Poetry and Nonsense

SUMMER DAYS bake on, one succeeding the next, strung together by a white hot thread, as slender as could be and burnt nearly through, connected only by the shrill cries of the cicadas: ji ya, ji ya, ji .. .
This month, since I've been ill, I've managed to save substantial sums of money that would normally have been used for groceries and carfare, and suddenly I feel rather well-off. I'm suffering from a less than refined malady-stomachaches so nasty that I roll across the straw mat on my bed, moaning in pain-but it is summer, and I'm idling away at home, unable to tackle anything more weighty than a few pieces on Cezanne's paintings, some books I've read, and Chinese religion, all admittedly rather elegant topics. I have decided that this should be my "month of elegance," and, continuing in this cultivated vein, I've started to discuss poetry as well.
I made my aunt read a famous Japanese poem, translated by Zhou Zuoren into Chinese, that goes like this: "Summer nights / like bitter bamboo/ slender stalked and close jointed / in but a moment / comes the dawn."' My aunt, a typical amateur intellectual, looked it over, shook her head, and said, "I don't get it." After another moment's thought, she added, "Since he's so famous, there must be something to it, no? But who knows?
'Zhou Zuoren (z881-1967), brother of the so-called father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun, was one of the most distinguished essayists and cultural figures of the Republican period.
 Once someone has reached a certain level of celebrity, they seem to have earned the right to talk nonsense."
I was reminded of Lu Yishi.2 The first poem of his that I ever read was "Sanbu de yu" (Fish on a stroll), published in a monthly literary digest. That particular poem was not exactly nonsense, admittedly, but it was rather overdone. When the tabloids began to make fun of him on a daily basis, I laughed right along, for quite a few days on end. On this front, I can be just as merciless as the tabloids, if not more so. For instance, when I read that Gu Mingdao had died, I was delighted, for the simple reason that his fiction was so badly written.3 In truth, I never knew him, and if I had, I'm certain that there would be reasons to hold him in great esteem, because he was a model of what a writer ought to be and experienced all the trials and tribulations that writers have been known to suffer throughout history. Besides, he has passed away, so to speak ill of him seems quite unpardonable. And yet I cannot help remembering when Mingri tianya (We'll be worlds apart come tomorrow) was being serialized in the Xinwen bao (Daily news). I was terribly annoyed by both Sun Jiaguang, the paragon of progressive youth in the story, and the girl he was helping through school, Mei Yuezhu. Whenever Sun visited her at home, her mother would heap the table with fish and meat to express her gratitude, an extra expense that must have exceeded by many times over the cost of her daughter's tuition. Mrs. Mei would then recount the honorable conduct of her late husband and go on to detail his many misfortunes, the minute circumstances of which appeared daily in the paper for two weeks running. And I had no choice but to read on, precisely because the novel was divided into daily installments and exercised thereby a most exasperating kind of appeal. I had a cousin who was also a reader of the Daily News. Whenever we got together, we would roundly criticize Mingri tianya, prattling on about its deficiencies even as our eyes continued to scan across the pages.
There really isn't anything extraordinary about Gu Mingdao's fiction. What is extraordinary is that the mass public is able to stand such colorless idiocy. The popular success of Autumn Quince at least is justifiable.4
2A modern poet active between the late 1920s and 1970s, Lu Yishi collaborated in the creation of several influential Shanghai-based poetry journals, such as Huoshan (Volcano) and, with Dai Wangshu, Xinshi (New poetry), before emigrating to Taiwan in 1958, where he continued to write poetry under the pseudonym Ya Xian.
3Gu Mingdao (1897-1944) was the author of more than thirty romance, historical, and martial arts novels.
4For more on the popular success of Qin Shou'ou's Qiuhai tang (Autumn quince), see Chang's essay "Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes" in this volume.
