The Poetry of He Zhu (1052-1125)
SINL-74-sargent_CS2.indd i 18-12-2006 16:24:11 Sinica Leidensia
Edited by Barend J. ter Haar
In co-operation with P.K. Bol, W.L. Idema, D.R. Knechtges, E.S.Rawski, E. Zürcher, H.T. Zurndorfer
VOLUME LXXIV
SINL-74-sargent_CS2.indd ii 18-12-2006 16:24:11 The Poetry of He Zhu (1052-1125)
Genres, Contexts, and Creativity
By Stuart H. Sargent
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007
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SINL-74-sargent_CS2.indd iv 18-12-2006 16:24:12 CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix List of Tables xi Abbreviations xii Brief Chronology of the Life of He Zhu xiii INTRODUCTION 1 The Approach: Genre, Contexts, and Individual Voice 2 Conventions and Texts Used in this Study 6 The Name of the Poet 7 Other Transcriptions 7 Meter 8 Poem Numbers and Texts 10 Chapter One THE ANCIENT-STYLE VERSE OF HE ZHU, 1078–98 12 1078–80: Fuyang 13 1078: The Contingency of Historical Judgment 13 1079: Reportage 15 1080: Time 21 1080: Animals and the Question of Allegory 27 1080: Variations on the Poetic Heritage 33 1081: A Transitional Year 36 1082–85: Xuzhou 38 1082: Tang Echoes, Su Shi 38 1083: More Celebration of Su Shi 45 1084: ~Zai, Tang Predecessors 47 1085: The Ironic Traveler 50 1086: In the Capital 54 Word Games 54 Imitations 56 1088: Fanghui’s Version of the Zhang Liang Saga 64 1088-89: The South 74 Gardens and Temples 74 Ten Historical Sites in Liyang 84 1091–93: Jinshan and the Capital 86 Teasing Mi Fu at Jinshan 86 1091: Wit in the Su Shi Mode 89 1093: The Past Recovered 90 1094: No-Mind in Hailing 96 1096: Hanyang 100 The Inscription For Zhou Dunyi’s Thatched Hall 100 The Reinterpretation of Tao Yuanming 105 Obfuscation 110 1096–98: Jiangxia 115 vi CONTENTS
1096: The Connoisseur 115 1096 and 1097: History 117 1098: Watchful Eyes 120 Further Thoughts on Imitation, Inscriptions, and Rhyme 121 Chapter Two THE SONGS OF HE ZHU, 1080–98 125 1080–85: Handan and Xuzhou 126 1080: An Ancient Site in Handan 126 1084–85: Sites and Poetry Sessions in Xuzhou 130 1088–92: Sending Songs from Liyang and Jinling 141 1088: A Suite Experiment 141 Liyang Experiments in 1089 and 1090 146 1090–92: Innovative Songs from Jinling 153 A Gift Enhanced by Rhyme (I) 157 1094: Hailing 160 Laments 160 First Farewell Songs 164 1096–98: Jiangxia 168 Tao Yuanming Outdone 168 Leftover Elder of Mirror Lake 171 Tao Yuanming Out of Reach 173 History 178 A Gift Enhanced by Rhyme (II) 179 East Slope 182 Innovations in Songs: A Brief Review 186 Chapter Three THE PENTAMETRICAL REGULATED VERSE OF HE ZHU, 1076–98 188 Poems Written before Xuzhou 188 Xuzhou 194 1084: Imitation of an Extended Regulated Verse 194 1084: Twin Views from the Delightful! Pavilion 202 Rhymed Opening Couplets 207 1087: In the Capital 223 1088–90: The Liyang and Jinling Area 225 The Capital 238 1091: Civil Classification 239 1092: Stretching Form 243 1093–94: Leaving the Capital 248 Mi Fu 251 1096–98: On to Jiangxia 256 Going Upriver: Diction from the Past 256 Hanyang: Responses to Assaults on History 258 1096–97: This is not Li Shangyin 262 1098: Farewell to a Buddhist Magistrate 265 Pleasures and Precedents in Regulated Verse 267 Chapter Four THE HEPTAMETRICAL REGULATED VERSE OF HE ZHU, 1075–98 269 Issues of Form 269 Situations in Which the Heptametrical Regulated Verse was Used 272 Heptametrical Regulated Verse in the North, before Xuzhou 273 CONTENTS vii
