed by fire, [Page lv] rises in a new birth from its own ashes. The Fêng Huang has no such power, it is no symbol of hope or resurrection, but suggests friendship and affection of all sorts. Miss Lowell and I have translated the name as "crested love-pheasant," which seems to us to convey a better idea of the beautiful Fêng Huang, the bird which brings happiness. Luan. A supernatural bird sometimes confused with the above. It is a sacred creature, connected with fire, and a symbol of love and passion, of the relation between men and women. Chien. The "paired-wings bird," described in Chinese books as having but one wing and one eye, for which reason two must unite for either of them to fly. It is often referred to as suggesting undying affection. Real birds and animals also have symbolical attributes. I give only three: Crane. Represents longevity, and is employed, as is the dragon, to transport those who have attained to Immortality to the Heavens. Yuan Yang. The exquisite little mandarin ducks, an unvarying symbol of conjugal fidelity. Li T'ai-po often alludes to them and declares that, rather than be separated, they would "prefer to die ten thousand deaths, and have their gauze-like wings torn to fragments." Wild Geese. Symbols of direct purpose, their flight being always in a straight line. As they follow the sun's course, allusions to their departure suggest Spring, to their arrival, Autumn. A complete list of the trees and plants endowed with symbolical meanings would be almost endless. Those most commonly employed in poetry in a suggestive sense are: Ch'ang P'u. A plant growing in the Taoist Paradise and much admired by the Immortals, who are the only beings able to see its purple blossoms. On earth, it is known as the sweet flag, and has the peculiarity of never blossoming. It is hung on the lintels of doors on the fifth day of the [Page lvii] Fifth Month to ward off the evil influences which may be brought by the kuei on their return to this world during the "hour of the horse." Peony. Riches and prosperity. Lotus. Purity. Although it rises from the mud, it is bright and spotless. Plum-blossom. Literally "the first," it being the first of the "hundred flowers" to open. It suggests the beginnings of things, and is also one of the "three friends" who do not fear the Winter cold, the other two being the pine and the bamboo. Lan. A small epidendrum, translated in this book as "spear-orchid." It is a symbol for noble men and beautiful, refined women. Confucius compared the Chün Tzu, Princely or Superior Man, to this little orchid with its delightful scent. In poetry, it is also used in reference to the Women's Apartments and everything connected with them, suggesting, as it does, the extreme of refinement. Chrysanthemum. Fidelity and constancy. In spite of frost, its flowers continue to bloom. [Page lviii] Ling Chih. Longevity. This fungus, which grows at the roots of trees, is very durable when dried. Pine. Longevity, immutability, steadfastness. Bamboo. This plant has as many virtues as it has uses, the principal ones are modesty, protection from defilement, unchangeableness. Wu-t'ung. A tree whose botanical name is sterculia platanifolia. Its only English name seems to be "umbrella-tree," which has proved so unattractive in its context in the poems that we have left it untranslated. It is a symbol for integrity, high principles, great sensibility. When "Autumn stands," on August seventh, although it is still to all intents and purposes Summer, the wu-t'ung tree drops one leaf. Its wood, which is white, easy to cut, and very light, is the only kind suitable for making that intimate instrument which quickly betrays the least emotion of the person playing upon it – the ch'in, or table-lute. Willow. A prostitute, or any very frivolous person. Concubines writing to their lords often refer to themselves under this figure, in the same spirit of self-depreciation which prompts them to employ the euphemism, "Unworthy One," instead of the personal pronoun. Because of its lightness and pliability, it conveys also the idea of extreme vitality. Peach-blossom. Beautiful women and ill-success in life. The first suggestion, on account of the exquisite colour of the flower; the second, because of its perishability. Peach-tree Longevity. This fruit is supposed to ripen once every three thousand years on the trees of Paradise, and those who eat of this celestial species never die. Mulberry. Utility. Also suggests a peaceful hamlet. Its wood is used in making of bows and the kind of temple-drums called mo yü – wooden fish. Its leaves feed the silk-worms. Plantain. Sadness and grief. It is symbolical of a heart which is not "flat" or "level," as the Chinese say, not open or care-free, but of one which is "tightly rolled." The sound of rain on its leaves is very mournful, therefore an allusion to the plantain always means sorrow. Planted outside windows already glazed with silk, its heavy green leaves soften the glaring light of Summer, and it is often used for this purpose. Nothing has been more of a stumbling-block to translators than the fact that the Chinese year – which is strictly lunar, with and intercalary month added at certain intervals – begins a month later than ours; or, to be more exact, it is calculated from the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius, which brings the New Year at varying times from the end of January to the middle of February. For translation purposes, however, it is safe to count the Chinese months as always one later by our calendar than the number given would seem to imply. By this calculation the "First Month" is February, and so on throughout the year. The day is divided into twelve periods of two hours each beginning at eleven P.M. and each of these periods is called by the name of an animal – horse, deer, snake, bat, etc. As these names are not duplicated, the use of them tells at [Page lxi] once whether the hour is day or night. Ancient China's method of telling time was by means of slow and evenly burning sticks made of a composition of clay and sawdust, or by the clepsydra, or water-clock. Water-clocks are mentioned several times in these poems. So much for what I have called the backgrounds of Chinese poetry. I must now speak of that poetry itself, and of Miss Lowell's and my method of translating it. Chinese prosody is a very difficult thing for an Occidental to understand. Chinese is a monosyllabic language, and this reduces the word-sounds so considerably that speech would be almost impossible were it not for the invention of tones by which the same sound can be made to do the duty of four in the Mandarin dialect, five in the Nankingese, nine in the Cantonese, etc., a different tone inflection totally changing the meaning of a word. Only two chief tones are used in poetry, the "level" and the "oblique," but the oblique tone is subdivided into three, which makes four different inflections possible to every sound. Of course, like English and other languages, the same word may have several meanings, and in Chinese these meanings are bewilderingly many; the only possible way of determining which one is correct is by its context. These tones constitute, at the outset, the principal difference which divides the technique of Chinese poetry from our own. Another is to be found in the fact that nothing approaching our metri- [Page lxii] cal foot is possible in a tongue which knows only single syllables. Rhyme does exist, but there are only a little over a hundred rhymes, as tone inflection does not change a word in that particular. Such a paucity of rhyme would seriously affect the richness of any poetry, if again the Chinese had not overcome this lingual defect by the employment of a juxtaposing pattern made up of their four poetic tones. And these tones come to the rescue once more when we consider the question of rhythm. Monosyllables in themselves always produce a staccato effect, which tends to make all rhythm composed of them monotonous, if, indeed, it does not destroy it altogether. The tones cause what I may call a psychological change in the time-length of these monosyllables, which change not only makes true rhythm possible, but allows marked varieties of the basic beat. One of the chief differences between poetry and prose is that poetry must have a more evident pattern. The pattern of Chinese poetry is formed out of three elements: