I was going to illustrate the piece below with an unrelated painting, but captioning the painting meant translating the title, which meant choosing an interpretation of the poem it alludes to, which meant adding my own unsatisfying translation to a growing pile of unsatisfying translations. You know how these things go.
The title comes from a poem by Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773 - 819). I don’t think I’ve seen a translation I liked yet, and this is not about to be the first, but as quickly as I can:

Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 - “River Snow” 江雪

    千山鳥飛絕     萬徑人蹤滅
    孤舟簑笠翁     獨釣寒江雪

    a thousand hills     and not one bird in flight
    a million trails and     not so much as a footprint
    lone boat,     rush cloak, reed hat:     an old man
    fishes alone     in the freezing river     for snow

This is a B- first draft and I’m about to poke a bunch of holes in it before setting it on the shelf to mature. For second through dozenth opinions, see Victor Mair’s Language Log post, which reproduces an older short essay by Lucas Klein about readings and renderings of the poem. (The comments are also good — I recommend Diana Shuheng Zhang’s in particular.) I’m less crazy about this draft now than I was at the beginning of this paragraph, and not at all sure about that spacing, and the first two lines are wrong or at least missing the point. Let’s reread:

1:
千山 a bunch of hills
鳥飛 bird(s) fly/flight
絕 is ceased

2:
萬徑 a bigger(?) bunch of human-made paths
人蹤 human tracks
滅 are eliminated

My first draft falls into the same thing as a lot of the other translations: I mistook 絕 and 滅 as just a dramatic way of saying “there aren’t any birds, and footprints are another thing there aren’t any of.” But there are a couple things going on here, I think. One is the sound dimension: 絕 and 滅 were checked-tone 入聲 words, meaning that for Liu Zongyuan they ended abruptly in stop consonants (dzjwet, mjiet).1 The words also have a sense of being brought up short: 絕 can be “to cut off” or “to be cut off,” but the passive construction in English implies the existence of an agent that the Chinese stative verb doesn’t. Same problem for “is obliterated.”
If I come back for a second draft, I think the thing to focus on will be the sense of things normally present — birds in flight in the natural world, footprints on the paths in the human-made world — being completely absent, which I take to be the operative sense of 絕 and 滅 here. If you can avoid assuming an agent: Amid hills, the flight of birds is ceased; on multiple trails, signs of people passing that way are erased.

3:
孤舟 solitary boat,
簑 straw rain-cloak,
笠 straw/bamboo hat
翁 old man

4:
獨釣 alone fishing(-for?)
寒 chill(,?)
江 river(,?)
雪 snow

I think the main question in the third line is whether to read three and four as verbal montages (flashing from the lone boat to the straw cloak to the bamboo hat to the old man) or as single images: in a solitary boat, an old man in a straw rain-cloak and bamboo hat. Because of the requirement for parallelism, your preferred reading for line three will influence (though not necessarily determine) your reading of line four, which is the interesting one.

Most translations go with the majority reading, “fishing alone on the cold river amid the snow.” This is definitely not wrong! That image and that line are absolutely in the Chinese. But I think “fishing for snow” is in there too, and that ending on an image of futility, rather than just cold, fits better with the first two lines as I understand them, and with the context Liu Zongyuan wrote them in, which was exile.2 So reread again, start to finish, unrolling the poem like a painting of a landscape. With rhyming lines marked:

Hills — birds flying? ceased. (dzjwet)
Paths — human footprints? obliterated. (mjiet)
Lone boat — rush cloak, reed hat — old man.
Solo angling — freezing river — snow. (sjwet)

The first two lines present an image, then immediately identify something missing, at smaller and smaller scales. I think the last line does the same thing, with 釣 “angling (for)” baiting the hook: we’ve made it all the way down to the bottom of our landscape scroll with this poor old insufficiently weatherproofed guy in the freezing river with his fishing rod — and there’s nothing to be caught but the abrupt stop-consonant of sjwet, “snow.”

Like deciding whether 山 is “mountain” or “hill,” this is an English problem, not a Chinese one: “fishing amid” and “fishing for” are both latent in the original, and it’s only our own barbarous language that has to choose. I may end up choosing differently if I come back for a second draft in the new year — I was reading under the influence of having recently been outside shoveling snow — but I went down this rabbit hole because I was just trying to justify the translation of the title of an illustration for the thing I’m about to finally get to, which has nothing to do with the painting except insofar as both have snow in them. You see what it’s like, doing this stuff.

Now for the fun part!

Before I fell down the rabbit hole of that caption, I was looking for a painting to illustrate “Watching the Snow at the Heart-of-the-Lake Pavilion” 湖心亭看雪, a vignette from Dream-Memories 陶庵夢憶 by Zhang Dai 張岱 (1597-1684), whom I’ve mentioned before.

Zhang was born into a well-connected gentry family from Zhejiang in 1597, at the tail end of the Wanli emperor’s reign. He spent his first four and a half decades (and his family’s money) as a serial enthusiast and connoisseur of most things that could be appreciated, not excluding the pleasure quarters around the West Lake 西湖 in Hangzhou 杭州, where this vignette is set. Dream-Memories is Zhang’s reminiscences of those times, recalled and reconsidered from abject poverty on the far side of the Ming collapse.
Zhang famously disdained anyone without a fixation or two — 人無癖不可與交，以其無深情也 — on the grounds that such people were incapable of deep feeling. Whatever the boatman at the end of this story might’ve been thinking, “mad,” in the sense of “being mad for something,” was a compliment as far as Zhang was concerned.

Watching the Snow at the Heart-of-the-Lake Pavilion

When I was staying by the West Lake at the end of the Chongzhen Emperor’s fifth year (1633) there were three days of heavy snowfall, and the usual sounds of humans and birds on the lake were replaced with silence. One evening I took a small boat out to Heart-of-the-Lake Pavilion, wrapped tightly in furs and huddling over a charcoal brazier, to watch the snow just as night was falling. Sky, clouds, hills and water were all an unbroken white in the fog and frost, and the only reflections in the lake were a slash of causeway, a dot of pavilion, a mustard seed of a boat and the two or three specks of ourselves aboard it.

We arrived at the pavilion and found two people sitting on a felt blanket, with a serving-boy warming wine in water that had just come to a boil. They were pleasantly surprised to see me – “Who’d have thought there’d be someone else out here!” – and dragged me over to drink with them. I forced down three mugfuls at their insistence and excused myself, though not before asking their names. Visitors from the southern capital.

“The gentleman may be mad,” the boatman muttered as I got back into the boat. “But it looks like he isn’t the only one.”

Happy Mid-Autumn! May there be as many or as few yolks as you prefer in your mooncakes, and may none of them have 五仁 filling.

On the fifteenth day of the eighth month they came to Tiger Hill: locals and visitors; scholar-officials with families in tow; chanteuses and accompanists; courtesans, actresses, and other belles of the demimonde; commoner wives and respectable daughters; hustlers and prettyboys; rakehells and wastrels; idlers and spongers; serving boys and confidence men, all packed together like scales on a fish. They laid out mats anywhere they could find a place to sit: on the stone ledge where Daosheng preached the Dharma so movingly that even the pebbles nodded, or on Thousand-Man Rock beneath it; between Crane Brook and Sword Pond; in front of the shrine to Grand Secretary Shen and even all the way to the Swordcleft Stone and past the first and second temple gates. From above, the crowds looked like geese flocking on a sandbar, or sunset clouds gathering over a river. The sky darkened, the moon rose, and from a hundred different spots rose a clamor of pipes and percussion, clashing cymbal ensembles and a thundering Yuyang drumbeat that shook earth and sky and drowned out even the loudest shouts.

With the first night watch this gave way to strings, flutes, and singers performing ensemble pieces like “Unfurl the Brocade Sails” and “Across the Limpid Lake.” Amid the confusion of cymbals and citterns and pipes and voices it was impossible to pick out a rhythm or tell one piece from another. As the night wore on, the crowds began gradually to disperse. The scholar-officials took to their pleasure-boats with their families, and the people who remained set about trying to out-sing one another, showing off in a farrago of Southern and Northern styles to the accompaniment by turns of woodwinds and strings. By now, it had become possible to make out the words, and the connoisseurs in attendance offered their appraisals of each line as it was sung.

By the second watch the crowds had quieted and all the instruments fallen silent save for one wisp of flute, clear and plaintive, that wound around the voices of the three or four remaining singers.

By the third watch, the moon hung alone in the sky, a chill had come into the air, and everyone was perfectly silent, even the mosquitoes. A lone figure strode out onto a rock high above, sat down, and sang, unaccompanied by flute or clapper, in a voice as fine as silk thread that rose and fell but never wavered, powerful enough to split stones and pierce clouds, every word as clear as a carving. The listeners sat transfixed, listening raptly to every subtle modulation of his voice. Nobody dared clap along. The hundred-odd people who sat there like stranded geese could only nod their heads in mute approval. Where but Suzhou could you find such connoisseurs!

布衣中，問英雄：
王圖霸業成何用？
禾黍高低六代宮，
楸梧遠近千官塚：
一場惡夢。

Standing in humble homespun robes, 
I question history’s men of great esteem: 
What use were all your kingly plans; 
How long endured the tyrant’s scheme? 
Palaces from the Six Dynasties 
Now fertilize the farmer’s grain, 
And scraggly catalpa trees 
Mark loyal ministers’ remains: 
All history is one bad dream.

After a mile or so, the ghost said: "Walking is too slow. How about we take turns carrying each other?"

"Very good," Dingbo said. 

So the ghost picked up Dingbo and carried him on his shoulders for another mile or so. "You're awfully heavy," said the ghost. "Are you sure you're a ghost?"

"I'm new at this," Dingbo said. "That must be why I'm so heavy." 

When Dingbo's turn came, he found that the ghost weighed almost nothing. They took a few turns carrying each other. 

“I'm new at being a ghost," Dingbo said again. "I forget -- is there anything we're afraid of?" 

"Only the spittle of the living," the ghost said. And on they went. 

