In Pursuit of Chinese Poetry: The journey begins

Many years ago, when I announced that I was going to live in Shanghai, a poet told me that he was envious that I would get to learn Chinese and read the great Li Bai in his own language. Though this wasn’t laid down as a challenge, it wasn’t meant in a particularly friendly way—it seemed to irk him that I would get to do this before him.

Unlike my experience with Spanish, I wasn’t actually going to China with the hope of reading a particular writer or group of writers in their own language. But his words stayed lodged in my mind.

Like most readers of poetry in English, I’d come across the Tang poets in Arthur Waley’s famous translations. Many of these have been updated or improved upon, but his work on translating some of the greatest poetry in the world made Waley arguably one of the most influential figures in English-language poetry of the 20th century.

With the envious words of the poet echoing in my head, I began to feel a certain excitement. After, there I was, about to go and live in a country with over 4,000 years of continuous cultural history. And poetry was a big part of that history, wasn’t it?

The shapeless blur of the present

It’s sometimes said in Britain, perhaps elsewhere too, that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The contrast between my excited preparations for life in China and the reality of my arrival in Shanghai followed a similar pattern. This was soon after the end of the SARS outbreak (which now looks like a forerunner for the COVID-19 pandemic); the city was getting back to its normal frenetic speed and I was just starting a busy job in an autumn of manic activity.

And so fond, poetic, imaginings of exploring the wonders of Chinese culture came up against the pure prose of a city rapidly grinding through the gears to become a “World City”.
John Ashbery somewhere describes the present as a ‘shapeless blur’ and that’s what I found myself in at first. After a time, an image of my surroundings began to take a more coherent form. But it was not the one I had hoped for or expected. My preoccupation had been with the past. Where was it?

Where could I find the poetry in present-day China?

Back to the future

However, as the weeks passed, I realised that I was wrong. I wasn’t living in the present. I was surrounded by the future. I don’t just mean the then futuristic look of the Oriental Pearl Tower, which used to tower over the Huang Pu river or the building of the Maglev, the world’s fastest train. It was more than that: Shanghai saw itself as the future of China, the future of the world (modesty is not the city’s strong suit). And as it talked itself up—as its officials did relentlessly—it was always describing a future state. The city described was never the city we lived in, but the one we’d be living in ten years from now. Shanghai was already living its future, while impatiently and frantically building itself into it.

This being Shanghai, it got there. Just one indication: when I arrived in Shanghai in 2003 there were 3 metro lines in the city. By the end of the decade there were 10 lines. I think there are 20 now.

Living in the future proved exhilarating, if exhausting. Coming from a country which reflexively looks backwards—at best, with nostalgia on the origins of the NHS and the construction of the welfare state, more often through the lens of worn-out pageantry on empire and world wars—this was thrillingly new.

But where did it leave the poetry? After all, the future does not seem to inspire the kind of enduring poetry that we crave. Not many Futurist poets have lasted well.

I thought the passing seasons might help me find it, but even during the mid-autumn festival most of the excitement was caused by mooncakes, not by classical poems about the moon. There was a famous shop across the street from my office which stimulated a lively secondary trade in mooncake coupons. It turned out that many of the people who had been given the vouchers by their companies for these expensive cakes then sold them for cash on the street outside. It was fascinating, but, again, where was the poetry?

Shanghai in prose

I started to tell people that the thing Shanghai lacked in order to become a “world city” was a great poet. Which was nonsense, of course. How many world cities have needed great poets? Paris gains further allure from Baudelaire, perhaps. I struggle to think of others, though I’d be delighted to read your suggestions in the comments.

In fact, Shanghai already had a great writer. Born in the neighbouring province of Zhejiang, Lu Xun (1881-1936) didn’t take up residence in Shanghai until 1927. But his name is now usually linked to the city. He wrote in prose, was intensively political and became known posthumously as a ‘socialist realist’. He is a wonderful writer, rightly admired across China, but I saw that I’d have to look elsewhere for poetry.

Of course, during this time I read many poems in translation and as my Chinese improved, even struggled through one or two in the original. I was advised that I should memorise one or two in the original, as a kind of party piece. But I have always had a terrible memory and am not much of a party person, so I don’t think I ever got beyond a stanza or two. I still felt I wasn’t really in touch with the beauties of Tang or Song period poetry.

Journey to the west

However, my luck was to change. From time to time, I made trips on business to other parts of China and the year after I arrived, around the time of the mid-autumn festival, I found myself way out in the west of the country, in Chengdu. This was my chance to pay homage to Du Fu, the Tang poet whose reputation at least matches that of Li Bai. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Du Fu’s legacy in China, as this clip makes clear. Du Fu’s thatched cottage is a famous landmark in the city. I decided to pay a visit.

