Note to Wang Wei
How could you be so happy, now some thousand years
dishevelled, puffs of dust?
It leaves me uneasy at last,
your poems teaze me to the edge of tears
and your fate. It makes me think.
It makes me long for mountains & blue waters.
Makes me wonder how much to allow.
(I’m reconfirming, God of bolts & bangs,
of fugues & bucks, whose rocket burns & sings.)
I wish we could meet for a drink
in a ‘freedom from ten thousand matters’.
Be dust myself pretty soon; not now.
John Berryman (1914 – 1972)
Answering Vice-prefect Zhang
As the years go by, give me but peace,
Freedom from ten thousand matters.
I ask myself and always answer:
What can be better than coming home?
A wind from the pine-trees blows my sash,
And my lute is bright with the mountain moon.
You ask me about good and evil fortune?….
Hark, on the lake there’s a fisherman singing!
Wang Wei (d. 761)
The Fisherman
Qu Yuan, banished, wandered by the Tsanglang River. As he walked he recited poems. Haggard he looked and thin.
An old fisherman saw him, and asked: “Aren’t you the knight Ch’ü Yüan? What brought you to such a pass?”
“The crowd is dirty,” said Ch’ü Yüan, “I alone am clean. The crowd is drunk, I alone am sober. So I was banished.”
“A wise man shouldn’t be too particular,” said the fisherman, “but should adapt himself to the times. If people are dirty, why don’t you wallow with them in the mud? If people are drunk, why don’t you drink a lot too? Why should you think so hard and hold so aloof that you were banished?”
Qu Yuan said: “They say, after you wash your hair you should brush your hat; after a bath you should shake your dress. How can a man sully his clean body with the dirt outside? I would rather jump into the river, and bury myself in the belly of the fish, than suffer my cleanliness to be sullied by the filth of the world!”
The old man smiled and paddled away, singing:
“When the river water’s clear, I can wash my tassels here. Muddied, for such use unmeet, Here I still can wash my feet.” This said, the old man went away.
Qu Yuan, 4th Century
Sources
John Berryman: Selected Poems 1938 – 1968 (Faber & Faber, 1972)
https://poems.mahacinasthana.com/en/poems/chou-zhang-shao-fu/
http://en.chinaculture.org/focus/focus/2010duanwu/2010-06/13/content_382714.htm
Some ripples from an old song.
Incidentally, Qu Yuan’s drowning in the Milou river became the basis of the Dragon Boat Festival enjoyed by millions in East Asia to this day.
IM