Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, page 37
Than in the Nation of Flying Heads.
My irrepressible transports
Are an unfettered rapture 40
That cannot be gainsaid;
My far-soaring ideas,
An unbridled folly
That cannot be denied.
Fastidious readers of my book
May mock me,
Just as the tale of Five-Fathers Crossroad
May be baseless –
But who can tell?
The tale of Three-Lives Rock 50
May contain
Food for enlightenment.
My wild words
Should not be put aside
Because of the man
Who utters them.
*
My father,
When I was born,
And the bow hung at his door,
Dreamed of a sickly Buddha, 60
Cassock bare at the right shoulder,
Entering the room,
On one breast
A plaster round like a coin.
He woke from sleep,
And saw on his own newborn child
A black patch.
As a child
I was thin and constantly ailing.
70 I grew to manhood
Ill-equipped
For the battle of life.
Our home was chill,
Desolate as a monastery.
I earned a living with my pen,
Poor as any priest with his alms-bowl.
Often, head in hand, I would exclaim,
‘Could I once
In a previous life
80 Have been
He who sat with his face to the wall?’
My spiritual failure in this life
Surely stems from obstacles and delusions;
This is
Karma from a previous life.
I have been blown
By the wind,
Driven
Like a flower against a wall,
90 Falling in the cesspit.
The Six Modes of Transmigration,
Though inscrutable,
Have a reason of their own.
*
Midnight finds me
Here in this desolate studio
By the dim light
Of my flickering lamp,
Fashioning my tales
At this ice-cold table,
Vainly piecing together my sequel 100
To The Infernal Regions.
I drink to propel my pen,
But succeed only in venting
My spleen,
My lonely anguish.
Is it not a sad thing,
To find expression thus?
Alas! I am but
A bird
Trembling at the winter frost, 110
Vainly seeking shelter in the tree;
An insect
Crying at the autumn moon,
Feebly hugging the door for warmth.
Those who know me
Are in the green grove,
They are
At the dark frontier.
Written on a spring day,
in the eighteenth year of the Kangxi reign [1679].
NOTES
Lines 1–4 Ivy-cloak… Rhapsodize: The opening line (the exact identity of the plants is unsure) comes from ‘The Mountain Spirit’, one of the rhapsodic Nine Songs in The Songs of the South, written by Qu Yuan and other poets from the southern cultural region of Chu in the fourth to third centuries BC (see David Hawkes (trans.), The Songs of the South (Harmondsworth, 1985); also extracts in John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (eds.), Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York and Hong Kong, 2000), I, pp. 237–64). This shamanistic collection ushered in one of the two main traditions of Chinese poetry – the personal, lyrical tradition, as opposed to the more folkloric tradition of the ancient anthology known as the Book of Songs, which became a Confucian classic. David Hawkes speculates that ‘The Mountain Spirit’ may have been addressed to the Lady of Gaotang, a fertility goddess whose physical union with the King of Chu on Mount Wu (Shaman Mountain) in ‘the clouds of morning and the rain of evening’ gave rise to the standard Chinese euphemism for sexual intercourse, ‘the clouds and the rain’. The poem ends (in Hawkes's version, p. 116):
The thunder rumbles; rain darkens the sky:
The monkeys chatter; apes scream in the night:
The wind soughs sadly and the trees rustle.
I think of my lady and stand alone in sadness.
In these very first lines of his Preface, Pu Songling is inscribing himself in the ‘unorthodox’ lineage of China's first shamanrhapsodist, Qu Yuan, the Lord of the Three Wards (this was supposed to have been his official title), whose poems were always considered ‘strange’. At the same time he identifies himself with Qu Yuan's melancholy, and echoes his disenchantment with a corrupt society. According to venerable tradition, Qu Yuan, who had been a prominent minister of the southern state of Chu, was banished by his king and committed suicide by throwing himself into the river.
