HEAVEN MY BLANKET, EARTH MY PILLOW

Poems From Sung Dynasty China

 

by

 

Yang Wan-Li

 

translated by

 

Jonathan Chaves

 

White Pine Press

P.O. Box 236

Buffalo, NY 14201

 

Paper, 125 pages, $14

ISBN 1-893996-29-8

 

 

Many are now familiar with T ang poets Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei, but the literature of the later Sung Dynasty is less well known. Among the major Sung poets is Yang Wan-Li, whose work has been beautifully translated by Jonathan Chaves in Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow.

Yang lived and wrote from 1127 to 1206, a time when the Sung were pushed into southern China by the invasions of northern nomads. When the Mongols finally overthrew the Sung, Yang died of grief and anger at the age of 79. Despite such turbulent times, Sung literature and art, and particularly Yang s poetry, are often characterized by a wistful calm, a softness that seems surprising. In Fourth Day of the Fourth Month, Yang wrote:

The sun light must be moving the waves by itself;

The sky is calm, and there is no wind.

 

Yang s ability to detect and express such subtle insights and images was the culmination of an intense, lifelong immersion in the art of poetry. In my life I have loved nothing else, he said. I have loved only literature, as other men have loved beautiful women. And I have especially loved poetry.

Like many young writers, he studied and imitated the masters; then, at the age of 35, he burned more than 1,000 of his early poems. He believed that a poet, once learning his craft, must find a style of his own. In this approach, he was more modern than medieval, and he became a champion of individuality in poetic style. When asked what one should use as a model, he replied: There is no model, there is no begging bowl, there is no robe. His approach to poetry was apparently akin to Zen Buddhism which advocates enlightenment through individual effort. To such a writer, poetry is not a labor, but instead it flows from the poet as a stream might flow in nature.

A man doesn t go in search of a poem

The poem comes in search of him.

 

But if a poem comes in search of a poet, it only comes through the most careful, and acute, observation, such as Yang s capturing the image of a fly, rubbing its legs, and buzzing to another spot the moment the light shifts through the window. In this way, he paid intense attention to the ephemeral quality of each moment, and the permanent transience in the nature of all things. In Passing by Waterwheel Bay he wrote:

Reading in my palanquin, I fall asleep and dream

dream of a fishing boat, lapped by waves . . .

When I awake the wind is riffling the pages of my book

and I can t even find the right chapter.

 

This sudden turn of an emotion, sending the poem in a new direction with a precise image, was something Yang fully mastered as in A Visit to Y s Cave:

Thin mist obscures the highest peaks.

A fine drizzle lightens the autumn heat.

When I look back toward the pine trees on the slope

The clouds are turning into dragons and tigers.

 

Yang was not, however, merely effete with a highly tuned sensitivity. At age 54, he led troops from Kwangtung to route a band of bandits and thieves who had descended upon the city. His courage was such that he once criticized a high official by stating the official had pointed to a deer and called it a horse, a reference to a powerful eunuch from 1,000 years before who had done the same thing without anyone daring to contradict him. For Yang, in his poetry, the trappings of authority were largely for others. In Portrait of Myself, from which Chaves took the title for this book, Yang said:

The pure wind makes me chant poems.

The bright moon urges me to drink.

Intoxicated, I fall among the flowers,

heaven my blanket, earth my pillow.

 

This kind of humility left Yang content to watch raindrops making patterns in the puddle of a courtyard ( First Day of the Second Month ), and to hear the sound of rain like thousands of pearls spilling onto a glass plate, / each drop penetrating the bone. ( Night Rain at Kuang-k ou ). In the same poem:

All my life I have heard rain,

and I am an old man;

but now for the first time I understand

the sound of spring rain

on the river at night.

 

Chaves translations of Yang s poems, 800 years after they were composed, are a priceless asset in the expanding tradition of Chinese poetry we can now read in our own language.

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