They came to a stream, and Dingbo told the ghost to cross first. It made no sound at all as it crossed, though he strained to listen, while his own crossing involved much splishing and splashing. 

"Why all the noise?" the ghost asked. 

"I only just died," Dingbo said. "I'm not used to crossing water, that's all. Don't give me a hard time about it."

As they were reaching the market in Yuan, Dingbo tossed the ghost up onto his shoulders and held onto it as hard as he could. The ghost squealed and sputtered and begged to be let down, but Dingbo ignored its cries. He didn't set it down until they reached the middle of the market. 

As soon as it touched the ground, the ghost turned itself into a sheep, and just as quickly Dingbo spat on it before it could change again. He sold the sheep for a string and a half of cash and went on his way. 

—from Investigations into the Spirit Realm (Soushen ji), j. 16, compiled by Gan Bao (d. 336 CE)

There are in this world three sorts of people who fear the heat, and three who do not.

First is the farmer out in the countryside, who spends his days tilling furrows or pacing ridges, pushing the plough or dragging the harrow; who twice a year must gather up whatever grain remains in the storehouse to pay the taxes; who during the cruel rainless days of high summer can only look out over his unwatered fields as his mind boils over with anxiety.

Second is the traveling merchant, who spends long years far from home peddling safflower and gromwell, beeswax and herbal teas; whose bindle weighs heavy on his shoulder and whose barrow sinks into the road as he pushes; whose journey takes him from hunger to hunger and thirst to thirst, sweat streaming down his face and soaking his clothes as he searches in vain for a single square inch of shade.

Third is the soldier stationed at the frontier, heavy helmet on his head and iron armor on his body, who when thirsty must lick the blood from his sword; who must take such rest as he can on the pommel of his saddle; whose campaigns keep him long years away from home; whose clothes crawl with lice; whose wounds fester; on whose body there remains no patch of unbroken skin.

These three sorts of people fear the heat. And what are the three who do not?

There are those who dwell within the inner precincts of the imperial palace, where amid waterside gazebos and breezy pavilions, meandering streams flow into pools and babbling springs feed ponds; where jade ornaments, large and small, set off intricately carved pieces of rhinoceros ivory; where jasper balustrades overlook plantings of the rarest flowers and crystal basins overflow with agates and corals; where on quartz-inlaid writing desks are arrayed inkstones of the finest, writing-brushes with ivory stems, note-papers and cakes of ink with impeccable pedigrees, crystal brush-racks and white-jade paperweights; where boredom can be dispelled with poetry, and hangovers by a nap in the southerly breeze.

Or the nobility and the women of the imperial house, the members of wealthy families and prominent households, where days are spent in the shade of cool garden grottoes and pavilions, in breezy studios or waterside follies; where the hanging curtains are woven of shrimp’s whiskers and the bedcurtains of mermaid’s silk, all perfumed by hanging pomanders of jasmine; where cool mats woven in rippling patterns of bamboo and coral pillows carved with mandarin ducks are laid out on mother-of-pearl bedsteads, surrounded by spinning fans; where in basins of ice water float plums and melons, red caltrops and snowy lotus-roots, bayberries and sweet olives, apples and water chestnuts; where serving-maids with fans stand at the ready, and every one of them pretty as a flower.

Or the Daoist priests in their temples and the Buddhist monks in their monasteries, secure in scripture halls that pierce the clouds and bell towers that scrape the stars; where in idle moments they might retreat to the abbot’s cell for a sermon on nirvana or a recitation of the Scripture of the Yellow Court, or perhaps browse their cloister gardens for exotic fruits or the Peaches of Immortality; where in moments of boredom they can have an acolyte play the zither for them in the shade of the pines; where a hangover is nothing that can’t be fixed by a good chat and a laugh over chess with friends in the shade of the willows.

These are the three sorts of people who don’t fear the heat. As the poem says:

The cruel heat of the sun scorches the land —
Grain half-withered, millet sere.
The hearts of the farmers roil with fear,
While high above, the nobles wave their fans.

孟夏草木長，遶屋樹扶疏。眾鳥欣有託，吾亦愛吾廬。
既耕亦已種，時還讀我書。窮巷隔深轍，頗迴故人車。
歡然酌春酒，摘我園中蔬。微雨從東來，好風與之俱。
泛覽周王傳，流觀山海圖。俯仰終宇宙，不樂復何如？

Reading The Book of Mountains and Seas: 1

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

The first month of summer: everything is growing,
   and the trees around my cottage have all filled in.
The birds exult in their new lodgings, 
   and I the fonder of my little home. 
And the ploughing is done, and the planting is all finished,
   and it’s time again for me to read my books.
(My lane is narrow, and off the beaten track,   
   which tends to turn friends' carriages away.)
There’s a spring in my step as I pour a cup of homebrew,
   and pick some vegetables from the garden plot;
And a fine rain coming in from the east,
   with a pleasant breeze for company.
I browse The Voyages of the King of Zhou,
   drift over The Book of Mountains and Seas.
When I look back up, I've covered the entire world --  
If that's not joy, then I don't know what is.

If you were wondering where Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (365-427) ended up after “Home Again” (歸去來兮辭), here’s part of your answer.

One of my favorite things about this poem is how well it conveys the pleasure people must have taken in books before print, when everything was hand-copied and most things were effectively irreplaceable. (Tao lived centuries away from a decent bookstore.)

My other favorite thing is that he’s reading stories about strange lands and fantastic beasts.

There’s a collection of 志怪 zhiguai — tales of the strange — attributed to Tao Yuanming, the Records of Further Investigations in the Spirit Realm 搜神後記. I wouldn’t buy a used car from whoever made that attribution, but there are some great stories in there — snake grooms! dragon babies! Here’s another one, about a thieving varmint:

Slashing the Lord of Thunder

It was early summer, the middle of the fifth month, and a man from Wuxing named Zhang Gou was tilling his fields. He brought rice with him, packed into a gourd, but when he reached for his dinner he found it gone -- and not for the first time. So the next time he staked out the gourd and caught sight of a large snake making off with his food. He slashed at it with his trowel, but the snake slithered quickly away. 

Running after it, Gou came to a small hole in the side of a hill. He squeezed into the hole, and overheard a voice whimpering “He ssssssslashed us!”1 

“What should we do?” another voice asked. 

“Report him to the Lord of Thunder,” said a third voice. “Get him to strike the peon dead with thunder and lightning.” Clouds and rain gathered, and lightning crackled overhead. 

Gou was hopping mad. “Heavenly Lord!” he shouted. “I’m a poor man! I wear myself out tilling and working the land! That snake came and took my food — he does the crime and I’m the one getting hit by lightning? You’re one stupid Lord of Thunder! Try it on with me and I’ll slash you in the belly with my trowel!” 

Instantly the clouds and rain dispersed and began moving in the direction of the snakes’ nest. Several dozen snakes died.

(Records of Further Investigations in the Spirit Realm, 10.4)

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I’ll post the whole set at some point further down the line, once I’ve got drafts I’m happier with, but for now some of the ones that currently seem more successful to me:

1.

兩鬢皤，中年過，
圖甚區區苦張羅？
人間龐辱都參破。
種春風二頃田，
遠紅塵千丈波動，
倒大來閑快活。

Hair gone grey,
Past middle-age,
And what was all the fuss for, anyway?
Doghouse and demand —
You’ve been in both too, in your day.
Plant the seeds of softer times, and tend
To your little plot of land.
Leave the racing to the rats —
That game’s too mean and I wouldn’t play.
Life’s best lived the free and easy way.

4.

佐國心，拿雲手，
命裏無時莫剛求。
隨時過遣休生受。
幾葉綿，一片綢，暖後休。

You could have risen to the top,
The sky was no limit for ambition’s call —
But fate said it was not to be.
Stop beating your head against that wall.
Forget old victories and defeats
And spend your days whatever way seems best.
Cotton sheets,
A blanket nest —
Warm enough is enough. Now rest.

5.

帶月行，披星走，
孤館寒食故鄉秋。
妻兒胖了咱消瘦。
枕上憂，馬上愁，死後休。

On the road. Moon overhead,
And stars around your shoulders for a cape.
Some backwoods inn just after spring’s last frost,
Returning home in fall to find
Your wife and children gained the weight you lost.
Late nights fretting,
Days distressed —
Dying, literally, for a rest.

6.

白玉堆，黃金垛，
一日無常果如何？
良辰媚景休空過。
琉璃鐘琥珀濃，
細腰舞皓齒歌，
倒大來閑快活。

Heap it up you may,
And rake it in —
But even then will come the day
Death sweeps your doings all away.
What then?
Why miss a lovely view, a sunny day?
Why let the chance of a pleasant hour pass,
With liquid amber glinting in the glass
As bright teeth flash, musicians play,
And slender waists to song and cittern sway —
Life’s best lived the free and easy way.

I was a couple drafts deep in the last of these before I realized that Ma was quoting the late Tang poet Li He 李賀 (790-ish - 817-ish). Li’s best poems were unsettling and gothy; this, combined with the borderline synesthetic overwhelm of his imagery, earned him the name of “the demonic genius” 鬼才. Ma Zhiyuan’s party, charming as I imagine it to have been, sounds like a conventionally pleasant one, but there is nothing so benign that Li He can’t make it sinister. Here’s what he does with the conventional party-rockin-in-the-house-tonight theme of the feast in “Bring in the Wine!” (將進酒), which shares a title with a much more conventional Li Bai piece:

Li He 李賀 - Bring in the Wine! 將進酒

琉璃鐘，琥珀濃，
小槽酒滴真珠紅。
烹龍炮鳳玉脂泣，
羅幃繡幕圍香風。
吹龍笛，擊鼉鼓；
皓齒歌，細腰舞。
況是青春日將暮，
桃花亂落如紅雨。
勸君終日酩酊醉，
酒不到劉伶墳上土！

Liquid amber,
Crystal glass,
Pearls of crimson beading on the cask,
Boiled dragon and roast phoenix
weeping tears of marble fat,
And a perfumed breeze, all girded round
with curtains of damask.
Sound the dragon pipes!
Strike the alligator drums!
White teeth flash in song,
Slender waists sway,
Seize the spring before dusk takes the day
And the peach blossoms fall in carmine showers —
Drink it all away.
Be dead-drunk all your living hours:
Wine won’t soak through the graveyard clay.

