Three Poems

For different reasons — or are they so different? — three medieval Chinese poems have been on my mind.

(All translations, such as they are, are mine.)​

A couple of months ago, reflecting on the present predicament of the United States, my father sent me this poem that I had learned in school, written in the tenth century by a deposed king now living under house arrest by the man who conquered his country:

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春花秋月何時了
往事知多少
小樓昨夜又東風
故國不堪回首月明中
雕欄玉砌應猶在
只是朱顏改
問君能有幾多愁
恰似一江春水向東流

When will I be rid of these spring flowers and this autumn moon
How many memories return
An east wind rose again last night over my building
I can’t bear to look back on my former country, reflected in the bright moon
The finely carved balustrades should still be there
But the blushing cheeks are no more
You ask me how much melancholy I can feel
It’s like all the water in the river flowing eastward

Secondly, this old favorite has been coming to mind as I wander the world:

少年聽雨歌樓上
紅燭昏羅帳
壯年聽雨客舟中
江闊雲低斷雁叫西風
而今聽雨僧廬下
鬢已星星也
悲歡離合總無情
一任階前點滴到天明

In youth I listened to raindrops in a night club
Amidst red candles and silk draperies
In maturity I listened to raindrops on a passenger boat
The river was broad, the clouds low, and a lone goose cried to the west wind
Now I listen to raindrops from a monastery
My temples have turned gray
Life in its vicissitudes cares not how we feel
It comes like the incessant raindrops falling at my steps until dawn

It’s like a medieval Chinese version of that riddle that the Sphinx posed to Oedipus: What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? A human being, of course. Or Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man.”

And I suppose it’s been on my mind because I can’t quite believe that I am at the stage of listening to raindrops in the boat.

And finally, the other day Bill Bishop, a respected American China-watcher, put up several photos of calligraphic scrolls on Twitter and asked whether anyone could decipher them for him. One I immediately knew, because every school child in China or Taiwan memorizes at an early age this text from 756 A.D.:

月落烏啼霜滿天
江楓漁火對愁眠
姑蘇城外寒山寺
夜半鐘聲到客船

The moon falls, the crows cry, and the sky is frosty
The maple trees by the river and the fishermen’s lights face insomniac me
From Cold Mountain Temple outside Gusu city
The ringing of the midnight bells reaches my passenger boat and me

Bishop’s Twitter challenge reminded me of the longstanding paradox of my inherited learning. On the one hand, why is he the China expert if he can’t even read this scroll? For the longest time, Western institutions have preferred to hire the white man who studies China instead of those with native learning. On the other hand, knowledge — as Confucius taught — consists in knowing what it is that one doesn’t know. A man like Bishop indisputably knows the ins and outs of the workings of today’s Beijing government more than I do.

And as I set down these three poems side by side, it occurred to me that all three of them use the imagery of a river, the eternal flow of which symbolizes the passage of time. And two of these poems also find the poets in a boat, traveling. In the end, that is probably the real reason that these three have been on my mind.