line, rhyme, and tone. The Chinese attitude toward line is almost identical with that of the French. French prosody counts every syllable as a foot, and a line is made up of so many counted feet. If any of my readers has ever read French alexandrines aloud to a Frenchman, read them as we should read English poetry, seeking to bring out the musical stress, he will remember the look of sad surprise which crept over his [Page lxiii] hearer's face. Not so was this verse constructed; not so is it to be read. The number of syllables to a line is counted, that is the secret of French classic poetry; the number of syllables is counted in Chinese. But – and we come to a divergence – this method of counting does, in French practice, often do away with the rhythm so delightful to an English ear; in Chinese, no such violence occurs, as each syllable is a word and no collection of such words can fall into a metric pulse as French words can, and, in their Chansons, are permitted to do. The Chinese line pattern is, then, one of counted words, and these counted words are never less than three, nor more than seven, in regular verse; irregular is a different matter, as I shall explain shortly. Five and seven word lines are cut by a cæsura, which comes after the second word in a five-word line, and after the fourth in a seven-word line. Rhyme is used exactly as we use it, at the ends of lines. Internal rhyming is common, however, in a type of poem called a "fu," which I shall deal with when I come to the particular kinds of verse. Tone is everywhere, obviously, and is employed, not arbitrarily, but woven into a pattern of its own which again is in a more or less loose relation to rhyme. By itself, the tone-pattern alternates in a peculiar manner in each line, the last line of a stanza conforming to the order of tones in the first, the intervening lines varying methodically. I have before me a poem in which the tone-pattern is alike in lines one, four, and eight, of an eight-line stanza, as are lines two and six, and lines three and seven, while line five is the exact opposite of lines two and six. In the second stanza of the same poem, the pattern is kept, but adversely; the tones do not follow the same order, but conform in similarity of grouping. I use this example merely to show what is meant by tone-pattern. It will serve to illustrate how much diversity and richness this tone-chiming is capable of bringing to Chinese poetry. Words which rhyme must be in the same tone in regular verse, and unrhymed lines must end on an oblique tone if the rhyme-tone is level, and vice versa. The level tone is preferred for rhyme. In the early Chinese poetry, called Ku-shih (Old Poems), the tones were practically disregarded. But in the Lü-shih (Regulated Poems) the rules regarding them are very strict. The lü-shih are supposed to date from the beginning of the T'ang Dynasty. A lü-shih poem proper should be of eight lines, though this is often extended to sixteen, but it must be in either the five-word line, or the seven-word line, metre. The poets of the T'ang Dynasty, however, were by no means the slaves of lü-shih; they went their own way, as good poets always do, conforming when it pleased them and disregarding when they chose. It depended on the character of the poet. Tu Fu was renowned for his careful versification; Li T'ai-po, on the other hand, not infrequently rebelled and made his own rules. In his "Drinking Song," which is in seven-word lines, he suddenly dashes in two three-word lines, a proceeding which must have been greatly upsetting to the purists. It is amusing to note that his "Taking Leave of Tu Fu" is in the strictest possible form, which is at once a tribute and a poking of fun at his great friend and contemporary. Regular poems of more than sixteen lines are called p'ai lu, and these may run to any length; Tu Fu carried them to forty, eighty, and even to two hundred lines. Another form, always translated as "short-stop," cuts the eight-line poem in two. In theory, the short-stop holds the same relation to the eight-line poem that the Japanese hokku does to the tanka, although of course it preceded the hokku by many centuries. It is supposed to suggest rather than to state, being considered as an eight-line poem with its end in the air. In suggestion, however, the later Japanese form far outdoes it. So called "irregular verse" follows the writer's inclination within the natural limits of all Chinese prosody. A tzu may be taken to mean a lyric, if we use that term, not in its dictionary sense, but as all modern poets employ it. It may vary its line length, but must keep the same variation in all the stanzas. Perhaps the most interesting form to modern students is the fu, in which the construction is almost identical with that of "polyphonic prose." The lines are so irregular in length that the poem might be mistaken for prose, had we not a corresponding form to guide us. The rhymes appear when and where they will, in the middle of the lines or at the end, and sometimes there are two or more together. I have been told that Persia has, or had, an analogous form, and if so modern an invention as "polyphonic prose" derives, however unconsciously, from two such ancient countries as China and Persia, the fact is, at least, interesting. The earliest examples of Chinese poetry which have come down to us are a collection of rhymed ballads in various metres, of which the most usual is four words to a line. They are simple, straightforward pieces, often of a strange poignance, and always reflecting the quiet, peaceful habits of a people engaged in agriculture. The oldest were probably composed about 2000 B.C. and the others at varying times from then until the Sixth Century B.C., when Confucius gathered them into the volume known as the "Book of Odes." Two of these odes are translated in this book. The next epoch in the advance of poetry-making was introduced by Ch'ü Yüan (312-295 B.C.), a famous statesman and poet, who wrote an excitable, irregular style in which the primitive technical rules were disregarded, their place being taken by exigencies of emotion and idea. We are wont to regard a poetical technique determined by feeling alone as a very modern innovation, and it is interesting to note that the method is, on the contrary, as old as the hills. These rhapsodical allegories culminated in a poem entitled "Li Sao," or "Falling into Trouble," which is one of the most famous of ancient Chinese poems. A further development took place under the Western Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 25), when Su Wu invented the five-character poem, ku fêng; these poems were in Old Style, but had five words to a line. It is during this same period that poems with seven words to a line appeared. Legend has it that they were first composed by the Emperor Wu of Han, and that he hit upon the form on an occasion when he and his Ministers were drinking wine and capping verses at a feast on the White Beam Terrace. Finally, under the Empress Wu Hou, early in the T'ang Dynasty, the lü-shih, or "poems according to law," became the standard. It will be seen that the lü-shih found the five and seven word lines already in being and had merely to standardize them. The important gift which the lü-shih brought to Chinese prosody was its insistence on tone. The great period of Chinese poetry was during the T'ang Dynasty. Then lived the three famous poets, Li T'ai-po, Tu Fu, and Po Chü-i. Space forbids me to give the biographies of all the poets whose work is included in this volume, but as Li T'ai-po and Tu Fu, between them, take up more than half the book, a short account of the princi- [Page lxviii] pal events of their lives seems necessary. I shall take them in the order of the number of their poems printed in this collection, which also, as a matter of fact, happens to be chronological. I have already stated in the first part of this Introduction the reasons which determined me to give so large a space to Li T'ai-po. English writers on Chinese literature are fond of announcing that Li T'ai-po is China's greatest poet; the Chinese themselves, however, award this place to Tu Fu. We may put it that Li T'ai-po was the people's poet, and Tu Fu the poet of scholars. As Po Chü-i is represented here by only one poem, no account of his life has been given. A short biography of him may be found in Mr. Waley's "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems." It is permitted to very few to live in the hearts of their countrymen as Li T'ai-po has lived in the hearts of the Chinese. To-day, twelve hundred and twenty years after his birth, his memory and his fame are fresh, his poems are universally recited, his personality is familiar on the stage: in fact, to use the words of a Chinese scholar, "It may be said that there is no one in the People's Country who does not know the name of Li T'ai-po." Many legends are told of his birth, his life, his death, and he is now numbered among the Hsien (Immortals) who inhabit the Western Paradise. Li T'ai-po was born A.D. 701, of well-to-do parents named Li, who lived in the Village of the Green Lotus in Szechwan. [Page lxix] He is reported to have been far more brilliant than ordinary children. When he was only five years old, he read books that other boys read at ten; at ten, he could recite the "Classics" aloud and had read the "Book of the Hundred Sages." Doubtless this precocity was due to the fact that his birth was presided over by the "Metal Star," which we know as Venus. His mother dreamt that she had conceived him under the influence of this luminary, and called him T'ai-po, "Great Whiteness," a popular name for the planet. In spite of his learning, he was no Shu Tai Tzu (Book Idiot) as the Chinese say, but, on the contrary, grew up a strong young fellow, impetuous to a fault, with a lively, enthusiastic nature. He was extremely fond of sword-play, and constantly made use of his skill in it to right the wrongs of his friends. However worthy his causes may have been, this propensity got him into a serious scrape. In the excitement of one of these encounters, he killed several people, and was forthwith obliged to fly from his native village. The situation was an awkward one, but the young man disguised himself as a servant and entered the employ of a minor official. This gentleman was possessed of literary ambitions and a somewhat halting talent; still we can hardly wonder that he was not pleased when his servant ended a poem in which he was hopelessly floundering with lines far better than he could make. After this, and one or two similar experiences, Li T'ai-po found it advisable to relinquish his job and depart from his master's house. His next step was to join a scholar who disguised his real name under the pseudonym of "Stern Son of the East." The couple travelled together to the beautiful Min Mountains, where they lived in retirement for five years as teacher and pupil. This period, passed in reading, writing, discussing literature, and soaking in the really marvellous scenery, greatly influenced the poet's future life, and imbued him with that passionate love for nature so apparent in his work. At the age of twenty-five, he separated from his teacher and left the mountains, going home to his native village for a time. But the love of travel was inherent in him, nowhere could hold him for long, and he soon started off on a sight-seeing trip to all those places in the Empire famous for their beauty. This time he travelled as the position of his parents warranted, and even a little beyond it. He had a retinue of servants, and spent money lavishly. This open-handedness is one of the fine traits of his character. Needy scholars and men of talent never appealed to him in vain; during a year at Yangchow, he is reported to have spent three hundred thousand ounces of silver in charity. From Yangchow he journeyed to the province of Hupeh ("North of the Lake") where, in the district of the "Dreary Clouds," he stayed at the house of a family named [Page lxxi] Hsü, which visit resulted in his marriage with one of the daughters. Li T'ai-po lived in Hupeh for some years – he himself says three – then his hunger for travel reasserted itself and he was off again. After some years of wandering, while visiting a magistrate in Shantung, an incident occurred which had far-reaching consequences. A prisoner was about to be flogged. Li T'ai-po, who was passing, glanced at the man, and, happening to be possessed of a shrewd insight into character, realized at once that here was an unusual person. He secured the man's release, and twenty-five years later this action bore fruit as the sequel will show. The freed prisoner was Kuo Tzu-i, who became one of China's most powerful generals and the saviour of the T'ang Dynasty. It will be noticed that nothing has been said of the poet taking any examinations, and for the excellent reason that he never thought it worth while to present himself as a candidate. The simple fact appears to be that geniuses often do not seem to find necessary what other men consider of supreme importance. Presumably, also, he had no particular desire for an official life. The gifts of Heaven go by favour and the gifts of man are strangely apt to do the same thing, in spite of the excellent rules devised to order them. Li T'ai-po's career owed nothing to either the lack of official degrees or official interest. What he achieved, he owed to himself; what he failed in came from the same source. About this time, the poet and a few congenial friends formed the coterie of "The Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook." They retired to the Ch'u Lai Mountain and spent their time in drinking, reciting poems, writing beautiful characters, and playing on the table-lute. It must be admitted that Li T'ai-po was an inveterate and inordinate drinker, and far more often than was wise in the state called by his countrymen "great drunk." To this propensity he was indebted for all his ill fortune, as it was to his poetic genius that he owed all his good. So the years passed until, when he was forty-two, he met the Taoist priest, Wu Yün. They immediately became intimate, and on Wu Yün's being called to the capital, Li T'ai-po accompanied him. Wu Yün took occasion to tell the Emperor of his friend's extraordinary talent. The Emperor was interested, the poet was sent for, and, introduced by Ho Chih-chang, was received by the Son of Heaven in the Golden Bells Hall. The native accounts of this meeting state that "in his discourses upon the affairs of the Empire, the words rushed from his mouth like a mountain torrent." Ming Huang, who was enchanted, ordered food to be brought and helped the poet himself. So Li T'ai-po became attached to the Court and was made an honorary member of the "Forest of Pencils." He was practically the Emperor's secretary and wrote the Emperor's edicts, but this was by the way – his real duty was simply to write what he chose and when, and recite these poems at any moment that it pleased the Emperor to call upon him to do so. Li T'ai-po, with his love of wine and good-fellowship, was well suited for the life of the gay and dissipated Court of Ming Huang, then completely under the influence of the beautiful concubine, Yang Kuei-fei. Conspicuous among the Emperor's entourage was Ho Chih-chang, a famous statesman, poet, and calligraphist, who, on reading Li T'ai-po's poetry, is said to have sighed deeply and exclaimed: "This is not the work of a human being, but of a Tsê Hsien (Banished Immortal)." To understand fully the significance of this epithet, it must be realized that mortals who have already attained Immortality, but who have committed some fault, may be banished from Paradise to expiate their sin on earth. For about two years, Li T'ai-po led the life of supreme favourite in the most brilliant Court in the world. The fact that when sent for to compose or recite verses he was not unapt to be drunk was of no particular importance since, after being summarily revived with a dash of cold water, he could always write or chant with his accustomed verve and dexterity. His influence over the Emperor became so great that it roused the jealousy, and eventually the hatred, of Kao Li-shih, the Chief Eunuch, who, until then, had virtually ruled his Imperial master. On one occasion, when Li T'ai-po was more than usually incapacitated, the Emperor ordered Kao to take off the poet's shoes. This was too much, and from that moment the eunuch's malignity became an active intriguing to bring about his rival's downfall. He found the opportunity he needed in the vanity of Yang Kuei-fei. Persuading this lady that Li T'ai-po's "Songs to the Peonies" contained a veiled insult directed at her, he enlisted her anger against the poet and so gained an