This in turn reminded me of two things, the more important of which1 is that, on the subject of excess turning into something sinister, I haven’t mentioned yet that I’m teaching a course on the great, obscene, severely under-read late-Ming novel Jin Ping Mei for Outlier Linguistics. I spent the past couple weeks struggling with my green screen and video-editing software, but have now progressed beyond the Oh-my-God-I’m-a-fraud-why-did-they-hire-me stage to the we’re-going-to-rock-all-over stage. Here’s how I described the novel a few years ago for a “100 China Books” list, on which Jin Ping Mei inevitably came in at #69:

The Great Learning (大學 Dà xué), one of the Four Books of Confucianism and a cornerstone of late Imperial education, describes how morality and proper order radiate outward from a cultivated individual. Through self-cultivation, the Great Learning says, the ancients improved their minds, their persons, their households, and ultimately their states.

This is not what happens in The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅 Jīn Píng Méi). What happens in Jin Ping Mei is precisely not this. Unlike the other “masterworks of Ming fiction” (Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Outlaws of the Marsh), which recount the heroic deeds of righteous heroes, Jin Ping Mei focuses on the squalid life of Xīmén Qìng 西門慶, a vulgar merchant who devotes his time, energy, and considerable wealth exclusively to the gratification of his own baser urges: his sexual escapades, described in exhaustive and increasingly unappealing detail, have earned Jin Ping Mei a reputation as an elaborately scandalous work of pornography. The rarity of good editions — the novel has been banned (with varying degrees of success) for most of the 400 years since its first printing, and unbowdlerized texts are still hard to find — has probably contributed to this misunderstanding, as have the age and obscurity of the novel’s language and the magpie’s nest of allusions and quotations that make up much of the book. In fact, the sex scenes for which the novel is infamous account for less than 1 percent of the work as a whole, and seem to have been intended to complement the other perversions — of justice, of morality, of proper social order — that the anonymous author documents with the same pitiless clarity. Ximen Qing debauches, ravishes, and whores his way through much of the novel, but he also cozens, suborns, and climbs to heights of wealth and access that no one of his character or social status should ever have.

For any late-Ming reader, the conclusion of the novel — the collapse and dispersal of the Ximen household, juxtaposed with the fall of the Northern Song dynasty to the Jurchens — would have come as no surprise, and not just because the Northern Song had ended five hundred years previously.2 Ximen Qing and his rapacity are symptoms, not causes, of a terminally sick society. Despite its Northern Song setting, which it borrows (along with its main characters and much of its first 10 chapters) from Outlaws of the Marsh, Jin Ping Mei is transparently about the late 16th century world in which its author and its first readers lived. The fashions, institutions, and characters are all straight out of the late Ming — the author’s eye for detail has made the book an important resource for historians of the period — as are the social ills it documents.

Imagine a world where the people in power are every bit as venal and corruptible as the merchants they officially despised. Imagine a state that imprisons and exiles the just. Imagine a society in such complete moral free-fall that the only imaginable goal is more. How long can it survive before the Jurchens show up? How long does it deserve to?

For the weekend, a short vignette by Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101; aka Su Dongpo 蘇東坡), writing from exile in Huangzhou, about the 12th night of the 10th month of Yuanfeng year six (November 24, 1083), which was also a Friday:

記承天寺夜遊

元豐六年十月十二日夜，解衣欲睡，月色入戶，欣然起行。念無與樂者，遂至承天寺尋張懷民。懷民亦未寢，相與步於中庭。

庭下如積水空明，水中藻荇交橫，蓋竹柏影也。何夜無月？何處無竹柏？但少閑人如吾兩人者耳。

A Nighttime Visit to Chengtian Temple

It was the 12th night of the 10th month of Yuanfeng year six. I had undressed and was just about to fall asleep when the moonlight shone in through the doorway. Delighted, I dressed again and stepped outside — then, realizing I had no one to enjoy the scene with, I stopped by Chengtian Temple to get Zhang Huaimin. Huaimin hadn’t gone to sleep yet either, so he joined me for a stroll around the temple courtyard. 

A translucent, watery radiance pooled at one end of the yard, and clumps of duckweed and floating-hearts swayed and criss-crossed in it — shadows of bamboos and cypresses. The moon is out every night, of course, and bamboos and cypresses can be found anywhere one cares to look. The two of us and our idleness had been the only things missing. 

Happy weekend! Use the idleness for something delightful.

I first heard about these from Yao Lin 林垚 just after I published “The Naming of Cats,” and had been meaning to write something about them. This went the way of all vague intentions until recently, when Wendy Xu reminded me of the paintings.
Just look at these little dudes! Look at all the personcatality on display! Look at their little names! Tag yourself — I’m “The Sky As Reflected In Water” 涵虛奴, but it was hard to choose and I’m already having second thoughts.

苓香狸 “Fragrance of the Dried Sclerotia of a Parasitic Wood-Decay Fungus Commonly Used in Chinese Medicine or Actually Probably Licorice Root in This Context Now That I Think About It” was clearly also a very good boy:

And I wouldn’t want to cast aspersions on “Mr. Marvelous Stillness” 妙靜狸, who looks like he’s on a quest for treats that’s about to include a big stretch and a friendly headbutt. All the other cats in these pictures look like they’re posing, but my man Marvelpuss Stillnyaass has been caught in the act:

And those names! On the left, from the top down, you’ve got 舞蒼 Dancing Through the Sky, 飛睇 Flitty Eyes, 苓香 Licorice, 涵虚 Reflected Sky, and 妙静 Marvelous Stillness. I for one would die to defend Flitty Eyes and his grumpy Wilford Brimley-looking little face.

On the right, the other five alleged cats — I’m setting something up here; your Spidey-sense should be tingling; please hold off on sharing the pictures until you’ve read to the end — are 清寧 Pure Tranquility, 仁照 The Compassionate Contemplator, 普福 Universal Good Fortune, and 采芳, The Flower-Plucker.

Last, and largest, there’s 翻雪 Snowplow, who is neither street-wise nor book-smart and would make a very poor general.

I’m pleased to report that according to Andrew West, Snowplow’s Manchu name, ᠠᡳᠶᠠᡳ ᠠᠮᠪᠠ ᠨᡳ aiyai amba ni, appears to mean something like “Yow, she chomk.” I take no pleasure at all in reporting that this is where the wheels start coming off of the Emperor’s cats.

I want to believe.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence for these paintings existing in the first place.

Ignatius Sichelbart really did exist, and really was one of the Jesuits who painted at the Qing court, alongside the better-known Giuseppe Castiglione 郎世寧; he even produced paintings of the Qianlong Emperor’s favorite hunting hounds. The cat portraits look more or less like (my impression of) Castiglione’s style, a fusion of European and Chinese techniques that one very talented Chinese painter friend finds absolutely enraging, but less, to my untrained eye, like Sichelbart’s paintings of the hounds — though some of that could be the lack of a background in the cat portraits, and more of it could just be me not knowing anything.

I can find posts about the cat portraits going back at least as far as 2018, but they don’t seem to be mentioned in any non-post, non-clickbait sources, and the images are always the same, plus or minus watermarks, rather than the mixture of slightly different lighting conditions, angles, and scan qualities you’d see if these were in a museum collection somewhere. The emperor’s cats aren’t in the Palace Museum’s catalogue, or the other Palace Museum’s catalogue, or anybody else’s catalogue as far as I can tell. This sets off more alarm bells — there should be some mention of them somewhere, surely — but isn’t decisive: I know nothing about art or art history, haven’t got institutional access to grown-up databases, and could very well be missing something obvious.

Finding things about the portraits has been a bust so far, but maybe we’ll get better mileage out of what’s in them, or what isn’t: Each portrait is signed “Respectfully painted by yr. servant Ai Qimeng” (臣艾啓蒙恭繪), just like the ones in the definitely-real “Ten Fine Hounds” album — but Sichelbart’s seals, visible in the album, aren’t on any of the cat paintings. Still not decisive: the seals on the hound paintings say the same thing as his signature; maybe he felt they were redundant. But it’s definitely weird that the Qianlong Emperor’s seals aren’t on any of these paintings, because that man loved stamping his name on things.

The cats sure do look real, though, don’t they? They look like real cats, in real poses, with believable expressions of affably irritated puzzlement at being made to sit still, and at least some of them — not poor Snowplow — really do possess the authentic hauteur of imperial moggies, though I’m not sure how one would go about distinguishing this from the attitude of your average garbage cat. There might even be genuine palace cats somewhere in the paintings’ backstory: Joel Martinsen notes that at least one of the cats supposedly belonging to the Qianlong Emperor — my guy Marvelpuss — seems to have been copied from a Southern Song-dynasty painting of a kitten with a dragonfly attributed to Li Di 李迪 (fl. 13th c.), now in the collection of the Ōsaka City Museum of Fine Arts.

I also found an album with the nine other cat portraits (as well as four additional ones) available in the Xiling Yinshe auction house’s 2009 Spring auction, under the listing “Anonymous - Cat Portraits” (佚名 - 狸奴影), with the Chinese and Manchu names but without Sichelbart’s signature, so all things considered this isn’t looking great.

But I want to believe, and I bet you do too, and that’s where the Bat-Signal of the title comes in.