1075: First-line Rhyme 273 1077, 1079: Order in Landscape, Order in Couplets 276 1082–86: Xuzhou 280 Celebration of Place and Complexity 280 Precedents to be Overturned or Celebrated 285 Anomalous Form 289 1086: Yongcheng 296 Playing with the Rhythm of the Line 296 The Capital 300 Zhao Lingzhi, Zhao Lingshuai 300 1088–91: Through Jinling to Liyang and Back 304 Wang Anshi 304 “First Poems” 306 ABAB Sequences 311 1090–91: Absence in Jinling 319 1091: Two Clever Social Poems in the Capital 327 1093–94: Hailing Ambiguities 331 1095–96: From the Capital to Jiangxia 341 Another Exile 341 1096: Up the Yangzi 344 1096–98: Hanyang and Jiangxia 351 An Extended Regulated Verse 352 Equanimity in Jiangxia 355 Qin Guan, Lü Dafang, Su Shi, Huang Tingjian 358 A Summary 366 Chapter Five THE PENTAMETRICAL QUATRAINS OF HE ZHU, 1085–98 368 1085: Xuzhou 371 The Capital 375 1086: Relationships with Past Poetry 375 1087: Ten Songs on Autumn Days 380 1088–90: Liyang and Quatrains for Monks 386 1091–92: Outspoken in the Capital 391 1095: Quirky in the Capital 395 1097–98: Mining the Past in Jiangxia 397 Addendum: Hexametrical Quatrains in the Capital, 1086 and 1092 400 New Life for the Pentametrical Quatrain 404 Chapter Six THE HEPTAMETRICAL QUATRAINS OF HE ZHU, 1077–95 406 Early Start in the North 409 1077: Quiet Scenes in Zhaozhou 409 1080: Restraint in Fuyang 413 1081: Making It Fresh 418 1081: Disingenuous Quatrains in the Daming Area 420 1081 and 1082: In and Out of the Capital 423 1083 and 1085: Xuzhou 425 1086–87 The Capital 428 Liyang 435 1088–89: Southern Scenes 435 viii CONTENTS
1089–91: The Society of Others 437 The Capital and Hailing 441 1091 and 1092: Spring Wind in the Capital 441 1094: Farewells in Hailing 444 1096: Up the River to Jiangxia 446 1096–98: Hanyang and Jiangxia 448 Closing thoughts on This Genre and the Lyric 452 CONCLUSION 453 Chronology of Poems Translated or Mentioned 457 Bibliography 465 Four-Corner Index of Poems Translated 479 Index of Poems by Poem Number 483 Index 487
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It was at one of our regular Friday afternoon departmental wine parties at Stan- ford University approximately thirty years ago that James J.Y. Liu suggested the lyrics of He Zhu as a possible dissertation topic. I am grateful for the suggestion and for his guidance through the ensuing work which, though very different in character from the present book, formed the starting point for my exploration of a fascinating poet. Since then, numerous individuals and institutions have sustained me and supported not only my research on He Zhu but also other projects whose results are reflected in the present book. The contributions of a few individuals are acknowledged at appropriate places in the body of the text; I should also note that some of the most valuable publications cited would not have been available or known to me had not their authors generously given me a copy. McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, the Library of Congress, and the Diet Library in Tokyo were significant resources for my post-dissertation research on He Zhu. In recent years, Norlin Library at the University of Colo- rado and the libraries at Stanford University were critically important. Special mention must be made of Colorado State University and its Morgan Library, not only for the recognized excellence of the library’s interlibrary loan services, but also for the ways in which they kept this project from being derailed completely when storm runoff destroyed my office, my computer, and most of my personal library in 1997. The University provided funds to replace my ruined books and services to photocopy those papers that could be recovered from waterlogged file cabinets; the Library freeze-dried and restored important books in my col- lection that could not be replaced and appropriated funds to start its own Chi- nese-language collection. The time to use libraries for something besides class preparation is generally bought with grants. My chronological reading of He Zhu and three of his con- temporaries was supported in 1982–83 by a Mellon Fellowship for Chinese Studies awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies. What you see before you now contains bits and pieces of the lengthy manuscript that re- sulted from that project but the present book is more directly the product of a sabbatical leave granted by Colorado State University in 