Famous places in China are usually pretty crowded—not really surprising, I tend to think, given the size of population—and in those days they were usually heavily commercialised, with stalls selling food and kiosks with the sort of tourist tack you’d see anywhere in the world. So my expectations were more of the same.

I don’t know if I was lucky or whether the site was not really very popular, but when I visited, the beautiful garden containing the cottage was almost empty of visitors and there were no shops or merchandising at all. It was a place of stillness and calm. Heaven.

Unspectacular, modest in scale by the standards of most landmarks in China, I had found at last an escape from the future. Epiphany is too strong a word for what I experienced, but here at last was a place grounded in the past, patiently enduring and home to a poet who somehow spoke for all time.

There was a pond with frogs and lily pads, some rather atmospheric flowers and trees and I thought it would be a beautiful setting under a full moon for poets to gather, drink wine and recite their verse. I have no idea if he wrote his famous poem “moonlit night” here but I recalled its opening lines:

Tonight my wife must watch alone
the full moon over Fu-zhou;
I think sadly of my sons and daughters far away..

(in David Lunde’s excellent version).

A tune beyond the river

From then on, I began to feel that I really lived in the country of Du Fu and Li Bai. I had, in that sense, finally arrived at my destination. Even future-obsessed Shanghai would never seem the same again.

There are, of course, many other great poets to read in Chinese. Among them is Su Shi (also known as Su Dongpo) who wrote “A Tune Beyond the River: When Will the Bright Moon Be Found?”

When will the bright moon appear? With wine in hand, I ask the clear sky. I don’t know in which palace of the heavens we are tonight.

This has been so since ancient times, and I only wish that we may all be blessed with longevity, so that we can share the beauty of this graceful moon even if we are thousands of miles apart.

I guess that for court officials, sent out to administer the empire, loneliness and separation came with the territory. It’s our gain, in that it inspired so much lovely poetry.

Less known outside China, but highly admired in the country is Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), who belongs to a later generation than Du Fu or Li Bai, living under the Song Dynasty. In her early career as a poet, she was known for beautiful and touching poems about nature. But following the untimely death of her husband while he was away on official duty (that again), her poems became permanently marked by grief.

This aspect of her work can be seen in the following lines:

They say that at the Twin Brooks, spring is still fair.
I, too, wish to row a boat there.
But I am afraid that the little skiff
on the Twin Brooks
Could not bear the heavy load of my grief.

So had I found that it was possible, after all, to feel the inspiration of centuries of magnificent Chinese poetry; the beautiful mountain landscapes, the serene moonlit nights, the vast distances that lend themselves to the immense sense of solitude and separation that many of the poets write about. Moving beyond Shanghai and its busy waterways, I had indeed begun to hear a “tune beyond the river”.

Personal grief

A bit like a minor Tang official on duty out west, I was also a long way from home. And that distance seemed ever greater when tragedy struck. A few months before I was due to leave Shanghai, my eldest brother Mark, died suddenly and unexpectedly back in England.

Shocked, I flew back for the funeral. In a daze of grief, knew I wanted to speak at the service. He and I had been united in a love of poetry, so reading a poem seemed obvious. I cast around for a suitable text. I didn’t want anything too uplifting or cloying. All I could focus on was his disappearance from our lives. How could I say goodbye? Considering and then rejecting the more usual offerings at such moments, I found myself deciding that Ezra Pound’s poem ‘Taking leave of a friend’, would work:

Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.
Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each others
as we are departing.

It’s a poem I had known for many years. I am sure that I already knew that it was a translation of a poem by Li Bai.

But it was only after the funeral that I would remember this.

On the day, my mind was indeed like a ‘floating wide cloud’ and I struggled to speak the words. But, at least, I was able to say goodbye in a way he would have appreciated. And as I look back now, in that moment of pain and loss, I had sought comfort in a tradition I was slowly beginning to understand—one which honoured countless others who had said their goodbyes before long journeys, had suffered separation over huge distances and had learned to travel with their grief.

Mark’s birthday is in October. So at the mid-autumn festival, as the weather turns and the nights grow cooler, and with the moon prominent in the sky, I think of him.

And at the same time, I think of those great poets whose language may have escaped my grasp, but whose words continue to speak to me over the centuries and from across the vast moonlit landscape of China.

Photo by Pen Tsai, Creative commons, via Unsplash. “A Tune Beyond the River” first appeared at English Republic of Letters. This modified reprint is used with permission of Jeffrey Streeter.

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Jeffrey Streeter

Jeffrey grew up in the English countryside but has lived mostly in large cities around the world. In 2022, he decided to step back from full-time employment and dedicate himself to writing and reading. He runs the Substack newsletter English Republic of Letters, which primarily focuses on literature and memoir. He also enjoys going to the ballet, cooking, and appreciating the passage of the seasons in Japan, where he currently lives.

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