“Waiting for the Unicorn”
(23 FEBRUARY 1873–19 JANUARY 1929)1
Liang Ch’i-ch’ao (Cho-ju, Jen-fu, Jen-kung), a native of Hsin-hui, Kwangtung, was the most eloquent, impassioned, and influential spokesman among the intellectual leaders of China in the early part of this century.
His association with K’ang Yu-wei (q.v.) marked the beginning of his active life and brought him into the forefront of the ambitious but short-lived reform campaign, known as the Hundred Days Reform, for which he drew up a program for the translation of Western books and sought funds and personnel to establish the Translation Bureau.
Despite the failure of the campaign and the many political vicissitudes he subsequently endured, which involved such prominent figures as Yüan Shih-k’ai, Tuan Ch’i-jui (1855–1936), and Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), he never abandoned his effort to achieve an intellectual and cultural regeneration through education. At the core of his philosophy of education was his firm belief that every individual should be free to develop his own thinking, unbound by any dogma, be it Confucianism or any other ism.
Through public lectures and prolific publications in the numerous periodicals he founded—the most famous and influential of which was Hsin-min ts’ung-pao (Journal of the New Citizen)—he sought to educate the young generation. The most comprehensive collection of his works is the Yin-ping-shih ho-chi, an impressive forty-volume work, the subject matter of which, embracing a wide variety of literary, scholarly, and political concerns, testifies to his stature as the foremost intellectual of his time.
As a literary figure, he is most remembered for his powerful, lucid, and unique semicolloquial style, which he advocated as early as 1896, two decades before the literary revolution that marked the replacement of classical wen-yen by colloquial pai-hua as the popular standard for writing. It was, in his words, a hsin wen-t’i (new literary style), a mixture of colloquisms and even foreign expressions. But apart from these stylistic features, it was due to the lucidity of his thinking and the intensity of his feelings—the nib of his pen was often drenched with emotion, he wrote—not to mention his erudition, that he was able to touch the hearts of the countless young Chinese who later became the backbone of the New Literature movement. The eminent literary scholar Cheng Chen-to (1878–1958) described Liang’s prose as having “toppled the drab and lifeless old style” and “enabled the youth to express themselves freely.” Liang Shih-ch’iu (b. 1901), scholar, writer, and translator of Shakespeare, remarked that his oral delivery was even more moving than his prose. His passion for Chinese classical literature came through so powerfully, as he lectured on “The Expression of Emotion in Chinese Rhyme-prose,” Liang Shih-ch’iu noted, that it literally swept the huge hall of Ts’ing-hua University. With his sonorous Cantonese accent, he chanted out loud not only the words in many of the poems he memorized as a child from the Shih-ching to the Ch’ing drama T’ao-hua shan, but also acted out the feelings, tears, and laughter contained therein as well.
While his heart was most intently set on the reformation of China through education and popularization of new ideas from the West, his love for traditional Chinese literature often moved him to compose poems in the classical style in order to record a sentiment or to vent a frustration, of which he certainly had a greater share than men of more ordinary capacities.
Strictly speaking, his verse expresses more of a literati’s than a poet’s sentiment, occasioned more by the twists and turns of his eventful life (see, for example, the poems translated below, “Autumn Thoughts” and “After the Rain’) than by a sudden visit of creative imagination. It is in these classical poems that we find more of a traditionalist than a liberal spirit. He guarded the long tradition of Chinese lyrical poetry with gusto despite his interest in innovation in other areas of life and literature.
(Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
____________________
1.BDRC, 2:346–351.
Already heavy with grief is late autumn,
Sadder still that the season’s better half lies squandered.
Bearing up under the rain, ten thousand lotus plants waste away;
Battling against the wind, a thousand leaves are tossed hither and yon.
Outside this room of utter solitude,
Stars change and things move on relentlessly.
Many a heroic ambition I used to cherish,
But long have I been cut off from my raft to reach beyond the ocean green.1
Grasping my knees I could only cry out my frustrations by chanting “Hsi-shih,”2
Staring at the clouds I heave a long, lonely sigh.
(YPSHC, 16:43–44)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
Sunshine after rain, rain after sunshine,
Who can tell Heaven’s will from its fickle ways?
