An introductory yet trenchant exploration of select Chinese classic texts that cover the domains of classical literature, history, philosophy, and fine arts.
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來自 The Chinese University of Hong Kong 的課程
Classics of Chinese Humanities: Guided Readings
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與講師見面
Prof. Ou Fan Leo Lee 李歐梵Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture
Faculty of Arts
Let's begin with the first sample of these three Radcliffe poems.
This one is called To the Charms of [FOREIGN].
Actually, [FOREIGN], in Chinese, is the tune pattern of a specific sound form.
In other words, this poem is the lyric to a song.
It should be sung out, but
of course we have lost track of that song, nobody knows how to sing it.
But luckily we still have the lyric by [FOREIGN].
The subtitle of this poem is called Thinking About a Past added Ratcliffe.
So literally it is really a historical poem, so to speak.
A reflective poem about that historical incident.
Some of you may not know that historical incident, but
basically this is the crucial battle that turned
the balance in the episode of the Three Kingdoms.
The strongest kingdom, the Wei kingdom, has a fleet
of hundreds of thousands, that invaded the south.
So the two weaker kingdoms, Shu and Wu,
joined their armies in a defense.
So the general in charge of the United Army
was this young soldier who is a very dashing figure.
So in a way,
we can say that this poem is dedicated to this historical figure [FOREIGN],
which was played by a very famous star, in fact, in the movie version.
Now, what's so special about this poem?
It really has a kind of heroic cadence.
It evolves the heroic path, all that glorious age,
so that I would suspect that if you really know how to sing it,
you should sing it in major not minor keys.
Let me read a few lines from Stillworth Sargent's translation,
which I think is a very good translation.
This is in describing the waves on the rocks.
Riotous stones pierce the sky, harrowing surf slaps the shore,
swirling up a thousand mounds of snow.
Of course, the striking part of this whole series is the thousand mounds of snow.
Referring to the waves of course.
In the second part of the poem, it becomes somewhat historical.
The poet thinks back, or imagines,
what the young [FOREIGN] was like, of that battle scene,
and a whole of how these heroes are no longer with him.
All the glories are gone, leaving a sense of emptiness which
makes him think that life is but a dream and he is dreaming.
So the last line says, with one goblet I pour offering to the River moon.
In classical Chinese poetry there are a lot of references to wine and drinking.
[FOREIGN] in particular loved to drink.
That's why I'm bringing a cup of wine myself,
and have a sip after I have done this before I go into some other poems.
[SOUND] Now, probably the most famous pairs of poem of
Radcliffe are what are now referred to as the former and
latter Radcliffe's, or let's just put it,
Radcliffe one and Radcliffe two.
[FOREIGN] saw it as a pair.
You begin with the first one, but
you must read the second one in order to make them symmetrical.
Now why is two poems so important?
For one thing, [FOREIGN] himself loves it.
In fact, as a calligrapher, he wrote out the Radcliffe one.
And that calligraphy, that sample of calligraphy, has been passed to posterity.
We still have a copy of it.
You can see that there was all the seals with all this kind of black ink.
You can sense kind of a heroic streak in [FOREIGN] calligraphy.
Some would argue that his strokes are rather fat, not thin.
They are certainly heroic not feminine.
In other words, he reminds, as a calligrapher, he reminds us of
someone who is very content, who is full of energy,
who manage to convey his thought in a very carefree fashion, etc, etc.
But not a kind of a subtle feminine tuberculosis stricken point.
So, now what do these two poems say?
This, of course, is a subject of countless scholarly articles and books.
Everybody has his own version to it.
So I have to draw on some of the scholar's works and
add a few, perhaps, points of my own.
In my view I think the first Radcliffe poem sets up a lyrical scene,
especially in the first part.
The lyrical scene is typically a moonlit night.
It is autumn.
[FOREIGN] and his friend are drifting on the boat on the Yangtze River and
then, probably, they are drinking wine.
The scene is so beautiful that his friend starts to play a flute and
begins to sing a quotation from the book of songs.
So [FOREIGN] or [FOREIGN], which then begets another scene,
let's just say a kind of a philosophical dialogue.
His friend touched by the beauty of the scenery,
of course like the previous poem, thinks back on historical heroes.
He voices the similar sentiment.
Where are they now?
They are all gone.
So this seems of the limit of time of history, that time and
history would never repeat itself again, brings to mind a certain
sense of finality, of mortality of the human being.
So you might consider this to be a kind of lyrical Confucianist point of view.
