“Waiting for the Unicorn” | Open Indiana

Chiang Shih (T’ao-shu), a native of Ch’ang-chou, Kiangsu province, was a man of obscure origin and of practically no known accomplishment except for his skill as a poet. Nothing is known of his life save that he was active at the end of the Hsien-feng era (1851–1861) and, after becoming a licentiate, was an alternate candidate for appointment to a magistracy. He probably earned his living as a tutor. He lived for some time in Fukien province, and he died after he reached the age of forty-five. No date of birth or death is given in any of the sources on him or his works. Chiang’s poetry, however, had many admirers among his contemporaries. It was approved chiefly for its lean, or sparse, and plain style, somewhat reminiscent of such T’ang poets as Han Yü and Meng Chiao, or the Sung poet Huang T’ing-chien. Often writing about loneliness and frustration, he was capable of some striking and original imagery, as in the following couplet:

Remorse I have: cloudy vapors that thunder against heaven;

My tears are like resounding tidal waves coming from the sea.

(yüan yu ho-t’ien jo-yün-ch’i/lei ju tao-hai tso-ch’ao-sheng; with the third word ho in the first line meaning “to reprimand” or “breathe upon.”) His collected works, entitled Fu-yü-t’ang shih-lu (Poems From the Studio of A Submerged Ancient Musical Instrument), were printed in T’ung-jen-chi (An Anthology of Contemporary Poets), edited by Wang Ch’ing-hsiung.

(Irving Lo)

Crossing Several Mountain Ridges on My
Way to P’u-ch’eng from Chiang-shan’¹ after a Snowfall

For nights on end, I’ve been pursued by rain and sleet;

Now inside a sedan-chair, I long for sunny sky at dusk.

Myriad bamboos are without a sound only when snow is falling;

Jumbled hills are like my dream: forever cloud-capped.

(Ch’en, p. 416)

(Tr. Irving Lo)

Getting Up Early at Lakeside Pavilion: Two Poems

Morning light floods my room overlooking the lake;

Last night’s dream, so vivid before, quickly fades as I get up.

I recall only the dawn bells from two temples:

The sound of one bell short and the other long.

Vapor rises from the water’s surface at dawn;

Coldly forbidding: the color of the cliff to the south.

Look, a tiny raft heads for haven on the Western Shore;²

It carries three people, two of them are monks.

(Ch’en, pp. 429–430)

(Tr. Irving Lo)

Night at an Inn: Written in the Style of Meng Chiao

A hundred griefs are like a hundred arrows;

I lack a bow to control my mind.³

But once let go, they return and pierce my heart;

So miraculous is the arrow of grief that it never misses.

Alas, the lonely eccentric

Shares his shadow only with the lamp!

His guts twist with every turn of the cart wheel;

His broken dreams cannot be mended for want of gum rubber.

Hungry rats scurrying stir up the dust—

How can they make reply to my short satire?

(No. 1 from a series of 4; Hsu, 159:9a)

(Tr. Irving Lo)

NOTES

1. Also called Chiang-lang Shan, in Chekiang province, south of Chiang-shan county. P’u-ch’eng refers to Chien-ning in northern Fukien.

2. In Buddhist terminology, the “Western Shore” implies salvation.

3. “Mind” or “heart”—actually the same word as the last word of the next line, since the Chinese consider hsin to be the seat of both emotion and the intellect.

Waiting for the Unicorn