So far, it looks to me as if all of the evidence points to these paintings being internet fakes, or maybe original images that someone else decided to improve by identifying them as the work of a Bohemian Jesuit painting for the cat-loving emperor of a conquest dynasty.1 (This is relatable: if I were the Son of Heaven, I’d rope some Jesuits into painting my cats too, once they got done translating Euclid and reforming the calendar.)
But it wouldn’t hurt to get more eyes on the cats’ Manchu names, which could probably decide this thing once and for all. According to Andrew West, Snowplow’s is the only Manchu name analyzable as having any meaning: The other names end with -aha (“[male] slave”), corresponding to 狸, or -ni (possibly short for ninuri, “cat?”), corresponding to 奴, but aren’t translations of the Chinese names and appear to be gibberish. Hence the Ashangga Singgeri-Signal.

Manjurists!

All those grammars, all that fiddly vowel harmony, all the screwing around with different initial/medial/final letter forms — it’s all been leading up to this. You have spent long, thankless years acquiring knowledge, and finally somebody is asking for it, and it doesn’t have any bearing on 21st-century state borders for a change so you’re probably even safe to speak!

How did the Manchus name their cats? Were the names usually meaningful, as in aiyai amba ni / Aiya, Big Kit[ty], or would “[meaningless syllables]-boy/-girl” have been more common?

Your question for the week is: Were Manchu cats “Mungojerry” and “Griddlebone,” or were they “Marvelous Stillness” and “Reflected Sky?”

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I apologize for doing this again so soon after last week’s brush with the last century, but if you heard any bitter laughter at any point in the last week, that was me, and I’m sorry, and you deserve an explanation. Most of the time I’m happy to remain out-of-date on anything that’s going on in the PRC — on my good days I’m seventeenth century out-of-date — but I’m out-of-date enough to remember the absolutely rancid discourse around Mo Yan’s Nobel win back in 2012, when the line outside the PRC was that Mo couldn’t be a real writer because he hadn’t been banned. I even wrote something about it, on a long-gone group blog called Rectified.name:

(Originally published October 15, 2012)

Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?

(No. The more interesing question is, why are people insisting that he is?)

Yo, man, Mo Yan. Even before the Swedish Academy announced Mo Yan as the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize winner, the Chinese internet was abuzz with discussion of his work and his relationship with the Chinese government. (Raymond Zhou’s October 9 piece in the China Daily gives a good, even-handed overview of the discussion.) The announcement on Thursday night that Mo had become the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel for literature set off a miniature firestorm of criticism, almost all of it from liberal-minded Chinese Twitter users, that seems mostly to have centered on several issues: Mo’s silence (now broken) on Liu Xiaobo, his vice-chair position in the China Writers’ Association (作协), his role in an unbeliev– all-too-believably boneheaded event in which 100 authors copied out Chairman Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, his behavior at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, and a bit of Weibo doggerel that he allegedly wrote in support of Bo Xilai. Some of the criticism is fair, but much of it isn’t, and I feel honor-bound, as a translator and as an EU citizen and fellow Nobelist, to point out which is which. [The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union. This joke was riotously funny at the time; you had to be there.]

There’s no question that Mo’s win was welcomed by the Chinese government. CCP propaganda chief Li Changchun wrote a letter to the CWA congratulating Mo on the win, coverage occupied front pages of newspapers across the country, and foreign media coverage of the win was translated in Cankao Xiaoxi (albeit in censored form, as Bruce Humes shows). Given China’s Nobel complex, however — or, more charitably, China’s sense that a country with more than 2,000 years of literature under its belt should have a slightly higher profile on the international literary stage than China currently does — a win by any novelist not banned outright would in all likelihood have been welcomed just as warmly.

Mo may not be a ‘dissident’ in the model of Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel, but his work is filled with depictions of the venality, cruelty, and stupidity of power and authority. The Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜苔之歌) opens with a farmer who organized a protest against the corrupt local government being arrested in front of his blind daughter. In The Republic of Wine (酒国), one of Mo’s more experimental works, the protagonist is invited by Diamond Jin, the corrupt Vice-Minister of the Liquorland Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Bureau, to a boozy banquet at which the pièce de résistanceis braised child. The still-untranslated Frogs (蛙), whose heroine is a midwife turned abortionist, is an explicit critique of China’s one-child policy. Red Sorghum (红高粱家族), the novel that made Mo Yan (and Zhang Yimou) famous more than 20 years ago, depicts the Communist guerrillas in a decidedly unflattering light, and they don’t come off much better in his 1996 novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀). His more recent Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (生死疲劳) begins its survey of the past 50 years of Chinese history with the protagonist Ximen Nao being unjustly shot in the head in the land reform struggles that followed the establishment of the PRC in 1949. One of the recurring themes in Mo’s novels is the juxtaposition of personal tragedy with the long, slow-motion tragedy of history, and whether you think he does this successfully or not, it’s hard to imagine coming away from his novels thinking that they are encomia to the Communist Party.

Mo’s position in the China Writers’ Association is discomfiting to observers, but the CWA is a big and diverse organization containing talented, edgy authors as well as Audi-riding talent vacuums. Mo has written movingly about growing up as a hungry, lonely child in an impoverished backwater, and his novels show a keen awareness of the smallness of individuals in the face of forces beyond their control. Given this, it seems unsurprising that Mo would prefer the security of a position that offers him some kind of official cover. As Mo said in 2009:

“很多人说莫言是官方作家，我在中国文化部艺术研究院有一份工资，余华、苏童都有，享受福利医疗。这是中国现实。国外无论在哪都有保险，在中国如果没有职业，生病我治不起啊。”
In the NYT’s translation:
“A lot of people are now saying about me, ‘Mo Yan is a state writer.’ It’s true, insofar as like the authors Yu Hua and Su Tong, I get a salary from the Ministry of Culture, and get my social and health insurance from them too. “That’s the reality in China. Overseas, people all have their own insurance, but without a position, I can’t afford to get sick in China.”

He is, of course, not just talking about health insurance here.

Mo Yan’s role in the CWA likely explains his public silence (until the day after the Nobel announcement) on Liu Xiaobo and his copying-out of Mao’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art. It most certainly explains his leaving the stage at the Frankfurt Book Festival when Dai Qing tried to ask a question. CWA authors, even very well-known ones, are told in no uncertain terms what they are and are not to say internationally — so much so that at the London Book Fair earlier this year, one normally brash author was almost comically careful not to be photographed with the dissident author Ma Jian — and Mo said as much in the 2009 Chinese interview linked above, immediately before the “health insurance” remarks:

没有办法。我看有的人说秦晖教授怎么没有离席，他是单独由德方邀请的。我是新闻出版署和作家协会他们让我去的，我属于代表团团员。
I didn’t have any choice. Some people have said that [historian and public intellectual] Qin Hui didn’t leave the stage — but he was invited on his own by the German organizers. I was sent there by GAPP and the CWA as a member of their delegation.

Some of the strangest criticism is revolving around a snippet of doggerel that Mo posted on his microblog on November 8, 2011. The verse, addressed to one or more “literary friends” (文友) in Chongqing, is being cited as a sign that Mo was a fan of Bo Xilai, the unbelievably corrupt, fantastically twisted former Party secretary of the municipality. Seeing Red in China has a translation of the poem, but the translator’s reading is based on the assumption that the poem is in fact in praise of Bo. I’ll put up [ha ha, I did not] a longer post about the poem with an alternative gloss within the next couple of days, but for now I’ll just say that the poem can be read, Rorschach-like, either as a paean to Bo Xilai or as a suggestion that the reader not get mixed up with either the pro-Bo or anti-Bo crowds. The latter reading would seem more consistent with Mo’s personality.

T.S. Eliot was a stone-cold anti-semite. Ezra Pound was a fascist-sympathizer who spent the end of WWII in a cage. Roald Dahl was mean to just about everybody. If we’re willing to accept The Waste Land and the Cantos and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as the works of flawed men, men who were subject to all of the limitations of their condition, then it seems grossly unfair to condemn Mo Yan for the lesser sin of keeping his head down. The fact of the matter is that there are many excellent Chinese authors who are not banned or in jail. They choose to work within the confines of officially acceptable discourse, pushing at the boundaries wherever they can, because the alternatives are banning, or jail, or at best an honorary professorship in Berlin and the lonely irrelevance of the exile. The people insinuating that Mo and other CWA members are lightweights incapable of writing lasting or eternal literature seem to be saying that such privations are a prerequisite for literary legitimacy — for Chinese authors, at least.

Exceptional courage is a rare quality. It may be admired and praised in others; it cannot be demanded of them. People might feel better about Mo Yan if he were more publicly outspoken, but I wonder if the people now calling Mo a lapdog of the Chinese government have given much thought to the very real costs that he would pay were he to do so. His remarks on Liu Xiaobo’s case may be a sign that the Nobel will inspire him to speak up on behalf of Liu and other censored or imprisoned writers, but it seems unfair to demand that he join their number in order to make himself more immediately appealing to outsiders.

Mo Yan is a serious writer with a substantial body of work, much of it dealing with Chinese social and historical issues as directly as he dares. We might wish as readers that he were more daring, but we don’t get to make that call — he does. He has chosen to ensure that he will have the freedom to keep writing and publishing. Mo’s novels and stories do his speaking for him, and they do so eloquently and forcefully.

Looking back at this piece almost 12 years later, I think it mostly holds up pretty well — but I was so focused on rebutting the accusations against Mo that I didn’t spend nearly enough time on the more important point, which is that white First-World writers don’t get evaluated on the basis of how critical/adulatory they are of whatever government happens to be in power. (In 2013, nobody suggested that Alice Munro be denied the Nobel because her short stories failed to address the environmental impact of tar sands.) Meanwhile, writers like Mo are stuck in an impossible position: too critical for the nationalists, who read with eagle eyes and malice in their hearts, and not critical enough for the international crowd, who weren’t going to read them anyway.

I don’t know what the solution is, but there’s plenty of room in the seventeenth century.

Du Fu 杜甫 - To Li Bai 贈李白

秋來相顧尚飄蓬，
未就丹砂愧葛洪。
痛飲狂歌空度日，
飛揚跋扈為誰雄？

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Autumn’s come. 
   I look at you: 
      Still a tumbleweed adrift. 
Still no key
   To immortality. 
      You’re no master alchemist. 
Rip-roaring drunk, 
   Bellowing songs, 
      Empty day emptying into empty day.
Your flourishes, 
   All your bravado —
      Whose hero are you playing?

