ing with ease a thousand li in a single day. And when they encounter hills and boulders, bends and turns, they take form from the things about them, though I do not know how they do it. All I know is that they always go where they should go, and stop where they should stop, that is all. Beyond that, even I do not understand.” (trans. Burton Watson)
p. 151, THE RED CLIFF: Also translated by DH as “Thinking of Ancient Times at Red Cliffs” in Mountain. p. 152, AT GOLD HILL MONASTERY: “The Scots call this flicker of herring ‘keething.’ The scene is the mouth of the Yangtze.” (KR, 100) p. 155, THE TERRACE IN THE SNOW: “I know of few poems which handle so successfully so many dramatic changes of mood.” (KR, 100) p. 158, THOUGHTS IN EXILE: “The dreamy cities and hill-fringed lakes of Wu, portrayed in countless paintings and sung in innumerable poems, were the very heart of Sung civilization, especially after the loss of North China. Nothing has ever been like it in the West, except possibly Tiepolo’s Venice, or somnambulist Paris from the Commune to August 1914.” (KR, 100)
CHU SHU-CHEN (11th c.) KR (Orchid): “Although she has often been ranked as second only to Li Ch’ing-chao, almost nothing is known with certainty of her life, and all the details of her traditional biography, which seems to have been developed largely from her poems, have been questioned.”
KR (Love): “[Chu and Li] are sisters of Christine de Pisan, Gaspara Stampa, and Louise Labé. There has been no writer like them in English, although a similar sensibility is found, in religious form, in Christina Rossetti.”
LI CH’ING-CHAO (c. 1084–c. 1151) KR (Orchid): “She is universally considered to be China’s greatest woman poet. She and her husband Chao Ming-ch’eng came from well-known families of scholars and officials. Li’s mother had some reputation as a poet, and her father was a friend of Su Tungp’o’s. Li and Chao were an ideal literary couple. They had poetry contests with each other and with their literary friends. They were not only poets but scholars and collectors and spent most of their money to build up a vast collection of seals, bronzes, manuscripts, calligraphy and paintings, and compiled the best critical study and anthology of seals and bronze characters ever written. When in 1127 the army of Chin Tatars invaded Sung China, they were driven from their home and lost most of their collection. In 1129 when Li was forty-six, her husband went alone to a new official post and was taken ill on the way. Li hastened to him, but he died at an inn shortly after she reached him. After her husband’s death she lived alone, usually in flight, striving to save what was left of their collection while the Chin were driving the Sung out of North China. Her work is not to be confused with the formularized, deserted-courtesan and abandoned-wife poems so common in Chinese poetry, and usually written by men–for instance, Li Po’s ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.’ Her poems are truly personal utterances, and they fall into three groups: the period of happily married life; that of desolation at the death of her husband; and that of increasing loneliness as she grew old.”
NOTES 238
