Night Mooring at Maple Bridge
Fun with Tang poetry
TANG DYNASTY rhyming poems are the most popular of traditional Chinese poetry. They are usually in terse five-character or seven-character sets, and meant to be read aloud.
Economy of words and simplicity of expression are the main features, making the poems easy to memorise and easy to understand, even among modern-day schoolchildren, despite the fact they were written more than a thousand years ago.
On your first reading of a Tang poem, you would encounter a straightforward narrative -- description of a moonlit river, farewell exchange at the frontier, observation of the effects of famine, listening to music, the thoughts of a young girl amidst the flowers.
But the simplicity of words and clear articulation of the poet's sentiment make the meaning deceptive. On further reflection and re-reading, you realise there is something more than the outward narrative. So you toss the lines back and forth in your brain, trying to tease out the hidden allusions, ideas and insights.
This is where the fun begins as you start mining the poem. Consider this popular and "easy" four-liner, Night Mooring at Maple Bridge, by Zhang Ji (Chang Chi). Here's a literal translation:
Moon sets, crows cry, frost fills sky.Maple trees by river, fisherman's lights trouble sleep.Outside Gu-su city, Cold Hill TempleMidnight bell sound comes to traveller's boat.It is an everyday scene that a traveller, homesick, melancholy and sleepless, sees, as his boat arrives in Suzhou (or Gusu, its old name). He is at Maple Bridge outside the city proper, where his boat is moored. It is night and chilly, and his mood is affected by three things -- the cry of crows, the fisherman's lights and the sound of the temple bell.
Here's my "interpretative" version of the poem:
Under a setting moon, crows cry in the frosty air.Under maple trees by the river, fishing lights trouble my sleep.Outside Suzhou city, comes the midnight bellAcross the water from Hanshan Temple to my boat.In my revised version, the poem is no longer purely descriptive. Instead, you get a series of "actions" -- the moon setting, crows crying in the sky, fishing lanterns troubling my sleep and the sound of bells coming to my boat.
A millennium later, in December 1984, while I was attending a building and construction trade show in Shanghai, I rode a tourist coach to nearby Suzhou to visit Cold Hill Temple (the Hanshan Shih). I wandered inside the saffron-painted walls, looked at the giant bronze bell hanging in the Dharma hall, and then strolled out to Maple Bridge. I snapped photographs of the picturesque waterways -- built by the Sui Dynasty administration, predecessor of the Tang -- that wound their intricate ways through rows of tightly-packed lime-washed houses.
Unfortunately, since it was a bright winter afternoon, I wasn't able to experience the romantic effect that reading the poem used to have on me.
For myself and like-minded close friends, we are engaged in a literary endeavour -- to study, understand, dig up and appreciate Tang poetry using the standard published anthology of 300 poems (from an estimated half-million that had been published and preserved).
Although traditional poetry is passe with young people in China today, driven by a money economy, I believe there are countless groups of individuals worldwide who desire to read this kind of poetry. For those who don't know the Chinese language, there are excellent English translations, although only the bilingual editions are useful.
-- Francis Chin, April 8, 2002