Lines 5–8 Ox-ghosts… Versify: The Bard of the Long Nails, Li He (790–816), of the late-Tang period, is often referred to in Western studies of Chinese literature as the Chinese type of the poète maudit (which can be roughly paraphrased as a ‘doomed poet with a vision so intense the world will destroy him if he does not destroy himself’). André Lévy calls Li a Chinese Rimbaud, while of his English transla-ors, Angus Graham compares him to Baudelaire, and John Frodsham prefers to evoke John Keats. ‘He [Li] is half in love at times with easeful death. He wrote in the shadow of the grave: and no philosophy, no religion, no consoling belief could quite keep out its ineluctable cold’ (J. D. Frodsham, Goddesses, Ghosts and Demons: The Collected Poems of Li He (London, 1983), p. lviii). In his biography in the New Tang History (ed. Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi (1060)), Li is described as having been ‘frail and thin, with eyebrows that met together and long fingernails’. He loved writing about weird and exotic subjects, and became known as the ‘demon talent’. ‘He felt himself already half way across the boundary between the living and the dead’ (A. C. Graham (trans.), Poems of the Late T‘ang (London, 1965), p. 90). But he was equally obsessed with the subtle sensuality and fragrance of the living. ‘Fine food and wine, music, rich silks and brocades, jewels, and beautiful women figure prominently in his verse’ (Frodsham, Goddesses, p. xxiv). His fellow poet Du Mu (803–52), in his Preface to Li's Collected Verse, places him in the tradition of Qu Yuan and The Songs of the South, adding that ‘whales yawning, turtles spurting, ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits cannot describe his wildness and extravagance.’ The expression ‘ox-ghosts and serpent-spirits’ came to stand for the supernatural and the fantastic generally. (By an interesting twist, in modern ‘revolutionary’ times, it came to denote politically ‘bad’ and unregenerate elements, ‘ugly’ fellows such as landlords, rich peasants and counterrevolutionaries.)
Among Li's best-known poems is ‘Song of Magic Strings’, which includes these memorable lines:
Cassia leaves stripped by the wind,
Cassia seeds fall,
Blue racoons are weeping blood
As shivering foxes die.
On the ancient wall, a painted dragon,
Tail inlaid with gold,
The Rain God is riding it away
To an autumn tarn.
Owls that have lived a hundred years,
Turned forest demons,
Laugh wildly as an emerald fire
Leaps from their nests.
(Frodsham, Goddesses, p. 166)
Pu Songling was himself a prolific poet and wrote poems imitating Li's style. He shared Li He's obsessive (driven) interest in the supernatural.
Lines 9–10 Each played… Heaven: Another of Pu Songling's revered mentors, the early Taoist mystic and zany storyteller Zhuangzi (fourth century BC), describes the adept Ziqi of South Wall sitting leaning on a table, breathing slowly, clearly in some sort of a trance: he has heard the Music (literally, the Pipes) of Heaven (or Nature), and is in tune with it. When his disciple asks him what he means by this transcendental music, Ziqi replies, ‘It blows on the Ten Thousand Things in a different way, so that each can be itself’ (compare Graham's translation in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 219–20). In other words, when we hear the Pipes of Heaven, everything sounds as it is by its very nature. It is an inner music that wells up of its own accord.
Line 11 Seeking not beauty of sound: In The Book of Songs, in one of the Praise Odes of the State of Lu, ‘beauteous sounds’ are made by the owls in the mulberry trees. According to the traditional didactic interpretation, which would have been standard in Pu Songling's day, the birds are straining to beautify their ugly screeching in order to express their praise of the newly founded college of Lu. By contrast, Pu Songling is seeking to hear (and utter) a sound that arises from within, not one designed to please conventional tastes.
Lines 12–13 But music… of its own: Pu Songling is thinking in Taoist terms. The music must be of itself. We sing the song that we sing because we are what we are.