The fine autumn is almost half spent;
A virtuous life is always dreary drifting.
Gazing upon streams and mountains yields a dim prospect:
Hesitating, pondering, musing, all to no avail3
Vexed still by fear of death, sadness of living—
It’s far better to be like the river moving straight and deep.
(YPSHC, 16:25–26)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
I wonder what kind of night is this night?
I force myself to sing and dance with the children.
Old dreams, like the shadow of a lamp, have long ago burnt out;
My own village, under the full moon, should be all the brighter now.
Does the moon goddess, with her stolen elixir, know of our spring?
Alas, the Star Bridge4 is locked in iron and the night is long.
High in the heavens there should be a god,
But can he bear to look upon hills and streams from the pearly Dipper?
(YPSHC, 16:59)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
10. Calligraphy by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. Text of a letter on tz’u poetry sent to Dr. Hu Shih. From the collection of the Hu family.
Scarlet red flowers burst into flame everywhere,
Fiery clouds hold forth a dazzling bright day.
How many rouge tears5 might we gather together
To paint the azalea hills back home.
(YPSHC, 16:64)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
Tune: Tieh lien hua
Title: Thoughts at the End of Spring—
A Farewell Poem for Someone Going Home
I
What is it that troubles you?
Even before middle age approaches,
Already so much bittersweet experience.
In the deserted courtyard spring is everywhere—
What does the crab apple know of our sorrow?
Suddenly the setting sun blends into the rain at dusk,
Such sunny wetness—how annoying!
Nor are the heavens to be trusted.
The flowers are silent and the orioles twitter aloud.
Alas, the heart knows more bitterness than the autumn lotus seed.
(YPSHC, 16:86)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
II
Trying to stay the departing spring is of no avail.
Again and again, the piercing cries of the cuckoo
Hurry one to go back home.6
Everywhere the catkins conceal the fragrant grass ford.
At the edge of the earth, can spring find its way back?
A nameless feeling, where to find an anchor?
The blackberry blossoms are all fallen,
Mixed with a few drops of Ch’ing-ming rain.
Don’t sing the heart-rending words of Fang-hui7—
In all the world, affairs of the heart are hardest to tell.
(YPSHC, 16:86)
(Tr. Cecile Chu-chin Sun)
NOTES
1. The raft and the green ocean suggest the legend of a fisherman who saw a raft floating out to sea every year in the eighth month, mounted it, and was wafted off to the Milky Way. Chang Ch’ien, the famous Han general, was reported to have had a similar experience when he was sent by Emperor Wu of Han to be the ambassador to Ta-hsia. Hence the line here seems to suggest that his ambition is thwarted and frustrated.
2. A poem in the Ch’u-tz’u, whose authorship is still unknown. Some attribute it to a contemporary of Yen Chi (188–105 B.C.) and Mei Sheng (?141 B.C.); Wang Fu-chih (q.v.) was fairly certain that it was written by Chia Yi who was lamenting Ch’ü Yüan’s treatment by the unworthy King Huai of Ch’u. Liang probably had Wang’s interpretation in mind, for it seems that a parallel can be drawn here: like Ch’ü Yüan, Liang’s faith in the young Emperor Kuang-hsü suffered a serious blow. His confidence in Kuang-hsü as a leader capable of executing a series of reforms met with great disappointment. This poem, although undated, was probably composed after the failure of the 1898 reform movement when Liang and his mentor K’ang Yu-wei barely managed to escape with their lives.
Poetically speaking, the imaginative description of air travel in “Hsi-shih” offers not only a beautiful parallel to the image of the green ocean of the previous line but is also subtly connected with the following line, in which the speaker gazes at the clouds up in the sky.
3. A more literal translation of the original would read: “Scratching one’s head, clasping one’s hands behind the back, musing aloud, all a waste.”
4. The Milky Way.
5. Usually referring to the tears of a woman; here they could also mean the blood of the legendary cuckoo that stains the azaleas.
6. The cuckoo has strong associations with homesickness in Chinese poetry and its cry, kuei, is a homonym in Chinese for the word “return home.”
7. Referring to the Sung poet Ho Chu’s (ca. 1063–1120) famous tz’u to the tune Ch’ing-yü-an.
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