2003-2004. For two quarters during that academic year, I had the privilege of teaching in the De- partment of Asian Languages back at Stanford, where I was provided with space x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS to work, computer support, and of course access to a fine library. This was a fulfilling period, indeed, and I am grateful to all parties. There are more personal debts to be acknowledged. My interest in China was sparked by a woman named Elsie Anderson: youngest of my mother’s aunts, she embarked for China in 1918 to work for girls’ education; some years after her death it was her copy of Lin Yutang’s Wisdom of China and India that set me, as a young teenager, on the trajectory that would eventually lead to this book. Mention must also be made of the uncle who passed her books on to me, Wilbur J. Granberg, a well-traveled writer and journalist who found his material in everything from the life of Joseph Pulitzer to the seagoing canoes of the Quileute Nation on the Olympic Peninsula. Alongside these formative influ- ences one must acknowledge my father and my two mothers, deceased and liv- ing, for their love and support. Those individuals and other friends, relatives, and teachers too numerous to mention here have been abiding sources of inspiration and guidance. None, however, deserves more direct credit for the completion of this work than Do- minique Groslier Sargent (known in the U.S. primarily as Dominique Bachmann Sargent), my wife. A scholar of modern French poetry who traveled the long road to her doctorate while raising a dynamic, high-achieving daughter, Domi- nique understands the goals, pressures, and sacrifices entailed in our profession. The fact that the period during which the present study was successfully con- solidated and completed coincides with our marriage to date bespeaks her im- pact on my life and my work. Her counsel on what worked and what didn’t work in the manuscript was crucial in shaping the final product. It is to her that this book is dedicated with loving gratitude. LIST OF TABLES
1 Form of Songs of Three Birds 143–44 2 Words in Poem 166 Typical of Wen Tingyun 198 3 Anomalous Regulated Verses 270–71 4 Pentametrical Quatrains in the Works of Selected Poets 368 5 He Zhu’s Pentametrical Quatrains by Year 370 6 Su Shi’s Pentametrical Quatrains by Year 370–71 7 Heptametrical Quatrains in the Works of Selected Poets 406–7 8 He Zhu’s Heptametrical Quatrains by Year 407
ABBREVIATIONS
Changbian Xu Zizhitongjian changbian CSJC Congshu jicheng HJAS Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society QSC Quan Song ci QSS Quan Song shi QTS Quan Tang shi SBBY Sibu beiyao SBCK Sibu congkan SSSJ Su Shi shiji SSWJ Su Shi wenji
BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF HE ZHU
Huangyou 4 (1052) Born; 1 sui. Xining 1 or 2 (1068/69) to 8 Capital Leaves Weizhou for capital (Kaifeng) at 17 or 18 (1075) sui; marries. Xining 8–10 (1075–77) Lincheng, in First appointment outside capital. Collects wine Zhaozhou taxes; acting magistrate at some point. Yuanfeng 1–3 (1078–80) Fuyang, in Arms factory. Cizhou Yuanfeng 4 (1081) Fuyang to Leaves Fuyang post 2nd month, travels in vicinity Capital of Daming, returns to capital 10th month. 30 sui. Yuanfeng 5–8 (1082–85) Xuzhou Third appointment outside capital. Baofeng mint. Active in local poetry society. Yuanyou 1 (1086) Capital Returns to capital via Yongcheng early in year. Yuanyou 2 (1087) Capital Fourth appointment outside capital. Starts for He-zhou late in year, delayed at Chenliu. Yuanyou 3–5 (1088–90) Hezhou Visits Jinling in 3rd month, reaches post at Liyang in Hezhou. Supervises militia. Leaves for capital, 12th month of Yuanyou 5. Yuanyou 6 (1091) Capital Reaches capital by 4th month. On recommendation of Su Shi and others, given civil status after twenty years in military classifications. 