Poems like the one above, written to a poet who was already famous by a starstruck younger man who would die unappreciated in his own century, testify to that friendship — Li and Du definitely did meet and spend time together; that’s not in question — but poems were the basic coin of social engagement, and Du Fu kept everything.2 There's no question that he admired Li Bai and enjoyed his company, but there have been few keener judges of character than Du Fu, and none so exquisitely attuned to irony, nor so deft at balancing contradictory emotions. Read them again through the eyes of the Poet-Sage, and Li's famous carousings and solitary wanderings suddenly sink a little closer to Earth under merely human weight, and the Poet-Transcendent becomes, at least potentially, a mortal man who never managed to transcend his own condition.

Going by the evidence — a dozen or so surviving Du Fu poems to and about Li Bai written over the course of his life, versus two Li Bai poems in the opposite direction — the Du Fu/Li Bai relationship was a pretty one-sided one. But that evidence! Even if their friendship seems largely to have been imagined into being by later centuries, Li Bai's “wish you were here” to Du Fu will make you want to believe.

Li Bai 李白 - To Du Fu, from Shandong 沙丘城下寄杜甫

我來竟何事，⾼臥沙丘城。
城邊有古樹，⽇夕連秋聲。
魯酒不可醉，⿑歌空復情。
思君若汶⽔，浩蕩寄南征。

And how have I been spending my time?
I’ve been here in Shaqiu: splendid isolation.
There are old trees by the city walls,
And day and night the autumn whispers through them.
Shandong wine can’t get me drunk.
The local poets leave me cold.
I'm thinking of you: thoughts like the River Wen,
Surging, churning, ever south.

(Thanks to Tom Mazanec for suggesting the idea of translating seven-character lines as triplets — someone should tell his publishers that they’re the waste of space.)

譏時

鋪眉苫眼早三公，
裸袖揎拳享萬鍾，
胡言亂語成時用。
大綱來都是哄！

The Times We Live In

Cozen. Flatter. Ingratiate —
The Three High Offices of state.
Bared fists and naked thuggery
Net a seven-figure salary,
And babble’s often all you’ll hear of late.
It’s all just cant and flummery!

— Zhang Mingshan 張鳴善, fl. 14th century

This draft is kind of a failure, or at least not yet a success: the first half of the lyric, which I’ve translated here, works well enough, but the second half is a lot denser, and I think the footnotes would probably outweigh the payoff.1 Can’t win them all, I guess.

But it did remind me of something else — a passage from the late-1989 (!) Not Even Human (千万别把我当人) by Wang Shuo 王朔, the king of “lowlife lit” 痞子文学, in which the residents of a Beijing hutong welcome a visiting official in the highest fashion they can manage. I hope you’ll forgive the contemporaneity. It’s just too good:

…Tears in her eyes, Yuanbao's mother addressed the Big Guy:

“Esteemed renowned revered and dearly beloved helmsman mentor pioneer trailblazer shining beacon blazing firebrand demon-revealing mirror cur-walloping club daddy mommy grandma grandpaterfamilias primal progenitor primate ancestor Supreme Sage on High Ascended Jade Emperor Hearer of the World's Cries and Generalissimo!

“Though every day brings a myriad matters and a million new challenges and hardships hard time hard work hard to quit your heavy habit your weighty burden your breakneck pace your breathtaking speed your lofty heights, in the driver's seat and outside the box as you raise up-lifting up-cheering up-holding justice dispelling evil curing rheumatism treating cold sweats lengthening strengthening and good for the kidneys nourishing the brain body-building liver-boosting stomach-soothing pain-killing cough-suppressing and makes you reg'lar,

“You personally in person your very own self on your lonesome took the initiative to make the effort to find the time to clear your schedule to take a moment to deign to descend to condescend to stoop to lowering yourself to our level to visit tour explore reconnoiter patrol inspect investigate inquire interrogate grill squeeze pump and press every last scrap of information out of our little alley, which is a great consolation a great inspiration a great stimulation a great comfort a great expression of trust a great sign of just how much you care and a great honor for us little people common people lowly people nobodies and crum-bums sons and bastards scraggy weeds puling whelps mewling kittens hoi polloi mindless proles madding crowd and simple folk.

“We are absolutely overjoyed deeply touched extremely anxious profoundly humbled utterly delighted jumping for joy sincerely flattered truly grateful genuinely moved to tears just beside ourselves utterly at a loss for words,
a thousand words and a million sentences a thousand songs of praise and a million model operas a thousand mountains and a million lakes a thousand phrases and a million little letters all blend into a cry that rises to the heavens top-of-the-lungs rolls forth like thunder, resonating and resounding around the rafters for three days afterwards, ear-splitting earth-shaking music to the ears, beautiful beyond compare, intoxicating inebriating leaving the listener numb to carnal temptation, the overriding overarching preeminent predominant paramount rallying cry of our age: HAIL! HAIL! ALL HAIL! HAIL! HAIL! A—”

Her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted dead away, having not taken a single breath throughout any of this. Auntie Li stepped forward and took over, rapid-fire and on full automatic:

“If it wasn’t for you we’d still be twisting and turning and churning and roiling and gyring and gimbling and gibbering and jabbering in the dark the dank the dirt the dust the dustbin the ashheap the ashpile the ashtray of history, hiding in caves, cowering in crevices, up the creek and stuck between the the frying-pan and the fire and the devil and the deep blue sea—”

Auntie Li's eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted dead away, having not taken a single breath throughout any of this. Yuanfeng stepped forward:

“You are our light our hope our future our role model our banner our battle-drum our victory success pride and joy and triumph, oh paradise oh pure land oh wise one magician wizard protector and savior, oh sun oh moon oh stars oh brilliant oh radiant oh gloriou—”

Yuanfeng's eyes rolled back and he fainted. Inky took over:

“Eagle-eyed lion-hearted brass-balled iron-willed nerves of steel fists of fury guided warhead! Our rock our touchstone our tombstone our Great Wall! If it wasn't for you we’d be sorry and freezing and starving and screaming and altogether screwed, we’d be down and out and in the gutter, beat up kicked down pushed around and thoroughly disrespected, we’d —”

“All right, all right,” the Big Guy said, smiling pleasantly. “That's enough of that — we don't want you fainting on us too.
“Besides. You could all wear yourselves out with kind words and honeyed words and wingèd words and praise and paeans and panegyrics and hosannas, but I promise you — I've heard it all before.”

(With apologies to George Carlin and thanks to Kate Lingley for kibitzing about an earlier draft of the Zhang Mingshan lyric, and to cg31 for catching an embarrassing typo.)

春曉

春眠不覺曉，處處聞啼鳥。
夜來風雨聲，花落知多少？

Spring Dawning

Spring slumber: I didn't mark the dawn.
From all around, the sound of singing birds.
In the night there was a noise of wind and rain —
Flowers fell. I wonder how many?

I have a soft spot for this one — as opposed to, say, Li Bai’s “Thoughts on a Still Night” (靜夜思), which by the numbers has got to be the most overrated piece of literature in all of human history. Meng’s poem is hardly any less of a cliche (it was several centuries’ introduction to pentameter, thanks to the anthology 千家詩 Qian jia shi) and to this day, if people know two Tang poems, you can be pretty sure this will be one of them — but there's more going on in it than initially meets the eye.

I'm cheating a bit by rendering the 曉 in the title as "Dawning" rather than the more common "Dawn" or "Daybreak" or "Morning" — but as in English, the word refers to both the thing that happens in the sky every morning and the thing that happens in our heads when we're lucky. Each line of the poem finds Meng a little more awake and a little more reengaged with the world around him. Spring and dawn have renewed that world for the time being — but the last line knows as well as we do that it's only temporary.

I also have a soft spot for the characteristically boozy response to this poem by Meng's younger admirer Li Bai, an entirely minor work by a poet as major as they come:

自遣

對酒不覺瞑，落花盈我衣。
醉起步溪月，烏還人亦稀。

Diversion

Drinking, I didn't mark the gloaming —
Fallen flowers fill the folds of my gown.
Drunk I rise, and track the moon in the stream.
The birds are roosting; people, few and far between.

Say what you will about the humanities — everyone does anyway — but there's nothing better than poetry for getting an uncomfortably accurate sense of perspective, with the possible exception of geology. Here's the Yuan official and poet Zhang Yanghao 張養浩 (1270-1329) on the site of Tong Pass, control of which could (and did) change the fortunes of emperors:

山坡羊 · 潼关怀古

峯巒如聚，波濤如怒，
山河表裏潼關路。
望西都，意躊躇。
傷心秦漢經行處，
宮闕萬間都做了土。
興，百姓苦；
亡，百姓苦！

Reflections on the Past: At Tong Pass
(to 'Sheep on the Hillside')

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The peaks of Mount Hua muster in, 
The waves of the Yellow River rage. 
Threading through mountain and river it runs: 
          The road up to Tong Pass.
I pause 
          and gaze west toward the capital that was: 
Where Qin and Han and Tang passed through, 
And every one of their palaces turned to dust. 
Dynasties
          rise: the little people suffer.
          fall: the little people suffer.

This is pretty good, but it's still only a human timescale. How about Hanshan 寒山, the dour Zen collective we met in passing a while back?

桃花欲經夏， 風月催不待。
訪覓漢時人， 能無一箇在。
朝朝花遷落， 歲歲人移改。
今日揚塵處， 昔時為大海。

Peach blossoms long to last the summer through,
But by wind and moon are driven ceaselessly.
Search as you may for the people of the Han,
There's nary a one alive today.
Dawn after dawn, the flowers aged and fell;
Year in, year out, the people moved and changed.
There, where your foot kicks up the dust —
That once was sea.

