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Contents
1 Returning to My Old Home
2 After Liu Ch’ai-sang’s Poem
3 Home Again Among Gardens and Fields
4 After Kuo Chu-pu’s Poems
5 Early Spring, Kuei Year of the Hare, Thinking of Ancient Farmers
6 In Reply to Liu Ch’ai-Sang
7 Written in the 12th Month, Kuei Year of the Hare, for My Cousin Ching-yüan
8 Begging Food
9 Written on Passing Through Ch’u-o, Newly Appointed to Advise Liu Yü’s Normalization Army
10 After an Ancient Poem
11 Back Home Again Chant
12 Untitled
13 Turning Seasons
14 Form, Shadow, Spirit
15 Scolding My Sons
16 9/9, Chi Year of the Rooster
17 9th Month, Keng Year of the Dog, Early Rice Harvested in the West Field
18 Thinking of Impoverished Ancients
19 We’ve Moved
20 Drinking Wine
21 Wine Stop
22 Wandering at Hsieh Creek
23 Together, We All Go Out Under the Cypress Trees in the Chou Family Burial-Grounds
24 Steady Rain, Drinking Alone
25 In the 6th Month, Wu Year of the Horse, Fire Broke Out
26 An Idle 9/9 at Home
27 Reading The Classics of Mountains and Seas
28 Cha Festival Day
29 Seeing Guests Off at Governor Wang’s
30 Peach-Blossom Spring
31 Untitled
32 Written One Morning in the 5th Month, After Tai Chu-pu’s Poem
33 Untitled
34 Elegy for Myself
35 Burial Songs
Notes
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
INTRODUCTION
1. The Work
T’ao Ch’ien (365–427 A.D.), equally well-known by his given name, T’ao Yüan-ming, stands at the head of the great Chinese poetic tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting. Although the Shih Ching (Classic of Poetry) and Ch’u Tz’u (Songs of the South) are the ancient beginnings of the Chinese tradition, T’ao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which all major Chinese poets inherited and made their own. And in the quiet resonance of his poetry, a poetry that still speaks today’s language, they recognized a depth and clarity of wisdom that seemed beyond them.
T’ao Ch’ien dwelled in the Great Transformation (ta-hua), earth’s process of change in which whatever occurs comes “of itself” (tzu-jan: literally “self-so,” hence “natural” or “spontaneous”). T’ao and his contemporary, Hsieh Ling-yün, are often described as China’s first nature poets. But T’ao was much more than a romantic enthralled with the pastoral. He settled on his secluded farm because earth’s Great Transformation was perfectly immediate there, because there he could live life as it comes of itself, as it ends of itself. When he spoke of leaving government service and returning to the life of a recluse-farmer, he spoke of “returning to tzu-jan.” He took comfort in death as an even more complete return, a return to his “native home.” Although he grieved over loss and dying because he knew the actual to be all there is, he also knew that whatever is alive, himself included, ceases to be as naturally as it comes to be.
T’ao’s return to tzu-jan was also a return to self. His poems are suffused with wonder at the elemental fact of consciousness, and at the same time, his poetry of dwelling initiated that intimate sense of belonging to the earth which shapes the Chinese poetic sensibility. For him, identity is itself tzu-jan. So, to become a complete and distinctive individual was to become an indistinguishable part of earth’s Great Transformation. In a poem not translated in this book, T’ao described this experience of dwelling:
Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow;
broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.
The language T’ao created perfectly mirrors the life he created. He crafted an authentic human voice, and its simple, unassuming surface reveals a rich depth. The great Sung Dynasty (960–1280) poets found this especially impressive. Su Tungp’o called it “withered and bland”: “The outside is withered, but the inside is rich. It seems bland but is actually beautiful.” And Huang T’ing-chien said: “When you’ve just come of age, reading these poems seems like gnawing on withered wood. But reading them after long experience in the world, it seems the decisions of your life were all made in ignorance.” If T’ao’s poems seem bland, it’s because they always begin with the deepest wisdom. They are never animated by the struggle for understanding.
The closest T’ao came to a struggle for understanding