Two Poems for a Rainy Sunday

Or: Traditional Chinese Medicine for Seasonal Affective Disorder, Except Effective

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.

Detail from painting of a kitten by an anonymous Song court painter. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, I think.

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.

1. My favorite: “Mice Kept Destroying My Books. The Cat I Ended Up Getting Wouldn’t Let A Day Go By Without Catching and Killing At Least One Mouse, So Now Practically All The Mice Have Fled, Which Is Why I Wrote This Poem” (鼠屢敗吾書，偶得狸奴，捕殺無虛日，群鼠幾空，為賦此詩).

2. I’m making this up. I’ve made no attempt to date or periodize these poems, which appear here in the order I found them in my “stuff to do some day” jumble drawer file, where I pasted them from unknown and not necessarily accurate sources. Do not make any major life or investment decisions on the basis of this e-mail about cats. There could be typos here, for all I know!

That said, please do let me know if you’ve got an edition of Lu’s poems that does have reliable/ish dates, or know more about his life and work than I do, which is not all that much. (And statistically speaking I haven’t read him at all: Lu is singlehandedly responsible for approximately 4% of the Complete Shi-Poems of the Song Dynasty 全宋詩, and the Song did not as a dynasty suffer from a shortage of poetry. He left behind thousands of poems, and for all I know they could all be bangers.)

3. Far be it from me to say “tacky,” but Lu is reusing this couplet on different cats and barely even filing the serial numbers off: in “First of Three Poems for My Cat” (赠猫三首 · 其一), addressed to “Little Tygre” (小於菟), he says L.T. “occasionally gets blasted on catnip / and hogs the blankets every night” (時時醉薄荷，夜夜佔氍毹).