(HS 55)

Those last lines knocked me on my ass pretty good the first time I read them, sitting about fifteen minutes' bike ride from the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, where the Atlantic Coastal Plain meets with what's left of the Alleghanian orogen. But we can still do better, or at any rate Liu Yin 劉因 (1249-1293) can:

茫茫大塊洪爐裏，何物不寒灰？
古今多少 荒煙廢壘 老樹遺臺
太山如礪 黃河如帯 等是塵埃
不須更嘆 花開花落 春去春來

One day, through all the smithy of Creation,
Ashes will cool where now the fire rages.
And what then, after all the ages?
Fortresses fallen to desolation,
Old trees the graves of palaces,
Mighty Mount Tai, worn to a whetstone,
A narrow band that was the Yellow River —
And even these soon dust forever.
No sense in sighing
At flowers blooming and dying in the blast:
The spring is past. Next year will bring
Another and another spring.

Enjoy the weekend! It won't be long enough, but what ever is?

It’s almost enough to drive a body to Discourse — but stay strong and fight that urge: being online this year is going to be bad enough already. Here’s Chen Cao’an 陳草庵 (1285 - ca. 1330), putting it better than I could:

風波實怕，唇舌休掛，
鶴長鳧短天生下。
勸漁家，共樵家，
從今莫講賢愚話，
得道多助失道寡。
賢，也在他；
愚，也在他。

Fearsome enough the storms of life,
So guard your lips and tongue.
If this duck has short legs, and that crane long,
They are as Heaven made them.
So a word to the “fishermen” commentators
And the “woodsman” pundits who debate them:

Cease your talk of worthy men
And go light on the idiots, too —
“Who finds the Way finds help along his way;
Whoever strays will find his friends are few.”
— Worthy’s a word for someone else,
And idiot’s not up to you.

I’m putting my thumb on the interpretive scale a bit in this draft with my handling of the lines about “fishermen” and “woodcutters.” To see why, let’s bop over to Crump’s Song-Poems from Xanadu, where I first saw the poem, and where Crump says he “still puzzle[s] over the author’s cranky Taoist message" in what he reads as follows:

Fearsome enough the storms of life,
So guard your lips and tongue.
"The Heaven that made a duck's legs short
Yet made the crane's legs long."
Oh Fisher! Oh Woodsman! now
Speak ye less of saints and fools;
Many aid one who's found the Tao,
While the bungler's friends are few.
A saint is always someone else,
The fool is never you.

There’s so much to like here! I’ve stolen Crump’s first two lines for my current version, and doubt I’ll be able to improve on them. The last two lines read really nicely too, though “saint” would be a problem no matter what, and I think I like his handling of the third line about ducks and cranes (鶴長鳧短天生下) more than my own. But he’s missing that the line about “finding the Way” comes from Mencius, and consequently misreading the ending in a way that keeps his interpretation from hanging together as well as it could.

I understand this poem as a straightforward caution against being too free with the moral judgments. In that light, I read the line about “fisherman” and “woodsman” — conventional figures for the homely wisdom of common folk, which is to say that they were common ventriloquist’s dummies for writers throughout the ages — as Chen addressing the poetic alter egos of his contemporaries: Hey @fisherman1279, hey @HumbleWoodsman420, log off and touch grass. The “made them / debate them” rhyme is probably too cute, and I doubt it’ll survive into future drafts, but I do think there’s something funny in the original at this point: usually we’re the ones listening to fishermen and woodsmen for advice, not the other way around.

The advantage of this reading is that it makes the poem consistent with itself: we go from “guard your lips and tongue” to “who are you to comment anyway?” to “less judgy plz” to, in the last two lines — literally “worthy also lies elsewhere; idiot also lies elsewhere” — what I take to be “not for nothing but judging can go both ways btw.”

No cranky Taoist message necessary. Crankiness, though.

不讀書最高，不識字最好，
不曉事倒有人誇俏。
老天不肯辨清濁，好和歹沒條道。
善的人欺，貧的人笑，讀書人都累倒。
立身則小學，修身則大學，
智和能都不及鴨青鈔。

There are no readers at the top —
Illiterate? You'll benefit. And praise
Is the prize for idiocy nowadays.
For Heaven won't discriminate
Between the low-down and the great,
And men have never understood
The difference between bad and good.

So mock the poor. Defraud the kind.
Watch anyone with learning fall behind.
Or practice your calligraphy
      and study your epigraphy: You'll find
The learned and the competent
Are worth less than a copper cent.

Anonymous1

But having nothing left to lose is just another way of describing freedom, as Kris Kristofferson said if you apply the symmetric property of equality. Here’s the poet and playwright Qiao Ji 喬吉 (1280-1345) to close out 2023 with one of my all-time favorite articulations of the joy and goodwill universally felt by all humans, in all places and times, upon leaving a PhD program:

自述

不占龍頭選，不入名賢傳。
時時酒聖，處處詩禪，
煙霞狀元，江湖醉仙，
笑談便是編修院。
留連，
批風抹月四十年。

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Explaining Myself

I didn’t ace the Examination
	or make it to the Final Ten.
I won’t be up for celebration
	in Biographies of Worthy Men.
But I play the Sage of Drinking now and then — 
       and, here and there, find inspiration 
               for poetic Zen. 

I’m a demimonde valedictorian, 
       transcendently boozy 
               and far past reformation,
Laughingly playing Imperial Historian 
        as I judge the world 
                 for praise or condemnation.

I   r o a m, 
My friends and peers —
Jotting comments on the wind my only occupation,
       footnoting the moonlight for my poems 
               these forty years.

That’s it; that’s the poem I wanted to share, and well-adjusted people can stop reading here. But I started talking about sanqu in the first place partly because I wanted to talk about translation — some people have expressed an interest in hearing more about my translation process; consider your bluff called.

I thought I’d add some notes on this and two other English versions by James Crump and Stephen Owen, both as a way of talking about craft and by way of pointing out where I’m playing fair and where I’m cheating a bit and why. The idea isn’t to knock anyone else’s translation or brag about my own (I do think mine is better, obviously; why would I have posted it if I didn’t?) but rather to pull back the curtain to reveal some of how the sausage is made where the rubber meets the road. It tends to be as messy as that sentence.

If you look at the original poem, even without knowing Chinese, you can see it’s expanded considerably on the journey. Some of this is just down to the standard 字-to-character exchange rate — written Chinese is compact — but note how 9 lines of Chinese turn into 18 lines of English, starting when I turn each of the opening two lines into a couplet. This gives me a bit of breathing room to work in, and also leaves me space for clarifying or amplifying things that require it.

Take the first two lines, 不占龍頭選，不入名賢傳: a character-by-character gloss would be “[I] don’t occupy [the] Dragon-Head List; [I] won’t [be] enter[ed in the] Famous Worthies’ Biographies.” But anyone reading this when it was written would have recognized “Dragon-Head” as referring to the top-scoring candidates on the examinations; hence “ace the Examination” and “the Final Ten.” The second line is pretty straightforward, though “up for celebration” is my probably unnecessary expansion on what it meant to have one’s name and biography added to such a list. (I also owe Stephen Owen for the title, as will be obvious in a moment.)

I’ve expanded even more in the central couplet, 煙霞狀元，江湖醉仙，笑談便是編修院, but readers of Chinese will note that everything from “demimonde valedictorian” to “laughingly playing Imperial Historian” is basically a straightforward-verging-on-literal translation.2 “Judge the world for praise or condemnation” isn’t in the original, except on a closer look it sort of is, insofar as that’s the relevant part of the historian’s responsibilities — i.e., what “playing Imperial Historian” actually means.3

The last verse is where I’m really cheating. Before I explain how and why, let’s pop over and see what Crump and Owen are doing. Both are good. Here’s Crump:

State honor rolls will lack my name
As do biographies for men of fame.
I have from time to time
Found sagehood in a cup of wine;
Now and then,
Some verse of mine
Has contained one brilliant line
Enlightening as zen.
With the Drunken Sage of Lake and Stream
And the Graduate of Sunset Sky
We've laughed and talked and ascertained
Just whom the state should dignify.
Loitering,
For two score years here I've remained—
In the perfect place to criticize
The coolness of a breeze at noon,
Or add poetic luster to an evening's moon.4

And Owen, whose version I saw first:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I didn't graduate in the top ten,
I'm not in "The Lives of Famous Men." 
Now and then I'm Sage of Beer,
I find zen of poetry everywhere.
A cloud and mist valedictorian,
the drunken immortal of lakes and the river. 
In conversation, witty and clever —
      my own kind of Royal Historian. 
After forty years I still endure,
of life's finer pleasures,
     connoisseur.

Crump reads the “Drunken Sage of Lake and Stream” and “Graduate of Sunset Sky” as referring to Qiao Ji’s friends rather than the poet himself. I don’t think this is a good reading, but it’s not an indefensible one, and I like his amplification (“ascertained…”) of “Imperial Historian.” Owen reads 處處 as “everywhere” rather than “here and there,” but that’s a judgment call, as is “beer” versus “wine” for 酒. I think he misses the point with “Royal Historian,” or at least doesn’t make it as clear to his readers as he could, but on the whole I’d say all three versions are more or less in agreement so far.

The last two lines are where it all starts to break down.

Crump and I both expand, while Owen keeps to two lines, but the differences start with 留連 liúlián, a word for which the Hanyu da cidian includes the definitions “to be at a standstill,” “to wander,” “to delay,” “to linger (because unwilling to leave),” “to continue or drag out,” “to urge a guest to stay,” and “durian, if you write it wrong.”
“Untranslatable” is not a good word; it’s for lazy translators and laypeople who have never really thought about language.5 But there are words — way more than you’d think — for which a “literal translation” is a logical impossibility. The translator can’t shirk their responsibility here: there is no way to translate this word without making an interpretive choice. (Try to imagine any translator seriously entertaining the possibility of “durian.”)

Next: 批風抹月 pīfēng-môyuè, “versifying in praise of nature” or something along those lines. Crump and I both overtranslate by reading it more literally: “commentating on the wind and annotating the moon.” Owen glosses this as “of life’s finer pleasures, / connoisseur,” retaining the connotations of judgment and taste but jettisoning the image.

