“Waiting for the Unicorn”
(3 DECEMBER 1877–2 JUNE 1927)1
Wang Kuo-wei (Ching-an and Po-yü; LI-T’ANG, KUAN-T’ANG, and YUNG-KUAN), scholar, epigrapher, translator, literary critic, and poet, was a native of Hai-ning, Chekiang province. The heir to a family tradition of scholarship and patriotic public service, Wang Kuo-wei was tutored as a child in traditional learning in preparation for a career in government. In 1892, he succeeded in passing the lowest examination degree, but he failed in two successive attempts to secure the second, or chü-jen degree. Thereafter, he went to Shanghai to work on the newspaper Shih-wu pao (Contemporary Affairs Journal), and subsequently, by having come to the attention of the scholar Lo Chen-yü (1866–1940), with the Tung-wen hsüeh-she (Institute of Oriental Languages). With Lo’s assistance, Wang began the study of English and Japanese, the sciences, and Western philosophy. Between 1904 and 1907, he concentrated his attention on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. His translations from the works of these philosophers were a pioneering venture; moreover, he was the first Chinese scholar to make serious use of Western ideas, particularly those of Schopenhauer, in the formulation of new critical concepts of literature, the subject to which he now turned his full attention. Over the next several years he produced some of his major scholarly works, particularly in the fields of literature and criticism, such as the pioneering Sung Yüan hsi-ch’ü k’ao (An Examination of Sung and Yüan Drama), the T’ang Wu-tai Erhshih-yi-chia tz’u-chi (A Collection of the Lyrics of Twenty-one Poets of the T’ang and Five Dynasties), and the influential Jen-chien tz’u-hua (Talks on Lyric Poetry in the Human World). In the latter work he formulated a theory of poetry as a fusion of ching (external scene) and ch’ing (inner emotion), which in combination constitutes the “world,” or ching-chieh, of the poem. (See the translation of the Jen-chien tz’u-hua by Adele Austin Rickett for a full exposition of this theory.)
After the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty by republican forces in 1911, Wang, along with his mentor and patron Lo Chen-yü, a political conservative like himself, sought refuge in Japan. This move also marked a turning point in his interests as a scholar, which now focused on the close textual analysis of the ancient classics and the recently discovered oracle bones. When he returned to China several years later, his reputation as a classical scholar was firmly established, thus leading to teaching appointments in Shanghai and later Peking, where he unexpectedly ended his own life by drowning in 1927.
Wang Kuo-wei’s reputation as a poet rests on a rather slim corpus of poems in the shih and lyric forms, but it is only in the later genre that he achieved the greatest distinction. His lyrics, many of which date from the years when he was exploring the history and esthetics of that form, are widely admired today for their fresh and uncontrived expression of inner despair and the search for meaning in the human condition.
(William Schultz)
____________________
1.BDRC, 3:388–391.
Thrust in life between heaven and earth, I can’t but feel cramped.
And still far from reach is the ideal of a Taoist Spiritual Man!1
The clouds seem aimless,2 so they remain pure and free;
If the river isn’t racing along, whence its mighty roar?
My heart embraces the Fu River and the T’iao Mountains;3
My mind is at home in the reigns of Wu-te and K’ai-yüan;4
Poets of all ages are indeed too frivolous:
They look to this world of dust in search of Paradise.
(WKTHSCC, 5: 1774)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
Tune: Ch’üeh-ch’iao hsien (Immortal at Magpie Bridge)
The sentry drums boom.
The pent-up horses whinny.
I get up and find flowers
of frost everywhere.
Suddenly I remember when
I left her
The weather then was like
the weather today
at the road house.
Cart tracks travel north.
Homing dreams head south.
I know there’s no way
to stop between.
In the human world not a thing
can be depended upon
Save and except the two words
“not depend.”
(No. 2 from a series of 2; KTCTC, p. 13)
(Tr. Li Chi and Michael Patrick
O’Connor)
A mountain temple dim and far away, its back against the setting sun—
No birds can reach that height far in the shade.
From above, at the single note of its chime, clouds pause in their passing.