important ally to his cause. On three separate occasions when Ming Huang wished to confer official rank upon the poet, Yang Kuei-fei interfered and persuaded the Emperor to forego his intention. Li T'ai-po was of too independent a character, and too little of a courtier, to lift a finger to placate his enemies. But the situation became so acute that at last he begged leave to retire from the Court altogether. His request granted, he immediately formed a new group of seven congenial souls and with them departed once more to the mountains. This new association called itself "The Eight Immortals of the Wine-cup." Although Li T'ai-po had asked for his own dismissal, he had really been forced to ask it, and his banishment from the "Imperial Sun," with all that "Sun" implied, was a blow from which he never recovered. His later poems are full of more or less veiled allusions to his unhappy state. The next ten years were spent in his favourite occupation of travelling, especially in the provinces of Szechwan, Hunan, and Hupeh. Meanwhile, political conditions were growing steadily worse. Popular discontent at the excesses of Yang Kuei-fei and her satellite An Lu-shan were increasing, and finally, in A.D. 755, rebellion broke out. I have dealt with this rebellion earlier in this Introduction, and a more detailed account is given in the Notes; I shall, therefore, do no more than mention it here. Sometime during the preceding unrest, Li T'ai-po, weary of moving from place to place, had taken the position of adviser to Li Ling, Prince of Yung. In the wide-spread disorder caused by the rebellion, Li Ling conceived the bold idea of establishing himself South of the Yangtze as Emperor on his own account. Pursuing his purpose, he started at the head of his troops for Nanking. Li T'ai-po strongly disapproved of the Prince's course, a disapproval which affected that headstrong person not at all, and the poet was forced to accompany his master on the march to Nanking. At Nanking, the Prince's army was defeated by the Imperial troops, and immediately after the disaster Li T'ai-po fled, but was caught, imprisoned, and condemned to death. Now came the sequel to the incident which had taken place long before at Shantung. The Commander of the Imperial forces was no other than Kuo Tzu-i, the former prisoner whose life Li T'ai-po had saved. On learning the sentence passed upon the poet, Kuo Tzu-i intervened and threatened to resign his command unless his benefactor were spared. Accordingly Li T'ai-po's sentence was changed to exile and he was released, charged to depart immediately for some great distance where he could do no harm. He set out for Yeh Lang, a desolate spot beyond the "Five Streams," in Kueichow. This was the country of the yao kuai, the man-eating demons; and whether he believed in them or not, the thought of existence in such a gloomy solitude must have filled him with desperation. He had not gone far, luckily, when a general amnesty was declared, and he was permitted to return and live with his friend and disciple, Lu Yang-ping, in the Lu Mountains near Kiukiang, a place which he dearly loved. Here, in A.D. 762, at the age of sixty-one, he died, bequeathing all his manuscripts to Lu Yang-ping. The tale of his drowning, repeated by Giles and others, is pure legend, as an authoritative statement of Lu Yang-ping proves. The manuscripts left to his care, and all others he could collect from friends, Lu Yang-ping published in an edition of ten volumes. This edition appeared in the year of the poet's death, and contained the following preface by Lu Yang-ping: Since the three dynasties of antiquity, Since the style of the 'Kuo Fêng' and the 'Li Sao,' During these thousand years and more, of those who walked the "lonely path," There has been only you, you are the Solitary Man, you are without rival. Li T'ai-po's poetry is full of dash and surprise. At his best, there is an extraordinary exhilaration in his work; at his worst, he is merely repetitive. Chinese critics have complained that his subjects are all too apt to be trivial, and that his range is narrow. This is quite true; poems of farewell, deserted ladies sighing for their absent lords, officials consumed by homesickness, pæans of praise for wine – in the aggregate there are too many of these. But how fine they often are! "The Lonely Wife," "Poignant Grief During a Sunny Spring," "After being Separated for a Long Time," such poems are the truth of emotion. Take again his inimitable humour in the two "Drinking Alone in the Moonlight" poems, or "Statement of Resolutions after being Drunk on a Spring Day." Then there are the poems of hyperbolical description such as "The Perils of the Shu Road," "The Northern Flight," and "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword Mountains." Mountains seem to be in his very blood. Of the sea, on the other hand, he has no such intimate knowledge; he sees it afar, from some height, but always as a thing apart, a distant view. The sea he gazes at; the mountains he treads under foot, their creepers scratch his face, the jutting rocks beside the path bruise his hands. He knows the straight-up, cutting-into-the-sky look of mountain peaks just above him, and feels, almost bodily, the sheer drop into the angry river tearing its way through a narrow gully below, a river he can see only by leaning dangerously far over the cliff upon which he is standing. There is a curious sense of perpendicularity about these mountain rhapsodies. The vision is strained up for miles, and shot suddenly down for hundreds of feet. The tactile effect of them is astounding; they are not to be read, but experienced. And yet I am loth to say that Li T'ai-po is at his greatest in description, with poems so full of human passion and longing as "The Lonely Wife" and "Poignant Grief During a Sunny Spring," before me. There is no doubt at all that in Li T'ai-po we have one of the world's greatest lyrists. Great though he was, it cannot be denied that he had serious weaknesses. One was his tendency to write when the mood was not there, and at these moments he was not ashamed to repeat a fancy conceived before on some other occasion. Much of his style he crystallized into a convention, and brought it out unblushingly whenever he was at a loss for something to say. Sustained effort evidently wearied him. He will begin a poem with the utmost spirit, but his energy is apt to flag and lead to a close so weak as to annoy the reader. His short poems are always admirably built, the endings complete and unexpected; the architectonics of his long poems leave much to be desired. He seems to be ridden by his own emotion, but without the power to draw it up and up to a climax; it bursts upon us in the first line, sustains itself at the same level for a series of lines, and then seems to faint exhausted, reducing the poet to the necessity of stopping as quickly as he can and with as little jar as possible. Illustrations of this tendency to a weak ending can be seen in "The Lonely Wife," "The Perils of the Shu Road," and "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword Mountains," but that he could keep his inspiration to the end on occasion, "The Northern Flight" proves. Finally, there are his poems of battle: "Songs of the Marches," "Battle to the South of the City," and "Fighting to the South of the City." Nothing can be said of these except that they are superb. If there is a hint of let-down in the concluding lines of "Fighting to the South of the City," it is due to the frantic Chinese desire to quote from older authors, and this is an excellent example of the chief vice of Chinese poetry, since these two lines are taken from the "Tao Tê Ching," the sacred book of Taoism; the others, even the long "Songs of the Marches," are admirably sustained. In Mr. Waley's excellent monograph on Li T'ai-po, appears the following paragraph: "Wang An-shih (A.D. 1021-1086), the great reformer of the Eleventh Century, observes: 'Li Po's style is swift, yet never careless; lively, yet never informal. But his intellectual outlook was low and sordid. In nine poems out of ten he deals with nothing but wine and women.'" A somewhat splenetic criticism truly, but great reformers have seldom either the acumen or the sympathy necessary for the judgment of poetry. Women and wine there are in abundance, but how treated? In no mean or sordid manner certainly. Li