“Waiting for the Unicorn” | Open Indiana

Huang Ching-jen (Chung-tse, Han-yung; HUI-TS’UN, LU-FEI-TZU) was a native of Kao-ch’un, Kiangsu province, and his family moved to Wu-chin when he was six years old. Although he came from a distinguished family—he claimed to be a remote descendant of Huang T’ing-chien, a disciple of Su Shih and one of the leading poets of the Sung dynasty—Huang Ching-jen led a short life plagued by continual poverty and repeated failures. In further contrast to his illustrious ancestor, who was particularly known for his close attention to formal excellence in his verse and for his respect for the T’ang poet Tu Fu, Huang Ching-jen was a romantic and expressive poet above all, and a self-conscious follower of Tu Fu’s very different contemporary Li Po. Huang did succeed in passing a few low-level civil service examinations, but for most of his life he depended on the good will and patronage of others for his livelihood, a situation that lends a tone of bitterness and desperation to much of his work. The one successful facet of his career was literature, for he was widely recognized among his more discerning contemporaries, most notably by his close friend Hung Liang-chi (q.v.), as a genius in the realm of poetry. His early death and the emotional intensity of his poems inspired great sympathy for him after he was gone, and his work has been repeatedly published. Huang’s poetry first appeared in print in Pi Yüan’s Wu-K’uai yin-ts’ai chi (A Collection of Works of Genius from Kiangsu and Chekiang), 1793. In 1796, the poet Weng Fang-kang printed a collection of his shih as Hui-ts’un shih-ch’ao. A larger collection of the poet’s oeuvre was printed in 1799 under the title Liang-tang-hsüan shih-ch’ao, which was reprinted many times in the nineteenth century. In 1858, his grandson printed the complete works consisting of over 1,000 shih and more than 200 tz’u, as Liang-tang-hsüan ch’üan chi (Complete Works from the Studio of Two Proprieties), in 1876. Still unpublished, scattered poems were found, and they were included in a modern edition of Liang-tang-hsüan chi, published in 1983. In the same year, to mark the bicentennial anniversary of the poet’s death, a memorial volume of the poet, Chi-nien shih-jen Huang Chung-tse, was also issued, consisting of poems and paintings by contemporary scholars and artists in the People’s Republic of China.

(Daniel Bryant)

____________________

1. Chao-ying Fang, ECCP, 1:337- 338.

A Sail on the Lake after Rain

The wind picks up and the water grows rough and choppy;

My boat is light and the going begins to slow.

After fresh rain over the lake,

The time for mist to gather in a myriad trees.

Here is a stranger leaning on his orchid sweep;

Who is it singing a Bamboo Branch Song?¹

The lotus girls have now all gone home;

Leaving only longing in the farthest reaches of the cove.

(LTHC, p. 15)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

Dawn Snow

The Master’s hut is as tiny as that of Wan-ch’iu²;

Late in the year, it is dreary to listen to the sorrowful sound of the wind.

For a single night, the wind dies away and I get some peaceful sleep;

Leaden clouds have come to rest now down along the eaves.

As dawn arrives my feet aren’t warm, even under several covers;

And yet how odd the light should pierce so through my paper window!

Wild with delight, a little boy comes bursting through the door

To announce that out in the vacant courtyard snow has drifted deep.

Scattered salt and drifting catkins are still thick and flurried,³

Cut off by only a sheet of paper, yet not a sound to be heard.

With a sheepskin robe on inside out, in the empty gateway I stand;

Glowing bright in my mind’s eye is the cold without an end.

Now that inspiration strikes, the imps of sleep are gone;

This is my very first chance this year to see it snow.

I empty my purse—there is just enough to buy some village brew—

Warm my inkstone and prepare to turn my verses loose.

Faintly humming, I muse abstracted, remember former companions,

When at the end of the year ping-hsü⁴ I was on a boat to Wu-ling.

Crouched under a mat in the heavy snow, suffering with nothing to drink,

For even now the furs of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju are still in hock.⁵

Glancing back toward this scene as though in a flash of lightning,

All those meetings and separations gone in the twinkling of an eye.

The noble lord of Fan-yang⁶ was a true hero in poetry;

When did he ever hold an inch of steel in “unarmed combat”?⁷

This snowfall must be less in amount than that on the hills of Yen;

Plucking their lutes, the men of old sang when they were grieved.⁸

Who will come on this cold night to visit Shan Stream?⁹

If I wanted to go, just as it pleased me, what would I do?

What would I do? The snow won’t stop.

Along with the wind it floats and soars, down and then back up;

Scattered over a thousand groves and into ten thousand hamlets.