Line 14 My desolate autumn firefly: The feeble firefly's light is a cliché for a man's humble efforts and lowly station in life, compared with the grand achievements of his more famous contemporaries.
Line 15 Is eclipsed by goblins: A reference to Xi Kang (223–62), celebrated musician and alchemist and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, that wonderful congeries of medieval Chinese eccentrics (men no doubt after Pu Songling's own heart). Many anecdotes tell of Xi Kang's encounters with spirits while playing his lute. In one he is sitting alone at night, strumming his lute, when suddenly a man more than ten feet tall, clad in black cloth and a leather belt, walks in. Xi Kang looks at him and blows out his lamp, saying, ‘How could I venture to emulate the light of a goblin!’ (For more on Xi Kang and the Seven Sages, see Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 456–67.)
Line 16 My insatiable speck of dust: The unusual word didi (insatiable) is taken from The Book of Changes, where it is used to describe the craving of a tiger (Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes (trans.), I Ching (New York, 1950), p. 110). Pu Songling seems to be referring to his obsessive and yet consistently unsuccessful attempts to pass the examinations. The ‘speck of dust’ is another reference to The Book of Zhuangzi, Chapter 1, ‘Free and Easy Wandering’.
Line 17 Is mocked by trolls: The two words Pu Songling chooses for his goblins and trolls can be traced back to an episode in the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, the first (probably third century BC) work of sustained narrative in the Chinese language and certainly one of the Strange Tales’ earliest ancestors. Strange Tales is strewn with references to it.
All the objects were represented [on the tripods], and instructions were given for the preparations to be made in reference to them, so that people might know the sprites and evil things. Thus the people, when they went among the rivers, marshes, hills and forests, did not meet with the injurious things, and the trolls, monstrous things, and goblins, did not meet with them. Hereby a harmony was secured between the high and the low, and all enjoyed the blessing of Heaven.
(Adapted from James Legge (trans.), The Chinese Classics, 5 vols. (Hong Kong, 1861–72), V, p. 293)
The Zuo Commentary itself certainly did not shrink from recording the strange and the supernatural. It is one of the earliest repositories of such accounts. A single episode (dated to the year 680 BC) illustrates this direct line of descent from the Zuo Commentary to the Tales:
Snakes living within the city and those from outside had engaged in battle in the middle of the southern gate to the capital of Zheng. The snakes living within the city died. Six years later, Duke Li of Zheng returned to the capital. When Duke Zhuang of Lu heard of this, he questioned his minister Shen Xu about it, saying: ‘Are there really such things as portents?’ Shen replied: ‘When people have something they are deeply distressed about, their vital energy flames up and takes such shapes. Portents arise because of people. If people have no dissensions, they will not arise of themselves. When men abandon their constant ways, then portents arise…’
(Burton Watson (trans.), The Tso Chuan (New York, 1989),
pp. 207–8)
Pu Songling is also alluding here to a story given in the Annals of the South (a historical work of the Tang dynasty, 618–907), about a mandarin by the name of Liu Bolong, who, when reduced to poverty and determined to improve his circumstances by engaging in commerce, sees a troll standing by his side, laughing and rubbing his hands in glee. ‘Poverty and wealth are matters of destiny,’ reflects Liu aloud. ‘But to be mocked by a troll…’ As a consequence he abandons his plans. (The troll's laughter echoes the Confucian contempt towards merchants.)
Lines 18–21 My talents pale… weird spirits: Gan Bao (fl. 320), prominent official and historian, is credited with having compiled one of the earliest and most widely read and imitated medieval collections of Weird Accounts, entitled In Search of Spirits (see Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 651–65).
Lines 22–5 My mood mirrors… strange tales: Su Dongpo (1037-1101), the great poet of the Song dynasty, was fond of ghost stories and wrote his own. This shared love of strange tales is referred to in an exchange of poems between the eminent statesman Wang Shizhen and Pu Songling, dating from 1689, ten years after this Preface.