T'ai-po was not a didactic poet, and we of the Twentieth Century may well thank fortune for that. Peradventure the Twenty-first will dote again upon the didactic, but we must follow our particular inclination which is, it must be admitted, quite counter to anything of the sort. No low or mean attitude indeed, but a rather restricted one we may, if we please, charge against Li T'ai-po. He was a sensuous realist, representing the world as he saw it, with beauty as his guiding star. Conditions to him were static; he wasted none of his force in speculating on what they should be. A scene or an emotion was, and it was his business to reproduce it, not to analyze how it had come about or what would best make its recurrence impossible. Here he is at sharp variance with Tu Fu, who probes to the roots of events even when he appears to be merely describing them. One has but to compare the "Songs of the Marches" and "Battle to the South of the City" with "The Recruiting Officers" and "Crossing the Frontier" to see the difference. Tu Fu was born in Tu Ling, in the province of Shensi, in A.D. 713. His family was extremely poor, but his talent was so marked that at seven years old he had begun to write poetry; at nine, he could write large characters; and at fifteen, his essays and poems were the admiration of his small circle. When he was twenty-four, he went up to Ch'ang An, the capital, for his first examination – it will be remembered that, in the T'ang period, all the examinations took place at Ch'ang An. Tu Fu was perfectly qualified to pass, as every one was very well aware, but the opinions he expressed in his examination papers were so radical that the degree was withheld. There was nothing to be done, and Tu Fu took to wandering about the country, observing and writing, but with little hope of anything save poverty to come. On one of his journeys, he met Li T'ai-po on the "Lute Terrace" in Ching Hsien. The two poets, who sincerely admired each other, became the closest friends. Several poems in this collection are addressed by one to the other. When Tu Fu was thirty-six, it happened that the Emperor sent out invitations to all the scholars in the Empire to come to the capital and compete in an examination. Tu Fu was, of course, known to the Emperor as a man who would have been promoted but for the opinions aired in his papers. Of his learning, there could be no shadow of doubt. So Tu Fu went to Ch'ang An and waited there as an "expectant official." He waited for four years, when it occurred to him to offer three fu to the Emperor. The event justified his temerity, and the poet was given a post as one of the officials in the Chih Hsien library. This post he held for four years, when he was appointed to a slightly better one at Fêng-hsien. But, a year later, the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out, which put a summary end to Tu Fu's position, whereupon he left Fêng-hsien and went to live with a relative at the Village of White Waters. He was still living there when the Emperor Ming Huang abdicated in favour of his son, Su Tsung. If the old Emperor had given him an office, perhaps the new one would; at any rate it was worth an attempt, for Tu Fu was in dire poverty. Having no money to hire any kind of conveyance, he started to walk to his destination, but fell in with brigands who captured him. He stayed with these brigands for over a year, but finally escaped, and at length reached Fêng Chiang, where the Emperor was in residence. His appearance on his arrival was miserable in the extreme. Haggard and thin, his shoulders sticking out of his coat, his rags literally tied together, he was indeed a spectacle to inspire pity, and the Emperor at once appointed him to the post of Censor. But this did not last long. He had the imprudence to remonstrate with the Emperor anent the sentence of banishment passed upon the general Tan Kuan. Considering that this clever and extremely learned soldier had so far relaxed the discipline of his army during one of the Northern campaigns that, one night, when his troops were all peacefully sleeping in their chariots, the camp was surrounded and burnt and his forces utterly routed, the punishment seems deserved. But Tu Fu thought otherwise, and so unwisely urged his opinion that the Emperor lost patience and ordered an investigation of Tu Fu's conduct. His friends, however, rallied to his defence and the investigation was quashed, but he was deprived of the censorship and sent to a minor position in Shensi. This he chose to regard as a punishment, as indeed it was. He proceeded to Shensi, but, on arriving there, dramatically refused to assume his office; having performed which act of bravado, he joined his family in Kansu. He found them in the greatest distress from famine, and although he did his best to keep them alive by going to the hills and gathering fire-wood to sell, and by digging up roots and various growing things for them to eat, several of his children died of starvation. Another six months of minor officialdom in Hua Chou, and he retired to Ch'êngtu in Szechwan, where he lived in a grass-roofed house, engaged in study and the endeavour to make the two ends of nothing meet. At length, a friend of his arrived in Szechwan as Governor-General, and this friend appointed him a State Counsellor. But the grass-house was more to his taste than state councils, and after a year and a half he returned to it, and the multifarious wanderings which always punctuated his life. Five years later, when he was fifty-five, he set off on one of his journeys, but was caught by floods and obliged to take refuge in a ruined temple at Hu Kuang, where he nearly starved before help could reach him. After ten days, he was rescued through the efforts of the local magistrate, but eating again after so long a fast was fatal and he died within an hour. Innumerable essays have been written comparing the styles of Li T'ai-po and Tu Fu. Yüan Chên, a poet of the T'ang period, says that Tu Fu's poems have perfect balance; that, if he wrote a thousand lines, the last would have as much vigour as the first and that no one can equal him in this, his poems make a "perfect circle." He goes on: "In my opinion, the great living wave of poetry and song in which Li T'ai-po excelled is surpassed in Tu Fu's work, he is shoulder higher than Li Po." Again: "The poems of Li T'ai-po are like Spring flowers, those of Tu Fu are like the pine-trees, they are eternal and fear neither snow nor cold." Shên Ming-chên says: "Li Po is like the Spring grass, like Autumn waves, not a person but must love him. Tu Fu is like a great hill, a high peak, a long river, the broad sea, like fine grass and bright-coloured flowers, like a pine or an ancient fir, like moving wind and gentle waves, like [Page lxxxv] heavy hoar-frost, like burning heat – not a quality is missing." Hu Yu-ling uses a metaphor referring to casting dice and says that Li T'ai-po would owe Tu Fu "an ivory"; and Han Yü, speaking of both Li T'ai-po and Tu Fu, declares that "the flaming light of their essays would rise ten thousand feet." Poetic as these criticisms are, it is their penetration which is so astonishing; but I think the most striking comparison made of Tu Fu's work is that by Tao Kai-yu: "Tu Fu's poems are like pictures, like the branches of trees reflected in water – the branches of still trees. Like a large group of houses seen through clouds or mist, they appear and disappear." Sometime ago, in a review of a volume of translations of Chinese poetry in the London "Times," I came across this remarkable statement: "The Chinese poet starts talking in the most ordinary language and voices the most ordinary things, and his poetry seems to happen suddenly out of the commonplace as if it were some beautiful action happening in the routine of actual life." The critic could have had no knowledge of the Chinese language, as nothing can be farther from the truth than his observation. It is largely a fact that the Oriental poet finds his themes in the ordinary affairs of everyday life, but he describes them in a very special, carefully chosen, medium. The simplest child's primer is written in a language never used in speaking, while the most highly educated scholar would never dream of employing the same phrases in conversation which he would make use of were he writing an essay, a poem, or a state document. Each language – the