Let's just say that we have such a short span of time, so
we better do something with your life.
Yet the other side of the same argument is that, why do we involve our self in
this hustle and bustle of official life, of corruption, of political chicanery.
We should be one with nature, and
enjoy our life in communing with nature to the full.
Precisely because we have such a short life.
So this inner dialectic provides the motif,
if you like, to the overall poem.
But it's not over.
If this is the case, then the point will become merely a refrain of
the previous one, the more heroic one we have just talked about.
But the first question by the guest, or
the first reflection by the guest is answered by Su Dungpo's own reflection.
In other words, we have a dialogue between two friends representing two
different philosophies, or two different outlooks on life.
So it is really the second part which is the last part of the poem, namely,
the answer, the response, that really is the crux of the whole poem.
You may recall that when we talk about Han Yu,
the Confucian prose writer, he also likes to use the dialogue form.
Two friends, or between a master and a student, people are talking.
Even the Grand Historian used to use the dialogue form.
But this dialogue is a metaphorical dialogue.
In other words, in reality it may or may not have taken place.
So how does Su Dongpo's answering,
a responsive answer, sums up his philosophy?
This is the crux of the matter.
Basically what he says is that yes,
our life is limited, and yet something else is long lasting.
And that something else is nature, the universe,
the kind of beauty that now we witness, we feel at this particular moment.
So in a way the more intense the brevity of the moment, or
the ephemerality of the moment, the more intuitive you can sense or
intuitively you can feel the eternity of nature, change and end change.
Out of this seeming dialogue, or
inner dialectics, Chinese art or the Chinese philosophy of art is born.
That is precisely the contradiction between the momentary impulse and
the sense of longing for eternity.
So unfortunately the two English translations are very
adequate but not really, in my judgment, perfect.
Since in this poem, again, Su Dongpo uses poetic cadence,
so the fu, this poem is written in the fu form.
Fu can be loosely translated as poetic prose.
Certainly not essay.
In other words, he's not writing a philosophical essay.
He's writing a descriptive piece of prose using poetry.
Of course, the more I talk about it, those readers will probably think about really
having in mind the famous 19th-century French modern poet Baudelaire.
Baudelaire, of course,
is the inventor of the French prose poetry in his famous Flowers of Evil.
So 1,000 years before Baudelaire, Su Dongpo was toying
with the same format, but of course, in classical Chinese.
Now how can you capture that poetic cadence,
which comes together with poetic imagery?
This is the challenge for all readers, especially bilingual readers.
So let me try my hand at a rather idiomatic translation.
I can only capture the cadence in the number of English characters.
So here it begins.
Lamenting the brevity of our lives,
envying the infinitude of the Yangtze River.
Roaming the skies with the immortals, and bracing the moon till the end of time.
We know this cannot be done, and cast echoes to the sad wind.
So it is a rather forced translation, but
hopefully it captures the kind of flow and rhythm of the original.
And the whole poem is full of that.
Variations, of course.
Four characters, six characters, and finally comes, when he comes to
the final few lines, seven or eight or nine characters.
So that's how a Chinese prose poem is composed.
Now this kind of artistic device is made to serve,
to buttress Su Dongpo's ultimate poetic vision,
which is a kind of a poetic philosophy.
Elsewhere I have talked about this and
I try to draw some inspiration from the famous Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou.
Suffice to say here that Zhuang Zhou, as a Taoist philosopher,
perhaps one of the most famous, argues that nature and human beings are one.
That all animals, all creatures,
all aspects of nature, as well as human beings,
are all ephemeral members of this same universe.
So that is in contrast to the Confucian point of view which is
centered on the human life, on the human being.
So as a Confucianist or trained in Confucianism,
Su Dungpo wants to break away by linking this
Confucian self with the enormity of nature.
And he singles out some of this aspect of nature, both in action and
in scenery, to accentuate that sense of unity.
Hence in his rebuttal, he really follows this kind of sense of unity
by arguing that if you're talking about the brevity of human life,
I can talk about the eternity of nature.
So depending on which point of view you want to take,
you want to take a historical point of view, that of change.
Then, of course, all human lives are just sparks in a ephemeral stream.
But if you wanted to take the view of constancy, or of infinitude,
then, of course, we are as long lasting as the moon and the river and the mountain.
This is basically what he says.
So at the end of the poem, he basically comes back to his own philosophy and
says that there are two things you can take without limit.
Namely, the breeze on a river and moonlight on the mountain.
