Book review: Three Hundred Tang Poems (2009)

This hefty little book contains poetry, in a new English translation, that dates from the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 to 907), which was in power in the years during which Chinese calligraphy and Buddhism were first exported to Japan.

The poems were compiled originally in the 18th century in a different order than that in which they are presented here. This is an Everyman edition and scholarly content is absent, making it hard to understand the subject and relevance of each of the poems it contains. The introduction is very short and says nothing about the individual poets (around 75 of them) whose work is featured. Some people might have heard the names Li Bai and Du Fu. Their work is included in the collection.

Most of the poets whose work is included in the book are men; there are a few women but it seems that most of the poets were imperial retainers who were employed on official business because they could write. Being versed in the literature of the kingdom they found gainful employment and were often, it appears from reading the poems, sent to distant parts of the realm. I read more than half of the poems in the book before tiring of the exercise. The lack of academic glosses made reading the work more frustrating than it otherwise could have been.

To help describe these poems it serves to use the example of painting. Most people will have some acquaintance with Chinese brush painting, with its clean lines, realistic depictions of birds and fruit, and creative use of white space. This poetry resembles that kind of painting. Here, the negative space is provided by descriptions of nature. There are endless meditations on the natural world, such as the sight of the clouds reflected in the water or the sight of the wind blowing through grasses. Birds fly across the sky against the backdrop of rugged mountain peaks. It’s hardly remarkable that such things occupy so much of the poets’ energies; descriptions of nature are apolitical and it would be hard to get into trouble for admiring the sound of cicadas in summer.

What is less often examined in much detail are the poets’ own feelings. Although they might be mentioned briefly in a poem they are not articulated or explored to see where they lead the writer. Most of the writer's effort is spent describing the landscape. The person is thus rendered in terms of where he is absent: in the spaces between words like “tears” and “sighs” that crop up occasionally. These poems are mainly occasional meditations on life with reference to specific, concrete things in the here-and-now. There are a few fictions with complex narratives but they are the exception rather than the rule.

A recurring theme in the poetry in the book is the longevity of the country’s culture. Already, for Tang Chinese, people were aware that China had existed in a recognisable form, to which the Chinese people alive at the time might profitably compare themselves, for a very long time. Certain people’s names recur, such as those of famous generals or noblemen, just as the name of the capital city of the empire (Chang’an) crops up from time to time as a point of reference. There is a longing to be close to the centre more frequent than there is a longing to be close to a woman.

Women are referred to fleetingly, often in concert with references to the zither, an instrument that they evidently played in those days. The illustration on the book’s cover shows a contemporary painting of a woman dressed in ornate robes holding a stick in her hand that has a tassel attached to its end. She is using it to play with a small dog. There is mention of wine in the book but more often of ale, although it’s not clear what sort of crop it had been made from. Poets drinking beer and talking about the moon while listening to women play a stringed instrument: good times for a Tang author right there.

Like Chinese music, in tone the poetry in aggregate is plaintive, and sadness seems to be the emotion invoked most frequently but there is very little use of psychological development that I could see; the pieces are mainly too short and merely give a snapshot of reality at a given moment in time.

Other emotions might flare up on occasion but overall the feeling of the poems contained in this book is elegiac, like a sunset or the dying days of spring. Life itself is full of pathos of course, and as time passes so does precious youth. While a reliance by the poets included in the collection on the physical world for imagery seems unsentimental the emotion contained in each poem is strong. The most common point of reference is the living world surrounding the poet as he gets by in his rural backwater, where the sound of troops marching against the Tartars is audible and where he fondly imagines the moon shining on his wife’s arms in remembered moonlight.

Here is a sample of the kind of poetry this collection contains. It is by Li Qi and it is titled ‘Something told as of old’:

As boys they did service with the frontier troops,
Youthful adventurers from You and Yan,
They tested their prowess under horses’ hooves –
Then as now men careless of their lives.
Now when they’re killing, no one dares come forward:
Their beards stick out like bristling hedgehog spines. 

Below the ridge of sandy clouds there are white clouds flying;
Their ruler’s grace is not yet required – they cannot yet go home.
There’s a young woman from Liaodang, fifteen years of age,
Who knows the lute, and can sing and dance, and now is playing the tune
‘Going beyond the frontier pass’ on a Tibetan flute,
Making the soldiers in our legion shed their tears like rain.

This poem strongly reminds me of the movie ‘Youth’ (in Chinese ‘Fang hua’), by director Feng Xiaogang, which was released in 2017. I saw it this year on New Year’s Day and wrote about it on the blog at the time. It tells the story of a troupe of entertainers attached to the People’s Liberation Army in the days when it was active in the task of cementing the borders of China in the years around WWII and later.

The fortunes of the troupe members are examined by the director in the movie, and it also contains many patriotic messages that people in the theatre audience were receptive to. Love of country, it seems, is ageless, but the Communist Party of China initially did not allow the movie to be screened in the country because of some things in it that were critical of the party. It was finally released in China in the middle of December and despite that ended up being the 6th highest-grossing domestic film of the year. To my eyes, the movie was heavily sentimental and determinedly nationalistic, but having read these poems I can see that the feelings it retailed in have always been there in the culture that produced it.

Here is another poem from the collection. It is by the monk Jiaoran and is titled ‘Looking for Hong Jian, but without finding him’:

Although the place you’ve moved to is near the city walls
It’s reached by a country path through mulberry and flax.
By the fence nearby you’ve planted chrysanthemums –
Autumn is here, but they haven’t flowered yet.
I knock at the door, but the dog doesn’t bark,
So I go and ask in the home to the west of yours.
They tell me you have gone off to the mountains
And won’t be back as usual till the sun starts to set.

Once again the imagery is strikingly secular and is formed to have an impact in the reader’s imagination. The moment is captured in a few, choice images like a bird in a painting made in the same era might have been formed with a few brushstrokes. All at once, in a few lines, you are there in the moment knocking on doors and questioning the neighbours about the friend you have come to talk with. The journey the narrator takes assumes the significance of a quest and the feelings you are left with at the end, as the final words pass through the barriers that sit in front of your mind, are sadness and a longing for something unattainable.

As in the case of the poem by Li Qi included above it, the monk’s poem takes you very quickly from the particular to the general, so that you are suddenly faced with universal things that can have resonance for anyone. This I think is the essence of the beauty contain in this collection of poetry. The thing that is also evident about a book like this is that it can take you in your mind to a foreign country: the past. Doubly foreign in this case: ancient China. I wonder why people spend so much time reading science fiction when this kind of diversion is also available. Spend a few hours of your time getting to know about the feelings of a Tang bureaucrat as he experiences life on the borders of civilisation, wishing he were at home! These wonderful poems may transport you away from the concerns of contemporary life.

And having read this volume it is quite clear to me that there is an urgent need in the trade book market for a better-presented collection of the same poems, one that comes with detailed scholarly notes that can help the reader to position the poet whose poem is being read, and the referents used in the poem, in relation to historical events and in relation to the corpus of published work of the era. Being situated so far from the time when the poems were written, as we are, we can form conclusions and make associations that someone alive at the time would certainly have missed. I would definitely buy and recommend such a book.