Three Hundred Tang Poems — Hengtang Tuishi
The Jade Mountain THE JADE MOUNTAIN EDITED BY EUNICE TIETIENS POETRY OF THE ORIENT An Anthology (1928) TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR WALEY 170 CHINESE POEMS (1919) MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE (1919) BY WITTER BYNNER SELECTED POEMS (1936) The Jade Mountain A CHINESE ANTHOLOGY Being Three Hundred Poems of the T'ang Dynasty 618 ~ 906 Translated by WITTER BYNNER from the texts of KIANG KANG-HU NEW YORK · ALFRED A. KNOPF · MCMXLV CORYRIGHT 1920, 1021, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, AND 1929 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW TO BE PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER. First and Second Printings before Publication Published October, 1929 Third Printing January, 1930 Fourth Printing March, 1931 Fifth Printing January, 1939 Sixth Printing November, 1945 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WE JOIN IN DEDICATING OUR TRANSLATIONS TO ALBERT M. BENDER "Literature endures like the universal spirit, And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men." LI SHANG-YIN CONTENTS Much of Witter Bynner's time has been spent in travel and a great deal of that travel has taken him to China. There he laid the foundations for his magnificent collection of Chinese art and acquired the comprehension of Chinese poetry which has made him perhaps its foremost exponent in the Occidental world. This book is the result of a decade of intense labour during which Mr. Bynner, in collaboration with the distinguished scholar, Dr. Kiang Kang-Hu, revised and studied and polished these 311 poems until every shade of their meaning had been rendered into English verse of a quality comparable to the original. This book was set in a face called Granjon, electrotyped, printed and bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass. Poetry and culture Introduction I POETRY AND CULTURE by Witter Bynner Like most of us who have been schooled in this western world, I was afforded in my youth a study of culture flowing mainly from two sources, the Greek and the Hebrew. I had come to feel that poetic literature must contain streams from one or the other of these two sources: on the one hand the clean, objective, symmetrical, athletic beauty of the Greek; on the other hand the turgid, subjective, distorted, elaborated beauty of the Hebrew. Like my fellow students, I had been offered nothing of the literatures of the Far East. I am still doubtful that I could ever feel any real adherence to the ornate and entranced literature of India; but I have come by accident into as close touch with Chinese poetry as a westerner is able to come without a knowledge of the Chinese tongue. And I feel with conviction that in the matter of poetry I have begun to receive a new, finer, and deeper education than ever came to me from the Hebrew or the Greek. Centuries ago cultivated Chinese had reached the intellectual saturation which has tired the mind of the modern European. The Chinese gentleman knew the ancient folk-songs, compiled by Confucius. He knew also, all around him, a profoundly rich civilization, a more poised and particularized sophistication than we westerners have yet attained. Through the Asian centuries everyone has written verse. In fact, from early imperial days down to these even worse disordered days of the Republic, the sense of poetry as a natural and solacing part of life has lasted among the Chinese people. Whether or not the individual may form or enjoy his poetry in metrical shape, he is constantly aware of the kinship between the beauty of the world and the beauty of imaginative phrase. On any Chinese mountain-climb toward a temple, rock after rock with its terse and suggestive inscription will bear witness to this temper. So will the street cries of the peddlers, or the names of the tea-houses, and on many hill-tops and lake-sides the casual but reverent jottings of this or that anonymous appreciator of natural beauty. When Whitman said: "To have great poets there must be great audiences too," he must have had in the back of his mind enriched generations like the Elizabethan in England or like almost any generation in China. In those great audiences each man, to the limit of his capacity and with natural ease, was a poet. There is a simple secret in these generations. It is told in a pamphlet by a venerable Chinese scholar who, until his death two years ago, was still with infinite passion adhering to the precepts of his ancestors, and with infinite patience, acceptably expressed by the way among foreigners, adhering to his conviction that foreigners impair the health of China. His name is Ku Hungming. His pamphlet, written in English, one of the five languages which he could use, is called The Spirit of the Chinese People. In it he advances, as reason for the eternal youth of the Chinese people, the fact that the average Chinese has managed to maintain within himself the head of a man and the heart of a child. On this brief he is absorbingly interesting, explaining the continuance of Chinese culture, the only ancient culture still racially existent. My immediate concern with his brief is more special. I detect in it something that he does not specify: a reason for the continuance of poetry as a live factor among his people and, more than that, the best reason I know of for the persistence of poetry anywhere among cultured races. Music may be the most intimate of the arts, I am not sure. Except for simple melodies, music is beyond the reach of any individual who is not a technician. Painting and sculpture are obviously arts expressing themselves in single given objects, which, although they may be copied and so circulated, are for the most part accessible only to the privileged or to those who make pilgrimages. Poetry more than any other of the arts may be carried about by a man either in his own remembering heart or else in compact and easily availa