A mountain monk holds his broom and looks up into the sky;

Yesterday evening in the empty kitchen there wasn’t a grain of rice.

(LTHC, pp. 16–17)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

A Note to My Friends, While Slightly Ill

Stinking drunk from morning to night, a thousand times over now,

I give offence to Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju’s old diabetic innards.¹⁰

Beneath the lamp my worn-out shirt is streaked with wine and tears;

Facing the wind my weary bones are at war with frost and ice.

I persist in poetry without necessarily growing thin from poetry;¹¹

To prolong my illness has truly become my way of treating illness.

Since all that I have got wrong with me is really very minor,

There is nothing to keep you from dropping in for a chat beside my hammock.

(LTHC, p. 62)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

The Grave of Li Po¹²

When I bound up my hair I was reading your poems;

Now I have come to visit your grave.

A cooling breeze comes fresh and clean across the river;

And I should like by way of it to convey my humble homage.

Alas! That genius as great as yours could not escape from death!

I myself am firmly convinced that dying, you did not die.

The planet Venus fell to earth three thousand years ago,¹³

And here it is, apocalyptic ash from K’un-ming Pool.¹⁴

Your lofty headgear towering high and girdle pendants dangling,¹⁵

With brave adventures and vigorous swordplay, the genius within your breast,

You smelted and forged Ch’ü Yuan and Sung Yü, combined with the Greater Odes,

Brandished and scattered the sun and moon to create your flawless lyrics.

In those days, though you were here, no place to make your mark;

And yet today your remnant relics are still remembered fondly.

When you were sober you toiled and moiled; when drunk—a thousand poems!

It must have been the Creator itself making your hand its own.

Heaven and Earth had no occasion to enter your fond embrace;

Your only concern, the quest for transcendence—that and drinking wine.

Throughout your life, you bowed your head to none but him of Hsüan-ch’eng;

The gate of your tomb is directly across from the green of his Green Hills.¹⁶

Your romantic spirit’s radiant glow is today as long ago;

Also here is a donkey-riding sojourner from Pa Bridge.

Here in this place beneath the earth a truly excellent sight;

Small wonder the rivers and hills bring together so much living beauty.

Rivers and hills to the end of time abide in the light of the moon;

Your drunken soul sank lower and lower, when called did not return.¹⁷

Brocade robe¹⁸ and painted boat, alone with no one near;

Dim and dark the sound of a song encircling the river waters.

Remnant richness, enduring fragrance, were scattered in the six directions;

But active yet in the world of men, the Master of Ten Thousand.¹⁹

Omissioner Tu was a man who lived in the same age as yourself,

And yet his gravestone is set apart, on the banks of the Hsiao and Hsiang.

Once long ago on a southward voyage, I paid a visit there,

The clouds of Heng-shan were dense and unbroken as far as Nine Doubts Peak.²⁰

Even when it came to a place to rest your bones when you were gone,

You proudly galloped off in another direction, as in the realm of verse.²¹

In the end, I am wary of that old man as too irascible and aroused;

The one I recognize as teacher is no one if not you.

For the hundred years of human life we ought to take our pleasure;

A thousand cups in a single day is nowhere near enough.

Laughing, I watch the woodsmen and herdboys talk in the setting sun;

Once dead I ought to be buried here at the foot of this very hill.

(LTHC, pp. 76–77)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

A Caged Tiger: A Ballad

At the city gates in the New Year season, a hundred skills are displayed;

Fish and dragons and outlandish creatures, hardly a one is missing.

What could it be that brings out on the town the idle-handed lads,

To issue commands to a mountain lord become the sport of boys?

First they drag out a tiger cage, brought to the open field;

The city is emptied as an audience forms, tiered like a solid wall.

On all four sides they set up bars and lead the tiger out,

With furry paws and ears relaxed, his spirit unaroused.

First they pull on the tiger’s whiskers; the tiger still submits;

Then they prop up a club on the ground and the tiger stands like a man.

The trainer shouts, the tiger roars, the noise is just like thunder;

With teeth and claws bared in a cluster; he rushes into the ring.

The tiger’s mouth is agape in a yawn, as wide as a bushel basket,

Into which, as cool as can be, the trainer extends his hand.

Then he lowers his very own skull in front of the tiger’s mouth,

As though he were serving it to the tiger, but the tiger will not eat;

A tigerish tongue laps the man as though it were lapping milk.

Suddenly leaning on the tiger’s back, he grunts to make him go;

And then the tiger begins to run back and forth around the ring.

Rolling over, he scratches the ground, kicking the frozen dust,

His entire body changed with a shake to a blossom embroidered cushion.

Around and about in dancing poses, copied from a nomad whirl;

As though to bend his tiger’s might and make it pleasing to men.