When I try to climb the peak, to peer at the bright moon,
By chance I obtain the Eye of Heaven to look at the mundane world—
And I find in its revelation, alas, I am but a man.
(KTCTC, p. 12)
(Tr. Ching-i Tu)
The drum sounds from the high city wall as the lampwiek burns out.
Asleep, yet awake;
Drunk, yet sober—
Suddenly I hear the two or three notes of a wild goose’s lone cry.
Life is no more than willow catkins in the wind:
Joy in fragments,
Grief in fragments—
All turn to patches of duckweed spreading on the river.
(KTCTC, p. 8)
(Tr. Ching-i Tu)
I
How much has the light thickened outside the window, under the green bough?
Only the bright red cherries remain,
Still enticing the faded red petals5 to linger.
All the fledgling orioles have grown old, in silence;
They come flying to pick the cherries before they fly away.
I sit and watch a pair of nursling swallows on the painted beam.
The swallows twitter softly
As if chiding someone for being tardy—
Surely a kind of longing. But how much do they know?
In the human world, only longing could have caused so much wrong.
(KTCTC, p. 5)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
II
Who says that in the human world autumn has already gone?
Pale willows, strand upon strand,
Still play with their shadows of gosling yellow.
The setting sun upon a grove of thinning trees gleams brightly;
Never pass up the sight of dusk from a western window.
A myriad dots, the roosting crows; a chaotic, unsettled mass;
A glittering sea of golden waves
Again shrouds the tops of blue pines.
Where south of the Yangtze do you not find this scene?—
I’m distressed only because there’s no one to savor it.
(KTCTC, p. 9)
(Tr. Irving Lo)
NOTES
1. The text reads: Ku-she shen-jen, alluding to the Taoist concept of a “spiritual man” (translated as “Holy Man” in Burton Watson’s translation of the Chuang Tzu). Ku-she Mountain, first mentioned in the ancient Shan-hai ching is the Miao-ku-she Shan in the “Free and Easy Wandering” (Hsiao-yao yu) chapter of the Chuang Tzu, said to be inhabited by Beings who have attained spiritual perfection. According to the teachings of Taoism, there are three classes of Beings, with Sheng-jen (Sage) at the top, followed by shen-jen (Spiritual Man), and then by chen-jen (Perfect Man) at the bottom. The following passages from this chapter, in Watson’s translation, may be relevant: “. . . there is a Holy Man living in faraway Ku-she Mountain, with skin like ice or snow, and gentle and shy like a young girl. He doesn’t eat the five grains, but sucks the wind . . . rides a flying dragon, and wanders beyond the four seas. . . . [Emperor] Yao brought order to the people of the world and directed the government of all within the seas. But he went to see the Four Masters of the faraway Kushe Mountain [and when he got home] north of the Fen River, he was dazed and had forgotten his kingdom there.” (The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu,1968, pp. 33–34)
2. Alluding to the two famous lines from Tu Fu:
shui liu hsin pu chin,
yün tsai yi chü ch’ih
(“The water flows but my heart does not race with it,
The clouds linger but my mind is the more sluggish”)
from the “Chiang-t’ing” (River Pavilion) poem (Harvard-Yenching Concordance edition, pp. 356–357). The cloud image in Tu Fu’s line is derived from T’ao Ch’ien’s yün wu hsin erh ch’u hsiu, translated by James Robert Hightower as “The clouds aimlessly rise from the peaks” (The Poetry of T’ao Ch’ien, 1970, p. 269).
3. Fu-t’u (Land around Fu) is mentioned in the “Yü-kung” chapter of Shu-ching, referring to the land of China before it was divided into the “Nine Districts” by Emperor Yü. T’iao-shan, as a compound, is most probably derived from “T’iao-feng,” the term found in the Yi-ching designating the auspicious wind from the northeast, which gives life to everything.
4. Respectively, the reign title of Kao-tsu (618–626), the founder of the T’ang dynasty, and that of Hsüan-tsung (713–741)—the two most splendid periods of the T’ang era.
5. A variant reading given in some other editions is ts’an-ch’un (residual spring).
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