Too Much Party

14th-century retirement parties, 9th-century ragers, and late 16th-century obscenities for early third-millennium eyes

A while ago, during my big sanqu kick, I started working on a set of linked verses by the playwright and poet Ma Zhiyuan 馬致遠 (ca. 1250-1321). Partly this was a translation exercise — refrains and repeating rhyme words are hard to handle well — but mostly it was just because I like them. Some of my favorite sanqu still carry a boozy whiff of the social gatherings they were composed at and for, and in my evidence-free but canonical-to-me reading, Ma wrote these for a friend’s retirement party.

A Yuan-dynasty wine jar with advertising - “Good Grape Wine” - in ʼPhags-pa script, from the British Museum. One of the cooler things I’ve seen.

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?

1. The other thing it reminded me of was “The Yellow Bittern” (An Bonnán Buí), by the 18th century Irish poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna, in which the poet sees a dead bird, concludes that it died of thirst, and writes a mock-heroic elegy for the bittern by way of excusing his own alcoholism. Thomas MacDonagh’s translation renders the end of the poem (“Is, a chomharsnaigh chléibh, fliuchaigí mbur mbéal / Óir chan fhaigheann sibh braon i ndiaidh mbur mbáis”) as:

So come, son of my soul, and drain your cup,
For you’ll get no sup when your life is past.

2. The fall of the Northern Song deserves to be made into a movie by Armando Ianucci. The scene of Emperor Huizong promoting his son to Emperor while the Jurchens invade would bring down the house: his son attempts to refuse, on grounds of filiality — how could he take his father’s place while his father yet lives? — while Huizong insists, also on grounds of filiality — how could he refuse his father’s order? — and then fakes a stroke, abdicates on grounds of illness, and orders his palace attendants to physically grab his son and plonk him on the throne. Comedy gold!