Also in 822, three years after Liu died, the townspeople of Liuchou constructed a memorial grave and a shrine to honor his memory. The shrine and grave are still there, along with descendants of Liu’s ubiquitous orange trees and the pond he was fond of visiting when the heat became unbearable. Although Liu didn’t become a city god like his grandfather, he did become the city’s hero and its face to the outside world. Most people assume the town was named for him.
That pretty much sums up what I’ve learned about Liu Tsung-yuan’s life. In the notes that I’ve appended to his poems, I’ll be repeating most of it, as I’ve always been of the opinion that without understanding the background of a poem it’s impossible for a translator to do it justice, and why shouldn’t the reader share in this knowledge?
In trying to describe Liu’s poems, I defer once again to Su Tung-p’o. Su wrote, “Of those poets whose work looks lifeless but is full of vitality, whose appearance is plain but whose essence is beautiful, that would be T’ao Yuan-ming and Liu Tsung-yuan” 其外枯而中膏，似澹而實美，淵明子厚，之流也. It was a beauty in no small part born of his circumstances. At the age of thirty-two Liu was banished. He had time on his hands. What he wrote in Ch’ang-an was bureaucratic in nature. What he wrote in Yungchou and Liuchou was about life, albeit life in exile. During the fifteen years he spent a thousand miles from home, he produced some of China’s greatest literature. His essays became the model later writers sought to emulate, and the ideas he expressed became a staple of thinkers, regardless of their points of view. He wrote in every genre, and with equal skill. He was as well known for his prefaces and inscriptions as he was for his allegories and fables or his memorials and letters. He even invented a new genre, the travel journal, with which I particularly identify, having honed such literary skills as I possess by doing two-minute pieces of fluff for an English-language radio station in Hong Kong about my own journeys in the Middle Kingdom. Had I read his work earlier, I might have cut down on the fluff. Also, Liu didn’t restrict himself to the standard Confucian view of things. He was equally at home with Taoist and Buddhist ways of looking at the world. And he wrote more or less as he might have talked, free and easy, but always in a style that elevated his work above his contemporaries’.
It’s hard to know how writers come to write the way they do. Liu’s mother, no doubt, played an important role, as his father was absent from the time he was four until he turned eleven. But his father played an equally important, if different, role, as Liu accompanied him between the ages of eleven and sixteen on his missions south of the Yangtze. During this time, the young Liu studied with tutors and attended local academies, but he was often left to his own devices, and he was free to choose his own literary models. Instead of the convoluted, ornate style that had become popular with officials over the previous 1,000 years, Liu looked to writers who weren’t simply stylists but also had something to say. He modeled himself and his writing on the works of Mencius 孟子, Chuangtzu 莊子, and Ssu-ma Ch’ien 司馬遷 and the historical commentaries of the Tsochuan 左傳. Critics later labeled what he developed as the ancient, or ku-wen 古文, style and contrasted it with the p’ien-wen 駢文, or parallel, style that had dominated literary genres from 200 BC until the T’ang. Liu cast aside the formal elements that often overshadowed a work’s content in favor of communicating ideas and feelings directly; he also had fun with the language in which he did so. I can only hope my translations give some sense of the ease with which he wrote.
In the pages that follow, I’ve included 140 of the 146 regular shih-style poems Liu left behind. I’ve omitted six that have a combined length of over 500 lines and would have required a small book of notes as well as more enthusiasm than I was likely to muster. I haven’t bothered with Liu’s ten fu-style 賦 prose poems or his nine sao-style 騷 laments, as they were written in a manner that the rest of his literary output argues against: dense as mud and weighed down by endless historical references. I’ve also ordered the poems in a chronological sequence, as near as can be ascertained or guessed at. Naturally there are differences of opinion about the dates of certain poems, but such differences are almost always limited to one or two years. I’ve also interspersed the poems with twenty of the prose pieces Liu wrote about his places of exile along with a few of his more popular allegories and fables and one letter. I’ve numbered these with uppercase roman numerals.
The texts I’ve used for the poems and the prose and have reproduced in this book are those in the four-volume Collected works of Liu Tsungyuan 柳宗元集 published by the China Publishing Company in 1979 as part of its Chinese Ancient Literature Text Collection 中國古典文學基本叢書. Where I’ve chosen variants of any significance, I’ve indicated that in my notes. Also, at the end of each note, I’ve indicated in parentheses the page number where readers can find the original text in the above edition.
Lastly, in preparing this book, I’ve had the good fortune to visit the places where Liu wrote these poems and prose pieces and to spend time with local scholars who have devoted themselves to his work. I am indebted to them for much of the information in this book. I’m not a scholar, and they saved me from having to become one. For readers interested in learning more, at the back of this book I’ve listed some of these scholars’ works along with the few English-language sources available. My thanks, too, to my traveling companions, Yin Yun 殷雲 and Li Xin 李昕, who helped arrange my visits to Liu’s places of exile and who joined me on my excursions. After coming up empty searching for Liu’s grave south of Sian, I never would have guessed I would find him still alive.
Red Pine
Summer 2018
Port Townsend
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UNDERWRITING COPPER CANYON PRESS TITLES, PLEASE CALL 360-385-4925 EXT. 103
WE ARE GRATEFUL FOR THE MAJOR SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:
Peter Lewis
Ellie Mathews and Carl Youngmann as The North Press
Larry Mawby
Hank Meijer
Jack Nicholson
Petunia Charitable Fund and adviser Elizabeth Hebert
Gay Phinny
Suzie Rapp and Mark Hamilton
Emily and Dan Raymond
Jill and Bill Ruckelshaus
Cynthia Sears
Kim and Jeff Seely
Dan Waggoner
Randy and Joanie Woods
Barbara and Charles Wright
Caleb Young as C. Young Creative
The dedicated interns and faithful volunteers of Copper Canyon Press
1. ON SEEING THE PAINTING FESTIVE CLOUDS AT THE EXAMINATION 省試觀慶雲圖詩
Before colors were added shapes were drawn
through diaphanous clouds the capital appeared
celestial