spoken, the poetic, the literary, the documentary – has its own construction, its own class of characters, and its own symbolism. A translator must therefore make a special study of whichever he wishes to render. Although several great sinologues have written on the subject of Chinese poetry, none, so far as I am aware, has devoted his exclusive attention to the poetic style, nor has any translator availed himself of the assistance, so essential to success, of a poet – that is, one trained in the art of seizing the poetic values in fine shades of meaning. Without this power, which amounts to an instinct, no one can hope to reproduce any poetry in another tongue, and how much truer this is of Chinese poetry can only be realized by those who have some knowledge of the language. Such poets, on the other hand, as have been moved to make beautiful renditions of Chinese originals have been hampered by inadequate translations. It is impossible to expect that even a scholar thoroughly versed in the philological aspects of Chinese literature can, at the same time, be endowed with enough of the poetic flair to convey, uninjured, the thoughts [Page lxxxvii] of one poet to another. A second personality obtrudes between poet and poet, and the contact, which must be established between the two minds if any adequate translation is to result, is broken. How Miss Lowell and I have endeavoured to obviate this rupture of the poetic current, I shall explain presently. But, to understand it, another factor in the case must first be understood. It cannot be too firmly insisted upon that the Chinese character itself plays a considerable part in Chinese poetic composition. Calligraphy and poetry are mixed up together in the Chinese mind. How close this intermingling may be, will appear when we come to speak of the "Written Pictures," but even without following the interdependence of these arts to the point where they merge into one, it must not be forgotten that Chinese is an ideographic, or picture, language. These marvellous collections of brush-strokes which we call Chinese characters are really separate pictographic representations of complete thoughts. Complex characters are not spontaneously composed, but are built up of simple characters, each having its own peculiar meaning and usage; these, when used in combination, each play their part in modifying either the sense or the sound of the complex. Now it must not be thought that these separate entities make an over-loud noise in the harmony of the whole character. They are each subdued to the total result, the final meaning, but they do produce a qualifying effect upon the word itself. Since Chinese characters are complete ideas, it is convenient to be able to express the various degrees of these ideas by special characters which shall have those exact meanings; it is, therefore, clear that to grasp a poet's full intention in a poem there must be a knowledge of the analysis of characters. This might seem bizarre, were it not for a striking proof to the contrary. It is a fact that many of the Chinese characters have become greatly altered during the centuries since they were invented. So long ago as A.D. 200, a scholar named Hsü Shih, realizing that this alteration was taking place, wrote the dictionary known as "Shuo Wen Chieh Tzu," or "Speech and Writing: Characters Untied," containing about ten thousand characters in their primitive and final forms. This work is on the desk of every scholar in the Far East and is studied with the greatest reverence. Many editions have appeared since it was written, and by its aid one can trace the genealogy of characters in the most complete manner. Other volumes of the same kind have followed in its wake, showing the importance of the subject in Chinese estimation. While translators are apt to ignore this matter of character genealogy, it is ever present to the mind of the Chinese poet or scholar who is familiar with the original forms; indeed, he may be said to find his overtones in the actual composition of the character he is using. All words have their connotations, but this is connotation and more; it is a pictorial representation of something implied, and, lacking which, an effect would be lost. It may be objected that poems were heard as well as read, and that, when heard, the composition of the character must be lost. But I think this is to misunderstand the situation. Recollect, for a moment, the literary examinations, and consider that educated men had these characters literally ground into them. Merely to pronounce a word must be, in such a case, to see it and realize, half-unconsciously perhaps, its various parts. Even if half-unconscious, the nuances of meaning conveyed by them must have hung about the spoken word and given it a distinct flavour which, without them, would be absent. Now what is a translator to do? Shall he render the word in the flat, dictionary sense, or shall he permit himself to add to it what it conveys to an educated Chinese? Clearly neither the one nor the other in all cases; but one or the other, which the context must determine. In description, for instance, where it is evident that the Chinese poet used every means at his command to achieve a vivid representation, I believe the original poem is more nearly reproduced by availing one's self of a minimum of these "split-ups"; where, on the other hand, the original carefully confines itself to simple and direct expression, the word as it is, without overtones, must certainly be preferred. The "split-ups" in these translations are few, but could our readers compare the original Chinese with Miss Lowell's rendition of it, in these instances, I think they would feel with me that in no other way could the translation have been made really "literal," could the poem be "brought over" in its entirety. If a translation of a poem is not poetry in the new tongue, the original has been shorn of its chief reason for being. Something is always lost in a translation, but that something had better be the trappings than the essence. I must, however, make it quite clear how seldom these "split-ups" occur in the principal parts of the book; in the "Written Pictures," where the poems were not, most of them, classics, we felt justified in making a fuller use of these analytical suggestions; but I believe I am correct in saying that no translations from the Chinese that I have read are so near to the originals as these. Bear in mind, then, that there are not, I suppose, more than a baker's dozen of these "split-ups" throughout the book, and the way they were managed can be seen by this literal translation of a line the "The Terraced Road of the Two-Edged Sword Mountains." The Chinese words are on the left, the English words on the right, the analyses of the characters enclosed in brackets: Shang Above Tsê Then Sung Pines Fêng Wind Hsiao Whistling wind (Grass – meaning the sound of wind through grass, to whistle; and in awe of, or to venerate.) Sê Gusts of wind (Wind; and to stand.) Sê A psaltery (Two strings of jade-stones which are sonorous.) Yü Wind in a gale. (Wind; and to speak.) Miss Lowell's rendering of the line was: "On their heights, the wind whistles awesomely in the pines; it booms in great, long gusts; it clashes like the strings of a jade-stone psaltery; it shouts on the clearness of a gale." Can any one doubt that this was just the effect that the Chinese poet wished to achieve, and did achieve by means of the overtones given in his characters? Another, simpler, example is in a case where the Chinese poet speaks of a rising sun. There are many characters which denote sunrise, and each has some shade of difference from every other. In one, the analysis is the sunrise light seen from a boat through mist; in another, it is the sun just above the horizon; still another is made up of a period of time and a mortar, meaning that it is dawn, when people begin to work. But the poet chose none of these; instead, he chose a character which analyzes into the sun at the height of a helmeted man, and so Miss Lowell speaks of the sun as "head-high," and we have the very picture the poet wanted us to see. Miss Lowell has told in the Preface the manner in which we worked. The papers sent to Miss Lowell were in exactly the form of the above, and with them I also sent a paraphrase, and notes such as those at the end of this book. Far from making the