And finally there’s 四十年 sìshí nián, “forty years,” which means “forty years.” This was the hardest line to translate.

I won’t lie, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself about the alternating -ation / -en rhymes at the beginning of my first draft. I liked the rhythm; I liked the jokiness;6 it felt like a good reflection of the brashness of the original.

The only problem was that I couldn’t sustain it through the end of the poem. Every line in Qiao’s poem rhymes with nián, “years.” The whole thing is building up to that final flourish (“…for forty years!”) and the translation really has to end the same way. And I just couldn’t make it work: I kept having to fall back on more or less the same things that Owen and Crump fall back on in their translations, which forced the poem into an anticlimax.7 I could switch up the rhyme in the final couplet, but then I’d lose the connection to the rest of the poem.

So I cheated and I hoped you wouldn’t notice.

Yeah, I can try to defend “My friends and peers,” I guess; Qiao was writing for an audience of his whatevers. But no, it’s a cheap trick, a shim, a bit of folded paper jammed under the wobbly table leg of the translation. If it wasn’t offensively obvious to you before, it will be now. How I hate it!

And then there’s my overtranslation of 批風抹月 pīfēng-môyuè. It’s about 20% too cute for my liking. I like it a lot more than any alternative i can think of, and I love the image of “jotting comments on the wind and footnoting the moonlight for a poem” — but even though those images are in there, I can’t convince myself that they would have been quite so front-of-mind for Qiao and his readers: (Many years ago in Barcelona, a friend of my father’s was absolutely in love with the English expression “there’s no use crying over spilt milk.” When’s the last time you thought about that one?)

“Roam” for 留連 liúlián just feels like obviously the right choice.8 Come on. The persona from the central couplet doesn’t linger. “Loiter,” maybe, but loitering with intent. I dunno: I think reading it in the sense of 流離 liúlí, “wandering” fits better with the rest of the poem, but I can’t say for sure that reading it that way isn’t at least partly motivated by wanting a rhyme for “poem” further down.

Either way, Owen’s not as good here. We might grant “endure” for purposes of rhyming with “connoisseur” — which has a real charm to it — but I don’t think there’s any way of getting anything better than “hang around” out of liúlián. And while we’re at it, I don’t think Qiao — or the persona he’s inhabiting here — could afford “life’s finer pleasures.” (The fine pleasures of the breeze and the moon are free, of course, but they’re nowhere to be found in this translation.)

I think Crump is trying to split the difference with “loitering.” (“Remained” is there to rhyme with “ascertained,” I think.) It’s not bad, but I don’t quite buy it. Part of our disagreement might be down to Crump’s reading of 煙霞狀元，江湖醉仙 as referring to the Qiao-persona’s friends, “the Drunken Sage of Lake and Stream and the Graduate of Sunset Sky” — maybe the idea is that he’s hanging out and kicking it with his homies. I think he’s wrong there, but he’s wrong because he knows too much: in a footnote, he notes that the Quan Yuan sanqu also contains a very similar Qiao Ji poem in which these might plausibly be nicknames:

溪友留連，笑談便是編修院，誰貴誰賢，
不應舉江湖狀元，不思凡蓑笠神仙。

(By the creek, I liúlián with my friends, / Laughingly playing Imperial Historian: / Who was noble? Who was worthy? / Underworld valedictorian[s?] who never sat the Examinations, / Transcendent[s?] in rush cape and straw hat who care nothing for the world.)

I don’t think they’re nicknames.
Other than that, I like Crump’s rendering: we hit upon the same idea for handling 批風抹月 pīfēng-môyuè, which is always reassuring. I’m a little surprised that he didn’t try the same cheat I did for “forty years,” since it’s a trick he uses in some of his other translations, but then again it didn’t occur to me until a pretty advanced draft of this translation had matured on the shelf for about 18 months. (Shout-out to Matt T.!)

All in all, I’d give the latest draft a B+: good enough to show in public; good enough to dissect; good enough, all things considered, for 2023. But I think that’s enough sausage-making for one post — and enough poetry for one year.

Happy New Year, all — here’s hoping for a better 2024.

I say “Tang,” you say “shi 詩.” I say “Song,” you say “ci 詞.” I say “Yuan,” you cough and shuffle your feet and mumble “qu 曲,” hoping I’ll hurry up and move on to the Ming-Qing part of the call-and-response, but no, not today. I’ve got a soft spot for sanqu 散曲, an overlooked little form from an embarrassing little dynasty. James Crump calls them “song-poems,” and I’ve used “ditties” in the past, just to distinguish them more strongly from cí lyrics, but the name doesn’t really matter; the main thing is that sanqu is a form that the nerds never got a chance to ruin.

Sanqu don’t get translated very often — fair enough, I guess; so many major things still need to be translated or retranslated that one can’t really complain about minor things getting sidelined. But I suspect another reason is that in translations from Chinese, a certain kind of unrhymed, unmetered verse (I think of it as “fifth-generation Gary Snyder photocopy”) has been hegemonic for the past forever, and a blank-verse translation of a sanqu would very quickly reveal all the shortcomings of that approach.1 Sometimes you really can’t get away with pretending the original didn’t rhyme!

醉太平 · 譏貪小利者

奪泥燕口，削鐵針頭，
刮金佛面細搜求：無中覓有。
鵪鶉嗉裏尋豌豆，鷺鷥腿上劈精肉，
蚊子腹內刳脂油 — 虧老先生下手！

Anon. - The Grubber
(to ‘Zui taiping’)

He’d snatch the mud from a swallow’s beak,
Shave iron from a pin, or peel
the gold leaf from a Buddha’s cheek —
Give him nothing and still he’ll find something to steal!
Peas from the crop of a quail,
Drumsticks from a stork,
The grease in a mosquito’s gut —
He’ll get it all. Just watch him work.

Even without reading Chinese, you can see that the meter here is much more varied than it is in Tang poetry. Speaking as a translator, it’s tremendously fun to find things that you can justifiably translate into Ogden Nash:

王和卿 - 長毛小狗

醜如驢，小如豬，
山海經檢遍了無尋處。
遍體渾身都是毛，我道你有似個成精物，
咬人的笤帚。

Wang Heqing (late 13th c.) - On a Small Long-Haired Dog

This misbegotten little thing
Is nowhere to be found in the Shan-hai jing.
Ball of fur? Malevolent sprite?
Or dust-mop with a nasty bite?

This works great for humor. But it works great for other things, too: the language of sanqu is much closer to speech than anything else you’ll find in Chinese poetry, and it allows for a simplicity and plainness rare in other forms, as in this verse, written by Guan Daosheng 管道昇 (1262–1319) to her husband Zhao Mengfu:

…把一塊泥，捻一個你，塑一個我，
將咱兩個一起打破，用水調合，
再捻一個你，再塑一個我，
我泥中有你，你泥中有我。

…The potter took clay:
he fashioned a you and he modeled a me —
Then smashed us together and mixed us with water,
fashioned another you and modeled another me,
so that in my clay would be you
and in yours would be me.

More coming soon.

On a housekeeping note, I’ve turned off paid subscriptions on this newsletter following the co-founder’s disappointingly disingenuous response to last week’s open letter. My sincere gratitude to everyone who had a subscription: I’m working on finding an alternative, but in the meantime I don’t want 10% of your money going to this platform.

A bit of doggerel for your weekend, courtesy of the late-Yuan poet and playwright Yang Jingxian 楊景賢:

小則小，偏能走跳，
咬一口一似針挑，
領兒上走到褲兒腰。
眼睜睜拿不住，身材兒怎生撈？
翻個筋鬥不見了。

Small as can be,
The minuscule flea
Can nimbly dance
(With a needle-sharp bite)
From the nape of the neck
To the waist of the pants.
Stare as you may,
Glare as you might,
It’ll give you the slip —
Just a hop and a flip
And it’s vanished from sight.

I’m planning to take a break from literary cats with a few favorite Yuan-dynasty poems next week — you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gain a clearer appreciation of the utter insignificance of man in light of eternity. It’ll be fun.

Dear Chris, Hamish & Jairaj:

We’re asking a very simple question that has somehow been made complicated: Why are you platforming and monetizing Nazis? 

According to a piece written by Substack publisher Jonathan M. Katz and published by The Atlantic on November 28, this platform has a Nazi problem: 

“Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to ‘publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes’...Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.”

As Patrick Casey, a leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who is banned on nearly every other social platform except Substack, wrote on here in 2021: “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling. The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Several Nazis and white supremacists including Richard Spencer not only have paid subscriptions turned on but have received Substack “Bestseller” badges, indicating that they are making at a minimum thousands of dollars a year.

From our perspective as Substack publishers, it is unfathomable that someone with a swastika avatar, who writes about “The Jewish question,” or who promotes Great Replacement Theory, could be given the tools to succeed on your platform. And yet you’ve been unable to adequately explain your position. 

In the past you have defended your decision to platform bigotry by saying you “make decisions based on principles not PR” and “will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation.” But there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale. We know you moderate some content, including spam sites and newsletters written by sex workers. Why do you choose to promote and allow the monetization of sites that traffic in white nationalism? 

Your unwillingness to play by your own rules on this issue has already led to the announced departures of several prominent Substackers, including Rusty Foster and Helena Fitzgerald. They follow previous exoduses of writers, including Substack Pro recipient Grace Lavery and Jude Ellison S. Doyle, who left with similar concerns. 

As journalist Casey Newton told his more than 166,000 Substack subscribers after Katz’s piece came out: “The correct number of newsletters using Nazi symbols that you host and profit from on your platform is zero.” 

We, your publishers, want to hear from you on the official Substack newsletter. Is platforming Nazis part of your vision of success? Let us know—from there we can each decide if this is still where we want to be.

Signed, 

Substackers Against Nazis

Thanks for reading. If the contents of this letter resonate, please share this post with others. If you’re a publisher who would like to join this collective effort, we encourage you to repost the letter on your own Substack.