40 sui. Yuanyou 8–Shaosheng 1 Hailing Stays with relatives. (1093–94) Shaosheng 2 (1095) Capital Returns to capital by 6th month, leaves for Baoquan mint in Jiangxia after 9th month. Shaosheng 3 (1096) Hanyang, Goes up Yangzi, reaching Hanyang in 5th month; Jiangxia crosses to Jiangxia in 8th month. Edits poetry collection to date. Yuanfu 1 (1098)–Jianzhong Suzhou Leaves Jiangxia after 6th month of 1098 to jingguo 1 (1101) mourn mother, travels in lower Yangzi region. Leaves for capital in autumn 1101. Chongning 1–3 (1101–4) Sizhou Vice prefect; acting prefect at some point. Chongning 4–5 (1105–6) Taiping zhou Prefect. Daguan 2–Xuanhe 7 (1101– Suzhou Retired and moving about in region with various 25) short-term or titular posts; dies at 74 sui in second month of 1125 in Changzhou.
INTRODUCTION
One day, well into the writing of this book, I suddenly realized that He Zhu ၅ ᦷ (1052–1125) had inserted a missing poem into his collection. There was a headnote describing what the poem was supposed to be about, but there was no poem. When I read the headnote more carefully a second time, I understood there never had been a poem. In all editions of He Zhu’s poems known to me a space is left where a poem should have been. Yet the missing poem never ex- isted. Surely a few readers in the last nine centuries had “gotten” the joke before me, but it was a delicious moment of discovery nevertheless. A poet I’d known for two and a half decades could still surprise and delight me with his humor! Missing words, missing lines, missing poems, missing titles—these things are common enough in old texts. In fact, He Zhu’s entire poetry collection disap- peared when the Jurchen armies swept south across the Yangzi River shortly after his death in 1125. Later, a copy of the first half of the collection (covering the years 1075 through 1098) was discovered in a trunk, but most of what He Zhu had written from around 1099 to his death was never recovered.1 Those poems are truly missing. The surviving first half of the collection, with five hundred seventy-two po- ems (counting the poem that was never written), does not constitute anywhere near all the poems He Zhu wrote in his first forty-six years of life. A preface to these poems that the poet wrote in 1096 informs us that down to 1088 he had written over five or six thousand poems, not counting the ones he’d burned in the stove periodically because they were “reckless works.” In 1088, he had started to think his poetry was not necessarily going to get better as he got older, so he’d better take better care of what he had; it was the rejection of old drafts that had been “reckless,” not the works themselves.2 He set about organizing ——— 1 Thirty-one of the later poems have been recovered from various sources. They form juan 11 in the Quan Song shi. (Five of these are attributed also to another writer.) I have not used those few poems in the present study because they lack the headnotes and dates that are so valuable in con- textualizing the rest of the collection. For a convenient account of the textual history of the collec- tion, see Zhu Shangshu, Song ren bieji xulu, 1:579–85. The poems were first printed in 1193 by a man who had been waiting in vain for the second half of the collection to reappear but was finally forced to publish what he had hurriedly before moving to another official post. 2 Zhong Zhenzhen, who has done the most extensive and important scholarship on He Zhu in China, reproduces and punctuates a version of the preface in his Dongshan ci, 519–21. A slightly different text is given in Zhu Shangshu, Song ren bieji xulu, 1:579–80. To get down to the present number of poems, it would seem He Zhu had once again thrown out well over ninety percent of his drafts. I surmise, however, that some of these drafts were alternative versions of the same poems. 2 INTRODUCTION and revising his poems, wrote the preface, and added a few poems in the next two years. The resulting body of work is the object of the present study.