These are mine and yours, as sounds to my ears and as colors to my eyes.
Take them as free, use them without limit.
This is the great bounty provided by the creator to be enjoyed by you and
me or together.
So once you've finished this poem, you feel a sense of comfort,
as if all the philosophical quests are brushed
aside by the sense of unity with nature.
But if that's the ending of this whole poem Then we will say
that sooner will succeed only in voice and in philosophy.
He then wrote a second reference and
that reference takes place in a wintry scenery.
The first one is Autumnal Scene With Bright Moonlight.
The second is in A Wintery Scene.
And then it begins, typically also was a evocation of scenery.
Once again, SunDu Puo and
two of his friends go to the river and enjoy the scenery.
And one of the friends happened to have captured a big fish.
So they all say though, "Where are the drinks?
Let's have some wine.
SunDu Puo say, all right let's go home and ask my wife.
And of course, the dutiful, understanding wife typically says,
I just happen to have a jug of wine that I've been hiding for quite some time.
So it's a perfect location.
So the free men go out to the river, to the boat, and start drinking.
Thereby unleashing another sense of lyricism.
This time is interesting that it is no longer philosophical,
it is more mysterious that is to say that SunDu Puo,
all of a sudden, when his two friends are drinking and singing,
almost goes by himself on to the cracks, up the hill,
into a kind of a woody area where he tries to literally be one with nature.
And there of course he hears really strange sounds
and he suddenly becomes scared.
The sins of solitude captures him.
So he doesn't want to stay there alone so he comes back and
rejoins his friends and continues drinking.
But just as he descends the hill he sees a lone crane flying over the horizon.
And he captures it in his imagination or in his memory, and
that night he goes home and has a dream and
then of course in the dream A Taoist priest comes to him.
Did you enjoy the evening?
And he suddenly realized that of course, the crane.
He is the Taoist immortal personified.
Or turned in to a crane.
Of course all our Chinese readers know that the crane is a symbol of Taoism.
If you [INAUDIBLE] the symbols of Taoism.
But the lone crane, not two cranes, that you might have mistakenly took them to be.
The lone crane also represents something of another facet of solitude.
Let's just say that when SunDu Puo himself goes to
the mountain when as a single person he captures that kind of
tumbling serenity of mother nature.
He is alone,
it is out of that sense of aloneness that he does not want to linger.
So this makes a very interesting comparison with
some of the other poems written by earlier poets, for instance.
Most of the other poems by other poets always refer to
the connection between the self and the other friends.
So that the self is never truly alone.
Same as SunDu Puo except in my argument in this particular poem.
For that magic moment he hears and fears and feels and fears mother nature.
It is a very mysterious kind of feeling.
In Chinese it's called a kind of trembling fear, but it's really more than that.
It is not that there are ghosts and all that.
So this reminds me of a very special kind
of poetic feature in 18th or 19th century German Romanticism.
When a young child of a poet, was in the woods,
the same kind of a mysterious feeling would pervade his heart.
Now, that mystery, in German Romanticism, can be linked up with religion.
Was god, was the Christian God, but in Su's case, it is linked,
in my judgment, only with what I will call transcendence.
That is to say that at that magic moment, the poet wants to become and be immortal.
He wants to transcend the mundane world in order to become truly one and
yet he cannot attain it.
The one person who really attains it is that lone crane that flies by.
And that, of course, is a dreaming figure.
It's not real.
So this, herein lies the charm and
contradiction of SuoDu Puo poetry, in my view.
So the two poems together capture two sides of SunDu Puo persona.
There's this worldly side, and the other worldly side.
But then, when you combine them together,
actually, they do not really constitute a whole.
What they give you is a sense of artistic expression.
In other words, we're not talking about a philosophy of a Schopenhauer or
a philosophy of Nietzsche and others, or even a religious kind of a revelation.
No, we're talking about art.
So my final argument is that when you talk about Chinese lyricism
as a tradition the crucial point of the tradition is precisely that
in place of religion, art or lyricism is the only way to capture
that sense of solitude, that contradiction between brevity and infinitude.
And how do you do this?
How do you theorize that lyricism
as the central most important tradition of Chinese art literature?
That takes a little time and effort.
I will try, but before I do that, in the spirit of SunDu Puo,
I would like to invite my friend to have a drink.
So let's have some wine and maybe if not fish, a little beef.
So kind of an intermission and
then we'll move on to my
last part of the lecture.
[FOREIGN]