For what it’s worth, I have no desire to move to a different platform — but I do have my own domain name, an alternative CMS with more features and all of my writing already loaded into it, and an active aversion to being on a platform that makes money for and from bigots and fascists. Substack wouldn’t lose much if I moved to something else for the backend, but then again neither would you or I.

Normal posting resumes tomorrow with some Friday doggerel.

The discovery that it can be useful to have a tiny, occasionally friendly apex predator around seems to have come pretty late to China. Tang Buddhist monks, faced with the twin problems of mice and the no-killing thing, realized they could outsource the job to cats, whose karma was pretty bad on that front already. (Expedient means, baby!) By the 9th century or so it’s common to see even non-Buddhist sources talking about cats as having a “duty” (職) to guard grain and books from mice.1
Cats don’t start getting the proper degree of respect and admiration until the Song dynasty — which brings us briefly back to Lu You 陸游, from Sunday, for a couple appetizers before the main course:

赠猫三首 · 其一
”Three Poems I Wrote For My Cat - I”

鹽裹聘狸奴，常看戲座隅。
時時醉薄荷，夜夜佔氍毹。
鼠穴功方列，魚餐賞豈無。
仍當立名字，喚作小於菟

For a bag of salt I engaged a cat.
Now I watch him bat his toys around on my seat.
On occasion and catnip he loses his mind,
and he hogs the blankets every night.
Back from the mouse-hole, the day’s work done,
He knows I’ll reward him with fish for a treat.
All that remains is to give him a name—
I think “Little Tygre” sounds right.

You know where this is going. Many have walked this path.

贈貓三首·其二
Three Poems I Wrote For My Cat - II

裹鹽迎得小狸奴，盡護山房萬卷書。
慚愧家貧策勳薄，寒無氈坐食無魚。

A bag of salt for a kitty-cat,
The kitty-cat for my books.
And shame I’m too poor for a better reward.
No pillow in winter, not even fish to eat.

“Pinknose,” another one of Lu You’s cats, landed a better deal:

贈粉鼻詩
For Pinknose

連夕狸奴磔鼠頻，怒髯噀血護殘囷。
問渠何似朱門裡，日飽魚餐睡錦茵。

My cat spends her nights ripping mice apart.
Bristling, spitting blood, she guards the grain.
By day she’s every inch the palace lady —
Full of fish and sleeping on silk pillows.

Another one of Lu You’s cats (unnamed, but innocent) was allegedly in breach of contract:

贈貓詩
For My Cat

執鼠無功元不劾，一簞魚飯以時來。
看君終日常安臥，何事紛紛去又回？

You haven’t caught any mice. I let it go.
The fish and rice were set out at the appointed hour.
I watched you drowse the day away — so now
What’s got you galloping madly everywhere?

The humans weren’t always so amused. The 18th-century writer and schoolmaster Shen Qifeng 沈起鳳 claimed to have gotten a student to practice writing bureaucratic prose by composing a formal declaration of war against a cat who was more of a lover than a fighter. I found out about this from Wilt Idema’s Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature, which I recommend to the extremely interested, but the translation there is partial (he leaves out the declaration, which is the whole point of the exercise) and does not reflect what Prof. Idema must know, which is that the piece is supposed to be funny. Forget “supposed to be” — it is funny:

討貓檄 Kitty Delenda Est

My student Huang Zhijun is greatly devoted to his studies. He sits with maps to his left and histories to his right, like a king upon his south-facing throne surveying his realm, and to keep the mice from his books he acquired a cat whose tiger-striped coat made everybody think it must surely be a noble creature. But the cat took up a post beside the bookshelves and has stayed there ever since, lazing all day and thrumming in his throat like a Buddhist invoking the Holy Name, num-nam-namo-namo. This earned him the name “Boods” after somebody remarked on his piety.2

The mice and rats at least made a token effort to hide their tracks when they first saw Boods. But after a mouse fell from a rafter to the floor one day and Boods escorted it home with the utmost solicitude, no mouse in the household ever knew fear again. They started ganging up on Boods after that, surrounding him and swarming over him.

The mice were scrabbling over Boods’ back and shoulders one day when one of them actually bit him on the nose. The blood came streaming out, and I happened by just as Zhijun was about to go fetch some medicine for the wound.
“Catching mice is what people keep cats for in the first place,” I said. “If Boods can’t get rid of the mice, he’s derelict in his duties as a mouser — and if the mice are biting him, he’s a failure as a cat. Forget medicine — I prescribe a whipping!” I assigned him to compose a formal declaration of war against the enemy cat, to be edited by myself as necessary. The finished product read:

Generalis Murilegus “Boods,” charged with leading the war on mice, has shammed mercy and feigned humanitarian concern to mask his unbecoming timidity. He chants Buddhist scriptures with all the sincerity and understanding of Yang Gui-fei's parrot, aping all the while the self-abnegating piety of the truly faithful.3 He idles the day away beneath the flowers, turning a blind eye to the mice and their mischief, and lazes by night on a cool bamboo mat, never minding the enemy chewing through the walls.

So derelict has he been in his duty that the mice have put out the call for their comrades to join them. They mass like a clutch of demons surrounding their mother, swarming over his back and shoulders and tormenting him as incessantly as the sensual perceptions do a monk. Yet still Boods sits there, deep in meditation, blind and deaf to their mischief, a mere puppet to their will, never lodging a mewl of protest. Diffident and hesitant, his soft touch has only emboldened the wicked mice -- and earned his nose double-duty as a tooth-sharpening pad for his pains.

Could the King of Hell maintain his authority if he feared the demons? Can a general too scared to fight keep order among his own men? Offering up one’s own face in tribute to the enemy surely marks a new low in conciliation, enabled at every step by this cat and his utter dereliction of duty. Left to their own devices, the mice have run rampant and formed barbarian legions; to apply the traditional punishments to Boods at this pass were as useless as goading a pig or a sheep. Run him up a pole as an object lesson to any who might follow in his stead, and make a pantomime kylin of his false-advertising pelt. This is a time for the tiger-hearted — there can be no place for those who turn tail and run like rabbits.

Shen Qifeng comments: At Wanshou Temple there was once a Master Bin who deemed it “Humane” of the cat to let mice escape. Many have called that madness, not knowing that it was in fact the Buddhist Dharma. Compare a student of Confucius and Mencius, for whom the first order of business in any new position is to root out evil and promote the Good. Any official who draws a salary without fulfilling the responsibilities of his office is setting a disastrous example for the common people! The Buddhists might pardon Boods and his ilk — but under the law of the land he ought to be executed!

I wasn’t there and I didn’t know him, but I don’t think he meant it.

(Thanks to Andrew West, Drew Gibson, and Yuanqi Monogatari / 圆妻物语 for help with the declaration of war.)

3

I’m glossing and amplifying here: the original is 學雪衣孃之誦經，冒尾君子之守矩, “imitates the sutra-chanting of ‘Dame Snowygown’ and feigns the rectitude of Mister Wei.’ These are both good stories in their own right.

‘Dame Snowygown’ was the name of the white parrot of remarkable intelligence presented to Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang by the provincial governor of Lingnan. Xuanzong and his Precious Consort Yang were very taken with the parrot, and Precious Consort Yang supposedly taught her to recite the Heart Sutra. The story was well-known enough to show up in a Liao tomb mural two hundred years later:

The second reference, “Mister Wei,” is to an episode in the “Footpad” chapter of Zhuangzi in which a man named Wei Sheng 尾生 has an appointment to meet a girl at a bridge. She doesn’t show, he keeps waiting, there’s a flood, the water rises, he’s found dead with his arms wrapped around one of the bridge supports. This shows up in a list of historical/mythical figures whose excessive loyalty brought them to grief. I’m treating Wei Sheng as a name based on the original context, but that’s the second layer to the joke: 尾君子, literally something like “Mr. Tail,” is also a jokey name for monkeys. Because the structure of the sentence juxtaposes this with “Yang Gui-fei’s parrot,” we’re inclined to read this as “monkey,” but the rest of the phrase whiplashes into a Zhuangzi reference instead. “Apes” for 冒 here is my little monument to the pun.

十一月四日風雨大作二首 · 其一
“First of Two Poems Written During the Heavy Winds
and Rain on the Fourth Day of the 11th Lunar Month”

風卷江湖雨暗村，四山聲作海濤翻。
溪柴火軟蠻氈暖，我與狸奴不出門。

Wind sweeps lake and river, rain darkens the village;
the mountains roar and crash like ocean waves.
The kindling fire burns gently, the wool felt blankets are warm —
My cat and I will not be going out.

I’m on the bus back from a friend’s wedding in Jersey City and it is grey, sodden, and altogether Irish out, so naturally I thought of the Southern Song poet and historian Lu You 陸游 (1125-1210), who liked long titles almost as much as he liked cats and hardline irredentism.1 Lu’s body of work, not necessarily the greatest but certainly the largest of any pre-15th century poet, records the progress of his ailurophilia and/or toxoplasmosis2 and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it at greater length in drier, warmer weather too— the man had so many damn poems.

得貓於近村以雪兒名之戲為作詩
“I Got A Cat In A Nearby Village And Called Him Snowball,
And Wrote This Poem About Him For Fun”

似虎能緣木，如駒不伏轅。
但知空鼠穴，無意為魚餐。
薄荷時時醉，氍毹夜夜溫。
前生舊童子，伴我老山村。

Like a tiger if it could climb a tree,
Or a colt that wouldn’t pull a cart,
So dead-set on his mousing
That he has no time for fish.
On catnip and occasion he loses himself,
and every night he keeps my blankets warm—3
He must’ve been my servant in some past life,
Keeping me company through age and rustication.

Stay warm and dry out there — and if any of you feel good about your ability to read formal Qing-dynasty prose, I’ve got a couple of questions I’d love to pick your brain about. This post was supposed to be a translation of a formal declaration of war against a lazy chonk who failed to perform his mousing duties, but a couple of things at the end of the text are giving me trouble.