THE APPROACH: GENRE, CONTEXTS, AND INDIVIDUAL VOICE
A critical issue facing all Song poets was how they were to handle the shi ᇣ gen- res that were available to them.3 Each came with centuries of precedents, some relevant to eleventh-century practice, some not. The effect of a given genre on the tone of a specific poem is seldom mentioned in most scholarship on Chi- nese poets, though certain poets are declared to excel in one genre or another. My hope is that, by experiencing significant numbers of He Zhu’s poems in the groupings that he establishes, the reader will begin to develop a feel for the rhythms and ranges of thematic options that are associated with the various formal properties of the genres. This should help us develop an appreciation for He Zhu’s creative responses to the givens of the forms and make us better read- ers of Chinese poetry in general.4 The astute reader may notice that we have slipped quietly past the vexing question of just what constitutes a “genre.” The genres we have listed are nor- mally defined in formal terms: the number of syllables per line, permissible and/or dominant rhyme schemes, dominant metrical patterns, and so forth. The issue of “genre” seems simple when limited to such definite parameters. He Zhu himself, however, hints at something more complex when he tells us (in the preface referred to above) how he classified his poems, especially the non- those that have“ ृ৳ײregulated ones. “Songs” he defines as ᠧߢ᠏ᣉլࣅ mixed line-length [or] that change rhymes, regardless of whether [the meters of individual lines are] ‘ancient’ or ‘regulated’.” The second part of that statement shows his recognition that metrically regulated lines abound outside of Regu- lated Verse. (See below for a description of the four types of metrically regulated lines.) Even more interesting is his definition of “Ancient-Style Verses”: ᜢᆠ२ those whose sound and sense are close to the ancient and“ ृڗնײ whose lines are composed of five characters.” “Sound” we can interpret as me- ter; here, He Zhu indicates that he will avoid the smooth-flowing rhythms of regulated lines in favor of the “ancient.” “Sense” might be themes and feelings that are somehow more suited to the unregulated meters; it could also designate ——— 3 The term shi broadly covers all forms of poetry, especially those not sung to specific tunes, as lyrics were. He Zhu was a major lyricist, but this study is confined to shi, specifically the genres we are about to list. 4 Like most of his contemporaries, He Zhu organized his collection by genre. It starts with Songs, but our study examines Ancient Style Verses first. Spanning a slightly larger number of years, the Ancient Style Verses offer a better framework for introducing the poet’s life. INTRODUCTION 3 a progression from line to line and couplet to couplet that rejects the semantic balance characteristic of Regulated Verse. Either way, more is at stake than counting syllables and identifying “awkward” strings of tones. Some theorists propose treating genres as “speech acts.”5 Insofar as Chinese poems routinely are situated in specified situations of composition, this ap- proach has much to recommend it. There are examples of poetry collections organized by situational or elocutionary properties rather than chronology or formal genre. A notable example of such an attempt is the topically arranged collection of Su Shi’s poetry attributed to Wang Shipeng ׆Լࣛ (1112–71).6 The classifications in this collection have long been criticized as arbitrary, and perhaps that is inevitable: one problem with constructing a neat system of topi- cal classification is that poems commonly perform more than one function. Despite those difficulties, it is often fruitful to identify typical situational con- texts and functions for He Zhu’s poems. In the following chapters, we shall take special notice of forms that seem favored for imitations of Tang predecessors, for initiating literary exchanges, for inscriptions, for correspondence, and so forth. We shall find that, within a given genre, trends in the defined functions of the poems will shift with the passage of time, and of course that more than one genre may be used for a given purpose. Nevertheless, there are tendencies in the uses of poems that will help us appreciate the formal properties that make them variously suitable for those uses. Each chapter of this study, then, is devoted to one genre, and genre is one of the “contexts” in which a poet must write. That is, topics, situations, and the formally defined genres (as well as any predecessors we can identify in the use of these) are broadly defined “materials” or “givens” against which and through which the artist works. Other contexts include contemporary