 To speak of Lu Yishi in the same breath as the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction that he despises with such passion would no doubt infuriate him. What I am trying to make clear is that I cannot forgive Gu Mingdao for his fiction just because he is dead. Nor can I excuse Lu Yishi for some of his later works simply because he wrote some good poetry in the past. After reading "Bang-wan de jia" (Home at dusk), however, I changed my mind. Not only "Sanbu de yu," I think, but even the immaturity, venality, and pretension of his other works can be forgiven solely on account of this one poem. It has an integrity that demands that I quote an entire stanza:
dusky home is the color of dark cloud
wind comes to the little courtyard
finished counting the returning crows the children's eyes grow lonely
at dinner in my wife's small talk
events of several years past disperse like mist and in the blandness of the vegetable broth
I taste something of the desolation of living
All of Lu Yishi's best poems possess this same purity, sadly lucid, sparing in their use of color, like ink paintings of bamboo. The field of vision is small, but because it's not bound to a distinct time or place, it gains an eternal, universal quality. For instance:
Once more the flurries of February snow somber house bathes in spring chill
ah, warmth that once was now distant my wife's eyes are forlorn
And then there are these lines from "Chuangxia yin" (Poem by the window):
But to speak of my
green, green
love, mirror calm
yet so very distant
a distance that
for sparrows and young crows would be absurd
 This poem is relatively long, with variations of tone that are extremely charming and supple. In "Eryue de chuang" (A window in February), there is an altogether more subtle and ambiguous feeling, a feeling unique to modern man:
The lazy westward drifting clouds make one melancholy trailing sorrow-laden eagles in their drawn-out wake slowly as an unthinkable sail
as each unthinkable day
sails past my February window
To have found in one volume just a few such stanzas is already immensely gratifying. China's new poetry-starting from Hu Shi, on to Liu Bannong and Xu Zhimo, and then even Zhu Xiang-seems to have been heading toward a dead end.5 It will no longer do to speak of our concerns in the words of the Tang dynasty, because all those words have already been said. Even when we try to express ourselves in our own language, however, something is still amiss; all in all, an exasperating state of affairs. Yet there are still some unexpectedly good poems. This stanza I came across in Ni Hongyi's "Chongfeng" (Reunion) is really quite good:
The purple carnation you called the flower of momentary love three years ago
the colors of summer fell limp
in the dead city
you suffered a sleepless night
colors of night surged and ebbed
words like a night train
you said
by my future grave will be night-blooming jasmine
I said why not plant a "love for a moment"?
Phrases like "momentary love" and "fell limp" sound extremely forced, but they are employed as a means of poetic economy, imparting a sense of solidity and compression, rather than a life-or-death desire to "never cease writing words that startle," as Du Fu would have it. I especially like "words like a night train"; the metaphor sounds out intermittently, distant and bleak.
5A11 these writers were central figures in the development of modern Chinese verse forms.
 Or, later:
you were sacrificed at the altar of chastity before our generation fatigued by the noise and the clamor
you will not see what comes later
your face obscured in silence
This last phrase is cast in the visionary mode of modern painting. I know very little about the person depicted in the poem, yet I feel that the picture looks just right: with gentle despair, she sinks slowly into the shadows, stretching her malleable white arms in an arc.
The last line of the poem is purely impressionistic, and the author himself has said that he fears it will not be understood:
you wholly possess dark-hued green
Having seen her, we may perhaps come to understand that within this limitless "dark-hued green" are concealed tranquil wounds. And yet there is a momentary uncertainty. For she is not so much a withered flower fallen from a branch as a plucked blossom embroidered on ancient silk, broken but very beautiful, broken yet necessary nonetheless.
And thus living in China has something lovable about it: amid dirt and chaos and grief, one discovers everywhere precious things, things that bring joy for an afternoon, a day, a lifetime. I hear the roads in Germany are so squeaky clean that you can use them as a mirror, that they are wide, ruler straight, tidy to a fault, and planted all along their length with towering trees. And yet I suspect that walking along such a road day after day would drive one mad. Then there is Canada, a country that in the majority of people's minds seems to lack any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever: a formless and desolate land. And yet my aunt says it is the best place in the world, with a cool climate, blue skies, emerald-colored grass, creamy white western-style houses with red roofs as far as one can see, each with a freshly scrubbed look and boasting its own garden. If she could choose, she would live the rest of her life there. If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I'm homesick even before I leave home.