“Waiting for the Unicorn” | Open Indiana

Wang Ts’ai-wei (Yü-ying, Wei-yü), a native of Wu-chin, Kiangsu province, was the fourth daughter of Wang Kuang-hsieh (1711–1779), a district magistrate. According to her father, she was very intelligent as a child and fond of reading, and she distinguished herself early as an excellent calligrapher. Her father, surprised by her precocity, often hid her poems, believing that the writing of poetry was unsuitable for young women. At the age of nineteen, she was given in marriage to the famous scholar and bibliophile Sun Hsing-yen (1753–1818), who lived with her family during the first few years of their marriage.¹ Wang Ts’ai-wei was very much attached to her own family and wrote a number of poems lamenting the deaths of her second and third sisters. Believing that, like her sisters, she would die young, she seems to have lost her will to live. Having suffered from poor health, she died at the age of twenty-four after giving birth to a daughter.

Wang Ts’ai-wei’s fame as a poet (along with Sun’s devotion to her after her death) was widespread. Yüan Mei (q.v.), the leading poet of her time, for instance, praised her works as being “melancholy and moving” and “possessing a ravishing beauty of a primitive sort.” He further described her verses as being “resonant, pure, and untrammeled.” Her surviving oeuvre, consisting of thirty-six poems and one tz’u composition, was printed in a slim volume entitled Ch’ang-li ko chi (which may be found appended to her husband’s collected works, Sun Yüan-ju shih-wen chi in the SPTK edition).

(Pao Chia-lin)

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1. Lien-che Tu, ECCP, 2:675.

Since You Went Away

Since you went away,

Both of us have grown thin, unrecognizable.

My heart flames like flowing cinnabar;

How could I hold it, offer it up to you?

(CLKC, 1:1a)

(Tr. Irving La)

Written in the Mountains

How blurred and misty are the pines in the evening!

The moon is too small to take off.

I know someone is holding the zither;

Moonlight falls at the bottom of a green curtain.

Dewy air brightens the curving precipice,

The flowers’ radiance glows in the empty night.

Everywhere are the sounds of white clouds;

The splashing waterfall tumbles down behind a veil of mist.

(CLKC, 1:1a)

(Tr. Pao Chia-lin)

Tune: Tsui hua-yin: (Tipsy in the Flowers’ Shade)
Title: Written in Response to [My Husband] Wei-yin’s Rhymes

Shrilly, the returning geese warn of the seaon’s passing;

In an inn, even my thoughts of home tarry.

My dream enters the dawn clouds in flight,

Everywhere it is green, to the very edge of the world;

I fail to recognize the willow at the gate.

Beneath the dewy shadows of peach trees, I’m no longer the same;

Spring, too, should find it hard to endure.

Wind and sun, then it’s Ch’ing-ming time again:

Alone I face withered petals of red,

Solitary hangs the curtain all day long.

(CLKC, 1:14a)

(Tr. Irving Lo)

Waiting for the Unicorn