Then for a moment he lies on his back pretending to be dead;

But as soon as some meat is thrown before him he leaps to his feet in a flash.

The crowd of onlookers laugh out loud as they hurry to pool their coins;

Once the trainer has picked up the money, the tiger wags his tail.

Then he is driven into his cage—pride showing in his speed;

So happy is he to be inside, his mountain home is forgotten.

Obeying his trainer, the tiger allows the man to command him by nods;

Befriending the tiger, the man is covered with the last of the tiger’s spittle.

As for me, I watch this sight feeling drained and depressed at heart;

Alas for you, my stupid slave, what a wretched sight you are!

You lack the wisdom to break out of your trap;

You lack the valor to smash your bars.

This churl is fed and clothed by you for all the rest of his life;

Is his power really the same as that of the Earl of Chung-huang?

How can his approval or anger equal those of Liang Yang?²²

If you get only leftover food to eat, who is there to help you?

A shamefaced, tiger-chewed ghost²³ has now become your master.

If you were to meet with one of your old companions from the hills,

He would laugh at you in your traveling lockup, no better than a rat!

(LTHC, pp. 354–355)

(Tr. Daniel Bryant)

NOTES

1. The title of a popular folksong.

2. Master Wan-ch’iu is a legendary person said to have been the teacher of P’eng-tsu, China’s Methuselah. Su Shih once referred in a poem to Wan-ch’iu’s study being as small as a boat.

3. This line alludes to an occasion in the Chin dynasty. Hsieh An (320–385) called upon members of his family to make up metaphors to describe the falling snow. His nephew Lang likened it to scattered salt, but An’s preference was for “willow catkins,” suggested by his niece Tao-yün.

4. I.e., 1766.

5. Once, when the Han writer Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, best known for his fu (rhyme prose), was in financial straits, he pawned his fur robes and bought wine with which to celebrate with his wife, Cho Wen-chün.

6. The “noble lord of Fan-yang” is identified by a note in the original text as one Min Chen, a friend of Huang’s.

7. An allusion to an incident in the Sung dynasty, when Ou-yang Hsiu (1077–1072) and some of his friends held a poetry competition during a snowfall. The rules stipulated that various common similes were disallowed. Su Shih later referred to the incident in a poem, one line of which goes, “In unarmed combat not allowed to hold an inch of steel.”

8. See Ts’ao Chen-chi, notes 6–13.

9. Wang Hui-chih awoke after a snowfall and, struck by the beauty of the scene, was inspired to visit his friend Tai K’uei (d. 396), who lived on Shan Stream. When his boat arrived at Tai’s house, however, he turned around and returned home. Asked why, he replied, “I went just because it pleased me and came back just because it pleased me; there was no need for me to see K’uei.”

10. The Han writer Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju is recorded to have suffered from diabetes.

11. Li Po addressed a well-known poem to Tu Fu in which he remarks that Tu has grown thin because he “suffers from poetry.”

12. Li Po’s grave is located in Tang-t’u, Anhwei.

13. Because the planet Venus had appeared to his mother in a dream, Li’s parents named him Po (white).

14. When a layer of ash was discovered during the excavation of K’unming Pool, in Ch’ang-an, a Buddhist interpreted it as being left over from a previous destruction of the world.

15. This line echoes a couplet from Ch’ü Yüan’s Li Sao.

16. The Six Dynasties poet Hsieh T’iao (464–499), who had governed Hsüan-ch’eng and whose work Li Po greatly respected, was buried at the site of a residence he had built south of Green Hill near Tang-t’u. Li Po’s grave was nearby. So too was Chia Tao, a Middle T’ang poet, who once encountered Han YÜ while riding his donkey in the capital near the Pa Bridge.

17. See Ch’ü Ta-chün, note 3.

18. I.e., Li Po.

19. This couplet is derived from an early encomium on Tu Fu, who is explicitly named in the following stanza of Huang’s poem.

20. Heng Shan is a mountain range in Hunan, one of China’s five sacred mountains. Nine Doubts (Chiu-yi) Peaks, also located in Hunan, is the site of the grave of the legendary sage-king Shun.

21. Tu’s grave was to the southwest, in Hunan. Although Tu Fu admired Li Po, his slightly older contemporary, their poetic styles are remarkably different.

22. The Chung-huang Earl and Liang Yang are animal trainers mentioned in early Taoist texts.

23. According to an old Chinese superstition, the ghost of a person killed by a tiger would be ashamed to appear in the nether regions, because disfigured by the animal’s toothmarks, and so would serve the tiger as a ghostly attendant, aiding its depredations.

Waiting for the Unicorn