Tao Yuanming Reads on a Summer Evening

Rest and quiet contentment, with monsters.

讀《山海經》· 其一

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

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.

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Tao Yuanming, detail from “To Serve or Withdraw” (出處圖) by Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬 (1599-1652). Sold to a private collector in 2010.

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.

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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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1. The snake talks funny in Chinese too — the text is literally 我某甲 wo mou jia, “he slashed a certain some-me.” I guess this is probably textual corruption, but I kind of like the idea of snakes just being prolix.

While we’re down here, “gourd” is my solution to a problem in the text: the character is 菰, “wild rice.” The only other translation I know of reads this as the homophonous gu 觚, “goblet,” but I don’t see why our fifth-century farmer would’ve had a ritual implement, or why he’d be using it for leftovers. My didn’t-do-any-research-on-this guess is, rare character, maybe a lapsus calami, maybe writing some other word. “Gourd” has roughly the right sound, is a component in the character, and seems plausible enough in context. I might be wrong, but it seems like a better grade of wrong.