literary and intel- lectual practice, as well as extra-literary events. Often we relate the appearance of a bit of diction or a literary or cultural concept in He Zhu to its use in an- other writer at about the same time, especially when we can show the possibility of direct or indirect contact between He Zhu and the other writer. Because the works and the lives of Su Shi ᤕሊ (1037–1101) and Huang Tingjian ႓அഒ (1045–1105) are relatively well-documented and these two men were of unques- tioned importance in He Zhu’s life, they figure prominently in this aspect of my research. Many other important figures in Northern Song politics and art will appear in these pages as well, giving the interested reader a more complete pic- ture of how they were regarded in the context of the times.
——— 5 For an illuminating analysis of this and other analogies in genre theory, see David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre. 6 For an excellent short account in English of this text and its vicissitudes, see Kathleen Tom- lonovic, “The Poetry of Su Shi,” 114. 4 INTRODUCTION
The extra-literary contexts that illuminate He Zhu’s poetry include agricul- tural conditions, national politics, water management, and local flora and fauna. Let us illustrate with two examples from the following chapters. Only when we place certain heptametrical Quatrains from 1081 in the context of both the floods taking place along the Yellow River and the persecution of Su Shi for writing poems critical of the New Policies do we understand that the Quatrains are ironic. Similarly, when we are aware of campaigns to destroy “seditious” writings and to censor official historiographers in the 1090s, we can fully appre- ciate He Zhu’s interest at the time in preserving texts, in the scholarship his friends are doing on ancient works of history, and in the writing of unofficial records of current events. This kind of research is facilitated to an unusual degree in the case of He Zhu because he dated his poems and provided headnotes to tell us where and under what circumstances he wrote them. (Most of his contemporaries provide this kind of information only occasionally; extensive scholarship is required to date the rest of their poems, and even for those poets on whom such effort has been expended, not all poems in the end can be dated, securely or otherwise.) Therefore, the contents of each chapter are organized chronologically.7 The reader will be led through the poet’s life six times, discovering new details as they are relevant to the poems at hand. Extensive cross-references and a chronological table of poems translated or mentioned will help the reader follow synchronic or diachronic relationships. Chronology enables us to be attentive to the fact that He Zhu’s output in each genre varied markedly across time, with peaks and valleys that are not at all synchronized. Moreover, the themes ex- plored in a given genre and the uses to which the poems in that genre were put will change with the years. (A caveat must be declared here and repeated peri- odically: our view is always dependent on what the poet didn’t lose and on what he decided to keep when he edited his collection.) Finally, we come to the individual poet’s voice. Perhaps it is best to speak of the voice of the poet and the voice of the man who was the poet. The voice of the poet is the intellect we feel reshaping and reveling in his medium—the gen- res, the topics, the situations that demanded poetry. We are fortunate to be able to use the electronic tools of modern literary study to sharpen our perception of ——— 7 My interest in chronology was stimulated by a chance meeting with Professor Tseng Yu མ of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan in the late 1970s. At the time, he was working on a series of charts that would align datable artifacts with datable texts on aesthetics or on perception of the object. This prompted me to organize the study of four Northern Song poets I was then beginning into a strict chronological framework. The present study and many of my publications over the past twenty years have been derived from that project, which eventually became too large for practical publication as a monograph. Professor Tseng’s charts might have been published as a “Chronological Table of Chinese Culture” around 1982, but in the National Central Library online । (Chronological Table of Chinese Art) that was publishedڣcatalog I can find only a խഏભ under his name in 1998. INTRODUCTION 5 these givens.8 When we can get a good picture of the choices available to the poet, we are able to show how he innovates, how he uses the tools of diction, allusion, or rhythm to make the old new and name the heretofore unnamed. (Some of his favorite