Wang wrote to ‘his friend Pu Songling, Teller of Tales’:
Bean arbour, gourd trellis, silken rain;
Idle words, idly spoken, idly heard –
Like Su the Poet and Teller of Tales,
Of whom we are both so fond!
The world's debates disdained;
We loved to hear the songs of ghosts,
Issuing from the graves of autumn.
Pu Songling replied:
Threadbare gown, grey head, silken hair;
Now my Book of Tales is done –
An idle jest to share!
Ten years have I tasted the joys
Of Su the Teller of Tales and Poet –
Of whom we are both so fond!
Nocturnal conversations,
Cold rain,
Illuminated by a lamp of autumn.
(Zhang Youhe (1962), p. 34)
Actually we know that his ‘Book of Tales’ was far from ‘done’ in 1689. It seems that such was Pu Songling's love of the project, he just kept on adding new items until he was a very old man.
Lines 30–32 The matter… grown into a pile: Herbert Giles comments, quoting from The World on Charles Dickens (24 July 1878): ‘And his friends had the habit of jotting down for his unfailing delight anything quaint or comic that they came across’ (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 2nd edn (London, 1908), p. xiii, note 13).
Lines 33–5 Here in the civilized world… Country of Cropped Hair: The Historical Records of Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 85 BC) records that among the ‘southern savages’ (the then outlandish tribes of southern China) there were men with tattooed bodies and short-cropped hair. Such strange place-names are also to be found throughout The Book of Hills and Seas (probably third or second century BC). But Pu Songling can see ‘strangeness’ all around him. Judith T. Zeitlin comments: ‘The cultural categories of strange and familiar, barbarian and civilized, are destabilized and inverted; the “geography of the imagination” has been relocated to the here and now, shifted back to the center. The point is that the strange is not other; the strange resides in our midst. The strange is inseparable from us’ (Historian of the Strange, p. 47).
Lines 36–8 Before our very eyes… Flying Heads: A fabulous community, so called because heads were in the habit of leaving their bodies and flying down to marshy places to feed on worms and crabs. A red ring was seen the night before the flight, encircling the neck of the man whose head was about to fly; with the appearance of daylight, the head returned. Some said that the ears were used as wings; others that the hands also left the body and flew away. (Adapted from Giles, Strange Stories, p. xiii, note 15.) The story occurs in several early sources, including Notes from Youyang, a collection of accounts of curious and marvellous phenomena compiled by Duan Chengshi (c. 800–c. 863), who ‘collected reports on the unseen or supernal worlds from persons who claimed expert knowledge of such places; for instance, he recorded a detailed description of the jewelled surface of the moon, transmitted by a mysterious visitor to the earth’ (Edward H. Schafer, in Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William Nienhauser (Bloomington, 1986), p. 940). Clearly Duan was another man after Pu Songling's own heart.
Lines 39–41 My irrepressible transports… cannot be gainsaid: A quotation from the ‘Preface for Prince Teng's Pavilion’, a much-admired and much-anthologized lyrical essay in elaborate parallel prose written by Wang Bo (c. 650–c. 676). It celebrates ‘a superlative feast’ given one autumn day on the estate of a local official in the southern city of Nanchang, in a pavilion named after the Prince of Teng:
Our joyous songs wafted over the hills, our unfettered rapture [my italics] soared through the air. A pure breeze arose to the lively Music of Nature; white clouds loitered to the filigree strains of melody… As Heaven spread above us in its height, Earth lay below us in its immensity, we sensed the vast infinity of the Universe; as rapture came to an end and sorrow took its place, we knew the fated succession of contraries.
(My translation, based on Richard Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes (Berkeley, 1994))
Lines 42–4 My far-soaring ideas… cannot be denied: In Redefining History: Ghosts, Spirits and Human Society in P‘u Sung-ling's World, 1640–1715 (Ann Arbor, 1998), Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang see in this a reference to the poet of ecstasy, Li Bo (701–62).
