1 of 3
Li Shangyin, First Month at Chongrang House
Locked up tight, barred gate on gate,
cased in green moss,
hallways deep within, tower remote,
here I pace back and forth.
I know beforehand the wind will rise,
a halo around the moon;
and still the dew is too cold,
the flowers have not yet bloomed.
A bat brushes the curtain sash,
I end up tossing and turning,
a mouse overturns the window screen,
somewhat startled, wondering.
I snuff the lamp and all alone
talk with the lingering scent,
still singing unaware
"Rise and Come by Night."
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Stephen Owen has written a monumental series of studies devoted to the poetry of China's Tang Dynasty (ad 618-907, with an interregnum between 690 and 705): The Poetry of the Early Tang; The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High Tang; The End of the Chinese "Middle Ages": Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture; and now The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860). In these books Owen surveys for English speakers a period widely regarded as the greatest in Chinese literature. In addition to several other freestanding books, worthy of note in their own right, Owen has another other major work, An Anthology of
Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911. In just under 2,000 amply annotated pages, he makes a kind of epic, in translation, of the entire Chinese poetic canon.
His books are not prose settings for Chinese poems in English that speak for themselves, the way Ezra Pound's "translation" of Rihaku's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," stands on it own. Instead, they are prose explorations of poetics, of the ways poetry is made, and read, in a
far-off time and place. A highly specialized inquiry? Yes, yet Owen's scholarship resonates nonetheless. When he talks about the difference between contemporary reputation and canonic stature, about the tendency of poetry to either tie itself too closely to the immediate or to cut itself off from extra-literary concerns, to aim high or pitch low, he could as easily be talking about present-day tensions between rhetoric and common sense, technique and truth, tradition and inspiration, art and earnest.
Until the sea change of the Tang, Chinese poetry was measured by and read in light of the Confucian Book of Songs. The "Great Preface," which every aspirant to Imperial service would have had by heart, states that "the sounds of an age of order are peaceful and happy—its government is in harmony." By contrast, "the sounds of a world in disorder are bitter and full of rancor—its government is perverse." Therefore, as a practical matter, "to understand how things have succeeded and how they have failed, to move Heaven and Earth, and to stir supernatural beings, there is nothing more appropriate than poetry."
The Late Tang closely considers the styles, genres, and literary schools that developed as the Great Age of Chinese Poetry ripened into the matured, self-conscious art of the middle 9th century. Five poets—Li He, Du Mu, Cao Tang, Li Shangyin, and Wen Tingyun—dominate Owen's account, with Li Shangyin receiving the dragon's share of ink. In poems and prose, these poets reflected upon their inherited tradition, and upon each other.
The Annals of the Grand Historian of China writes history two ways. In one, narratives recount the fates of nations and dynasties through the words and actions of individuals; imagine Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus combined. A Plutarchan second cycle consists of famous lives, sometimes of large figures in the narrative, sometimes of minor players in affairs, but important in other ways. Famous is not the same as good. Also, the Grand Historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, makes a chapter of his own unfortunate career.
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