ideas and phrases become personal clichés after a while, and we shall duly note this.) Feeling the power of this creativity and mulling over the situations repre- sented in the poems, one forms at least a tentative image of the real-life He Zhu. The man who was the poet we read must have been intellectually aggressive and self-assured. These excerpts from a biography written by a younger admirer, Ye Mengde ᆺኄ(1077–1148), confirm that image: [He Zhu] was seven feet [over two meters] in height, his eyebrows bristled, and he had a face the color of iron. He enjoyed conversing unreservedly about the affairs of the age; when it came to what was right and wrong, he made no allowances. Even if it were an important person whose power could overturn the times, if something was slightly off, [He Zhu] would scold him fiercely, not mincing his words. Because of this, people considered him almost a knight-errant. Yet he was broadly learned, strong in memory, masterful in language. His words were deep, subtle, and dense, as if [he were] making a piece of embroidery.… Important peo- ple often extended invitations to him: there were some he accepted, some he did not. Those he did not want to see did not hold it against him in the end. Early on, when he was inspector of works in Taiyuan, there was an influential man’s son who happened to be a colleague. He was proud and did not humble himself. [He Zhu] secretly checked and discovered he had stolen a considerable amount of construction materials. One day, he dismissed the attendants and locked the man in a secret room. He upbraided him with a rod, saying ‘Come here! At such-and- such a time, you stole such-and-such materials for such-and-such use; at such-and- such a time, you stole such-and-such a thing and put it in your house. This is true?’ The influential man’s son was flustered and admitted that it had happened. [He Zhu] said, ‘If you can accept the treatment I will give you, we can avoid an expo- sure.’ Then he made him rise and bare his skin and gave him ten strokes with the rod. The influential man’s son kowtowed and begged for pity. Then [He Zhu] gave a big laugh and released him. After that, all those who had been arrogant, re- lying on their power, averted their eyes and dared not raise their eyes to look at him. य़ (1051–1107)…was known for his imposing statureۏ In those times Mi Fu and for being extraordinary and unpredictable. [He Zhu] happened to be about the same in boldness and derring-do. Every time the two met, they glared at each other and pounded their fists. Their arguments swarmed [like hornets]. Neither was able to submit, even after an entire day!… ——— 8 The following resources have been particularly important for this study. 1) The database of Tang and Song poetry, including ci, at Yuanzhi University in Taiwan, http://cls.admin.yzu.edu.tw/QTS/HOME.HTM. Note that a few of He Zhu’s poems are missing (the nine poems on pp. 2.12512–13 and Poem 307, whose date is erroneously transferred to Poem 308) or garbled, and that the Song poetry database as a whole is not complete. 2) The Academia Sinica databases at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/~tdbproj/handy1/. 3) My own concordance to the poetry of Su Shi, available from [email protected]. 6 INTRODUCTION
He had over ten thousand juan9 of books in his house. He collated them him- self; not a single word was dropped or mistaken…. His family was very poor. His income was the interest on money he lent out, but if someone defaulted, he tore off the [promissory] coupon and gave it to him. He did not in the least pester oth- ers for money.10 Quantitatively speaking, He Zhu is far more likely in his poetry to voice his longings and frustrations than to discourse directly on what is “right and wrong.” Yet he can also be boldly satiric and, with Mi Fu and other friends, mocking. Of course, his “broad learning, strong memory, and mastery” of lan- guage is evident almost everywhere in the poems we shall study. Some of the poems require all the resources at our command before they will divulge their meaning, and even then some points must remain tentative. Besides his library, He Zhu also drew on documents kept in prefectural or county offices. These may have included both printed local gazetteers (which begin to appear in the Song) and the maps, biographies, and other records that local offices would col- lect in manuscript form, often to accompany reports to the central govern- ment.11 He Zhu was deeply engaged intellectually, emotionally, and artistically with the people and places around him, as well as with the history of his culture and his literature. We shall turn in a moment to his “deep, subtle, and dense” words, the poetry in which his voice still lives.