slightest attempt at literary form in these paraphrases, I deliberately made them as bald as possible, and strove to keep my personality from intruding between Miss Lowell and the Chinese poet with whose mood she must be in perfect sympathy. Her remarkable gift for entering into the feeling of the poet she is translating was first shown in "Six French Poets," but there she approached her authors at first hand. It was my object to enable her to approach these Chinese authors as nearly at first hand as I could. That my method has been justified by the event, the book shows; not merely are these translations extraordinarily exact, they are poetry, and would be so though no Chinese poet had conceived them fourteen hundred years ago. It is as if I had handed her the warp and the woof, the silver threads and the gold, and from these she has woven a brocade as nearly alike in pattern to that designed by the Chinese poet as the differences in the looms permit. I believe that this is the first time that English translations of Chinese poetry have been made by a student of Chinese and a poet working together. Our experience of the partnership has taught us both much; if we are pioneers in such a collaboration, we only hope that others will follow our lead. The second section of the book, "Written Pictures," consists of illustrations, or half illustrations, of an art which the Chinese consider the most perfect medium in which a man can express himself. These Tzu Hua, "Hanging-on-the-Wall Poems," are less known and understood than any other form of Oriental art. A beautiful thought perpetuated in beautiful handwriting and hung upon the wall to suggest a mental picture – that is what it amounts to. In China, the arts of poetry and calligraphy are united in the ideographs which form the written language. There are several different styles in which these ideographs, or characters, may be written. The earliest are pictograms known as the "ancient pictorial script," they were superseded in the Eighth Century B.C. by the "great seal" characters and later by the "lesser seal." These, which had been executed with the "knife pen," were practically given up when the invention of the writing-brush, which is usually translated as "pencil," revolutionized calligraphy (circa 215 B.C.). Their place was taken by a type of character known as "li" or "official script," a simplified form of the "seal," and this, being an improvement upon all previous styles, soon became popular. It created almost a new character in which the pictorial element had largely disappeared, and, with certain modifications, holds good to-day. The "model hand," the "running hand," and the famous "grass hand," so popular with poets and painters, are merely adaptations of the li; all three of these, together with the li itself, are used in the composition of written pictures. The written pictures here translated were formerly in the possession of a Chinese gentleman of keenly æsthetic taste, and are excellent examples of the art. A photograph of one of the originals will be found opposite the translation made from it on page 170. The names which follow the poems are not those of the authors, but of the calligraphists. In the case of two poems, the authors' names are also given. These written pictures had no titles, those given here were added simply for convenience; but the titles to the poems in the body of the book are those of the poets themselves, except in one or two instances where the Chinese title conveyed so little to an Occidental mind that its meaning had to be paraphrased. The Notes at the end of the book are intended for the general reader. For which reason, I have purposely excluded the type of note which consists in cataloguing literary cross-allusions. To know that certain lines in a poem are quoted from some earlier author, is one of a class of facts which deeply interest scholars, but are of no importance whatever to the rest of the world. A word as to the title of this book: There lived at Ch'êng-tu, the capital of Szechwan, early in the Ninth Century, a courtesan named Hsieh T'ao, who was famous for her wit and verse-writing. Hsieh-T'ao made a paper of ten colours, which she dipped in a stream, and on it wrote her poems. Now, some years before, a woman had taken the stole of a Buddhist priest to this stream in order to wash it. No sooner had the stole touched the water than the stream became filled with flowers. In an old Chinese book, "The Treasury of Pleasant Records," it is told that, later in life, Hsieh T'ao gave up the "fir-flower tablets" and made paper of a smaller size. Presumably this fir-flower paper was the paper of ten colours. The mountain stream which ran near Hsieh T'ao's house is called the "Hundred Flower Stream." I cannot close this Introduction without expressing my gratitude to my teacher, Mr. Nung Chu. It is his unflagging interest and never-failing patience that have kept me spurred on to my task. Speaking no word of English, Mr. Nung must often have found my explanations of what would, and what would not, be comprehensible to Occidental readers very difficult to understand, and my only regret is that he cannot read the book now that it is done. |
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| 19 | 1921.4 |
Fir-flower tablets : poems [ID D29140](4) Sekundärliteratur Janet Roberts : Fragrance in flowers such as orchids, the plumb blossom, the peach, and the peony play a dramatic role in Chinese literature. It is not only the 'flower' itself, as a natural item, in its botanical specificity ; the poet is concerned with the act of the memory evoked in an image of petals falling, associated with a woman, and the scent which lingers, in her passage. Like fragrance in Chinese verse, many Chinese poets write the words 'to a tune', or mention a musical instrument. Amy Lowell was serious about music, about music transmitted and transformed into poetry, and certainly she was concerned, in Fir Flower Tablets, about rhythms. Given Amy Lowell's love of music, her effort to translate music into her poems, in her words, "reproduce the effect of the music in another medium. I wanted to try something more, something less obvious than mere rhythm, and closer to the essence of musical speech". When the composer and violinist Charles Loeffler invited Lowell to his home in Medford, his playing of the d"Indy violin sonata in his music room inspired Lowell to conflate Chinese imagery and musical notations. Refashioning the poems in English, first required knowledge of the laws of Chinese versification, but then Amy Lowell says she had to respect the technical limits but found it impossible to follow either the rhythms or rhyme schemes of the originals as she had no experience of the spoken language. Since she did not hear the idiom of Chinese speakers, and did not step foot on Chinese soil, it is no wonder, that given she worked with the English transliterations, she could hardly exactly replicate the original rhythms. Lowell, intrigued by the Chinese classical poems, was inspired by what she saw that Pound was able to achieve, without knowing Chinese language. Lowell acknowledges that the study of Chinese, as well as the study of poetry, require lifelong learning, and clafifies that she has not taken up the Chinese language or the field of sinology, as had Florence Ayscough. |
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| 20 | 1922 |
Waley, Arthur. Review of Fir-flower tablets by Florence Wheelock Ayscough ; English versions by Amy Lowell. In : Literary review of The New York Evening Post ; Febr. 4 (1922). "It is a real book of Chinese poetry, it is worth criticizing". |
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| 21 | 1926 |
