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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
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p. 162, SORROW OF DEPARTURE: Earlier version by KR in 100: “To the Tune, ‘Plum Blossoms Fall and Scatter.’” p. 163, FADING PLUM BLOSSOMS: Referring to another poem of hers, Li Ch’ing-chao wrote: “Poets in the past always complained that to write about plum blossoms was very difficult, for you can hardly avoid vulgarism. Now that I have tried it, I totally agree with them.” p. 164, AUTUMN LOVE: Earlier version by KR in Love: “A Weary Song to a Slow Sad Tune.” p. 167, ON SPRING: Earlier version by KR in 100: “Mist.” p. 168, A SONG OF DEPARTURE: Earlier versions by KR in 100 (“Alone in the Night”) and Orchid (“The Sorrow of Departure”). p. 169, SPRING ENDS: Earlier versions by KR in Love (“To the Tune ‘Spring at Wu Ling’”) and Orchid (“Spring Ends”). LU YU (1125–1210) KR (Love): “Lu Yu is the least classical of the major Sung poets. Although a member of the scholar gentry, he never attained, or desired, high office, and seems to have been genuinely far from rich, especially toward the end of his life. (Understand that throughout China’s history a really ‘poor farmer’ never got a chance to read or write anything.) His poetry is loose, casual. It had to be–he wrote about eleven thousand poems. His poems have that easy directness that is supposed to come only with rare, concentrated effort. By his day Sung China had retreated to the South and the Golden Tatars in the North were already being threatened by the Mongols who were soon to overwhelm all. Lu Yu’s patriotism was not prepared to accept the modus vivendi less doctrinaire minds had worked out, and his stirring agitational poems against the invader have been very popular in twentieth-century China where everybody has been an invader to everybody else.” Lu Yu: “We make our poems out of pure sadness, for without sadness how would we have any poems?” Tai Fu-ku (1167–?) on Lu Yu: “Using what is plain and simple he fashioned subtle lines; / Taking the most ordinary words, he changed them into wonders.” (trans. Burton Watson) p. 176, THE WILD FLOWER MAN: “There is a veiled ironic reference to a Sung Buddhist saint who was reputed to live only on honey.” (KR, 100) YANG WAN-LI (1127–1206) An important official who fell in and out of favor; a devout Buddhist who developed a Ch’an theory of poetic careers: in the disciple stage, one imitates the masters; then one achieves a poetic “enlightenment” and effortlessly writes one’s own poetry. His poem on a fly is thought to be the first in Chinese. DH (Mountain): “Yang Wan-li was the last of the great Sung poets, and with him China’s rivers-and-mountains poetry had opened up virtually all of its possibilities. China’s poets would continue to actively cultivate this rich terrain up to the present, but there would be few really fundamental innovations.” NOTES 239

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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

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