CONVENTIONS AND TEXTS USED IN THIS STUDY
Before getting into the poems themselves, I would like to forestall potential confusion over what names I use for the poet, how I transcribe modern Chinese and the Chinese of (roughly) He Zhu’s day, and how meter will be represented. For the specialist, brief remarks on texts cited and exceptions in citation format are also appended.
——— 9 Juan originally referred to “scrolls,” but by this time designated “sections” of books written or printed on pages bound at the spine. He Zhu’s library may have included books in both forms, so we cannot say how many physical volumes/scrolls “five thousand juan” represented, only that it is a large number. Unlike the English ‘chapter,’ the juan does not imply a division of content. Divi- sions in content may be coincidentally coterminous with juan, but juan tend to be of roughly equal length while divisions in content vary according to the material itself. Thus, there is no regular correspondence. It seems best to leave the term untranslated. 10 Quoted in Zhong Zhenzhen, Dongshan ci, 523–24. 11 Interestingly, in later gazetteers He Zhu’s poems are often the only documentation cited as evidence for the existence of certain landmarks.
INTRODUCTION 7
THE NAME OF THE POET
The name of our poet has been transcribed above in pinyin: He Zhu. The chief problem attendant on that spelling in an English language context is that the surname He is a homograph of a capitalized English pronoun. A slight bit of mental energy is required on every encounter with the name to choose: is He a god? At the beginning of a sentence, is He a pronoun or a name? Many scholars, myself included, still use the older Wade-Giles romanization, in which the name would be written Ho Chu. That doesn’t make the name any easier to pronounce. For those who don’t know Chinese, let us note that He/Ho is pronounced to rhyme with ‘duh’ in a falling intonation; Zhu/Chu, whose initial is similar to the j in “judge” and whose final rhymes with the “coup” of “coup d’etat,” also has a falling intonation. In any case, for various reasons, this book uses pinyin Romanization, and we are stuck with “He Zhu.”12 To minimize the effort required to disambiguate the sign
OTHER TRANSCRIPTIONS
When talking about an individual word or phrase from a poem, we shall often simply transcribe it in Italics, in pinyin. The reading is thus modern Mandarin, a language Fanghui would have understood only with the greatest difficulty, if at all. When the sound patterns Fanghui would have recognized are important, we shall use the transcriptions derived from medieval Chinese by David Prager Branner.14 These will be in Roman letters rather than Italics. Ordinarily, we ——— 12 My decision to use pinyin stems from the fact the “post office” spellings that were customar- ily used alongside Wade-Giles are now out of date. Thus, it becomes awkward to write “Chin-ling (the modern Nanking)” when no one uses “Nanking” anymore, although it is just as good an English word as “Munich” or “Greece.” Using Wade-Giles consistently would not solve the prob- lem: “Chin-ling (the modern Nan-ching)” is peculiar-looking because almost no one used “Nan- ching” in the past. Much simpler is the consistent “Jinling (the modern Nanjing).” 13 When the cognomen comes up in Poem 462, we shall offer educated guesses about the ra- tionale behind the name. Incidentally, let us note that there is also a homograph problem in Chi- in Chinese is indistinguishable from the name Fang Hui, which belongs to a ڃֱ nese! Fanghui well-known literary critic, dates 1227–1306. Fortunately, Fang Hui’s name will not come up again in this study. 14 Professor Branner kindly shared his 2002 draft edition of C