Ayscough, Florence. Amy Lowell and the Far East [ID D32315]. In the critical analysis bound tob e made of Amy Lowell's contribution to literature, it is important that due stress be laid on her interpretations of the Fartheast East – that is, of China and Japan. The sum total of these interpretations may not be large but the quality is unique. By virtue of her astounding gift of intuition Amy Lowell annihilated time and space, and seemed to comprehend the thoughts of men long dead, and visualize the movement of scenes long past, although both thoughts and scenes belonged to civilizations far removed… If Miss Lowell's approach to Japan sprang from a childish enthusiasm which grew to critical and sympathetic appreciation, her approach to China and its literature was very different. The central Flowery State attracted her, and she loved to read and talk about China. I have lived ther for many years, and when I came to America she always plied me with questions, but until the autumn of 1917 she had not studied it seriously. At that time I happened to pay her a long visit, and I had in my possession some paintings and a number of 'written pictures', examples of that art which the Chinese consider the most perfect medium of aesthetic expression. They are perhaps the least known, and certainly the least understood, of all oriental art forms ; which is a pity, since these 'hanging-on-the-wall-poems' are highly characteristic of the Chinese idea. A beautiful thought perpetuated in beautiful handwriting, and hung upon the wall to suggest a mental picture – that is wha a tzu hua amount to. Mrs. Lowell was immensely interested… I was fascinated by the poems, and, as we talked them over, we realized that here was a rield in which we should like to work… We both realized that it was impossible for her to give an adequate rendering of a poet's thought unless she knew exactly the words in which he clothed it. So ideograph by ideograph, and line by line, we worked together, I translating and she making careful notes. While so working Miss Lowell made a discovery which I believe will be far reaching in its result. She found that, frequently, an analysis of an ideograph in a phrase instead of in a single word made the meaning of the line far more vivid… Later in discussing our collaboration she said : 'The sinologues do not know enough about poetry to make adequate translations and the poets who have done them best are more concerned in making a name for themselves than in rendering the old Chinese people'… |
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| 22 | 1926 |
Catel, Jean. Review of Fir flower tablets. In : Le mercure de France (1926). Catel praised the accuracy and flavor of the English renderings of Chinese poems. However, after reading the McNair publication of the letters between Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell, he recants : "Chinese poetry was to Amy Lowell the most delicate of dishes, her collaborating with Florence Ayscough a means of justifying her approach to it. The oriental flavor has evaporated under the touch, however, delicate, of a Western hand." |
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| 23 | 1928 | William Leonard Schwartz : Amy Lowell is less important as a mere interpreter of the Far East than as a propagandist, practitioner and theorizer who drew attention to the poetry and art of China and Japan. She had a genius for catching the public eye. |
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| 24 | 1931 |
Letter from Witter Bynner to Miss MacKinnon ; Santa Fe, July 20 (1931). [Fir-flower tablets by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough]. The third question is more difficult. I should say, first of all, that I consider my method more faithful to the balanced meaning of the original than Mrs. Ayscough's method. Suppose, for instance, the radical meaning of composite English words were translated into a for¬eign tongue—suppose "extravagant terms" were translated "beyond- straying terms" or "at daybreak" "when the day cracked"—then you might have a literal translation of what, in English, correspond to a combination of root strokes in a Chinese character; but the meaning and stress of the word in its context would be distorted and swollen beyond the intent of the author. It is true that a Chinese scholar pleasingly feels in an ideograph the two or three roots that make the meaning. It is true also that a Western scholar feels, say, in a word made from Greek or Latin the interesting original courtship of images which have quieted into a final everyday marriage of meaning. The Chinese character for "quarrel" indicates two women under one roof; but imagine translating it that way. Equally absurd is it to say "upper and lower garments" when the character, though literally conveying that, means "clothes." I made my translations from literal texts given me by Dr. Kiang —or my other Chinese friends. Their phrases were often, of course, odd and tickling to the fancy. My constant effort, however, was to I let detailed fancy go, for the sake of the imagination behind the poem—to find as nearly as I could, the exact English equivalent of, the Chinese word—the real rather than the literal translation—that I is if "literal translation" means translating parts of words and then | binding the parts of words into phrases rather than translating the customary finished meaning of the composite word. In a way, I was lucky in not knowing the Chinese language. A moderate knowledge might have tempted me astray from poetry into etymology. My first interest in Chinese poetry came from Chinese friends whom I met in California during 1917 and 1918. With their help I translated "ancient" poems (mostly from the Confucian "Book of Poetry", I believe) which appear in my "Canticle of Pan" (Knopf). In 1918, Dr. Kiang (on the faculty of the University of California, as I was) initiated me deeper into the realm, and ever since then I have been working with him on "The Jade Mountain", which the Chinese call "modern" poetry. Before that, in 1916, on my first trip to China, I had been drawn to its poetry by stanzas written on the earliest acquired of my collection of Chinese paintings. Some day I shall translate those inscriptions. |
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| 25 | 1945 |
Fletcher, John Gould. The Orient and contemporary poetry. In : The Asian legacy and American life. Essays arranged and ed. by Arthur E. Christy (New York: Asia Press, 1945). Many of the shorter poems in her [Amy Lowell] 'Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds', published in October 1914 betray that preoccupation with the concrete occasion which is common to both Chinese Poetry and to Imagism. There are even vividly pictoral sonnets here, like 'The Temple' and 'A Tulipan Garden', which could not have been what they were without some reference to Chinese models in their author's mind. |
Bibliography (3)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1917 |
Lowell, Amy. An observer in China : Profiles from China by Eunice Tietjens : review. In : Poetry ; vol. 10, no 6 (Sept. 1917). http://www.jstor.org/stable/20571377 |
Publication / Tiet6 | |
| 2 | 1920 |
Lowell, Amy. A legend of porcelain : China. In : North American review ; March (1920). https://archive.org/details/legendsamy00loweuoft |
Publication / Low1 |
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| 3 | 2014 | Amy Lowell : the online books page : http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Lowell%2C%20Amy%2C%201874-1925. | Publication / Low3 |
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Secondary Literature (6)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1926 |
Ayscough, Florence. Amy Lowell and the Far East. In : Bookman ; March (1922). https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://64.62.200.70/PERIODICAL/PDF/Bookman-1926mar/11-19/. |
Publication / Low6 |
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| 2 | 1928 | Schwartz, William Leonard. A study of Amy Lowell's Far Eastern verse. In : Modern language notes, vol. 43 (1928). | Publication / Low5 | |
| 3 | 1981 | Katz, Michael. Amy Lowell and the Orient. In : Comparative literature studies, vol. 18, no 2 (1981). | Publication / Low4 | |
| 4 | 1982 |
Johns, Francis A. Arthur Waley and Amy Lowell : a note. In : Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, vol. 44, no 1 (1982). http://reaper64.scc-net.rutgers.edu/journals/index.php/jrul/article/view/1614/3054. |
Publication / Low2 | |
| 5 | 1993 | Huang, Guiyou. Cross currents : American literature and Chinese modernism, Chinese culture and American modernism. Dissertation Texas A & M University, 1993. – Ann Arbor, Mich. : University Microfilms International, 1993. [Betr. Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell]. | Publication / WhiW43 | |
| 6 | 2010 | Roberts, Janet. Amy Lowell : the fragrance of adapted Chinese verse in "Fir flower tablets". In : Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (China in Shanghai) ; vol. 74, no 1 (2010). | Publication / Low7 |